RPGs without movies

[matthijs]

This is a thought experiment.

What if our cultural experiences weren't so strongly anchored in the visual media? What if movies & television didn't exist? How would we play RPGs then - where would we get our inspiration?

Theatre, I suppose.

But I also believe we'd use modified literary techniques a lot. Instead of focus on visual action and use of movie references ("I kick him in the head like in Die Hard"), there might be focus on character description and use of textual references and quotes ("Well, Prince, so Elfland and Dwarfland are now just family estates of the Realms of Men. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Daemonspawn - I really believe he is a Daemonspawn - I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you - sit down and tell me all the news.")

I'm not going "hey, let's try to do this now!" I don't think it would work. Most of us reading this aren't able to quote large blocks of text from memory - it's a lost art. If we tried to do it now, it would probably be pretty pathetic. But I'm thinking - what would it be like?

[nellist]

My esperience of Play By E mail has included great chunks of textual references and quotes (at least, from me) and the medium is much more text oriented than visual, for obvious reasons. The characters also tend to speak in unrealistic monologues - a feature of literature rather than the more pithy soundbites of movies.

I'm curious to know what you think you might get as a result of this thought experiment. I'm not so convinced that movies and television are are pervasive an influence as some tend to think. For Swords and Sorcery, for example, I still do not think any movies or films have had as much influence as RE Howards writings. Even in HeroQuest where Robin Laws often uses movie terminology in my opinion the resulting game often comes out more like a saga or epic poetry, than an action movie.

Another question would be to ask what influence movies and TV have actually had on, for example, D&D. I cannot really think of anything that promoted a D&D type world view in film or TV.

I guess it depends on the genre to some extent. Zombies are clearly the spawn of horror movies rather than any literary tradition, animated skeletons might be argued to come from Harryhausens "Jason and the Argonauts."  

I'm not convinced by theatre, but that might be a personal bias against it.

Keith Nellist

[Domhnall]

I'm confused as to why you chose theatre and not literature (unless the two are synonymous in Norway?).

[beingfrank]

Hmm, my experience is in the opposite direction.  The PBEM play I do is usually full of descriptions of visual stuff, body language, where stuff is in relation to other stuff, visual effects, and so on.  And the FTF play I do often seems to become a massive talk fest with only dialogue.  If I add in a description of a character action it would be inappropriate for me to act out, or describe a visual effect like my character dramatically framed by an doorway, I often get a 'what planet are you on' look from the others in the group.  It may just be the groups I play with, though.

In email games, people do use literary techniques, but the ones I prefer to play with use the techniques to improve the quality of the posts they write, rather than to bung in big long quotes and stuff.  And the focus is often more visual, because in a text based medium one is more aware of the lack so tries to compensate.

I'm not sure I've added much.  I just wanted to say that while the way we play RPGs might be different in your thought experiment, I suspect it would actually be in the opposite direction than you suggest.

[efindel]

This is a thought experiment.

What if our cultural experiences weren't so strongly anchored in the visual media? What if movies & television didn't exist? How would we play RPGs then - where would we get our inspiration?

Well, personally, I've never been much of a movie-goer, and the genres I tend to prefer for RPGs (psuedo-medieval and modern fantasy) have never been all that big on TV.  I have been a big reader, though, so my own experiences are heavily anchored there.

Theatre, I suppose.

But I also believe we'd use modified literary techniques a lot. Instead of focus on visual action and use of movie references ("I kick him in the head like in Die Hard"), there might be focus on character description and use of textual references and quotes ("Well, Prince, so Elfland and Dwarfland are now just family estates of the Realms of Men. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Daemonspawn - I really believe he is a Daemonspawn - I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you - sit down and tell me all the news.")

I'm not going "hey, let's try to do this now!" I don't think it would work. Most of us reading this aren't able to quote large blocks of text from memory - it's a lost art. If we tried to do it now, it would probably be pretty pathetic. But I'm thinking - what would it be like?

I'm not sure what an ability to quote large blocks of text from memory has to do with this, though.  Writing 'a quote' isn't the same thing as quoting something else -- you're making it up as you go along, not having to recall it from somewhere else.

My own PBEMs have tended to have a 'literary' feel to them, I think... but part of that is because most of the people I've played them with have also been big readers.

In my first Buffy the Vampire Slayer PBEM, I found myself writing my character's turns in a psuedo-screenplay format, including things like camera directions (zoom in, pan, change focus, etc.).  It worked very well for that.

Later on, in a superhero PBEM, I made a conscious decision to write as if I were scripting a comic book, with references to "panels", changes of point of view, etc.  I continued this in the playtest of Capes via IRC, which was made very natural by the "panel" mechanic that was in it (but which didn't make it into the final version).

[matthijs]

Daniel: I made a passing reference to theatre, but my example and discussion are based on literature. (No, they're in no way synonymous in Norway).

In general: I'm NOT talking about PBEM here - I'm talking about what standard face-to-face role-playing would be like if we didn't have thousands of hours of TV and movie references influencing us, but had mostly literature references instead.

That's why I included the quote. As far as I understand (and I may be wrong), cultures that don't have TV as their main medium are usually way better at remembering text. (Whether it's old Norse or thousand-line Indian epics that were passed on for generations before anyone actually wrote them down, or school children routinely being required to learn large amounts of psalms by heart).

The analogy is: Just as we can easily fall back on visual movie references when we're describing stuff, in another world, perhaps we'd be falling back on textual literature references, using quotes from one source in a different type of narrative.

(The quote I used was a bit from the beginning of War & Peace - which I've never read - mutated to make it fit a fantasy setting).

[timfire]

[A]nimated skeletons might be argued to come from Harryhausens "Jason and the Argonauts."

Not to derail the thread, but 'living' skeletons have a LONG tradition in art, from all around the world.

[Ian Charvill]

That's why I included the quote. As far as I understand (and I may be wrong), cultures that don't have TV as their main medium are usually way better at remembering text. (Whether it's old Norse or thousand-line Indian epics that were passed on for generations before anyone actually wrote them down, or school children routinely being required to learn large amounts of psalms by heart).

Cultures that do that also tend to have narrative forms that are mnemonic.  Poetry is a lot easier to remember than prose because you have cues like -- the next line rhymes with this line so the word at the end of it sounds like, and that can jog your memory and allow you to proceed.  Rhythm and repeated formal devices help this too -- like the Iliad's wine-dark sea.

But, luckily we have the time machine you need.  Just read a bunch of nineteenth century prose if you want to see how people referenced other work prior to cinema.  You end up with more allusive stuff than direct quote stuff -- "he was shot by cupid's arrow" meaning to fall in love, rather than verbatim quotes from old myths.

Think like kennings.

In roleplaying, one would expect it to be the same, but less well done.

[John Kim]

Although the true thought experiment is impossible, obviously, I think this is possible to approach.  Try playing in a game set in a milieu with a strong literary background but no film or television background.  For example, my http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/vinland/">Vinland campaign had a very definite literary base (the historical Icelandic sagas), along with a strong real-world images since it was set in real places (the Hudson river valley).  There are very few movies which are close -- the handful of viking movies were generally horrible and ignored by the players.  I think that in practice, there were very few movie-like references in play -- and while no one directly quoted passages from the sagas, there were a lot of references to events and characters in them.  

There was some cinematic influence on combat, but I deliberately picked the RuneQuest rules to resist this tendency.  I wanted combat to be more like it was in the sagas: bloody exchanges of wounds, and who hit who.  So sometimes players would describe cinematic moves, and I would have trouble directly ruling against it -- but the rules helped force it to be more prosaic, more gritty.  In retrospect, I wonder if the designers of RuneQuest had a similar intent.  

This is a good contrast since I've also recently GMed a James Bond 007 campaign and am co-GMing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer campaign -- which are deliberately modeled after a movie series and television series, respectively.  The campaigns definitely have different flavors as a result.  

One thing I would note is that if you're want to avoid the influence of films, you should use a literary basis written prior to the advent of movies and television (i.e. pre-20th century, really).  In particular, I am thinking of Amber roleplaying here.  That is a strong literary basis which has never been adapted into film or television.  However, I feel the text itself has visualization which draws heavily from film -- particularly in the fights.  

Matthijs -- I'm curious about your experience in games of Draug.  Is there a strong literary basis for your games?

[ffilz]

Hmm, I'm trying to think how my own gaming is informed because I don't watch TV, and see very few movies. On the other hand, my idea of what "swashbuckling" is would certainly be informed by The Three Musketeers (which I have seen), and certainly Star Wars back other visualizations. These days, I could just about count the hourse of exposure to movies and TV on my fingers, whereas there are many weeks I probably spend more than 10 hours reading fantasy novels.

I think one result of this is that I am not motivated by flashy descriptions of combat, and I certainly don't imagine NPCs are being played by particular actors.

Frank

[matthijs]

Ffilz and others, as John noted: Post-TV literature is a part of the visual culture. As long as the authors have seen dozens of TV shows and movies, that will influence their writing, and what you read will have an element of TV dramaturgy and techniques in it. It's impossible for us to escape that element of our culture.

John: Wow, thanks for an interesting question re Draug! Hadn't thought of it in that way yet.

The descriptions of the game's setting are based mainly on two different sorts of written sources: Historical references and more-or-less ethnographical records of fairy tales.

When describing it to Norwegians, I say it's the Asbjørnsen & Moe RPG. Asbjørnsen & Moe were two highly-educated men who travelled through Norway in the 1820's, collecting stories from local storytellers. The game doesn't emulate the structure of those stories, but uses elements from them, usually in a more straightforward Hollywood paradigm structure. (Something from outside disturbs the harmony - heroes face the disturbance - harmony is restored).

So, while the game text itself is strongly based on written-down accounts of a verbal fairy tale tradition, the game as it is played is, in fact, a fairly traditional RPG.

[M. J. Young]

Hmm, I'm trying to think how my own gaming is informed because I don't watch TV, and see very few movies.

I think the question is not how much television and movies you watch currently so much as how much you've watched over the course of your entire life.

I remember a genuine revelation I had some years back now concerning sword fighting. I've never been Marklanders or SCA or anything; all my swordfighting experience came from bashing sticks with my brother as kids. We learned it from watching television, usually movies on TV. The odd thing was, when we played sword fighting, our object was always to hit the other guy's sword. In that sense, I was doing the whole thing wrong--in real combat, the object is to hit the other guy; hitting his sword is incidental to preventing him from hitting you. I'd been learning to sword fight by watching actors who were being very careful not to hurt each other, and had missed the point of real sword fighting entirely.

I think it's that kind of influence more generalized that we're talking about here: imagining things like they are in the movies and on television, where they're not really terribly realistic but they come to define our own concepts of plausibility.

--M. J. Young

[ffilz]

Growing up, I watched relatively little TV, and we didn't see movies very often. The only time I became a reasonably frequent media watcher was during college, and even then, I watched way below average. So yes, my outlook certainly is tainted by the media.

I'm not quite sure I buy matthijs's argument though, or at least if one does accept the impossibility of escaping influence, then I question the value of even contemplating what it would be like since any contemplation is by definition tainted. Is it valuable to wonder what RPGs would be like if we had green fur?

But I do think that there is an interesting question of what RPGs look like to someone like me who is relatively insulated from media culture, compared to some of my gamer friends who generally watch more hours of media in a week than they spend gaming.

Frank

[Damballa]

I've always try to speculate as to why Roleplaying developed around 1974 and not before - dice (etc), paper (etc), make-believe and convivial games have all been around for most of human history.  One of my older theories was that visual language (TV, Film, Comic books, Art, Advertising) had reached some kind of critical mass, giving the first players a rich pattern of common referents.  Since then I've become more aware of various Anthropological concepts and now I'm not so sure about that old 'lots of movies=RPG" theory...  

We could take Hakim Bey's ideas of 'Voodoo Theatre' onboard, though:
http://www.left-bank.org/bey/imaginat.htm

[M. J. Young]

I've always try to speculate as to why Roleplaying developed around 1974 and not before....

Paul Cardwell (chairman of CARPGa) asserts that he saw a role playing game being played in the 1950's (he remembered it because it was the first time he'd seen a thirty-sided die), and that he finds references to free form role playing in the biographical accounts of C. S. Lewis. However, Reverend Cardwell isn't a big fan of D&D or Gygax, and likes to minimize the impact of that game.

I think a big part of it was that at that time it was possible to build role playing as an extension of wargaming, which was very popular in the hobby game industry. Thus it caught on. Somewhere online there's a photocopy of a review of the original D&D supplement for Chainmail, in which the reviewer indicated that it wasn't very good in his estimation and probably wouldn't amount to much. It clicked with a segment of the wargaming crowd, spread through colleges and military bases, and gained something which we might call a cult following. It was then helped by two other aspects. One was that in a time in which teens and twenty-somethings were particularly interested in things that were disapproved by the mainstream D&D got some very strong negative press to add fuel to the fire. The other was that the creators were sharp enough to work on minimizing the wargaming aspect and bring out the role playing at an early stage, and so created a game that would reach beyond the wargaming roots (few of us here have any real experience with hard core wargames).

I don't think television had much impact on that; but then, I could be wrong.

--M. J. Young