Applying "Red Curtain"-style

[Daredevil]

Hey folks,

I've been pondering the possibilities of taking certain cinematic techniques and incorporating them into roleplaying games. Sure, it's nothing that hasn't already been almost endlessly debated in a variety of forms. This has been seen in the various Guy Ritchie related threads on the Forge (see  here for one) as well as discussions on cinematic combat and such. Certainly many of the cinematic tricks are untranslatable as such into roleplaying, since they involve a knowledge and usage of the medium (such things as slow-motion, odd camera angles, fast cutting). In one way one could consider almost all progressive discussions on rpg design to be the same thing, as we constantly strive to understand our medium better. However, I'd like to focus on those things that we can translate into roleplaying from other mediums and not necessarily from only the film medium.

Getting on with the point, I'd like to point to another director besides the Forge favorite, one who has used the techniques of other mediums in making films, namely Baz Luhrmann (of Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge fame). I'll paste in a few quotes concerning his style.

The first one is from the official website of Moulin Rouge:

The 'Red Curtain' style that defines our filmmaking comprises several distinct storytelling choices. A simple, even naïve story based on a primary myth is set in a heightened or created world that is at once familiar yet exotic, distant. Each of the 'Red Curtain' trilogy has a device which awakens the audience to the experience and the storyteller's presence, encouraging them to be constantly aware that they are in fact watching a film. In 'Strictly Ballroom' dance is the device, the actors literally dance out the scenes. In 'Romeo+Juliet' it is Shakespeare's heightened 400-year-old language. In 'Moulin Rouge', our ultimate 'Red Curtain' gesture, music and song is the device that releases us from a naturalistic world.

The second quote is from an interview with the director:

It's called red curtain because that's just a simple way of saying it is theatricalized cinema. Now this theatrical cinematic language has very direct roots in the films of the thirties and forties. This is a time when we're looking at films like Citizen Kane, Singing in the Rain, Top Hat. The cinema of that period is not naturalistic. The mark of how artistic it is isn't based on how real it appears. Your response is based on how high the art is in the artifice. It's what I call the big lie to reveal the big truth. It's clearly a heightened cinematic language.

The three films that we've done are all bound together by a few basic rules. One is that they are simple, identifiable myths, so that you understand how the film is going to end within the first ten minutes. You know the ending. You're not revealing plot. They tend to be set in heightened creative worlds. Lands far, far away like the world of ballroom dancing or the apocalyptic world of Verona Beach or, in the case of Moulin Rouge, Paris 1899. These heightened worlds are distant and far away, but we recognize our own world in them. And the third thing is that you've got to constantly keep the audience awake through the movie.

Naturalism tends to put the audience to sleep. It invites you to forget yourself and believe that you're looking though a keyhole into a room and observing the reality of someone's life. There's no way that Singing in the Rain is ever really trying to make you believe that it's an examination of Hollywood in the silent era in a sort of gritty, real documentary. It's clearly using that background in a very entertaining way to celebrate some big idea in the human condition. And so, to keep the audience at all times engaged, we're using a device. In the case of Strictly Ballroom we use dance, in Romeo and Juliet it's iambic pentameter, and in Moulin Rouge it's breaking out in song in a musical form. So, to a certain degree they are all kind of living in a musical vernacular. Strictly Ballroom was the first step in a ten-year journey to crack the modern musical code...In no way is it a new language. It's an old language that we used to revere taken and we sort of reinvented it.

I've always liked Luhrmann's approach in movies and I'm wondering what we could learn from this roleplaying-wise. I think this approach has a lot to do with "empowering Color" (bad, bad term, I know) in our games to elevate the playing experience. Luhrmann's movies use it to make old classic tales seem new and innovative.

Now I think expecting players to burst in song, or to speak entirely in Shakespearean style, is asking a bit too much. This has been discussed re: Guy Ritchie, that it is almost impossible to replicate the level of witty conversation in those movies in play. We've seen reward systems used to go in this direction.

What's left to explore in this regard? Any ideas?

- Joachim Buchert -

[J B Bell]

A really distinctive style, especially in the direction of a film, is usually called auteur.  The Red Curtain style is a conscious choice of adding that characteristic.  My personal favorite is in the films of Hal Hartley, who did Henry Fool, The Amateur, Simple Men, and other really cool pictures you should run out and rent right now.

What?  RPGs?  Oh, yeah.  Well, a group could choose a distinctive style as a choice at the level of the social contract, or a designer can make choices that influence playing style (not color exactly, but part of color, I guess).  The Dying Earth comes to mind as a system that reputedly creates a very distinctive kind of characterization and dialogue.  I'd even say you probably could do a musical RPG, but the players would all have to be experienced (or very brave) performers.  If you've ever seen What's My Line, the British imrpov comedy show, you know how amazing it is what people can produce--opera spoofs sung with almost no prep time, song & dance routines, and so on.

I think satire would be easier to do than, say, Hartley's direction of actors to deliver their lines in a near-monotone.  Since we're all (mostly) so saturated with entertainment culture, most people nowadays have a pretty strong ability to puncture the facade presented by movies, advertising, etc.

Y'know, I could see doing an Inspectres musical.  Seriously.

Right, bit of a ramble there, but you were looking for ideas.  I want video if someone does that musical.

--JB

[M. J. Young]

Each of the 'Red Curtain' trilogy has a device which awakens the audience to the experience and the storyteller's presence, encouraging them to be constantly aware that they are in fact watching a film.

It would seem to me that the analogy would be to design a role playing game in which the system was designed to keep the participants aware that they are involved in a game--a sort of anti-immersion design in one sense, although facilitating a different kind of immersion. Pawn stance is encouraged, with dramatic tension shifted to the level of player interaction.

One might achieve this by a sort of "game within game" meta-system. What I'm thinking now is something on the order of two levels of play. We create characters for the inner game that have ability scores and the crunchy numbers that make them playable; but we create a second set of characters who are the "character players". These could be stereotypes, such as the munchkin, the power gamer, the storyteller, whatever you could come up with in that regard; they could be more fleshed out, as characterizations of other people. I'm told that the secret of the Smothers Brothers success lay in the fact that when they got on stage they played each other, and interacted with each other as charicatures of what they saw in each other. So what I'm looking at is that the players are doing a sort of live-action play in which they take the personalities of someone else playing a game, each of whom has a character designed to express that player's priorities in the inner game.

This is too wild an idea for me to pursue right at the moment; but I think it may be the sort of thing that would be analogous to the Red Curtain style as you describe it.

I never heard of Strictly Ballroom before now. I saw Romeo and Juliet in a sort of distracted in-and-out-of-the-room way and didn't think more about it than that it was an interesting adaptation. I only saw the beginning of Moulin Rouge and have wanted to get the chance to see the rest. So I'm primarily going by what you've quoted here.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

Just a caveat... this may be a stylistic preference.  I have always hated musicals precisely because of the way they draw attention to the very act of the performance.  No doubt some people will enjoy this sort of thing, but for me it would be the direct anathema to exploration.  Further, I have concerns about articulating this as empowering colour; from my perspective it would be disempowering colour because the colour is rendered meaningless.

[Daredevil]

Quotes from M.J Young's reply:

It would seem to me that the analogy would be to design a role playing game in which the system was designed to keep the participants aware that they are involved in a game--a sort of anti-immersion design in one sense, although facilitating a different kind of immersion.

Yes, I think this is a quite correct way of looking at it. Yet, I think one could immerse oneself after a fashion in this kind of game, but certainly not in the uber-sim way of realistically portraying a world. It would be immersion of a different caliber, immersion directly to the act of roleplaying, perhaps. Part of the charm of the technique is that the in-character level regards the strangeness going on as it were commonplace, the players just have to "get it" as well, though that strangeness and (as suggested in the quotes by Baz Luhrmann) the odd settings remind the players that this is something fantastic and not an attempt at "naturalism" (hmm, I like that term a lot better than realism for this instance).

Pawn stance is encouraged, with dramatic tension shifted to the level of player interaction.

I found myself intuitively thinking this whole approach has a lot to do with using Director Stance in a creative manner. Which is conveniently coincidental to the fact that we were talking about film directors. I think Director Stance allows us to perform a lot of gimmicks similar to these. A lot of that is already seen in many game designs here on the Forge. Or perhaps the style actually has more to do with the creative use of stances in general. Hmm. Maybe it's not limited in this sense, but Director Stance just happened to be the first thing that popped into my mind when I started thinking about this. Sorry for grasping for straws there, but I'm trying to better understand this style and also on what level (of theory) it occurs. I think this could provide game design with a fresh new perspective.

Quote from contracycle:

Just a caveat... this may be a stylistic preference. I have always hated musicals precisely because of the way they draw attention to the very act of the performance.

I knew the musical references would rub some people the wrong way. I don't think using this technique is innately tied to just musicals, though it is certainly one way of doing it. Indeed, a roleplaying game played as a musical would probably be kind of cool (if you'd be into that thing), but as mentioned would require a great deal from the players.

InSpectres, as mentioned by J B Bell, is certainly a game that already seems to fit the style.

Oddly, I'm also reminded of a cartoon -- Wormy -- that ran in Dragon magazine all those years ago, which featured typical fantasy monsters playing wargames between themselves, but was actually much more interesting than that makes it sound like. For the reader, it seemed somewhat absurd that a dragon and a bunch of ogres were playing wargames between themselves, though the for the characters it seemed perfectly natural. After a while, that tension became very interesting. Of course, the cartoon wasn't really about those wargames per se, it was just something that the characters did.

- Joachim Buchert -

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I can't recommend the game Extreme Vengeance highly enough for precisely the principles outlined in this thread, as they pertain to action movies. Most people's reading of this game stops with its humor, which in my opinion is badly misplaced because it obscures the actual power of the system - which is, not to over-state, revolutionary.

Best,
Ron

[Christoffer Lernö]

Damn. I just read a review of it on rpg.net since you mentioned it Ron. Seems like a really fun game. So many games I want. Anyone feeling like going shopping for me? (Still can't get any games here except a chinese version of D&D 3rd ed)

Anything more to add about Extreme Vengeance for those unfortunate bastards that would have to pay a lot to have it shipped to whatever side the of the world they happen to be on? I read about the instant city thing. What more does it do to enhance Red Curtain style gaming?

[Emily Care]

Excellent topic and good insight.  Baz Luhrman's films are so rich they could yield a lot to the discussion of narrative construction, use and authorship of character, and world creation.

The freedom of flashback order and editing to support narrative found in Moulin Rouge speaks to narrativist role-playing. My favorite sequence in Moulin Rouge, the "Come What May" montage, is an example of this.  In this sequence, the young lovers exchange a secret song that affirms their love in the face of jealousy and separation.   As they sing it the visual images flash between the first time they sing the song, and the time they sing it just before betraying their secret love, and range back over the course of their relationship.  Many scenes that had been alluded to before this point in the plot, but not shown, are given to us at a moment when their emotional impact is being expressed by the song.  

Time is fluid in the film, in this way.  We often see moments that relate associatively with the "current" moment in the plot, rather than chronologically.  It's stunning really.  RPG, like film, is not limited to linear time, and these techniques could be used in like fashion to flesh out characters' past experiences at the moment that it becomes relevant, rather than simply in chronological fashion.  Memory, and narrative, are asynchronous and alinear, though they give us the illusion of happening in sequence because that is how most of us perceive events to be happening.  But in our recollection and reconstruction of the events, we are constantly re-interpreting the past in light of the present, projections about the future,  and in light of our re-re-interpretations of the past.  Looping and cycling on, ad infinitum.

It would seem to me that the analogy would be to design a role playing game in which the system was designed to keep the participants aware that they are involved in a game--a sort of anti-immersion design in one sense, although facilitating a different kind of immersion.

The distancing techniques of the music and editing function simultaneously with the incredibly immersive creation of setting and world. Moulin Rouge is reminiscent of films like Brazil, Delicatessin and City of Lost Children, all of which have meticulously detailed settings.  They create a world and bring you into it. Definite legacy of  Welles' formalistic films, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.  The setting itself becomes a character in the narrative.

The kind of lavish detailing of background one might imagine a gm doing to simulate these films could easily founder into masturbatory soliliquies of what kind of silk a lady's undergarment is made of etc. ad nauseum. (Anybody read some later Anne Rice?)  I'd be more interested in a game that gave a lot of room for group exploration and development of setting and background as a foundation for play, but that also did what these films did so successfully: intertwine that setting with narrative.  The mythic storyline that Baz talks about is perfectly suited to a baroque outfitting.  Strictly Ballroom is the simplest tale of a boy meeting girl and overcoming opposition of their elders and all odds.  A more involved story would probably have overbalanced the campy, lurid and ridiculously extravagent world of Ballroom Dancing competition.  

So what I'm looking at is that the players are doing a sort of live-action play in which they take the personalities of someone else playing a game, each of whom has a character designed to express that player's priorities in the inner game.

I'd love to see this.  I didn't know that the Smothers' Brothers were playing eachother.  What a kick.  I had a character that was multiple personality that I wanted to be played by a different player for each personality, but she never entered play.  Isn't there a role-playing game about role-playing?  That would be very analogous to Moulin Rouge.

--Emily Care

[M. J. Young]

Not so long ago we had a wild night. It started when it was agreed that we would "do something together" (there are seven of us in the family, five sons from 19 to 10) and that we would decide by each of us writing something on a card and someone drawing one card from the hat. Then it really got wild. The card drawn, from my second son, suggested that we trade identities for a while, and so be each other. Back into the hat went one card for each of us, and we drew our new personalities. For the next hour or so, each of us did our best to portray the person we drew.

I pulled the youngest; after several attempts to annoy people, I threw a fit and went to my bedroom. My third son drew me, and promptly went into my office, sat their typing on the keys and periodically yelling "don't make me come out there" and similar phrases. My wife drew my fourth son, and promptly followed me into the room, where she jumped on me trying to get me to come out of my room. The fourth son drew the eldest, and immediately sat in front of the computer playing video games and ignoring everything that was going on around him. In all, it was a wild time. It was also a very interesting way to see how we are perceived by each other.

Yet throughout there was this unreality to it all. We were doing charicatures, really. It was always very much a game. There was a lack of immersion, in the sense of truly feeling the part you're playing. All of it was about presenting an exterior appearance that matched what you had perceived of that other person.

Maybe this has something of that Red Curtain feel.

--M. J. Young

[Walt Freitag]

As far as I know, the Red Curtain technique doesn't exist as such in live theater, because there's no way to stage a live theater production without the artifacts and language of theater reminding the audience that they are watching a performance. A production can highlight it (visible stagehands, audience involvement, Stoppardian scripts full of self-reference, excessive Broadway spectacle) or play it down (though modern theater has been highlighting it so much for so long that at this point attempting to play it down just becomes another way of highlighting it) but cannot make it a non-issue.

So it is with most role playing games. Perhaps I'm missing the point here, but it appears to me that most RPGs already fit the description of the "Red Curtain" technique as described in the quotes of the first post. Don't the dice, system, character sheets, and other conventional trappings of play constitute quite a robust Red Curtain?

"Simple, identifiable myths," "heightened creative worlds," "lands far, far away," that we "recognize our own world in them," and "keeping the audience awake" are as close to universal in RPGs as anything is. The only major departure appears to be the foreknowledge or internal predictability of the plot and the ending associated with Red Curtain, which while far from universal (and often deliberately avoided) in RPGs, I suggest is more common than generally recognized.

This is not to dismiss the insights and ideas expressed here by Emily and others. I agree that there's a lot of room for increased use of stylistic artifice in RPGs. By necessity, many LARP games have had to go in some of these directions (with the exception of the nonlinear time Emily describes, which is impractical in a large-scale LARP) and have had some execellent (and occasionally, as one might expect with such experimentation, some terrible) results. It arises most often and most easily on the purely comical or satirical level (as a million instances of deliberate and silly in-game-world references to game system concepts, such as a vial full of hit points, can attest to), but it can coexist with and even enhance pretty much any mood. Most discussion of "genre expectations" techniques end up in a similar place, with the realization that in-game-world cause and effect rules alone (no matter how divorced from "realism") cannot replicate the feel of a genre. Overtly artificial style-driven rules and conventions must be applied as well.

- Walt

[Jonathan Walton]

Isn't there a role-playing game about role-playing?

Sort of.  Both of my current projects, Storypunk and We Regret to Inform You (The GM is Dead) are intended to be self-referencial games that are "about" roleplaying.

In Storypunk, the characters are people who escape into 'Story' as a way to get away from their less-than-ideal lives (at least initially) and reap the rewards and penalties for doing so.  Additionally, at the end of the last thread, I talked about characters intentionally choosing to take Actor, Author, or Director stance within the Story, which also mirrors some of the external mechanics of rpgs.

Even more so, The Gm is Dead tries to take roleplaying over the deep end, exploring what happens when the characters are aware of the players' existence and try to affect the world outside the game.  This one's still in the initial processing stage, but it's likely to end up being even more self-referencial than Storypunk.

Both of these were influenced by Brechtian theater traditions, which is very much the kind of "Red Curtain" effect that Baz is talking about, where the audience is constatly aware (though the absurdity of what's going on) that they are watching a play.

Later.
Jonathan

[M. J. Young]

Walt, I think maybe Emily and Jonathan are on this already, but to focus it, what about achieving the Red Curtain effect through a game in which the characters know that they are characters in a game? I'm taking a bit of a page from The Last Action Hero here, but I think it could be interesting. It would be particularly interesting if they were debating such questions as "do I have plot immunity?" and "am I operated in director stance?" But I suspect it would have a very narrow audience for that.

--M. J. Young