Nice quote

[andrewducker]

The games I run and play in aren't stories. When we play, we make this gigantic tangled mass of narrative. There's too much stuff in them to be a story. We make stories out of them, by taking a particular point of view, and highlighting some bits of the mass as important, and sidelining other things.

When you take a point of view to get a slice of the game, you get a story -- protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters emerge. However, you can slice a game in multiple ways, and get multiple stories. And in each slice, who the protagonists are is different. All from the same play session.

My sense is that this is one of the most amazing aesthetic features of rpg play. A movie like Rashomon is cutting-edge stuff because Kurosawa had to invest a huge amount of brilliance to make a movie that could present multiple perspectives on the "same" event -- but when we game we do this automatically, with not the slightest hint of effort.

IMO, that's where the real artistic potential of rpgs lies: in those places where we can do better than other narrative arts.

-Neel

stolen from blackmanxy.

And that's one of the things I love about gaming - the fact that we're not creating a story, but one happens through us anyway.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I completely agree, which is one of the reasons that I find the fact that a number of game designers create rules to allow player to deliberately craft stories to be utterly wrong-headed and counter-productive (pretty much anything that can be described as metagaming narrative control falls into that category for me).

IMO, that's where the real artistic potential of rpgs lies: in those places where we can do better than other narrative arts.

Absolutely, I'd love to see more exploration of this. It seems an obvious way to help RPGs survive in the era of MMORPGs (which are inherently far more linear and will remain that way until we have something very close to true AI).

he fact that we're not creating a story, but one happens through us anyway.

For me it's like life - we are creatures that intrinsically create stories and so our lives and our games become stories.

[andrewducker]

I don't have a problem with storytelling games. I can't see how it's counterproductive - it's just a different kind of game. The problem happens when you have people going in to play one type of game, and other players expect a different kind of game.

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

I remember back in the later 80s when dice-less games came in, and it became fashionable to emphasise GM/Ref as storyteller. "Real" roleplayers, apparently, didn't *want* to treat the whole thing as a cross between a simulation and a wargame. At the time, it made me feel both irritated and vaguely childish. Now I find that I was in fact an Old School gamer.

[broin.livejournal.com]

Yep. :)

Games where I don't have some degree of control bore me to tears, and I haven't played a game with a GM in... a year? I'd much sooner have everyone at the table throwing ideas into a pot _equally_, seeing which characters clearly become protagonists (either through mechanics like in _In A Wicked Age_ or just through evolution of their status), following unexpected leads as the story appears, focusing on different perspectives, etc.