Grey
Dialectical Hermeticist
While SYWTW... is on an accidental hiatus, please enjoy this filler episode.
And by filler, I mean a short but important lesson many users need to learn. Happily, the world of videogaming gives us some handy examples for this discussion.
You know how movie tie-in games suck? Barely coherent, shoddy mechanics, and a loose relation to the plot of the film, at best? A overriding sense that the devs don't actually grasp the work they're adapting?
That, friends and neighbours, is what a stroll through Fandom feels like.
The medium is part of the message, kids. A particular narrative format is chosen to tell a story because it suits that story. At the end of the day. a roleplay is another way of telling a story, and some stories just don't work. Or they might, with enough talent and effort. I'm going to be uncharitable here and assume your roleplay benefits from neither.
Consider; Hotline Miami's fractured and strange narrative works in a videogame, but you might have a harder time telling that story with the same impact as, say, a movie. Or a novel. On a related note, Drive is adapted from a novel of the same name, but abandons the changing viewpoints and chronology of the book for something more straightforward. Not quite the same, an impressive exercise in editing, and it ultimately impacts the viewer in a different way, prompting different interpretations of the material.
Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons is an amazing story in novel format - but the idea of adapting it to a film? Wouldn't work. As a game? Maybe, but it'd be a crazy amount of work. As a roleplay? Nope.
Attack on Titan poses problems for adaptation in two ways - part of the central narrative is world-building, and everything is built around the central narrative. Without knowing where the plot is going, adapting it to a roleplay forces you to try and run a side-story - which people are less likely to engage with, because we know the real plot is deciding the fate of the world just offscreen - or to try and finish the hanging plot in your own way, which is apt to leave some players cold and take a lot of work. A lot of the series impact comes from the visuals, the changes in perspective, and the limited information available to the viewer. A lot of those things contribute to the way it feels, you see?
And that, now I finally get to it, is my real point. When you want to start a roleplay based on a videogame or TV show, an anime or movie, you have to ask yourself - do I really have a story to tell, or do I just want more of the media I have just enjoyed? Do I want to sustain the feeling that this existing game or world or plot gave me, or do I really want to do something with the material?
Because if you just want more, you're wasting your time and everyone else's. You can't perfectly replicate it; you have to work on adapting it and accepting it won't be the same. You need to use a setting, or a conceit, or a mechanism, rather than simply copy/paste the existing work and hope it'll actually go somewhere.
And by filler, I mean a short but important lesson many users need to learn. Happily, the world of videogaming gives us some handy examples for this discussion.
You know how movie tie-in games suck? Barely coherent, shoddy mechanics, and a loose relation to the plot of the film, at best? A overriding sense that the devs don't actually grasp the work they're adapting?
That, friends and neighbours, is what a stroll through Fandom feels like.
The medium is part of the message, kids. A particular narrative format is chosen to tell a story because it suits that story. At the end of the day. a roleplay is another way of telling a story, and some stories just don't work. Or they might, with enough talent and effort. I'm going to be uncharitable here and assume your roleplay benefits from neither.
Consider; Hotline Miami's fractured and strange narrative works in a videogame, but you might have a harder time telling that story with the same impact as, say, a movie. Or a novel. On a related note, Drive is adapted from a novel of the same name, but abandons the changing viewpoints and chronology of the book for something more straightforward. Not quite the same, an impressive exercise in editing, and it ultimately impacts the viewer in a different way, prompting different interpretations of the material.
Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons is an amazing story in novel format - but the idea of adapting it to a film? Wouldn't work. As a game? Maybe, but it'd be a crazy amount of work. As a roleplay? Nope.
Attack on Titan poses problems for adaptation in two ways - part of the central narrative is world-building, and everything is built around the central narrative. Without knowing where the plot is going, adapting it to a roleplay forces you to try and run a side-story - which people are less likely to engage with, because we know the real plot is deciding the fate of the world just offscreen - or to try and finish the hanging plot in your own way, which is apt to leave some players cold and take a lot of work. A lot of the series impact comes from the visuals, the changes in perspective, and the limited information available to the viewer. A lot of those things contribute to the way it feels, you see?
And that, now I finally get to it, is my real point. When you want to start a roleplay based on a videogame or TV show, an anime or movie, you have to ask yourself - do I really have a story to tell, or do I just want more of the media I have just enjoyed? Do I want to sustain the feeling that this existing game or world or plot gave me, or do I really want to do something with the material?
Because if you just want more, you're wasting your time and everyone else's. You can't perfectly replicate it; you have to work on adapting it and accepting it won't be the same. You need to use a setting, or a conceit, or a mechanism, rather than simply copy/paste the existing work and hope it'll actually go somewhere.
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