So, me and good old Spikey over there were talking about how my blog posts tend to be there for a very small audience, because I talk about the slight intersect of RPGs and Television, and rarely about anything else. I came up with the idea of trying to open up the reasons for this a bit, but it came out a bit dull on the first try, so tonight’s solution:

This should help a bit. Notes in italic are written on the morning after.

So, Alvan, television and role playing games, 101. As one might see from the odd blog posts I write, both are a big part of my daily thought process. To be honest, I don’t actively play RPGs these days. It’s almost more likely for me to have a month when I don’t play a single game than one when I do. On the other hand, I still maintain my healthy interest in TV-shows, watching the essentials daily and sometimes popping to the non-essentials in nice big rounds (season at a time, DVD rental these days is awesome). But let’s take a look back in time.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I convinced my mother to buy me the Finnish edition of RuneQuest after seeing the Dungeons and Dragons Red Box in my best friend’s bookshelf. Now, to a toddler like me (I was something like 10 back then), the mechanics of the game were way too hard to understand. My best friend managed to play a couple of D&D sessions with me, but he never got RuneQuest. Neither did I, but kept returning to the book, trying to figure out what the deal with it was. I made simpler versions of the rules and had a couple of games, but to be honest, I spent most of the time just reading the book. By “simpler versions of the rules” I mean something like “let’s roll these dice and if we roll something like X or lower, then we succeed, okay?”, not something that was really thought out – as said, this was when I was very very young.

Years passed, monkeys found monoliths and discovered fire and death. Somewhere around this point I met a lot of the people who are still part of the gaming group I still consider I belong to. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons became the game of choice (and in case you’re wondering: I still don’t understand some of RuneQuest’s rules, and have stopped trying 15 years ago), as we knew how to read English (I blame the computer games and old-school Batman TV series for that). So, back when I was something like 14, the RPGs we were playing were pretty much about a group of good guys (the players’ characters) fighting the bad guys (who were about as 2-dimensional as they get). And the biggest thing that was considered a story twist was that the game master poured a surprising monster or two at the end, or an ally turned out to be a traitor.

At some point, humans escaped the Garden of Eden and the games started getting more mature with the players. There was the Vampire: The Masquerade era when the games moved to a story-focused and more serious direction. Story-focused meant that it was pretty much the game master telling a story where the players were allowed to listen. And serious meant that things were cool. On the outside. The worst of this era was probably symbolized by a legendary game called “Varastoalue”, where the players were so desperate to affect the story (which was bad) they actively tried to kill own their characters.. and failing. All while the Game Master’s “story” went on. With cool ninja bodyguards and whatever else that was supposed to be awesome, but in reality just dreadful. As manatic comments below, Varastoalue wasn’t a full-fledged, planned adventure. But to be honest, not many games back then were. Lots of improvised one-shots that tended to be nearly as awful as Varastoalue. It just has a symbolic value that shines over the other games of the era because of the sheer absurdity of the things that happened in it.

And so eventually mankind blossomed, built pyramids and cathedrals, and we got pissed at it all – the railroaded games, the superficial cool (that wasn’t cool) and the gaming. I think we actually stopped playing for a good while at some point. When we came back the games started to change, something a bit different. (there’s a 10 years or so leap somewhere here in time). And after being so pissed at how things had worked, we started questioning the fun of the games we were playing.

And with the questioning of the games and gaming, we started looking for answers in the other things that we had been comfortable with. In my case, it was television and popular culture in general. To give another example before moving on – one of us has moved towards exploring the games through linguistics and history.

Now, to emphasize the point of loving TV series, here’s a photo I took earlier when cleaning my DVD cabinet (yeah, here only to show off, also, sorry about the quality, cameraphone + bad lights = not a good combo):

Whoa, pretentious much, well – I guess when you have taken a photo of the collection, you need to post it somewhere.

Now, what was I saying. Yeah. (the port’s good btw, you should try it someday) I’ve grown with television series. Mostly the geeky stuff you’d expect – Star Treks, Babylon 5s, Batman (the old series), the works. But also other things – Love Boat, Knight Rider, MacGyver, Twin Peaks… Hmm, I guess those are the geeky stuff too. Lovejoy, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Bergerac, The Darling Buds of May and other quality Brit drama. So, anyways, the main point – watched lot of TV, and TV started affecting the way I viewed my games.

And while movies and books are great when you’re talking about a singular story structure that’s maybe played in one session as a RPG, television series (in my mind) provide a way better analogue to story structure of a game that gets split into sections. Sure, it’s not perfect, but quite many problems that come up with TV series also apply to games. And thus I blog. About the problems of television series, and try to create the analogues to RPGs the best I can when they arise.

Now, as said, I don’t actually play that many games these days. I have returned to the phase I was when I had RuneQuest. I try to keep up with the trends of the games and still buy the books that I find interesting, but most of the time, I just read them and think about how they might work. Most of the game design I tend to do these days is when I’ve watched TV. And try to see what’s good, what’s bad and what can be learned from it.

So. The best I can come up with for parting words now that the Niepoort has been working wonderfully are: When you’re reading these blog posts of mine you will hear me talk of role playing games. And if you’re someone who is not familiar with them, there might be some preconceptions that might make you want to just ignore the posts. When that happens, please try to think less of the stereotype (that I might somewhat fit, granted) of sad grown up men in their parents’ basement, rolling dice and talking about Sir Ben Dover saving the fair elf princess from the vile Dragon of Omfgawesomeness of +5. And maybe think about the text more in terms of writing and thinking of television drama – should make the reading experience a bit more balanced and maybe a little less sad. And most of the time it might even make sense.

I’ll take another look at this tomorrow and see if there is any sense in what I’ve written. Now it’s time to go rest and hope I feel better in the morning. Yeah, wasn’t half as bad as I had imagined. I can live with this. As someone commented on IRC – it’s a “this is why we can’t have nice things” sort of a history. Whatever that means.

Related Posts:

• Century and Advancement
• Thoughts of the first Decade
• A Beginning
• 4 Things the 4th Edition Teaches You
• What do I get out of it?

Tags: rpgs, television, the site, writing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 06:21 and is filed under metastuff, movies/television, roleplaying games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.