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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 4422893" data-attributes="member: 59082">I agree and disagree with you here, because you are saying different things at the same time. I hear you saying that D&D isn't an art form but it can be art. This is really no different than any artistic modality; music is an art form but is all music "artistic"? Or is it a matter of degree? It gets tricky, because we probably all have different criteria as to what art is, let alone "good" art. I'd like to keep it open and say that art = a creative activity that is self-generated, active and not just mimetic or passive. Or to put it another way, art is what artists create. So it is more a matter of discussing what an artist is than what art is.I also agree with Ycore Rixle's slight twist on what you are saying: This, I agree with, although would offer that it is hard to make a sharp distinction between good and bad art. I can look at pretty much any RPG and see some degree of artistry, or at least creativity. It may not be "good" in the sense that Rembrandt or Van Gogh is "good" (to say the least), but it is still art. Actually, one of the positive cultural developments that I've seen, especially with my own Gen X and later, is that everyone is an artist, or at least a self-fashioned artist. The Boomers are sometimes called the "cultural creatives" and Gen X takes it a step further. Later generations (or sub-generations) seem to take it to greater extremes: either more artistic and individual, or less so, depending on the degree to which they are lost with the gadgetry of 21st century entertainment technology. But that is another conversation, so won't go there.Back to RPGs. One of the most creative aspects of RPGs, in my mind, is campaign world creation, which is something it shares with scifi and fantasy writing. I see world design as a potential art form in itself, even divorced from RPGs or novels. Why not create an imaginary world just for the sake of it? Like drama it can be a kind of "meta-art" that incorporates many different more specific forms. The problem, of course, is putting it out there--if one wants to, that is--which requires some kind of marketable, accessible form. Let us not forget that for Tolkien Middle-earth was primary, the Lord of the Rings secondary. Tolkien created Middle-earth to play with mythology and languages, especially in terms of what a syncretic European proto-mythology might look like. This began to the take the form of the Silmarillion; the Hobbit was basically a transcript of an ongoing story he told his children, and the Lord of the Rings the result of the Hobbit's publisher asking for a sequel. But the creative act itself, Tolkien's art, was first and foremost Middle-earth itself.</blockquote>

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