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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5641194" data-attributes="member: 3887">This is a great point, Danny. Intent (also concept) does matter. It's what separates a drop cloth from a Drip painting. But I think it's a point that works in service of the idea playing role-playing games creates art.By giving their PCs personalities, goals, motivations, mannerisms, and frequently background stories, all the good stuff we're encouraged to do before and during the game, the players are writing and developing fictional characters. How is it meaningfully different from what authors and actors do? It's still fiction writing and performance. It's even done for much the same reason; entertaining an audience (including the creator), albeit a very small and specific one. That sure looks like the intent to create something art-like to me.Basically, any creative act the players engage in with their characters not directly related to "winning" the given scenario is a form of characterization. You don't typically characterize your rook in Chess, or your hat in Monopoly. You do that to characters in fiction. And fiction-making is art-making by definition, no?Then there's the whole "exploring a fictional space" angle. I'm not convinced there's an important difference between exploring Middle Earth as a reader and exploring Room 17a in the module D1, The Dungeons of Desolate Desolation, other than you're a passive explorer in the former and an active explorer in the latter. In each case you're nosing around a make-believe world in the guise of another, hungry to discover "what's new" and "what happens next".When you boil a lot of narrative art down to it's core, you get something that looks like gaming. But perhaps that says more about me as a reader and general art-consumer than it does about art... either way, it's an interesting old chestnut to discuss.</blockquote>

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