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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Odhanan" data-source="post: 5644052" data-attributes="member: 12324">Role playing games to me are not novels. They're not movies. They're not comics. They're not MMOs. They're not "something else" to be judged by "something else's" standards. Can a rule be art? That's an interesting question. I would say "yes", because a rule represents something in the context of what the game tries to emulate through its system. The corpus of rules, therefore, may represent something that may carry a message, a value, a point of view that is shared through the way the system itself is built. Therefore, it can carry emotions, sensibilities, POVs, etc etc that can be reacted to, and further than this, used by the end users of the game, in a way that helps them express their own imaginations, their own POVs, their own aesthetics of the make-believe they want to play in. So they can be considered art, though not automatically, from the viewer's point of view, like the designer's. The question of whether the written rules book is art or not to me takes into consideration the whole of the work: what process of play it wants to convey, what aesthetics (world, setting, organization of the make believe etc) it uses to further that goal, how all the components combine to create a defined whole with its perceived usefulness and value from the viewer/user's standpoint, like the maker's.It's actually really interesting, because role playing games have something that novels, comics, movies etc. don't have. That it is the user who, in the end, becomes the maker. So from an artistic point of view it's a very interesting medium in which basically you can deliver a painting that each individual viewer can pick up to then create his or her own painting from there. It's really cool.</blockquote>

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