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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4297204" data-attributes="member: 32536">I would agree with this.I mean, look at the use of the words "videogamey" and "anime" to describe things like flashy attacks with fancy names and the like, as a contrast to "literary" which supposedly entails realism and subdued action. There is no doubt that a lot of anime series and videogames made these days feature flashy attacks with fancy names, but the reason they do so is because that kind of thing is the kind of thing that captures the attention of modern audiences of the fantasy genre. If D&D now features flashy attacks and fancy attack names, it is because people have grown to expect them in the fantasy genre, not because D&D is emulating anime and videogames.Meanwhile, the classic "anti-videogame" "literary" influence seems to be Tolkien, which is rooted in the kind of fantasy you see in the writing of Tolkien's day. A lot of other "literary" examples come from a particular period and style of fantasy which seems pretty much limited to the set of fantasy authors who were popular when D&D was created. That particular kind of fantasy is mostly relegated to history now, since newer popular fantasy has taken a very different turn. D&D is just trying to catch up.Anyways, there is one more thing I want to mention regarding this particular discussion. Far too many people are (perhaps unconsciously) trying to equate the role of the player in a videogame with the role of a player in D&D. These two things are not equivalent in any way, and trying to do so will lead to problematic conclusions. Just as it is fallacious to say that the role of D&D player is the same as the role of a reader of a book, or that the role of a D&D player is the same as the role of a player of a miniatures-based wargame, it is fallacious to make statements equating the range of choice open to a D&D player to the range of choice available to the player of a particular videogame. After all, a person playing a videogame may be expected to fulfill any number of roles with respect to the game, and this may range anywhere from "reader" or "viewer" to "distant commander of military units" to "controller of a single character", and often somewhere in between, and this makes direct comparison to D&D (which assumes a very specific and unusual player role) incredibly difficult.</blockquote>

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