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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6115177" data-attributes="member: 4937">Leaving aside the fact that as a Tolkien purist, the existance of a movie falsely presenting itself as being an adaptation of a beloved fantasy novel is not something I try to think about much, I don't think that anyone has asserted that scenes can't be artfully framed - as by a master of cinema like Stephen Speilburg or even compotent artist like J.J. Abrams - or conversely inartfully framed - as by a no talent hack like Peter Jackson.   Stephen Speilburg is a master of letting a visual effect stand for 1000 words - a movie like Jurassic Park is filled with the sort of visual dialogue with the audience that you are pointing out in 'Super 8'.As an art form, I think that cinema is at a much more mature state than PnP RPGs (which isn't to say that a lot of great cinema is actually being made).  The fundamentals of what makes for good cinema is pretty well understood, albiet there has been sadly too little focus on cinema as great story telling and too much on 'artful framing'.   French cinema is for instance filled with extraordinarily well framed shots serving terrible, dry, poorly paced, often nihilistic, and gimmicky story telling.   But at least we can say something like that about cinema.  I don't know that we can even make reasonable assessments about the state of PnP RPGs as art.  Nobody records PnP RPG sessions, and when they do that isn't the experience of a PnP RPG session - but merely the rather dull movie of same.   Perhaps we first need to learn how to make an artful movie of an RPG session or otherwise learn how to create a reproducable RPG session before we can begin to study them as art.We can frequently study PJ's movies as examples of what not to do in making a movie, but they often succeed at some level anyway because of the brilliant work of custumers, set decorators, CGI artists, concept artists (Howe and Lee, for example), and the occassional almost accidental resemblence they have to the works of JRR Tolkien to see how great material can be rendered merely adequate.   And we can look at a particular scene in Jurassic Park - like a cup of water vibrating - and see how those moments elevate otherwise pedestrian material to some level of greatness.  But I'm not sure that there is a 1 to 1 relationship between what works in a movie and what works in an RPG session.   Certainly at some level its all story telling arts, and a good story remains a good story regardless of medium it is transferred to, but there are so many differences between cinema as a medium and PnP RPGs as a medium - more even than there is between a movie and a novel - that it's not at all clear how you go about making a story in an RPG in the most artful manner.   Maybe you can or even ought to do things in the PnP RPG that would be wrong in cinema.  Certainly I know that there are things you can and maybe ought to do in a novel that don't exactly translate to PnP RPGs, and things about novels that can be the essential features of the novel that you cannot do in a movie and have it come out right.  Consider for example how tricky Dune - a novel that depends on internal dialogue - is to adapt to a movie - where internal dialogue violates just about every good practice of movie making.   Or sense it is now in production, consider how tricky the extremely critical opening scenes of Ender's Game are to adapt to a movie when you can't have Ender's insightful internal commentary informing the reader of the deeper currents of the scene.   I shudder to think what the hacks are going to do to that (including sadly OSC himself, who among other things doesn't show to me he really knows screen plays).I really loathe a lot that comes out of Forge, because I think it is flat out wrong.  But at the same time I greatly admire the attempt and effort involved in creating a theory of RPGs as art.  Even if I disagree with the conclusions, the thought process involved is a thing of worth.Right now the art is young.  It's great to see RPGs as art coming out - the original 'Mass Effect' in the world of computer games.  But even in Mass Effect, much of the power of the game comes from good cinematic art.  Not to put to fine of a point on it, but the RPG side of things in Mass Effect - the things unique to RPG story telling - is rather less artfully done and I think it is ultimately in that that the fans were often greatly disappointed by Mass Effect 3.  Anyway, the tl;dr version of this is: I'm not sure it simplifies the argument to transform it to the question of, "How do you create an artful RPG session?"  I know it has something to do with meaningful choices, player agency, and creating a great shared mental space along with and in addition to all the things that makes for a good story generally, but I'm not sure anyone has the answer to that yet.</blockquote>

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