Telling Stories: Serial roleplaying or building events
One of the things that has made my wife and I both develop an affection for Netflix-produced shows is the simple fact that these shows don’t have to work like traditional television. They can break a cardinal rule that’s long been accepted as fact – they can be completely non-serial.
Most shows have to be designed so that you can sit down and watch with a minimum of overall knowledge. This isn’t always a bad thing; after all, Batman: The Animated Series ran on the idea of boiling down the characters to their essences, and it was one of the best animated shows ever. But when you get shows like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, you feel the writers struggling against the restrictions imposed by a format that relied upon standalone episodes. It’s kind of a miracle that Lost ran as long as it did while putting up a wall for any new viewers.
There’s something of the same issue when it comes to roleplaying. You’ve got a tug-of-war between the serial version or a more constant continuity. The trouble is that one is a lot more rewarding than the other, and the benefits of serial roleplaying are mostly conceptual.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
All right. So let’s go over this for just a minute. Assume you work as an innkeeper in a desert oasis town not too far from a major castle. One day, you see someone new strolling into town. Closer inspection reveals that he is a man in ominous black armor, carrying a young girl who has obviously been injured and weeping recently.
What I’m getting at here is that it’s a major miracle that the game’s lot didn’t end here, with Cecil being sent to every single possible jail. I mean, the explanation would just make it worse. “See, it’s because I killed her mom!”
Yes, after you’ve blown a village to hell, the only thing to really do is head for the nearest town in the hope that the girl you traumatized and almost killed isn’t actually dead. The innkeeper lets you take her to a bed to rest immediately, and said girl wakes up after about five seconds of bed rest. Despite Cecil’s eagerness, she’s a little reluctant to chat with him due to the whole dead mother thing, so Cecil also prepares to go to sleep. Until soldiers burst in, anyway.
Hard Project: Adventure Time
Well, everything looks right, I suppose.
If you haven’t seen Adventure Time yet, go do that now. The first two seasons are on Netflix, you have no excuse. Do what you have to do. Shove someone down a flight of stairs if you have to! Except probably not that, because that’s kind of an awful thing to do, and Adventure Time is a show that is generally against doing awful things like shoving people down flights of stairs. Unless they really want you to and they’re cool with it.
Where was I? Right, Adventure Time, which is absolutely wonderful. It’s a fun show. It’s got fun comics. It’s got a few games, and only one of those has produced a non-tepid response. That’s a bit weird, seeing as how the show has been running for long enough that there’s lead time for some development and a lot of creative people really like this show. There’s every reason for it to be successful, and yet the games just don’t stand up. So why is that? What’s keeping us from having a totally sweet Adventure Time video game?
Defiance and the dancing bear
Let’s all pause for a moment to appreciate the show giving us another non-English curse word to pepper speech with while avoiding strict censor guidelines.
The dancing bear joke really isn’t; it’s more of a punchline in search of a setup. It’s simple enough, though. If you see a bear dancing in the circus, you’re not concerned with his form. You’re just impressed that the people training him got him to dance at all. Sure, it’s mostly just shuffling back and forth, but does it really matter as long as it counts as dancing?
A lot of media has the dancing bear problem. Strictly speaking, for instance, it doesn’t matter if the Transformers cartoons are any good, it just matters whether or not they sell toys. Skylanders toys could come to life at night and try to kill your pets, but the important thing is that they tie into the video game. You get the idea. When you’ve got any piece of media tying into something else, you’re starting out with a dancing bear.
Defiance falls into that category quite handily. It’s a show that’s made to tie into an online game running at the same time, with the promise that the two will feed into one another – events in the game are reflected by the show, and vice versa. The problem being, of course, that a show not aimed at supporting a merchandising line can’t survive for long on novelty. It’s not enough to be a dancing bear here; you have to be a bear that turns out to be a pretty good dancer.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 