I Met A Traveler
Some people who read this blog may remember when I was more prolific in the TTRPG streaming ecosystem, and I'll immediately add that "prolific" is only by comparison to my current activity. Even if I never became a proper neon-and-vape e-boy on Twitch, I did come to appreciate the performative space that it represented. Represents, even. Twitch is still around, even after I stopped streaming regularly! Wild, I know. I'm made to understand that a lot of things happen without much consideration or input from me.
One day I'll get used to it, but I don't have to like it.
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| Pictured: This fucking thing refuses to revolve around me |
An Antique Land
Anyway every medium impacts its media. A book's content is absolutely related to the fact that it is a book and not, for example, bathroom stall graffiti. Shakespeare could not have written Much Ado About Noting on the wall while slapping out wet misery in a Wendy's toilet, is my point, though I think we can all agree that Billy Shakes might've been game to try.
RPGs are an interesting artifact because to my observation they don't have as prescribed a medium as even one of their closest chirographic relatives-- the script. A play's script presumes a certain medium, a space where the active performance will take place; the literal stage. There are conventions of that space which impact--and can be manipulated, played with, subverted, upheld--by the script itself.
Similarly, a screenplay presumes the camera as its performative space-- the acting, the directing, the cinematography which girds the textual object all channel towards the camera lens.
I'm not being revelatory here, this is a critical theory that has been well-trod elsewhere by people more successful and less inclined to make jokes about Billiam Shackespurr having an unpleasant shit in a fastfood joint.
But I am leading up to an observation that RPGs as textual objects make very little presumption as to the space (and attendant rules, conventions, mores) of their performative space. Where does an RPG "happen"? Is it a table? I've personally been at RPG sessions in a living room, without even the benefit of a coffee table. Is it a garage or a basement?
Is it some invisible imaginative place, not unlike the space two people occupy when texting one another?
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| Awkwardly sexting in an AIM chat is the ur-RPG, not Blackmoor |
Of That Colossal Wreck
This isn't something I have an answer to, though I'll admit I'm curious what kinds of arguments could be hawked.
Twitch is the example I'm going to lean on, but understand I also mean Youtube. I also mean things like Penny Arcade's Acquisitions Incorporated games, on stage. I also mean a house where your family goes about their own activities even as you pretend to be an elf with your buddy Keith.
I want to explore an RPG which presumes at least one aspect of its performative space-- that it will have an audience.
The impetus was a conversation with a good friend of mine. We had started on the topic that there are some RPGs that are better suited to a Twitch liveplay than others; even that this suitability was more granular, extending to certain kinds of liveplays (pre-recorded, edited, podcast, etc.). To our sight, some channels and content creators seemed to have a grasp of that-- and others did not.
But it spun out from there. If the RPG system could impact the "success" (I hesitate to use the word because art isn't about success or not, it's about whether people think you're handsome and are ging to send you thousands of torrid love letters, or at least that's my experience) then was there some kind of Ideal Liveplay RPG out there? What elements of an RPG helped a liveplay (or a kind of liveplay) and what elements hindered?
Because I felt the conversation was veering into territory dangerously not centered on me, I ended up saying that I was going to take a crack at writing a Liveplay-oriented RPG. Then, because I'd committed, I had to go back and actually think about it-- hence all the paragraphs above. There is a Google Doc with a bunch of stuff, already.
I'm calling it Chorus, because I will die a thousand deaths before I give up the paper-thin veneer of academic intellectualism which I've so carefully cultivated. In the desert there will be two vast and trunkless legs of stone, a pedestal on which will appear the words "My name is Colin, Coolguy of Coolguys; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside will remain.
