Dear Those Who have Asked that I Watch GoT

Not interested.

If I did not have an argument before ~ and I did, given the painful smearing of the writer's fingerprints over ever bit of dialogue ~ the above is enough.

Some will say, "Well, shit happens."  Those people have never been in a movie.  There are dozens and dozens of people who are involved in the making of this shot, from the cameraman to the director to the editor, not to mention the actors, the continuity and the many, many techies who were lighting and propping this scene.  And no one noticed.  No one.

Or, it was intentional.

If no one noticed, it was because everyone involved in the making of this trash is clearly, plainly, going through the motions.  They've all stopped caring.  If they cared, this would have been caught and fixed long before it broadcasted ... but they didn't, because hell, who gives a shit.  Let's just film this bit and get it done.  Bleh.

And if it was intentional ... well.

Either way, no one on this crew, no one connected to this scene, should ever work again.  Or, at least, they should experience a period of suffering, during which they endlessly have to re-evaluate their commitment to their art.  Given the number of people watching, this was Merkle's Boner.

It is forgivable that someone goofed.  That some "one."  But dozens upon dozens goofed here, or phoned it in, and that's amateur night.  That's high school.

No, I do not want to watch a show this tired.

I Am So Sad

I have now made two attempts to watch the new Netflix show, the Defenders.  The first time I lasted until the credits.  The second time, 22 minutes in.

Oh, gawd, I have super-powers and I am just so sad and so miserable, I can hardly bother to stagger down this hallway to my office and act so bored in front of these strangers, I am dying and I am so miserable and there is nothing I can do, I'm blind and you're in a wheelchair and life is just so bad, so awful, and these dreams, these dreams of dead people, oh, oh, it is so awful and terrible and pointless and angst, oh so much angst, angst pouring over everything, tons of angst, because we are the writers and we have the shit pile right here, the feces have been delivered, and we have shovels, so here it is, let's just start shoveling, shoveling and shoveling, and oh, aren't you excited now to watch these four mediocre series come together for the triumph of angst we're promising in the first twenty minutes ...

No. No thank you.

Nobody's Business

The Edmonton Expo is in four days.

There's very little left to do.  We're set up for the scene, we've got the presentation necessary.  My daughter, I believe, is cosplaying as Sailor Moon.  I am cosplaying as the writer in residence.  The only concern left is a delivery of books that should be here by tomorrow afternoon.  Fingers crossed.

In light of the Expo, I was asked to write about the Dungeons and Dragons television show . . . specifically this episode.  I don't know what I'll say yet; I'm still gearing up to the task.  There's a good chance that I'll say something I should apologize for - but we'll see.

Whenever I hear someone remember this show fondly, which seems to happen often, I find myself in awe.  Perhaps it is because everyone I played with when the show came out (1983) were already 18 and way, way beyond kid's shit.  My memories of the show consists mostly of how really bad my groups considered it to be, how offended we were that a gritty show about D&D had been shat on again (something that hasn't changed) and in particular in which ways the show was nothing like the actual game.

Regarding the linked episode above, I'll keep off the subject of animation quality, voice work and other aspects of production (which are horrifically execreble); I'm also not going to say anything about costumes and the silliness of their design.  I'll stick to game interpretations with which I have a problem.  I'll give the time stamp for when the problem occurs.  I'm going to ignore the title sequence and just start with the show itself (part one), which begins at 01:00.

• 1:47 - the Dungeon Master tells the party what to do.
• 2:37 - the mages' powers are limited to his hat (and by extension that the abilities of all the characters are due to their magic items).
• 3:04 - characters run away from danger before engaging first (one arrow does not equal engagement for D&D players).
• 3:14 - only barbarians want to fight things.
• 3:23 - "fighting will only make them mad."
• 3:37 - fighting is somehow equated to "heroics"
• 4:30 - in a world where people turn down exchanging bread for talismans (because they're obviously cheap and worthless) there's still room for accusations that the use of magic proves "an evil wizard."
• 4:53 - peasants are willing to rush off to try to destroy a mage after displaying an obviously powerful talisman.
• 5:04 - too exhausted to run; obviously, not too exhausted to fight.
• 6:50 - characters sleep in their armor.

On the whole, mere quibbles.  So much of the show is taken up with anvilicious development and flanderization that it's amazing there was time to have anyone portray any event that can be reconciled with D&D.  And of course, the fact that it was presented as a kid's show in a pre-internet world, when children's programming was hopelessly relegated to infantilization and marketing, meant that fighting had to be something the participants couldn't do.

That's the saddest part of this show - that it was designed around a game with a fundamental structural dependency on fighting in a media where fighting could not be discussed.  Television has always been funny this way.  As elementary age boys in an upper middle-class neighborhood, the favorite game was always 'guns.'  The television we watched was full of six-shooters, phasers and spy pistols, so those filled our pockets.  Guns meant running across open lawns, diving over fences and dying - mostly dying - in spectacular ways.  Twitching one's body while running off a five-foot ledge to a slope of grass, skidding to a halt and then holding the 'death pose' for the demanded 30-seconds (rules!) was just the sort of thing to cause mothers to rush onto their back porch and scream in full panic.

At seven we understood the pleasure of fighting.  That's part of what we immediately loved about D&D at - in my case - 15.  But television has always tried to pretend that fighting is something children do not do.  And it has always tried to shove that perspective down children's throats.

As children, we ignored it.

Naturally, the D&D show was nothing like D&D.  How could it be?  Even if the writers had done due diligence (which obviously they did not do), nothing on earth is more executively meddled with than children's programming.  There are too many legal landmines for it not to be that way.  The error, of course, was that D&D was promoted as a children's game.  It is still promoted that way.  It will always be promoted that way.  It doesn't matter that it requires more time, effort, ability, expertise, background and practice to manage it than bridge or football pools . . . this is simply the way the world insists on looking at the game.  This is why every nerd portrayed playing it on television always emphasizes the fantastical, silly aspects.

When a dragon is presented in a children's show, it is a fat, dumpy thing that clumps around breathing harmless fire.  It isn't that dragons can't be scary.  We can see a bit of the fear in a movie sort of aimed at adults, where an effort is made to sort of cause the dragon to be aggressive, moving like a clumsy snake and breathing hot fire between talking like a serial killing university professor.  We can make it burn down a town.

What we can't do, even in an adult movie with a dragon in it, is show the smashed and burnt bodies of the dead, as they're dying, like we can in a war film.  People will pay to watch tank shells splitting bodies in two or to see people cut to pieces by bullets, but no one's going to put up with that shit from a movie with a dragon in it.  Because this isn't horror, this is fantasy.

Yet - and here's something that most D&D players never really grasp - role-playing is horror.  It is what we would never choose to do in reality - court death, see it as acceptable, take pleasure in destroying an enemy and callously make plans to do it all again.  For gain.  It is viscerally satisfying to act as brutally as we wish for purely selfish motivations.  This is what the game taps into.  And the more advanced the game, the greater the agency for pursuing that selfish intent.

Films and television can't represent that because the 'good guys' can never be that way in that media.  The 'good guys' can't possess the motivation that D&D demands as proof of winning.  It is a game built in an underground and pursued habitually in an environment where authority and morality have no voice.  Where 'right' and 'wrong' are limited to what a small number of quiet players accept as the gameplay they want.

A great reason for the success of expos and gaming cons comes from the sense of free-spirited lawless associations that arise from people dressing as they want and playing up the characters they want, without the usual discourse and condemnation that follows from social rule-makers.  Role-playing represents a form of media where executive meddling is impossible above the level of the DM, where hours can be spent in the company of others who are okay with arson, murder, genocide and the like.  It is the only group activity that allows a meeting of the minds in this way.

But this is a great secret, isn't it?  We're supposed to pretend it isn't going on this way around gaming tables.  Every once in awhile someone on the net gets upset because someone mentions rape or infanticide and there's a back-and-forth.  Doesn't mean anything, however - because if six adults can agree that the castration going on in this role-playing game, tonight, is fantasy and nothing more, then the rest of the world can fuck off.  Ain't nobody's business but the players.

That makes role-playing a dangerous game - in the eyes of the controllers and the pundits.  This encourages such people to proclaim, again, that RPGs are on their way out.  Or that the only people still playing them are children.  Or whatever other lie that wants to be said.

But we at the tables know different, don't we.  We know that when Eric the Paladin says, "I make a pass at Lorne - how does he feel about that?", we don't have to take a public sampling to find out if the players having sex is okay.  All the DM needs to do is roll a die.

Gawd Help Us All

Camera Angles

Of late, I have been working my way through the series, Agents of Shield.  I like the actor Clark Gregg, who plays Phil Coulson . . . I have liked him since he used to turn up occasionally on The West Wing, when he played pretty near the same character.  I don't care about that.  I like the character.

I'm not liking the show, however.  It suffers from being on television.  And by that I mean, it has phrases and exposition and characterization that exist only so the really stupid people watching won't change the channel.  Example?  Some scientist on the show spits out a bunch of nonsense technical speak, and the inserted dumb character on the show says, "Um, High School drop out here."  I swear, that's an actual quote.  It's supposed to be funny, but it really just says, "There are a lot of high school drop-outs watching without any I.Q., including the producer, who is the son of a network executive, who has final approval of the show, so could we please dumb this down for a significant portion of our audience?"

Result?  About 10% of the show's dialogue is stated twice.  Once for the smart people, and once for the stupid people.  This is why I don't like television.

Film seems to be divided much more clearly between audiences.  A film is either made by morons, or made exclusively for morons, and thus it can be avoided easily.  Certain directors and actors can be found only in moron-made films, like a big sign that says, "Don't see this if you have a brain."

Alternately, there are films that clearly don't give a crap if dumb people watch.  Sadly, there aren't enough of them, and every now and then a smart director will go right up their own asshole.  So we can never be sure.

This all has something to say about players.  The DM presents the game for the players, and so the DM is in the same position as television and film.  Some of the players are smarter than others.  Some of the players aren't able to communicate as easily.  They find it difficult to focus their attention on a person's words.  What do we do about this?

Television has long taken the attitude that shows must be reduced to the lowest common denominator, there aren't very many smart people anyway, and our biggest sponsors are those who sell to lower class, non-professional, ignorant consumers.  So write off smart people and keep it simple, stupid.

Film has approached it more like a DM would if that DM were to say, "You're too stupid for this campaign, get out."  Or, "You're too serious about this campaign, get out."  Having observed the players, and having decided what the game shall focus on, the players who don't fit the mold are pushed out of the group by a variety of peer pressures.

But this is what we do with our friendships, isn't it.  Jim doesn't like drinking at the bar?  Fuck Jim.  Marie doesn't like rafting?  Fuck Mary.  And so on.

The main problem with this is that Joe pretends to like drinking at the bar, and Marie pretends to like rafting, because if they don't pretend, they're going to spend that day alone.  And no one likes to be alone.  Being alone is worse than rafting or heavy drinking.  And after a lifetime, both Jim and Marie have gotten good at pretending to smile and nod their heads and go through the motions, and making up excuses for why they're not smiling like, "Oh, things have been bad at work lately."  Or, "I'm worried about my . . ." (insert family member, pet or material value here).

Because humans are like this, the usual result is six people on rafts drifting along a slow river and getting sunburns because ONE person really likes rafting, and knows how to manipulate the others.  And each person who doesn't like it thinks they're the only one who doesn't, so that they spend the whole day being miserable and pretending with one another, never realizing that there's a consensus here they'll never identify.

The reader, I hope, sees the problem.

If you are the DM of the group, YOU are the person that really likes rafting.  You love your world.  And you have a lot of players who really want to role-play.  Your world is what they have.  They see others enjoying your world - or appearing to enjoy your world - so they cram down their own displeasure and keep playing.

Some of the people in your world probably like your world.  Some, however, probably don't.  And here's the thing - you won't be able to tell the difference.

Let me pull this back to film again.  I've seen a lot of bad art films, awful, boring, pretentious art films, but there is something that's always true about them.  People LOVE them.  I've never been clear why.  The people themselves never seem very deep.  Many of them are vaguely artistic, but like people with their own table at a Comix Expo, they don't get formal training and they don't seem concerned about technique. Where discussing the film, they speak in vague, generalized terms, like the 'acting' or the 'presentation' or 'camera angles' and the like - things that are wholly subjective.  Why one camera angle is crazily superior to another is often lost on me - not always, but often.  The shot across Anne Bancroft's legs at a tiny Dustin Hoffman makes perfect sense:

The shot is obviously about lust, impotence, youth and so on. Ben in the film is a little boy. During the scene above, Ben has already slept with Mrs. Robinson several times, and he's trying to relate intellectually with her. He can't, of course, because she's smarter than he is, she's in control, she knows the effect of her sexuality and he's completely hopeless. That is why this particular shot is famous and easy to find.

Most clever camera angles, however, are really just camera angles. They barely do a good job of showing what's going on. But hell, do faux film lovers love them! Okay, I'm off topic.  I'm going up my own asshole.  I'll get this back in line.

The thing about 'smart' art films, and the lovers of art films, is that they are about pretension.  Not the pretence of liking film, but the pretence of liking film that is too 'smart' for stupid people.  Oh, it was boring? That is because you're stupid.  Oh, it seemed to lack a plot?  You only thought that because you're stupid. And so on.

If you will look around at the Internet, you'll see the same attitude used to defend a lot of worlds.  You think story arcs are railroading?  That's because you're stupid.  You think a DM shouldn't fudge the dice?  That's because you're stupid.  And so on.

The final pitch I am making here is for

honesty.  Television and movies that are clearly made for stupid people is at least honest.  Television that wants to be made for smart people, but doesn't want to leave the dumb people behind, is effectively dishonest.  Art films that are deliberately made to be irrational, so that a host of pretentious people can claim the importance of camera angles, are fundamentally dishonest.  And thinking that everyone at your table loves your world, because they appear and play every week  . . . that is your version of camera angles.  You're only seeing what you want to see.

Hm.  That sounded like a much better conclusion when I started out this post than it does now.

I don't want to be dishonest.  That really sucked.  Sometimes, you start off with the best of intentions, but it just goes . . . nowhere.

Okay.  Not enjoying Agents of Shield.  Watching it for the actor.  Working on a section about getting to understand your players and the importance of engaging them in your game.  Getting some of my thoughts onto the blog.  Take it for what it was worth.  I'll have something better tomorrow.