RE: Xena or not...

From: John Hughes <nysalor_at_...>
Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 08:22:01 +1000


I enjoy watching Xena, if only for the unrelenting courage of the show's high campiness, and it's cheery mutato approach to history and myth. Last time I watched it she was being crucified by the Romans, became an angel, then a devil, pledged eternal love to Gabriel and foiled Big Julie's apotheosis to Roman Emperor by enlisting Brutus. Not bad for an eighty minute game. There was a resurrection of course, but alas, they didn't chuck in a reference to three days. That was my biggest disappointment, along with the fact they didn't show Mark Anthony with a bag of ears... :)

The point is that Xena's high camp fantasy is itself part modelled on the seventies fantasy gaming paradigm we struggled so long to grow out of. There already seem to be a few DnDisms that have crept into HW, along with a return to some subtle forms of power gaming. I find the entire 'simulationist' versus 'cineamatic' paradigm a bit forced and a bit suss - whatever happened to the storytelling and drama paradigms - in those you get to ask questions about the intrusion of visible game mechanics into seamless storytelling situations? Glorantha used to encourage people and read and absorb history and myth - is the future really to be found in junk tv? If it is, (and I'm quite fond of junk tv, despite my rantings :)), we're going to have to look further afield. Babylon 5 rangers like Marcus or Delenn?

But no matter how far you look, the fact is that tv models and ideal types are few and highly artificial, and stretched to fit HW only with difficulty. Thank the stars that that awful period where game designers used to 'borrow' vast unacknowledged chucks from scriptwriting manuals seems to have passed. The Babylon Project was the worst, but White Wolf has a lot to answer for as well.

So What's In The Bag? :)

John

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