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Tuesday, December 27, 2011 at 9:43PM Like everyone else, I’m clearing out some of my year-end links.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 7:20PM Over on his blog, Rob Donoghue posted about what he calls the RPG Sports Paradox:
The only way to make an RPG about a sport is to make an RPG that’s not about that sport.
What does this mean? To understand it, take a minute to imagine a sports RPG. It doesn’t matter much what the sport is, but the expectation would be that you would need rules for playing that sport. Seems obvious, but that’s the trick - sports stories are not really about playing any particular game, they’re about a destination. There are a couple of possible types of destinations, but they’re mostly some variant of needing to win “The Big Game”. The exact form of the Big Game is less important than the fact that it provides meaning to all the games along the way - they’re the road to the destination.
And that’s where the problem arises. Such a game will fall apart if the players lose a game. Oh, sure, there are some tricks you can pull to smooth over things (“The Maplewood team got food poisoning! We’re in the finals!”) but they have the clear stink of Deus Ex Machina about them. So you’re left with two choices: You can either allow the players to lose their games (and hope they won’t) or you can guarantee that they won’t.
I asked, of course, “What about Bull Durham?” To which Rob replied, “Are baseball movies ever about baseball?”
I started to reply over there, but I realized I had too much to say in a comment. So here it is:
Baseball movies are always about baseball. To say that Bull Durham isn’t about baseball is to not understand what baseball is.
To make a larger point, if you look at sports films in general, they aren’t as attached to the concept of “Winning The Big Game” as it might first appear. Look at Raging Bull, Rocky, Eight Men Out, The Wrestler, Brian’s Song, Hoop Dreams, Tin Cup, or Rudy. Sure there’s films like Hoosiers, A League of Their Own, Breaking Away, Chariots of Fire, Remember the Titans, or Major League where winning it all is what the story is about, but that’s not anywhere near the entirety of sports movies, or sports storytelling in other media.1 Even When Our Heroes win it all, the story is never about the mechanics of the sport. Sports stories aren’t always about the destination. Like most stories, they’re more often about the journey.
Which is mostly to say that if I wanted to play a sports RPG, I’d play Primetime Adventures.
1 Intriguing, most of the examples I cited in the “winning it all” category are either (a) retelling historical events or (b) comedies. How many of these kinds of movies have you seen where you didn’t know going in that they were going to win in the end?
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 6:39PM It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so I figured I was due.
Saturday, November 12, 2011 at 12:26PM I’m out camping, so that means it’s time for another link roundup.
Saturday, November 5, 2011 at 2:39PM One of the few podcasts I still listen to is the HBR Ideacast, a weekly, twenty-minute show — usually an interview — put out by the editors of the Harvard Business Review. “Business” is a pretty broad topic, so not every episode grabs my interest. The last three, however, have resonated powerfully with me.
In the first, Michael Beer talks about the kind of business that I want to work for, ones that put priority on their social impact, and do well financially as a result. In the second, Nancy Koehn discusses how our understanding of capitalism is shifting and that businesses are discovering that just as important as what they do is how they do it. In the third, Heidi Grant Halvorson breaks some misconceptions about and shares research-based techniques for achieving success.
The first pair is obviously linked, with their focus on the social footprint of today’s enterprises. I found a subtle connection between the first and third, as well. When Heidi talks about how we get our best results when we emphasize getting better rather than doing well, I heard echoes of Michael’s thesis that the sorts of companies he and his co-authors profiled performed well financially precisely because they didn’t make it their sole objective. It put me in mind of Peter Drucker’s writings about the nature of businesses, that they did not exist solely to deliver shareholder value, but that they necessarily existed to serve some purpose and that profits were a byproduct of that activity. Nancy’s comments on the emerging notion of “shareholder capitalism” give me hope that those ideas might actually take hold.