Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and
electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys
as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal
Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most
points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons &
Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those
aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a
fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a
play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take
on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords,
crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine
and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead,
they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The
game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee
usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is
impromptu. Performance is a major part of role-playing, and
role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book,
which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance
aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a
critical model useful in understanding the art--especially in terms
of aesthetics--of role-playing games. The book also serves as a
contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and
aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing
art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent
to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal
structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which
encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among
players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence
of role-playing as an art form.
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