(no subject)

[nozomi604]

(ETA: still thinking about this!)

I'm going to have to be careful if I don't want to include excessive backstory. And then Peter Chung argues, pretty convincingly IMO, that all backstory is irrelevant:

"...art's function is to exercise the mind's capacity to find meaning. Meaning is not something innate in the world. It exists only because there are conscious minds alive which are eager to create it. I'm not talking about something esoteric and rare. This is the most basic, most universal trait of being human.

The point is that: don't focus on the fictional events themselves. Focus instead on how your mind is working to find meaning in those events. You can discard the fictional events. The workings of your mind is a fact. Your mind's capacity to find meaning is what makes you human. The question of which fictional character ended up loving/ killing/ sacrificing themselves for which other fictional character is just the stimulus intended to trigger your mind's workings. The experience of art is the appreciation of becoming aware of your own mind's capacity for creativity, empathy and insight. Focusing on the fiction is enjoyable, but it's escapism.

If you remember from the Monican Spies interview- "backstory is a trap". Informing the viewer of the (Aeon Flux) movie that the story takes place 400 years in the future, that there are X number of people alive, etc. are a distraction, because viewers will try to cling on to these made-up bits as if they mean something. They mean nothing. Such information takes away, it does not add."

Comments

[jewelfox]

I have an entire file of quotes about the dangers of getting carried away with backstory and stuff:

My feeling is that the reader performs most of the act of writing. A book spends a very short time being written into existence; it spends the rest of its life being read into existence. That’s why I find in many current uses of the term “active reading” such a deeply ironic tautology. Reading was always “active”; the text itself always demanded the reader’s interaction if the fiction was to be brought forth. There was always a game being played, between writers and readers (for that matter between oral storytellers & listeners), who knew they were gaming a system, & who were delighted to engage each other on those terms.

Worldbuilding is the province of people who, like Tolkien, actually resist the idea it’s a game, and have installed their “secondary creation” concept as an aggressive defense of that position.

That's from http://web.archive.org/web/20080410181840/http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/01/27/very-afraid/, which also calls worldbuilding "the great clomping foot of nerdism." I think that sort of connects it with the kind of people who quiz "fake geek girls" to make sure they memorized all the same books? I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's always bad, a lot of the time it can be interesting, but I feel like you're more on the right track here.

Here's also a little something from the Something Awful traditional games forum:

RIFTS is born of 80's game design and sensibilities. Nothing is real unless it has numbers or justification behind it. Things need to be explained, even if the players will never touch the explanation, even if everything is designed so that they can't. Not that Siembieda is willing to put in the research and work to understand how those numbers or explanations should actually look. He'll come up with something on the spur of the moment, and then assume that he's smart enough that whatever came off the top of his head must be good, or at least close enough. That's how you get super firearms that fire significantly slower than modern firearms and monetary systems that break down the second you squint at them. The idea that you could abstract these things, represent them with fuzzier mechanics, is foreign to that kind of designer. The fact that they abstract other things doesn't really occur to them, and if it did, they'd start trying to argue that either real life really did work that way, or else try to de-abstract it and make it work as "realistically" as possible.