Game Ideas Un limited: Waltz

  It might be a bit pretentious for me to claim to be a fan of classical music.  After all, I've actually been to few professional concerts, have a very limited collection, and don't support public radio with my few dollars.  Those who are legitimately fanatical about classical music could rightly look askance at any claim on my part to be connected with their hobby.  However, it is the type of music to which I most listen, and although there is much written unknown to me I recognize most of the major composers and periods and have my favorites among them.  I might not send money to public radio, but it's the station to which my alarm clock is set, and I listen in the car.  Further, as a vocalist and instrumentalist, I've performed a fair amount of it over the years, even if only in small concerts or rehearsals.

  I say I have my favorites; but there is one particular style which I have never enjoyed.  I don't care for the waltz.  I've heard many of the great waltzes, and can recognize a few of the major ones, but my feeling is that they all sound the same.

  Oddly, I don't have the same feeling about marches; not even John Phillip Sousa marches.  These, for some reason, do not strike me as all the same, despite the rather rigid structure he followed in creating them.  So perhaps the march and the waltz offer something to consider about creative endeavor generally.  Both are highly structured forms, with constraints placed upon their completed versions by the requirements of the application.  That is, a waltz, as much as it is a beautiful piece of music through which much emotion may be expressed, is ultimately intended for dancing, and fails in its purpose if one cannot find the steps; a march, obviously, is written for marching, and if the band cannot walk crisply in time with the music, it has failed regardless of the patriotism and courage it may inspire.

  There are exceptions, of course.  Within The Nutcracker Suite, Tchaikowski offers us both The March of the Wooden Soldiers and The Waltz of the Flowers, neither of which are particularly conducive, the one for marching or the other for waltzing; but these are neither a march nor a waltz, really, but part of a ballet, composed to provide the background over which professional dancers and choreographers may express their crafts.  It is not the name of the form but the form itself that matters.  Sousa wrote marches, Strauss wrote waltzes, the one for marching bands and the other for dance orchestras, and these are the songs that represent the form, whether by them or their contemporaries or their imitators.

  I find myself wondering what it is about waltzes that make them all sound the same to me.  The answer that suggests itself is that the constraints of the form override the differences between examples.  That is, the things that make them the same, in my opinion, overwhelm those which make them different.

  This is a hazard in every creative effort.  My wife has refused to this day to watch Blazing Saddles or Unforgiven (two entirely different movies, in case you missed one), because they are both Westerns, and to her, all Westerns are the same.  I've never played any Final Fantasy game because I had my fill of same-old-same-old computer simulations of role playing games in the eighties.  Some people can't tell Dali from Picasso, Beethoven from Dvorak, Dickens from Hawthorne.  The greater the strictures of the form, the more the differences are in the nuances.

  Which brings us to the subject of the column:  role playing games.  There are people who have played one, and decided that they have played enough.  Those of us in the hobby think they have been hasty, rushing to a negative conclusion based on a single experience; yet to a large degree it may be our fault.  We have created the constraints of our own form, and locked much of our gaming into that.  To us, the nuances of difference between fantasy settings or character creation mechanics or resolution systems are important.  We fail to recognize that we have built boundaries which restrict the definitions of the game perhaps unrealistically and certainly unnecessarily.

  Many of these boundaries are being challenged; new games frequently attempt to push the envelope.  Yet our common parlance reverts to certain assumptions.  We speak of the Gee Em as if it were an immutable rule that all games must have one, and even as if the role was strictly defined across the entire medium.  Multiverser's books do not once use the phrase hit points that I am aware, and yet in play the words are used constantly by players and referees who use the vocabulary of earlier games.  Games have been written in which role playing occurs in courts of kings and on space stations and in innumerable other worlds, and yet we still refer to game sessions as the adventure and think the word fantasy means there are elves living in the woods.

  People still waltz; the dance is still taught in academies and considered an important part of high society.  No one, however, writes dance waltzes--everyone dances to the old ones.  If the structure dominates the form, it chokes innovation out of existence.  If we want role playing to continue well into this new century, we must look for ways to break out of the mold (in both the metallurgical and the biological senses) and do something new and different.  We must recognize that much of the trappings of role playing games are not the essentials, and look for new ways to improve old ideas.  Otherwise, like the waltz, we will be relegated to the oddities of the past, something done for nostalgia rather than for innovation, learning to dance to the old music to which no one really listens and certainly no one writes anymore.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.