By Kieron Gillen on August 2nd, 2009 at 2:12 pm.
Sundays are inexplicable jet-lag, luxuriating in the glow of a 7-1 Blood Bowl victory and compiling a list of the finest (mostly) games-related writing from across the week in a handy list format, while trying to not include a link to some manner of pop music or another.
- Interview of the week, and no mistake. Sarinee “Home of the Underdogs Founder” Achavanuntakul breaks her silence and gives Rob Cummins her first extended interview in years. Extensive coverage of every issue around the Premier Abandonware site and community the Internet has ever seen – what developers said to her, what the industry did and the whole diaspora of sites that have emerged in her wake. Great stuff.
- Jordan Garski on the death of Matrix Online this week. What went wrong? Well, he says, I jacked out pretty quickly. For old time’s sake, here’s my on-release review. Also, this piece on the Escapist which has stuck in my mind years after reading it, about how its playerbase differed from the standard Fantasy MMO. And it sounds as if the end was pretty. It’s kind of a theme this year, isn’t it? The turning off of those games who failed in the 3rd wave of MMOs.
- It’s enough to make John Walker cry. Jason Denzel continues reviews maps which came with games in the distant past. These are wonderful things. You should have seen Alec and my face light up at Develop when Larington delivered a copy of Legend of Valour’s map. Seriously, Alec – whatchadoingwithit? Can I have it?
- More J Nash hailing. For God’s sake, go listen to Sexton Blake already.
- Movie-exec claiming that it’s a silly idea that you should own the media you buy in perpetuity. Cory Doctrow, of course, gives it a proper kicking.
- Mark Richmond pointed me at The Blue Casket. A site devoted to player journals of games. Lots and lots and lots of them. In the sidebar: Charles Dickens, Football Manager. That’s kinda irresistible, yeah?
- Troy Goodfellow – WHO I WOULD DESTROY IN BLOOD BOWL, I’M SURE – pointed me at this piece by Lara Crigger about not having played a game recently, and feeling like an Ex-pat. Which suddenly reminds me both of the Russian Ex-pat communities I was reading about recently post-Revolution, and my usual ideas of videogames being places. If you can emigrate to an MMO, if you leave this land, you are an ex-pat, yeah?
- Daniel Lipscombe over at Resolution writes about why he games.
- Away from games, but this piece on canon and Doctor Who – being a rant against the bean-counters of the soul who obsess over continuity – caught my eye. Linked within is an older piece by Dr Who Writer Paul Cornell – whose splendid Captain Britain and M-13 Marvel series finished recently, and is well worth picking up for fans of high-velocity, fun superheroics – also talking about canon. To steal a line: This Is An Imaginary Story. But aren’t they all?
- Rumble Strips – Not The Only Person. Splendidly Not shit!
Failed.
Despite its closure, Matrix Online lasted an extraordinary amount of time, for an MMO that was almost always off the radar. That’s quite the thing. I mean, it makes you wonder how that can stay up, and Tabula Rasa (which I assume was more popular) didn’t.
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It was part of the Sony deal thing.
KG
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Cheers for linking Charles Dickens, Football Manager :)
http://www.sekritforum.com/storybook/dickens/
Direct link. Cheers!
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I find it somewhat hilarious that the current argument for “Why the glorious lack of Canon in Doctor Who is a natural consequence of time travel” completely misses the point.
(The point being that at the core of what people argue about in canon arguments is “what is possible”. The ability for historical events to be inconsistent doesn’t remove the illumination by those pseudo-historical events of the space of possible and impossible things – physical laws aren’t generally altered by travel in time ;) )
Now, Doctor Who isn’t even consistent in how its physics works, but this isn’t justifiable by any degree of fanwanking about how time travel removes consistent histories. (This lack of consistency in physics is both good and bad – it allows more creative freedom, but also allows cheap plot resolution by “breaking” the previously set rules. That is, it lets good writers be better, but lets mediocre writers be potentially dire.)
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Thanks for the Sarinee Achavanuntakul interview link. Interesting person.
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Oh, sure, rub it in some more =)
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End of Matrix Online reminds me of the end of the WoW beta, when Blizzard opened up Burning Legion portals in every city on Azaroth. Best moment was when a bunch of low level folks in Stormwind jumped in the Canal to escape an elite Infernal, only to end up getting attacked and killed by the elite crocodile that once resided in there. Good times.
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Second that; the HOTU interview was interesting.
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N’thing the praise for the Sarinee interview. The lady is seriously sharp – her insights and thoughts on the industry are really quite nice to hear. I have a feeling the interviewer underestimated just how much she had to say, too.
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I found this post on Blue Casket quite interesting: http://bluecasket.sekritforum.com/?p=336 – namely, why write about games in this way, and how to do it? Reading the article, most of the points apply to any writing (and frankly, you can make anything entertaining with good writing) but the best gaming diaries can be insightful – Bastard of the Old Republic gives insight into the motivations for doing things in games and how people act, for example.
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Also, guys- totally read the other diaries. DeGeen is my personal favourite (written by Gap Gen!). Outside Charles Dickens, Football Manager of course ¬_¬
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Rule 3′s a dangerous one. The just-as-true-flip is “Don’t just write for everyone else”. If you haven’t an emotional hook – a reason for doing this – it’s going to be shit. Judging when you’re being too self-indulgent and when you’re not being self-indulgent enough, of course, is the tricky one.
I’m also not entirely sure that I agree with them there’s no support system for them. We get a lot of links, but it’s because we’re actually a pretty hefty site. Alice and Kev showed exactly how big a piece of reportive games writing can get. The AAR writers, writing in a place like The Blue Casket, are totally part of the blogosphere. I’d treat what they write exactly like any other form of games writing. I’ve linked to god knows how many AARs in the Sunday Papers, and it’s not as if we don’t do a whole lot of what they class as meta-writing ourselves.
KG
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I’m not sure the point is that there’s no support system. RPS isn’t a dedicated portal to gaming diaries, and a discussion on a game diary link might well be buried under a thousand comments on DRM (arguably, it could work on the forum). Posting a game diary somewhere you get feedback quickly is a good thing, even if it’s just a “keep writing” comment.
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Well movie-exec, if your going to be like that, then I think piracy is a good thing to fighting bastards like you.
If there is no canon, then why is there a lot of stories in Doctor Who talking about the history of the Time Lords, and why si there a big wiki page talking about the history of the time lords. I personnally hate the phrase “It can’t be canon it hasn’t got this this and this in it.” And rubbish arguments of getting the handbook out and critisisizing a piece of FICTION that it didn’t have this this and this in.
You heard this a lot with the new Star Trek film where people were complaining about the new ship design. And there are people out there that complain that the Jeffry tubes are numbered wrong in loads of episodes. I feel kind of sorry for these people.
I also believe there should be a kind of museum in games, it really depresses me when you se companies refusing really old works that weren’t even made by them but they got the IP rights. It really is art and business in general. They don’t go together.
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I think the main thing with the Cory Doctorow article is that it’s insane that a whole industry exists where there’s a very obvious and easily-tapped market that executives won’t touch. Why not put TV shows on iTunes (IP issues aside) hours after they broadcast? Why wait for a DVD release?
But yeah, the assumption with time-limited DRM seems to be that they believe that they are no longer producing culture, rather they’re churning out fast food that is forgotten about and gone soon after it’s consumed.
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In case anyone is interested – Giant Bomb spent some time over the last few weeks playing MxO before it died (5 parts in total)
http://www.giantbomb.com/the-matrix-online-not-like-this-part-01/17-997/
The community’s response to the GB presence – http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/posts/list.m?&topic_id=36300029344
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I absolutely syimpathize with that girl who wrote the Ex-Pat piece. It’s been months since I played anythig seriously. I live vicariously through RPS and local games press. Admittedly, this has provided me with time to do a bunch of other useful stuff, but I still feel sad and a bit gulity every time I shoot a glance to my game shelf. :|
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People care enough about Doctor Who to argue about the existence or otherwise of continuity? Odd. You weird me out, internet.
And thanks for the HotU interview and the game-diary site.
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Yeah, the HOTU interview really put the light on some of the completely illogical stuff going on with the gaming industry nowadays.
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Blake’s 7 had the best ‘canon’ ever. I.e. completely non-existent and proud of it. Same with Red Dwarf. So long as we’re not in the same franchise, and, say, a member of Voyager in the Star Trek of that same name invents a transporter or something, let’s face it canon doesn’t have to be so goddamn strict.
It’s what fun or cool, for me. With some internal logic of course.
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Everyone beats me at Blood Bowl.
Except maybe you, Kieron.
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@R.J. Croton: I think it’s the caveat you use that makes this a valid point. It’s precisely when a sub-set of fans thinks that the internal logic has been broken that all the big fights about canon happen. So, canon is how you avoid having to have all your writers be clever and great – you force them to stick to some set of ground rules.
Red Dwarf managed without this because it was almost entirely controlled by two guys (who then became one guy, which broke the setting as the “canon” didn’t exist to limit some of his later excesses), and so they maintained the same “internal logic” inherently.
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The best part of the HOTU interview is that the original authors of the abandoned games wrote her to say how much they liked what she was doing. Developers want to make games that people will still care about long after their market is gone. Those are the games I really want to play.
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Red Dwarf is also about being silly, so canon doesn’t really matter so much as long as there aren’t vast continuity issues.
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you would think the epic fail MMOs had these past years would scare publishers but nooo, almost every game planned for 2010 is either a MMO, or a multiplayer focused game with a mmo like community planned (communities that used to be optional, but now will be forced, and if you ever played on bnet you know you dont want to be forced to be with those ppl)……… weeee
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Slate did an article in April on why movies and TV shows aren’t appearing more on something like iTunes:
http://www.slate.com/id/2216328/
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JKjoker: that’s probably more because that sort of system is easier to protect from piracy, than any other reasons.
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@Sonic Goo: trust me, the whole “Piracy” thingy is more of an excuse than a reason, they are other much more interesting reasons to lock ppl into your “online communities”, forcing micropayments up your arse being the one of them
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Anyone know where that gaming column of Sarinee Achavanuntakul is? It’s mentioned in the introduction of the interview: “She has worked in investment banking in Hong Kong, translates books from English into Thai and writes a gaming column.”
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Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey. It’s all good, to a point.
I seriously dislike the direction that rampant fanboyism (of the sole resurrector of the series, no less – talk about mixed feelings I have of gratitude and betrayal) has taken us to up til now. I’m grateful it’s back on the air, but I miss the somewhat plausible co-existence The Doctor had to the real world before the Time War seemed to make Him go all Wibbly Wobbly.
I’m hoping these few more one offs (and then the movie?) will slake Mr. Davies’ seemingly unquenchable thirst and we can move on to something more closely approximating the monster in the castle and the rest of the world isn’t massively impacted type of story lines I grew up with. Everything changes, Eventually. Even Time Lords, I reckon. I will see how Mr. Moffat chooses to guide my favorite televised character. Not like I’ll stop watching, regardless.
Wonderful reads. Thank You.
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qrter: OK, so it is contracts and IP (as well as perhaps industry inertia). But yeah, the consumer does lose out. It would be interesting to see how piracy changes if this happened. Anyone know what happened to piracy when buying mp3s online became widespread?
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@Harmen – it’s probably in Thai.
More generally, I just wanted to say that I absolutely agree that a proper archival of games is necessary. I can’t think of a single other medium where it’s so ludicrously impossible to get ahold of huge swathes of that medium’s history in a legal fashion. I’d like better archives for things like books and movies and so forth too, of course, but those industries haven’t decided that they can’t possibly bother to make things available for more than about five years after they’re first made. It’s nice to have things like Gametap and GoG, but I do think Sarinee’s right that those aren’t ever going to be the comprehensive solutions that the problem needs. In fact, the way both services have -lost- games as licensing agreements expired suggests quite the opposite. This is also why I absolutely despise online-activation DRM, regardless of install limits. Talk about a completely unnecessary “screw you, potential archival” move.
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Probably not that much, I’d guess, seeing as it still had/has DRM up the jacksy, which still made/makes pirating the better choice, purely from a consumer’s point of view.
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@Keiron:
From my reading, Rule 3′s a bit simpler and less tricky. I feel like he’s just trying to get across the idea that writing is about communication; just because you know what you mean, doesn’t mean that they’ll know what you mean if you don’t make the effort to communicate it clearly.
And following from that, just because you care about something doesn’t mean they’ll care if you don’t manage to communicate it evocatively. So, at the end of the day you’re trying to create something that complete strangers will be able to read and know what you’re getting at.
. . . which is honestly a pretty basic concept, but I think not quite grasping this is a primary factor in writing turning all rambly and incoherent.
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Oops, that “i” is in the wrong place. MORTAL INSULT: DELIVERED.
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The interview with the underdogs founder made my day :)
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Ah yes, Legend of Valour. Impressive for what it tries to do, I chucked it into dosbox just before the conference and ’twas when I realised that there wasn’t much I could take away from the game that I couldn’t just learn by looking at walkthroughs and other web material that I decided I didn’t mind letting go of my copy of the game. Plus, I knew where it was headed it’d be appreciated which is a double bonus.
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All Lara Crigger needs to bring her back into the fold is for some enterprising developer to release Crochet Hero.
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Thanks for taking a look at the Casket, RPS! The authors of the hosted blogs are RPS commenters too, so I hope everyone takes a look at them. Next week I’m posting a roundup of our hosted blogs’ progress, so check back in the week for a summary of what we do!
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Seeing that Legend of Valour map was amazing. It did, however, make me feel remarkably young. 1993! I was six! Man!
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I think a more specific version of Rule 3 might read “Don’t describe the game mechanics”, as in people aren’t really interested in how the game works, they want to know what you experienced. Then again, like I said in the article’s comments, Bow Nigger, the upheld example of NGJ, goes ahead and breaks that rule for an excellent reason. So I don’t know.
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On Blue Casket’s third rule, it reads to me very much as Kieron interpreted it, in that you should write for your audience not yourself. I think that is fairly dangerous ground to walk on. Thinking like that promotes watering your work down and ultimately would encourage pieces to be less original
Also, surely writing any non-commercial blog, be it gaming or otherwise, is something very personal. You are not writing for a specific audience as such but for your own pleasure. The hope is that others find what you have to say interesting enough to read, which would be watered down somewhat if they only liked it because you wrote it for them. As Kieron says, something that the writer feels passionately or excited about will add to the readers enjoyment and will inherently be something very personal.
I remember a quote from Joss Whedon that goes something like “I write not what you want, but what you need.” It may sound a touch arrogant, but I think that it speaks volumes about what a successful writer should strive for. On a level where the writer’s freedom is so great, as it will be for internet metagaming blog, the writers own personality should be encouraged, but that rule seems to discourage.
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Yeah, but I didn’t need certain characters to die for no reason other than it felt dramatic ¬_¬
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To clear up confusion, Rule Three is really meant to read “Don’t Just Write For You”. But yes. Everyone makes good points.
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Mainly because – and I mention this in the rule – games are supposed to leave you with the sensation that something amazing happened and you caused it. Sometimes this is true, which is why a blog like Reggio Perino works, because huge odds are overcome in spectacular style. That’s great, that makes for good reading.
But if what happened is just a case of you played the game properly, that’s not quite as good, and you need to make sure before you put it to paper/screen that what you’re about to tell me isn’t just a rehash of the exact same experience I played.
Obviously, writing is a personal endeavour. This we know. But when trying to fictionalise the experience of playing a game, there are a lot of things to consider.
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I would like a DRM system that protects me from Cory Doctorow’s writing.
The Blue Casket looks very interesting, will have to keep an eye on that.
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That Escapist article is ridiculous. The main achievement of Matrix Online that all other MMO’s should emulate is that it allowed an old white guy to talk on Ventrilo with black teenagers? What kind of gay nonsense is that?
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Also, in general, if you’re bored writing something then it’s worth asking if that means that people will be bored reading it.
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What isn’t enough to make John Walker cry?
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http://www.sekritforum.com/storybook/dickens/?p=165
Latest episode of Charles Dickens, Football Manager, as promised.
Please comment if you enjoy, and remember to subscribe via RSS!
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Ironic how you commented about jet lag. I just flew to Tokyo and I’m suffering from it bad!
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And also your arms are tired.
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An interesting side-observation: The Pirate Bay, as one of the Holy Four at RPS has previously mentioned, is meant to go offline any day now. It’s been up and down for about the past 12 hours and I thought that was the end of it when I first saw it go down, but it’s up and working again.
Anyway, just a heads up, cause someone at RPS might want to watch and see what happens if/when it actually does go offline. A follow up to the whole “Piracy = Pirate Bay” piece maybe…
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Tastes differ.
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I empathise with that gamer-expat article. I still think of myself as a Roleplayer even though I haven’t roleplayed for 15 years. Your teenage hobbies colour your perception of your whole life.
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‘Not like this, not like this’
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I’m a bit of a sucker for consistent canon, me. Granted, something with the longevity of Dr Who or Star Trek or whatever is going to take some keeping-track of, but is that really difficult these days? In fact, if you’ve got the fanbase these shows have, it’ll probably be done for you.
The thing is, even remaining strictly canonical doesn’t have to be terribly limiting. All it really means is that if you want to use a previously named McGuffin, you look up how it was used last time. If you can’t be bothered – call it something else. Nestene Consciousness isn’t supposed to work this way? OK, its the Narbular Hivemind.
The thing is if you use popular stuff from the history of the show (sonic screwdriver anyone?), its popular because your audience like the way its been previously used – you’re trading on the name, and just making new shit up every time you use something seems to cheapen that.
The other nice thing comes from the fact that the people amongst your audience who give a crap are also the only ones who are going to notice if you bother keeping track. In other words – there’s a built-in advantage to recycling your technobabble; most of us won’t notice, but the ones who do get a little rewarding charge for being that obsessive about your creation.
The other reason I think canon is a good idea is what I shall dub ‘X-Files Syndrome’. Especially with a character who relies on a somewhat mysterious past (like The Doctor, or Mulder), if you just continually redact the previous partial explanations with a cry of “Aha! But even *that* was just part of the greater deception!”, eventually it just gets irritating.
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What’s the Canon in – say – Greek Mythology?
KG
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That there are Gods and they fuck a lot. The rest is up for grabs.
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It’s not my field of expertise, but I think it’s the religion?
In that you’ve got Greek Mythology as this sort of broad shared-universe collaborative bundle of myths (more like the Marvel or DC universes than the run of a single show, with different writers using each others characters and rehashing older stories with a newer spin) . . . but that you’ve also got the religious aspect, with the clergies and governments enforcing some basic ideas interpretations, and prosecuting disagreeing parties for heresy.
I wish I knew more about the way Grecian religion was actually set up so I could provide some good examples, but all that’s coming to mind is the trial of Socrates where he as accused of being a “Natural Philosopher” . . . which was a killing offense, since the religion had firmly established that the Gods did not want mere humans trying to figure out more about the world.
And this canonized policy is reflected in stuff like the Prometheus myth, and Oedipus Rex, where the gods punish people for trying to give humanity a leg up and trying to get to the bottom of a mystery, respectively. I’m not sure which came first (the religious canon or the myths), though, nor am I especially clear on the extent of the religious faction’s policies on enforcing canon.
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Either way, though, you’ve got an established religious power maintaining some manner of established canon, and then you’ve got particular authors or playwrights writing (or remaking) stories in that universe.
I think.
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Er, how would that work? Send an email out to all major fansites, “We’re planning the following plot for the next episode. Would that violate any canon? Please get back to us ASAP”
You don’t feel it would kind of ruin the point if they handed the script out to anyone who wanted to see it?
And keep track of where the characters have been, when, in which order, who they met, who they killed, who lives, who don’t, who they’ve heard mentioned, who was the ruler on the planet at time T and which references have been made to that.
Along with the precise properties of each McGuffin used or referenced ever. Take the sonic screwdriver, for example. Ok, so it can open locks. What else can it do? They need to keep track of *everything* it has ever been used to, *as well as* everything it has *not* been used for. If the Doctor didn’t use it in situation X back in 1975, then it must be because it won’t solve situation X. Better remember that so we don’t end up using it for that now. But if it *has* been used for situation Y previously, then we’d damn well better keep track of that too, or fans will start complaining “why didn’t he just use the sonic screwdriver in last week’s episode? We know he could’ve used it for that, he did it 30 years ago!”
Whether or not consistent canon is important, pretending that it is “just a matter of keeping track of the names of the mcguffins used” is just silly.
It is, ultimately, just a matter of keeping track of every single scene, ever sentence spoken, in every episode of the show, constructing a huge matrix where you can plot in how each of these interact with *all* the others.
Piece of cake, really. Can’t be that hard. ;)
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Which does imply that the canoneers are the baddies.
The myths were moral stories, used to explain to people what right and wrong action was, and so the details were always subject to change as they weren’t the important things – only the lessons.
Lessons that shift about as the prevailing winds of cultural values shifted about, thus making the stories shift about.
Also they were very much the soap operas of the time – part of the aural tradition of storytelling that used the same basic building blocks of famous and popular characters to come up with something fun to listen to.
And this is probably where my take on canon is – these quasi-mythical stories, like superheroes and other pulpy characters, are there to tell roughly the same stories over and over again but in ways that are relevant and fun to whoever happens to be reading. They change. They are mutable.
Thus canon becomes a sickness in demanding that each successive telling of the same story recognise each and every other time that story has been told in the past. It becomes an existential hell, and becomes insane – like that dude who has to push the rock up the hill, you know, in that story.
Like in the X-files when it stopped being the ‘monster of the week’ and became about telling the same ‘the truth truth is hidden by a conspiracy’ story but having to come up with more and more conspiracies because the show had to recognise that the previous conspiracies had already been uncovered.
The show, the stories, and often the characters too, just go mental.
So yeah. Canon, in the sense of a specific and unchangeable time-line of events, is bad. These mythical stories were not designed to support that.
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Yeah – the Macguffin is just the random thing that allows the story (the actually interesting thing) to happen. Getting caught up on the Macguffin is missing the point.
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@jalf:
Sure – that’s not going to work so well; but why take it in that direction? If your fans have already built hundreds of painfully detailed fansites, its just a matter of searching keywords. Besides which, if you did decide to directly contact the fans, who among them wouldn’t squee at the idea of being brought on-staff to do exactly this kind of otaku continuity checking?
Sonic screwdriver:
Mark I
A small, simple device similar to a penlight, first used by the Doctor in his second incarnation. (DW: Fury from the Deep)
Known uses
* Opening up hatches, panels and control panels. (DW: Fury from the Deep, The War Games)
* For cutting through a section of a wall. (DW: The Dominators)
* As a conventional screwdriver (without touching the screws). (DW: The War Games).
Early model Sonic Screwdriver
Mark II
A larger and more elaborately detailed version, the Doctor began using this model in his third incarnation. It had yellow and black stripes. (DW: The Sea Devils).
Known uses
* Booby trap detector in the Master’s TARDIS. (DW: Colony in Space)
* Remote detection and detonation of land mines. (DW: The Sea Devils)
* To open an electronic door. (DW: The Mutants)
* Undoing wrist clamps. (DW: The Mutants)
* Creation of a spark of fire and igniting swamp gas. (DW: Carnival of Monsters)
* Open electronic locks. (DW: Carnival of Monsters)
…and so on, and on; this doesn’t even get us past John Pertwee. This is the sort of thing at which wikis excel.
Granted, I was a bit glib about the ease with which this can be done, but I reckon it *is* possible.
Ok, these type of fan thingies don’t track *every* detail, but while you don’t need to go to the lengths of replacing every instance where The Doctor mentions being born with ‘loomed’, where *do* you draw the continuity line? Give the companion a different personality every episode?
I’m deliberately taking the point too far here, but I think that a reasonable amount of attention to continuity is important in the creation of a character the audience gives a toss about.
@AndrewC: yes, the MacGuffin is not the point, but if your MacGuffin has become one of the most recognised elements of your show, I reckon its worth at least making an attempt.
(Also I had a witty and erudite response for your “Its just a matter of keeping track of *everything*” comment, jalf, which involved basically linking a few very nerdy wikis, but the spam-o-tron kept eating my comment. It obviously hates Star Trek and The Simpsons.)
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Dammit, RPS comment system. The Spam-O-Tron has eaten 4 attempts at a response now, so I’m just going to summarise and deprive your readers of my more erudite prior versions.
@jalf: I countered your initial point about sending scripts to fansites by suggesting that all one really need to is *visit* said fansites, and do a keyword search. This was further fleshed out in my riposte to your sonic screwdriver point where I posted a list of everything it had been used for from the beginning up until the end of Pertwee’s reign. (Find it at tardis.wikia.com – I’d post the link, but that seems to get me branded a spambot, too.)
I went on to reel off a few other hardcore wikis in response to your “just a matter of keeping track of every single scene, ever sentence spoken, in every episode of the show” point, as examples of places that seemed to come close to just that.
At this juncture I admitted to being glib and deliberately taking my argument too far, but while making these placatory noises re-iterated that I think paying much more attention than generally seems to be the case would not be impossible, or even terribly difficult.
I then got all craftily rhetorical, and asked where one *should* draw the line for continuity. Why not just replace The Doctor’s companion without explanation whenever a popular new young Brit is on the rise and needs some screen-time, I asked. It’s only a story, innit?
I s’pose the thing is this; when I really like a bit of cultural produce, be it TV, game or whatever – I find it a bit of a blow to my confidence in the thing when the people making it have paid less attention than I have.
Oh, and @AndrewC: yes, the MacGuffin is not the point, but if your MacGuffin has become one of the most recognised elements of your show, I reckon its worth at least making an attempt.
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Dammit, RPS comment system. The Spam-O-Tron has eaten 4 attempts at a response now… is it the content, or just me?
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Canon fights can get stupid, sure.
But canon is the one thing comics and TV series have that makes them able to do things that movies and books can’t. Which is create new stories that get their power, cleverness, emotional depth, etc. by building on previous stories.
The laziest way to do this, of course, is the ultra-cliche’d cliff-hanger end of an issue/episode in which you pull back the curtain to reveal…DUN DUN DAAH!…A CHARACTER YOU HAVEN’T SEEN FOR A WHILE!
But, what make that lazy is that it’s not really using canon, it’s just reusing a character.
What makes it interesting is when an old character or plot shows up, and the new story feels like another chapter in that same story. It builds on the old story rather than simply reusing an old character/idea. But to do that successfully, the new story needs to be consistent with the old story.
The problem is it’s hard to draw a bright line between writing inconsistent (and thus unsatisfying) stories on the one hand and the kind of fanwank these articles are complaining about. Maybe you can write a cool Dr. Who episode in which Daleks are robots, or in which the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver as a stun gun, or which asserts that the Doctor has never worked with an organization like UNIT before. But then you make it harder for other writers to create interesting stories around the idea of the cyborg nature of Daleks or the fact that the Doctor doesn’t carry a weapon or building on his previous relationships with UNIT. And I would argue that it’s that ability to build on continuity that makes a long-running TV show more interesting than a TV-movie-of-the-week starring characters you’ve never seen before.
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For what it’s worth, the Pro Vercelli diaries at runofplay are a true gaming diary peak – this highlight might be a good starting point: http://www.runofplay.com/2009/04/03/pro-vercelli-from-the-diary-of-walter-colombo-31-august-2014/
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I’d argue that canon is an excellent thing that can be taken too far. I don’t think it should matter terribly if someone contradicts a throwaway line from 16 seasons ago, in their new thing. If, on the other hand, the new Doctor is a vicious, feral albino with a taste for human meat, one needs a mighty good explanation for that – because it so clearly contradicts basic and fundamental precepts of the setting.
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I’d watch that religiously…
“Would you like a jelly baby?”
“…These aren’t jelly!”
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