[Aiwendil]

Glenethor:

what is the best recorded album ever, and there is never any resolution to those arguments (it's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, btw)

Come, now. We all know it's Abbey Road.

Kalessin:

Now I agree that Tolkien's works were influential in the development of the fantasy genre, not least because publishers realised LONG books of this type could sell. On the other hand, I'm not convinced that influence was seminal. You could make the same argument for Robert E Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), amongst others.

I think that LotR was unquestionably more influential in the genre than Conan. Such things are hard to judge, however.

Tolkien certainly didn't create the genre, and well before LotR appeared in the states science fiction was well established, with some writers already pushing the breadth and depth of their stories, creating alternate universes and expansive cosmologies (which would today have been classified as fantasy).

There were certainly some examples of science fiction that approached fantasy prior to Tolkien. But these were weird science fiction stories, not mainstream fantasy. Tolkien effectively (re-)invented the pure fantasy epic.

You could also say that Tolkien was merely one in a long tradition of epic storytellers stretching back hundreds of years, but that changes in society and economics meant that his work was disseminated across a far wider audience than previous exponents, and that the mechanisms for unprecedented marketing and distribution were in place - ie. a "right place right time" scenario.

There really hadn't been an epic like LotR since the middle ages. Not that I can think of, anyway.

Now I'm sorry about this, but you then go on to say RPG games are as valid an art form as literature, at which point we completely part company.

This is, I suppose, a rather uncoventional view, and I'm not shocked to see that you disagree. Of course, it really only peripherally relates to Tolkien.

If you take this line, then pretty much anything is an art form, and therefore of course everything is equally valid.

Well, I simply can't pass up an opportunity to defend RPGs as an art, so I'll argue it, even though it really doesn't matter to my main argument.

No, I do not consider everything an art form. Nor do I rely on some postmodern argument for universal aestheticism. Role-playing can be shown to be an art using quite conventional definitions. There is really nothing that literature can do that RPGs cannot. All the necessary elements are there: plot, character, form, idea. Role-playing is nearly as closely related to literature as are film and theater. Granted, its nature permits only a very small audience for each work, but certainly audience size is not a factor in determining whether or not something is art - if a book were written and distributed only to three people, who read it and then burned it, it would nonetheless have been art while it existed.

Role-playing is essentially literature in which the main characters have wills independent of the author's. This of course makes it more difficult to control the plot, but not impossible. It also infuses it with a certain vitality and sense of immediacy that is difficult to create in literature. I do not claim that role-playing is in any way superior to literature, merely that it is just as valid as an art form.

If RPG games are an art form then Chess is an artform. If Chess is an art form then football is an art form.

Come, now. Role-playing is very, very different from chess (and football). The former is limited only by the creativity of the gamemaster, the latter operates in an entirly prescribed way. The former has character and plot, the latter does not. The former is a cooperative endeavour in which there is no winning or losing (though there may be for individual characters, just as there may be for characters in a novel); the latter is a competitive game in which one person wins and the other loses (or they draw).

The above comparison between RPGs and chess could just as well pertain to literature and chess. Do not be fooled by the G in RPG. It is considered a game only by convention, and out of a historical accident. I will grant that few of even its most avid supporters treat it as an art; there is a good deal of bad role-playing out there. There is also trashy literature.

Yet you're criticising the very same postmodernism that elevates RPGs to artforms, so step carefully.

Well, as I hope I've just shown, I don't rely on postmodernsim for that.

Sorry, but there's nothing 'modern' about that, and its not peculiar to critics. Readers of all kinds, and many, many WRITERS through the ages - ie. since before the Bible - have attempted, or argued for, the accomplishment of something beyond entertainment.

Perhaps I should rephrase that: it's a modern fallacy to think that the primary purpose of literature is to accomplish something non-literary. Sure, literature that deals with non-literary issues has existed for a very long time; but the only purpose that all literature shares is entertainment. Homer was meant mainly to be enjoyed. So were Beowulf and other northern heroic poems. You might argue that these latter also deal with themes such as Christian piety, but not any more so or any more directly than LotR deals with corruption, immortality, and similar things.

Just being 'entertaining' doesn't make something better than art which is not 'entertaining'.

It does if the entire purpose of art is to be pleasing. But don't you find that when a work has a message or meaning, those things can make it more enjoyable?

Well, probably, but all that leaves you with is the 'staying power' argument as a way of distinguishing popular from good.

I never said that popularity could be used to judge a work of art at all. Not now, not a hundred years from now. It's probably a better indicator a hundred years later, but still not perfect. There are still problems of accessibility (the fact that many people haven't ever heard of Palestrina doesn't mean that they wouldn't like his music if they did hear it), reputation (Elvis developed a huge following during the 1950s that raised him to near-legendary status and makes him more popular today than he would have been if we'd just discovered a stash of his music somewhere without knowing who he was), and familiarity (some people don't give Mozart a chance because all they've really been exposed to is rock and roll).

Maybe popularity would be a decent standard if he we could somehow get a large sampling of people that had never heard any music before, and knew nothing about Mozart, Elvis, or that so-called "singer" we were discussing. Of course, even this improbable scenario breaks down for literature, since one would first have to know how to read, and what books one had learned on would form a small bias.

you argue it is the intrinsic aesthetic qualities in a work that cause it to be liked or disliked.

I don't mean anything profound here. A novel by a professional author is probably aesthetically superior to one by a first-grader, and it therefore will be liked better. A novel by a good author is better than one by a bad author, and will be better liked (never mind that 'good' and 'bad' are so difficult to define).

Thingol: I agree with pretty much all that you say. Despite my above tirade against the necessity for meaning in art, I do think the LotR involves some very important themes.

Sorry for another rambling post.

[ March 04, 2002: Message edited by: Aiwendil ]