Simply Complicated Vs. Complicatedly Simple
Interviewed for the documentary Billy Wilder Speaks
, the master director says that there are two kinds of stories-by which he means there are two ways to successfully tell stories. You can tell a simple story in a complicated way, full of rococo stylistic flourishes. Or you can tell a complicated story as clearly and simply as you can.
Roleplaying stories, what with our volumes of rules, branching narratives, dropped story threads and competing player visions of what’s going on, are inherently told in a complicated way.
A dungeon crawl is a simple story. Boy meets dungeon, dungeon plays hard to get, boy loots dungeon. The overlay of above-named complexities adds the necessary crunch to make that simple story entertaining over many, many iterations.
If we follow this analogy, more story-oriented games are in danger of being complicated stories told in complicated ways. The more complex the underlying narrative, the simpler the overstructure of RPG elements ought to be.
The documentary, by German new wave director Volker Schlondorff, is crude as a cinema but indispensably enjoyable for cinema fans. In their conversations, the two directors focus on technique and story, in addition to Wilder’s famously witty anecdotes. The extra interview material on the DVD is as long as the film itself. By contrast, the similar doc on the excellent Criterion set of Wilder’s sparklingly bleak cult classic Ace in the Hole
is by critic Michel Clement, and concerns itself with Wilder’s themes and on drawing a portrait of him as a character. With a famous raconteur like Wilder you’d expect a lot of overlap between the two docs, but there’s surprisingly little.