Violation and Collaboration
Violation. In her work " A Director Prepares " Anne Bogart (2003) has this to say about what it means to direct theater: ... I recognized that night the necessary cruelty of decision. The decisive act of setting an object at a precise angle on the stage, or an actor’s hand gesture, seemed to me almost an act of violation. And I found this upsetting. And yet, deep down, I knew that this violent act is a necessary condition for all artists. Art is violent. To be decisive is violent. (pp. 44-45) Whether or not one agrees that table top roleplaying games are art (or that games of any kind are art) it is clearly an act of creation. It requires decisions on the part of its designers and typically its participants. For Bogart, the primary violation here is of volition and the will. Actors go from having the full space of creativity in their performance to being restricted as they are told to "keep it", turning what was a free experience into a much tighter repetition...
