Your recent blog post reminds me so much of why people write fanfiction. They’re given the rules of the characters and/or the rules of the world, and the only way for it to be entertaining is to place the characters in a new situation while tightly sticking to those rules. The reason most fanfiction is crap is because they don’t do this. The reason why there can be “official” fanfiction, like with the Star Wars extended universe novels, is because those authors can do this well.
At first glance, the reader may not think the emailer is saying much here. But he is.
In that type of writing with established franchises, the writer is not given “freedom”. To use a Star Trek example, the writer is not free to make Data into a different character. Data must be written as Data. The writer also could not have the Enterprise act like a warship and shoot everything in sight. It is not your universe. It is someone else’s universe. You play by their rules.
With writing scripts for TV, imagine all the other things the writer do outside the normal stuff. The actors have a say in their line and will request lines to be changed. If the writer called for an event that causes production to go overbudget, it must be nixed.
If you look at JMS’s writings about Babylon 5 when it was being aired, you will get the sense of how proud and how defensive he was on how his show is consistent with the rules of the universe (of his fictional universe and standard science fiction rules). It is one reason why he insisted on being a producer to protect the integrity of his show. If you asked him something like, “So writing a story means ‘ultimate creativity’ where I don’t have to obey the rules of my own fictional universe?” he’d probably tell you to get the hell out.
Think of music. Music obeys mathematical rules. Poetry is a form of music. It often takes around the age of 50 to 60 for the craftsmanship for the poet to come together. It is just that hard. A century or two ago, it used to be accepted that what we consider the Humanities (such as literature and art) to obey the laws of Nature as obediently as physics and biology.
If you ever wondered why Shakespeare is often seen as the ‘best’ writer ever, it is because his texts can be read as poetry or theater. The poet-playwright hybrid is extremely rare among Mankind. Outside that period of England, where else are there good poet-playwright hybrids? Ancient Greece?
To make a video game, you must program a computer. This takes an absolute mathematical precision. There is no such thing as ‘creative programming’. The gameplay also requires a mathematical precision. But when it comes to the content of the game, all precision goes out of the window. It is “creative time”. All types of junk is brought forth.
In order to make interesting content, one needs to have the craftsmanship of stimulating the imagination. If you are dealing with a fictional universe, you need to map out the order and rules for that universe. If your game is using swords and magic, having spaceships appear to shoot laser guns would shatter the universe.
“But what about Final Fantasy and other JRPGs? They do it all the time!”
That is because the West relies more on a Tolkien fantasy. Much of Asian myths came from ancient India (while the Western myths came more from Egypt and Greece and the Medieval Period). Ancient India’s myths and legends do have spaceships and ‘futuristic’ type technology mixed in with their swords and magic. A common staple is ‘airships’.
One of the most fantastical stories ever made is Alice in Wonderland. The author was not a ‘creative’ twinkletoes who wandered forests looking for… ‘creativity’. The author of Alice in Wonderland was a teacher of mathematics. If he lived today, he’d probably be making video games.
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