I may be too late to the game, and this may be simply an aside, BUT!

I was thinking recently about some contemporary authors I’ve read whose work shows the notable influence of visual media, as opposed to other written media. That is, their pacing, the beats hit by their dialogue, and their section/chapter breaks feel like a movie or TV show. You know, you get to the end of a chapter and you can picture the “cut” being made. I feel like they are documenting the “movie in their head”, as opposed to documenting a story, they way earlier authors not impacted by film or television might have.

And so it makes me wonder, prompted by this post; what was the first RPG to use “scene” as a distinct unit of measurement?

And prior to that, assuming that RPG designers based their conceptions of play on their respective “Appendix N”s — which were generally “old style” novels and historical texts — how did they envision at-the-table division of in-game units of time? Sure, early RPGs used rounds, turns, minutes, hours, etc., and you have Uncle Gary admonishing us all that no campaign can function without accurate timekeeping, but even then you couldn’t track every single second of every day in-game.

And (and!) even if we get to the point of using “scenes” as a common unit, what kind of scenes are we using? (Which I guess is the fruitful void being talked about, right?) Scenes in original Star Trek have a different feel and pacing than scenes in Killjoys. And if a game’s source material is not visual media (say, The One Ring) then what does a “scene” appropriate to that material look like?

I dunno that I’m contributing at all, but there you go.