Abstract
Problem: People across all ages increasingly resist change — in culture, in games, in media adaptations. Why do changes to beloved IPs provoke such strong reactions, and when are those reactions justified?
Approach: Tim Cain reflects on the nature of change in gaming and media, examining the concept of canon, sharing personal examples from Temple of Elemental Evil, and using a humorous hypothetical biography to illustrate his points.
Findings: Canon is real and objective in its existence, even if subjective in its boundaries. Quality of an adaptation is independent of how closely it follows canon. Changes should be justified by genuine need (like medium constraints), not by a creator's desire to "put their own spin" on things. Ultimately, change is inevitable and can only be evaluated personally.
Key insight: You can't stop changes from happening — all you can do is decide for yourself whether a change is good for you.
The Desire to Stop Change
Tim opens this New Year's Eve 2024 video by observing that resistance to change is no longer just an "old people" thing. He now hears younger people saying "I liked how things were — they should stay like that." This is especially visible in gaming: players go through a phase of exploring many genres, find what they like, and then want more of exactly that — with no fundamental changes to what they love. They want new areas, characters, and storylines, but "within reason — their reason."
Canon Is Real
Much of the resistance to change in media centers around canon. Tim addresses creators who claim "there is no canon" and calls this "utterly ridiculous." Canon is what defines an IP. While the definition of what constitutes canon is objective (it exists), deciding which specific elements are canonical can be subjective — different people draw the line in different places.
Tim illustrates this by noting that he's watched adaptations that changed things he considered canon, while other adaptations were criticized online for canon violations he didn't personally see. This confirms the subjective boundary problem, but not the existence problem.
Canon vs. Quality Are Independent
A crucial distinction: the quality of a show doesn't depend on how closely it follows canon. Tim describes watching one adaptation that deviated heavily from source material but was genuinely well-made — good acting, good writing. His reaction was: "Why didn't you just make your own show?" Conversely, he's seen adaptations that were both unfaithful to canon and poorly made. Staying true to canon and being good are separate axes.
The Temple of Elemental Evil Example
Tim shares a personal regret about his game Temple of Elemental Evil. He stayed extremely close to Gary Gygax's original D&D module because it was "near and dear to his heart" — he'd played it in high school. But the module left many gaps where a human GM would improvise storylines (in the starting village of Hommlet, in Nulb, in the temple itself).
Tim admits he should have expanded those stories — adding side quests that fleshed out characters, weaving new narratives in and out of the main storyline, all while respecting the base canon. The core canon he identified: an evil Temple about to break free and rampage across the countryside, set within D&D's framework where good and evil are distinct, defined forces (alignments, outer planes, alignment-affecting magic and items). These elements are so baked into D&D that removing them would mean you're no longer making a canon-based game.
The Tim Cain Biography Test
In a characteristically humorous hypothetical, Tim imagines someone making a movie about his life. The first problem? "How would they find an actor handsome enough to play me?" (His mom says so.)
But more seriously: Tim is famously obsessed with chocolate. Everyone who knows him would confirm this. If a biopic changed that to cinnamon, or to hang-gliding, the first question should be: why did you change it? Even if the obsession itself is preserved, swapping the specific object demands justification. Was chocolate hard to show visually on screen? Would hang-gliding make for more cinematic scenes? Maybe — but the change still needs a reason beyond "the showrunner decided it would be better than what the author wrote."
The Standard for Judging Changes
Tim distills his view into a framework for evaluating changes to an IP:
- Why are you changing that?
- Is it better?
- Who benefits from the change?
- It better not just be that the creator "wanted to put their own spin on it"
Some adaptations must make changes — books can do things movies can't and vice versa. But when changes are so fundamental that the new thing "is no longer an adaptation" and only shares a title and parts of a setting, something has gone wrong.
Change Is Inevitable
Tim closes with a philosophical note: changes will always be made, and people will always argue whether they're good or bad — really meaning good or bad for them. You can't put a pin in it. You can't stop changes from happening. All you can do is decide for yourself: "Is this a good change for me? Do I like it or not?"
"Kind of a weird topic to end the year on, but here we are. Happy New Year."