RPGs (It’s Only a Game)

RPGs (It’s Only a Game)

RPGs or Role Playing Games are my favorite genre of games to play. Perhaps it’s the turn based battle system which allows me the chance to pause time, tormenting my opponents before I lash out to attack them. Or the vast array of equipment or abilities/skills on offer to customize my character. Or maybe it’s the choices I make to determine the destiny of my character…

The concept of morality is usually to present players with a common link to identify more with the protagonist, I still care about the illusion it generates and repeatedly finding myself in the web of choices that are presented. Moreover, I always find a sense of satisfaction in doing the right path by my character and surrounding world. I even debate both the ordinary and significant impacts of my choices before taking any action. Plus it adds a great deal to replay value.

For example: Look at Fable (2003)

In Fable, a player's character has a measure of good or evil association based on the character or Hero's actions. Good deeds award good points, which produce a positive alignment, while doing evil adds evil points, producing a negative alignment. For example killing monsters or saving villagers are acts of good, whereas killing innocents, breaking laws and aiding bandits will accumulate evil points. The path of the character affects not only the responses of non-player characters around the Hero, but also the appearance of the Hero himself.  For example, a Hero with a strongly positive alignment will feature a halo and a shaft of sparkling light above his head, butterflies fluttering around him and lighter features. An evil Hero emits a red haze, draws flies, has glowing red eyes and grows horns.

 VS.

^ It is the quests in Fable that allow players to pick sides and aid either evil characters, such as bandits, or good characters, such as traders and guardsmen

Just like many video game players, I get emotionally invested in my characters and play their morality based on my own system of values. Sometime the game tend to create characters which were clearly divided into good and evil category, i.e. Fable, however I remember making many “rebellious” decisions because I felt them acceptable and justifiable. Games could also easily reset my consequences so that I could make a choice and then reload the game again to choose a choice I wouldn’t normally make so that I could see what could happen to the character and how it would affect the story later. 

But in a game with a specific narrative, the writer often wishes to characterize a character toward an “archetype”, meaning a person displaying a typical trait, so specific so that you can identify with the character, as well as recognize his representation on a grand scale in the game plot. In linear stories, the character isn’t supposed to represent the player, but one piece on the personality “scale”. That’s why most games feature a “rag-tag” group (i.e. Final Fantasy games). Each character is of a different personality, with the writer using each character from their own personality representing in each scenario.  It would be great to see more RPGs with a wider variety of choices, but this would be too expensive.. since there would be a multitude of different scenarios to be written and created (I.e for every 3 life changing options created – good, bad, neutral – another 3 scenarios would in turn need to be created… so for a narrative with 7 life-changing quests that would be 3^7 = 2187 different scenarios). 

So I guess morality draws people in to play games. It makes the character more personal, and thus, the story more immersive. But, it also restricts the story-telling of the writer by diminishing their “representative nature” thus “contradicting the allegory”. After all, a game – no matter how awesome the narrative – is only a game.