Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Role-Playing and Storytelling!

Centered around a table, surrounded by emptied bags of Funyuns and Fritos, I lick my lips and carefully examine the placement of my signifying letter on graph paper. As it near the mysterious disc I listen carefully to its description. It is concave, covered in reflective materials but apparently inactive. It may be possible to activate the disc, if I’d like to attempt to do so, but who knows what the results would be.

I climb on to the surface of the disc, carefully examine it. Some of its paneling has peeled back to reveal gears and diodes inside, but it’s impossible to say just what it does without blasting a hole in the ceiling and letting the light rain down on it. I sigh and clamber my way back up the disc, reporting to the rest of the party.

“I don’t think it’s worth it.”

An argument ensues. The ranger wants to activate it just to see what it does. The bard wants to explore some more and find some interesting stuff in the ruins before we potentially activate some plot sensitive object. And me, I just don’t see why a wandering group of adventurers would want to activate a device without having at least a vague idea of what it does.

Eventually we compromise – our sunrods are holding up, and we’ve got plenty of time. We’ll explore a little, then come back later with whatever we find. Something in the ruins might help us figured out just what we’re supposed to do with that disc, and even if it doesn’t my character is excited at the prospect of finding riches. That’s why he’s here, after all.

When I think of role-playing games, I have trouble fitting experiences like this into the context that games like Final Fantasy XIII and the old Gold Box RPGs have made, but this is role-playing at its truest. You assume the role of a character in a world, and the choices you make then have impact on that world. The choices aren’t necessarily limitless, but they’re not just a collection of visible lines awaiting a hammer’s stroke. There are objects in space, and these objects exist even when I’m not looking at them. Indeed I might not even find them.

But this is what role play fundamentally means – it’s not about dragging yourself through a series of events, it’s about embodying a character and investing yourself in that character’s world. It’s right there in the term role-playing game. If the game was about watching a movie, it could be called a movie-watching game, or a book-reading game, terrible names for genres both. But that’s essentially what the current generation of role playing games are all about: pushing you through a set of pre-ordained events and making you watch.

Take the Final Fantasy series for instance. Final Fantasy VII, debatably one of the greatest games in the history of gaming as a whole and certainly the most acclaimed of the Final Fantasy games within the body contiguous of the series, doesn’t really give you a whole lot of impact on your character’s future. In fact most of the game is spent uncovering various facts about Cloud Stryfe’s past, not deciding his future. And when you do start to forge ahead as a character you’re not making decisions that change world events: you’re following your characters along pre-ordained paths. The end result is a series of events where players can only really exert influence over the violent actions their characters take. Most of the story of the game unfolds in pre-rendered cut scenes that we are privileged enough to sit and watch following some of the more interesting and challenging bits of violence. Occasionally reading is required as characters pontificate on their motivations and just what Mako means to them in text format. But each of these scenes, each piece of information they offer, is immune to tampering from players. The role you assume in most video game RPGs is that of a cameraman, not a character.

There are games that attempt to change this, certainly. The Baldur’s Gate sequels, for example, did quite a bit to provide multiple paths for characters and allow them to spontaneously generate solutions to various situations as they emerged. But even in these games you weren’t really permitted to decide the fate of your character, just which of two paths he followed along. And even along those paths the choices you could make were fairly narrow.

Part of this certainly has to be attributed to the lack of a human consciousness governing the events of a computer-based role-playing experience. Developers can hardly be blamed for not being able to program every single possible iteration into a game, and the lack of choice in video game RPGs is simply a by-product of this difficulty. But at times it feels as if developers and designers simply aren’t looking for ways to let the players insert themselves into stories, like they’re just trying to tell a very specific story through the lens of a role-playing experience which has more in-common with tactical strategy games than its RPG roots.

“I don’t think its worth it” could easily become a rallying cry for these pragmatic developers. Generating carefully controlled experiences which require certain specific sorts of action can make it much easier to introduce, develop and resolve the arcs of various characters. That’s why it’s far easier to write an excellent book than an excellent game: an excellent book simply requires a reader to be realized to its full potential. An excellent game requires a co-author of sorts, as well as a primary author who is capable of planting cues subtly enough for his co-author to notice them and utilize them without feeling forced to do so. There are many sorts of writing it could be compared to, but none of the analogies really do the difficulty facing the authors of games justice.

Still, there are a few titles which approach the glory of pen and paper RPGs. The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series have both done much to preserve the feeling of “go to this place, encounter a situation, resolve this situation in your own way” that pen and paper games have always operated on. These games also have nearly no cut-scenes, and provide players with an at times overwhelming number of options for resolving various conflicts. Unlike its Baldur’s Gate contemporary, Fallout is known for allowing characters to resolve many of its conflicts without using violence at all, instead relying on guile, stealth and technological know-how in order to circumvent seemingly inevitable battles. The Elder Scrolls are famed for the same sort of loopholes, and it is telling that speed runs in these games, that is to say attempts to beat the games as quickly as possible, involve avoiding as much combat as possible. What is perhaps more impressive is that most speed runs in these games ask you to do so without breaking the scripting language inherent in the game.

So why is it that games like Final Fantasy and Baldur’s Gate don’t provide these non-violent solutions to problems? Why is it that these more venerable, better funded and arguably more popular franchises are allowed to ignore the important concept of non-violent resolution, the careful bending of rules that makes tabletop gaming so great? Perhaps it is simply a matter of design philosophy. Japanese RPGs lack the cultural basis of pen and paper games which the unabashedly western Bioware, Black Isle and Bethesda have drawn from liberally. As a result they seem to draw from popular and historical fiction rather than a history of collaborative storytelling, and as a result do their best to present players with world changing stakes rather than world changing decisions. The scope of the game is expanded and the scope of the player’s involvement reduced, the player forced into a precious few decisions which have dramatic and reverberating effects. Make this choice, get this character. Make this choice, kill another character, get the incredible-sword-of-fucking-you-up. Limiting the scope of your choices permits the developers to make the stakes of each choice that much higher, to draw you into the game with grandeur rather than minutiae. While you are no longer responsible for a few characters you are now made to feel responsible for unlocking an epic storyline that the developers have put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into generating. Even if your involvement is only pressing the A button occasionally your reward, being able to see that amazing cut scene at the day’s end, is worthwhile.

But what about games from western developers which seem to miss this all important element of choice and character development in their designs? Bioware seems like the best example of this trend, with their streamlining and simplification of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons to allow players more accessibility and ease of play, along with an overall glut of choices and an increased focus on combat. Perhaps we can trace these design decisions back to Bioware’s predecessors, the venerable Gold Box RPGs from the late 80s and early 90s. These games featured an almost slavish degree of loyalty to the original Dungeons and Dragons rule set, and also possessed a relatively extreme focus on combat, owed as much to increased technological limitations as to the combat-heavy focus of earlier Dungeons and Dragons games. These games did attempt to provide players with a decent dose of the “go anywhere, solve problems as you see fit” mentality of tabletop games, however, and would often present players with seemingly insurmountable obstacles as a result. By refusing to or failing to artificially gate their world the early Gold Box developers allowed players to get in over their heads and asked them to improvise in manners which they may not have been comfortable with as CRPG players. Their sales, as a result, were not equivalent to the overwhelming successes of competing properties such as the earliest Final Fantasies, the Bards Tale games or the rising star of the platformer as exemplified by the Mario series. A streamlining of the elements of these games into the most engrossing and best executed (that is to say, combat oriented) elements makes perfect sense for western developers.

But this is pure speculation on both counts. The fact is that regardless of cause role-playing games are predominantly less about establishing your own story within the framework of a larger adventure and more about defeating monsters in order to unlock chunks of story. And while there has, of late, been a trend towards creating more open worlds which encourage exploration and improvisation on the part of the players with the massive commercial and critical success of games like Fallout 3 and Oblivion there remains a bevy of games like Mass Effect 2 and Final Fantasy XIII which simply ask players to kill enough monsters to see the next awesome cutscene. And these games, while fun and certainly worthwhile, aren’t really appropriate representatives of what role-playing games are capable of as a genre. Which is a shame, given their massive commercial success and the fact that players will come to expect this sort of experience more and more from developers when they release an RPG. It simply feels like a missed opportunity when the game which made me best associate with a character and feel as if I was making my own story is a shooter like Bioshock 2, rather than an role-playing game, a game ostensibly created for this express purpose. Perhaps this is more a statement about the potential of shooters to tell stories than anything, but I’d love to see more RPG developers settle back into table and think about what made those experiences so great, sitting around a table with friends, drunk or high, telling one another “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”