All though at first I must admit I was becoming offended within the first two paragraphs but then began to realize his point about game play. I started to think about my WoW time and the first time I played the mage...to me it was such a different play style that you really had to play differently. Also you ended up having to spend time in a different part of town for your goods and such. But I can see that maybe being able to pick different out comes in a quest for instance that could have a profound effect on your characters good and evil siding. Such as many single player games like Morrowind, Oblivion and KOTOR. Who knows, maybe people would start roleplaying with dwarvish chat a bit more and enjoy it?
And hope that when people read this column that they don't just automatically assume that he is "bashing" RPer's because he's not! He was simply saying that chatting with a dialect does not make you a role player. Such as sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. Got it?
Originally posted by Crysalis ...but then began to realize his point about game play. I started to think about my WoW time and the first time I played the mage...to me it was such a different play style that you really had to play differently.
Normally, I don't have a great sense of direction in real life or in any game that I play. But on the occasions when I played a Ranger in Everquest, I was fanatic about always making sure I had the area maps printed out for wherever I was, and I always kept track of where we were and where we were heading. Because Rangers were the ones who could track MOBs, so I usually ended up leading, and I never wanted to be known as "the Ranger who got us lost."
The big difference is I that never tried to impose the game that was going on inside my head upon anyone else -- that's all the article was talking about. And that personality trait has very little if anything to do with the design of any MMORPG.
The original author misses a key point - WHY do RP servers cost more? Is it the RPers? Or is it those who are too stupid to create an account on a non-RP server? As for name police, I've seen that outside the RP community too. If you have a name that remotely comes close to violating a rule and someone doesn't like you or even just got up on the wrong side of the bed, they report you.
Dirty little secret from the industry to Mr. Wilson - GM costs for PVP servers are high too. Why? For people constantly reporting exploits that have to be investigated and... *drumroll* name police griefing.
Mr. Wilson needs to stop staring at the backside of his navel and pontificating about how bad the world smells. There are far better ways to engage debate... if you take your head out of the dark wet hole first.
All the columnist made fun of was the kind of pompous flake who tries to enforce the term "roleplaying" within a strict set of parameters that exists solely within his own head (and which, for some bizarre reason, often includes talking like a retarded Englishman.) Then what happens? A bunch of people jump up out of the crowd, scream, "How dare you make fun of ME like that!" and claim this site (and maybe even the entire MMORPG industry along with it) will collapse if you're not sufficiently appeased. Lucky you're not smug about it, though!
(raises his hand)
Me.
Oh wait. Sorry. That didn't sound like... what was it again? "A retarded Englishman"?
That's odd... no wait, let me think about it... nope. No character I've ever created in any roleplaying game, PnP or online, talked like a retarded Englishman.
Stereotypes are crutches.
OK then, a Californian, whichever. Jeeze, lighten up.
But yeah, this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about: it's somehow EVERYONE ELSE'S job to figure out what ridiculous little game is going on inside YOUR head from one moment to the next.
So now I guess you're supposed to be an Internet forum poster who's incapable of comprehending the concept of a "point" and/or a "generalization?" Well, congratulations, you get an "A" for realism, but a big fat "F" for originality.
OK -- I'll amend my earlier statement.
Generalizations are crutches. If you need them to sort our your worldview, that's your lookout.
What's that negative tone that many seem to have a problem with? the first two paragraphs he has written was to word how (in general) many other games feel about roleplayers.
Next he goes on about how he technically is roleplaying in other nonroleplaying games (and suspect a lot of "non-roleplayers" to do the same) ending with how sad it is that the very genre that should be dedicated if not emphasizing on roleplaying is actually worse than those, just to follow with how it could improve.
Remember, this is all from the perspective from a non-roleplayer who tries to make his point that roleplaying is a very viable way of playing and what, in his opinion, could be done about enhancing the roleplaying experience.
I actually chuckled at the first two paragraphs as he was indeed showing some of the stereotype problems and even accusations that nonRPers have about RPers.
After all the bashing that many RPers have experienced, why on earth do you bash his attempt on understanding RPers and explaining it to the outside world. No, indeed his article is far from perfect. He does make mistakes, but if he is making the gap between RPers and nonRPers smaller, than I'm all for it.
What more can you want than having an "outsider" explain your playstyle [b]in his own words[] and make it a viable style even. If he continues to hang around RPers he will eventually understand more and more, and he can relay that to "his own kind".
Ofcourse I have been generalizing, but many that have posted in this thread have bashed him and some even to an extreme. All the while he is learning to appreciate roleplaying and roleplayers to some degree... this is not helping, not him or other nonroleplayers that read the article.
Be more supportive to people that actually try to understand.
I thoroughly enjoyed this article. At first it seemed as though you were making fun of RP'rs but later on I realized that wasn't the case as I read through the entire article.
I think you hit the nail on the head. If there were programmers and developers who could write a game to help the character stay true to their role I believe MMORPG's would be so much funner. Hacking and slashing seems to be the only thing going for most of the games I have been playing. I get bored quickly and move onto another game. Honestly, I hate to invest too much money into a game because I know I will get bored once the novelty and newness wears out. But if you could truly get the game into a more RPing style it might make the game so much more interesting. I know it is possible to get games to work for the RP'r if written with that in mind. I hope to see one in the future and a beta is a good idea to see if this would work.
Anywho, I enjoyed your article. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
I didn't find the introduction offensive because I (like, I believe, many others) live in the middle ground between the Achiever/powergamers and the Socializer/roleplayers. I'm not interested in spending all my game time grinding for XP or some bit of uberloot. On the other hand, neither am I interested in spending all my game time chatting with people as a kind of performance art.
The very idea of doing either of those things 24x7 leaves me exhausted -- and that's pretty much the opposite of "fun," which is why I play these MMOG things in the first place.
I don't mind the occasional moment of destruction-oriented gameplay. And I'm not above making some gameplay decisions based on aspects of the character I play. There are things about both powergaming and and roleplaying that I can respect and even enjoy. But I don't want to be forced to do either of them constantly, whether by the designers or by other players.
So I concur wholeheartedly with what I read as Steve Wilson's manifesto, which is that designers of MMOGs need to make "roles" mean something. Instead of blithely assuming that all anybody could possibly want to do is slaughter the local wildlife and NPCs, whether as a dwarf from Dire Mountain or a robot from Planet X, MMOG designers should try to offer both of these and other ways of interacting meaningfully with the game content.
My suggestion: talk to different kinds of people and really listen to them when they tell you how they like to play. And then design the game so that your content can be approached in the three or four most popular ways, with equivalent rewards for success via each approach. Make all of your content as multidimensional as possible.
A truly good MMOG would treat Achievers, Socializers and Explorers as equal-status gamers, with equivalent gameplay/content support for all. Not out of some idealistic notion of fairness, but because being more supportive of different playstyles should translate directly into attracting and retaining more players: i.e., increased profits.
I thought the original article was pretty good. The author was sadly rather naïve, however, to start out by expressing his irritation with some roleplayers. So I found it utterly predictable that many readers would be outraged by a perceived negative stereotyping and subsequently fail to understand what he then went on to suggest could be done to improve the mmorpg genre. I've felt the same irritation myself and I'm pretty sure that everyone who commented here has at some time too .
I think what he was broadly suggesting echoes thoughts that I have had almost since my first day playing a mmorpg.
There's a great deal of fuss and confusion over what roleplaying means, in my opinion primarily caused by the genre term mmoRPG and consequent stereotyping. These days it seems to mean different things to different people so I'd like to try to bring everyone back to a common understanding (mine ), because it might help those players like the author of the article and his outraged critics to see eye to eye, and realise that they probably would like the same sorts of things from the game developers.
Act, the first: 1981.
I started out many years ago with Tunnels & Trolls and pencil and paper and no understanding of roleplaying. RPG was a term which described a type of game which I soon adored. My friends and I quickly picked up lots of other games which involved detailed world backgrounds and stories - Runequest became my favourite - and we began to understand the thrill of playing a character who had no knowledge of the numbers squiggled on our character-sheets or inscribed on the brightly-coloured and variously-shaped dice. We began to let our characters do things that felt right instead of what our knowledge of the numbers told us would be sensible or optimum. We were beginning to roleplay. This is just as appropriate to a mmorpg as it was then to our pencil and paper rpg.
Didn't every roleplayer begin by learning the rules and the mechanics and the stats - "how to play the game" - same as everyone else? Only later did they learn to play a character with a role they defined, and then perhaps they began to approach games by reading up on the "lore" first. (Aside: maybe because of this development in playstyle roleplaying is sometimes felt to be a higher form of playstyle?)
Pencil and paper veterans will know the antithesis of the roleplayer: the rules-lawyer. I'd suggest that the stereotypical equivalent in mmorpgs is the PvP player. The two playstyles have often been characterised as collaborative and competitive, which I think are good descriptions but I don't want to go any further with that now. I want to go back to my development in pencil and paper rpgs and how it relates to mmorpgs and the original article which this thread concerns.
Act, the second: revelation / innovation.
Runequest had a particularly detailed and complicated set of game mechanics, which was wonderful, but seemed to me to often get in the way of roleplaying - interrupting immersion. Knowledge of the game mechanics also allowed for rules-lawyering and arguments. So I began to GM a campaign where I did ALL of the paperwork and the players had nothing but their own notes of what they carried and anything else they cared to scribble down. They would roll the dice and that would give them a feeling for how well they had been able to attempt something, whether they were "in the zone" or had just completely screwed up, while I would relay the result. I was GOD and my word was final, as it should be This posed an enormous workload on me, however, which task I realised would be entirely appropriate for a computer! Only I was neither rich enough nor quite geeky enough to sort that out .
Act, the third: many years later, MMORPGs centre stage.
Following on from MUDs, somebody finally wrote software to manage the game mechanics and do oh! so much more too. Only, they left all of those numbers on the character sheets for every player to see. The workings may be hidden, controlled by the game software, but so many attributes are open. It seems that the computer games industry had picked up the rulebooks of the the pen and paper rpgs and decided that those weighty tomes were what made a rpg what it is. An understandable mistake.
I entered the scene with Everquest and was enthralled by what had come about. After nearly a year there I happened across the Saga of Ryzom, to my delight, and emigrated. Amongst other things such as the beautiful and living world, I loved Ryzom for the little mysteries the game poses for players, like crafting recipes and the weather influences upon materials availability. Little secrets like these inspire characters to act ingame like researchers and scientists, whether or not they are "roleplayers", finding out what they want to know by asking other characters ingame, or by their own devices. Unless they have learned knowledge out of character, out of game.
Finale: in conclusion.
The author of the original article eventually proposed what I see as a rather stilted, but practical development for games developers to consider, and it is laudable. Allowing players to make choices without being able to know beforehand the likelihood of success or possible subsidiary consequences frees them to play a role with their character, making every player a roleplayer - without, necessarily, the twang of the awful stereotype .
I think I have made clear what development in the genre I think would bring "roleplayers" and "non-roleplayers" together, bringing all players to a more common ground in our immersion - don't let us see the numbers, only the results!
Disclaimer
This took me an awfully long time to write so I apologise now for any meandering which lead anyone who got this far to lose track of what I was trying to get across. And I never meant no offense to noone, especially playwrights.
Comments
All though at first I must admit I was becoming offended within the first two paragraphs but then began to realize his point about game play. I started to think about my WoW time and the first time I played the mage...to me it was such a different play style that you really had to play differently. Also you ended up having to spend time in a different part of town for your goods and such. But I can see that maybe being able to pick different out comes in a quest for instance that could have a profound effect on your characters good and evil siding. Such as many single player games like Morrowind, Oblivion and KOTOR. Who knows, maybe people would start roleplaying with dwarvish chat a bit more and enjoy it?
And hope that when people read this column that they don't just automatically assume that he is "bashing" RPer's because he's not! He was simply saying that chatting with a dialect does not make you a role player. Such as sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. Got it?
The big difference is I that never tried to impose the game that was going on inside my head upon anyone else -- that's all the article was talking about. And that personality trait has very little if anything to do with the design of any MMORPG.
Dirty little secret from the industry to Mr. Wilson - GM costs for PVP servers are high too. Why? For people constantly reporting exploits that have to be investigated and... *drumroll* name police griefing.
Mr. Wilson needs to stop staring at the backside of his navel and pontificating about how bad the world smells. There are far better ways to engage debate... if you take your head out of the dark wet hole first.
The adventure is in the journey itself.
(raises his hand)
Me.
Oh wait. Sorry. That didn't sound like... what was it again? "A retarded Englishman"?
That's odd... no wait, let me think about it... nope. No character I've ever created in any roleplaying game, PnP or online, talked like a retarded Englishman.
Stereotypes are crutches.
OK then, a Californian, whichever. Jeeze, lighten up.
But yeah, this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about: it's somehow EVERYONE ELSE'S job to figure out what ridiculous little game is going on inside YOUR head from one moment to the next.
So now I guess you're supposed to be an Internet forum poster who's incapable of comprehending the concept of a "point" and/or a "generalization?" Well, congratulations, you get an "A" for realism, but a big fat "F" for originality.
OK -- I'll amend my earlier statement.
Generalizations are crutches. If you need them to sort our your worldview, that's your lookout.
Next he goes on about how he technically is roleplaying in other nonroleplaying games (and suspect a lot of "non-roleplayers" to do the same) ending with how sad it is that the very genre that should be dedicated if not emphasizing on roleplaying is actually worse than those, just to follow with how it could improve.
Remember, this is all from the perspective from a non-roleplayer who tries to make his point that roleplaying is a very viable way of playing and what, in his opinion, could be done about enhancing the roleplaying experience.
I actually chuckled at the first two paragraphs as he was indeed showing some of the stereotype problems and even accusations that nonRPers have about RPers.
After all the bashing that many RPers have experienced, why on earth do you bash his attempt on understanding RPers and explaining it to the outside world. No, indeed his article is far from perfect. He does make mistakes, but if he is making the gap between RPers and nonRPers smaller, than I'm all for it.
What more can you want than having an "outsider" explain your playstyle [b]in his own words[] and make it a viable style even. If he continues to hang around RPers he will eventually understand more and more, and he can relay that to "his own kind".
Ofcourse I have been generalizing, but many that have posted in this thread have bashed him and some even to an extreme. All the while he is learning to appreciate roleplaying and roleplayers to some degree... this is not helping, not him or other nonroleplayers that read the article.
Be more supportive to people that actually try to understand.
I thoroughly enjoyed this article. At first it seemed as though you were making fun of RP'rs but later on I realized that wasn't the case as I read through the entire article.
I think you hit the nail on the head. If there were programmers and developers who could write a game to help the character stay true to their role I believe MMORPG's would be so much funner. Hacking and slashing seems to be the only thing going for most of the games I have been playing. I get bored quickly and move onto another game. Honestly, I hate to invest too much money into a game because I know I will get bored once the novelty and newness wears out. But if you could truly get the game into a more RPing style it might make the game so much more interesting. I know it is possible to get games to work for the RP'r if written with that in mind. I hope to see one in the future and a beta is a good idea to see if this would work.
Anywho, I enjoyed your article. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
Zweete
I thought the original essay was excellent.
I didn't find the introduction offensive because I (like, I believe, many others) live in the middle ground between the Achiever/powergamers and the Socializer/roleplayers. I'm not interested in spending all my game time grinding for XP or some bit of uberloot. On the other hand, neither am I interested in spending all my game time chatting with people as a kind of performance art.
The very idea of doing either of those things 24x7 leaves me exhausted -- and that's pretty much the opposite of "fun," which is why I play these MMOG things in the first place.
I don't mind the occasional moment of destruction-oriented gameplay. And I'm not above making some gameplay decisions based on aspects of the character I play. There are things about both powergaming and and roleplaying that I can respect and even enjoy. But I don't want to be forced to do either of them constantly, whether by the designers or by other players.
So I concur wholeheartedly with what I read as Steve Wilson's manifesto, which is that designers of MMOGs need to make "roles" mean something. Instead of blithely assuming that all anybody could possibly want to do is slaughter the local wildlife and NPCs, whether as a dwarf from Dire Mountain or a robot from Planet X, MMOG designers should try to offer both of these and other ways of interacting meaningfully with the game content.
My suggestion: talk to different kinds of people and really listen to them when they tell you how they like to play. And then design the game so that your content can be approached in the three or four most popular ways, with equivalent rewards for success via each approach. Make all of your content as multidimensional as possible.
A truly good MMOG would treat Achievers, Socializers and Explorers as equal-status gamers, with equivalent gameplay/content support for all. Not out of some idealistic notion of fairness, but because being more supportive of different playstyles should translate directly into attracting and retaining more players: i.e., increased profits.
Everybody wins.
--Flatfingers
Cross posted and edited from a Ryzom forum
I thought the original article was pretty good. The author was sadly rather naïve, however, to start out by expressing his irritation with some roleplayers. So I found it utterly predictable that many readers would be outraged by a perceived negative stereotyping and subsequently fail to understand what he then went on to suggest could be done to improve the mmorpg genre. I've felt the same irritation myself and I'm pretty sure that everyone who commented here has at some time too
.
I think what he was broadly suggesting echoes thoughts that I have had almost since my first day playing a mmorpg.
There's a great deal of fuss and confusion over what roleplaying means, in my opinion primarily caused by the genre term mmoRPG and consequent stereotyping. These days it seems to mean different things to different people so I'd like to try to bring everyone back to a common understanding (mine
), because it might help those players like the author of the article and his outraged critics to see eye to eye, and realise that they probably would like the same sorts of things from the game developers.
Act, the first: 1981.
I started out many years ago with Tunnels & Trolls and pencil and paper and no understanding of roleplaying. RPG was a term which described a type of game which I soon adored. My friends and I quickly picked up lots of other games which involved detailed world backgrounds and stories - Runequest became my favourite - and we began to understand the thrill of playing a character who had no knowledge of the numbers squiggled on our character-sheets or inscribed on the brightly-coloured and variously-shaped dice. We began to let our characters do things that felt right instead of what our knowledge of the numbers told us would be sensible or optimum. We were beginning to roleplay. This is just as appropriate to a mmorpg as it was then to our pencil and paper rpg.
Didn't every roleplayer begin by learning the rules and the mechanics and the stats - "how to play the game" - same as everyone else? Only later did they learn to play a character with a role they defined, and then perhaps they began to approach games by reading up on the "lore" first. (Aside: maybe because of this development in playstyle roleplaying is sometimes felt to be a higher form of playstyle?)
Pencil and paper veterans will know the antithesis of the roleplayer: the rules-lawyer. I'd suggest that the stereotypical equivalent in mmorpgs is the PvP player. The two playstyles have often been characterised as collaborative and competitive, which I think are good descriptions but I don't want to go any further with that now. I want to go back to my development in pencil and paper rpgs and how it relates to mmorpgs and the original article which this thread concerns.
Act, the second: revelation / innovation.
Runequest had a particularly detailed and complicated set of game mechanics, which was wonderful, but seemed to me to often get in the way of roleplaying - interrupting immersion. Knowledge of the game mechanics also allowed for rules-lawyering and arguments. So I began to GM a campaign where I did ALL of the paperwork and the players had nothing but their own notes of what they carried and anything else they cared to scribble down. They would roll the dice and that would give them a feeling for how well they had been able to attempt something, whether they were "in the zone" or had just completely screwed up, while I would relay the result. I was GOD and my word was final, as it should be
This posed an enormous workload on me, however, which task I realised would be entirely appropriate for a computer! Only I was neither rich enough nor quite geeky enough to sort that out 
.
Act, the third: many years later, MMORPGs centre stage.
Following on from MUDs, somebody finally wrote software to manage the game mechanics and do oh! so much more too. Only, they left all of those numbers on the character sheets for every player to see. The workings may be hidden, controlled by the game software, but so many attributes are open. It seems that the computer games industry had picked up the rulebooks of the the pen and paper rpgs and decided that those weighty tomes were what made a rpg what it is. An understandable mistake.
I entered the scene with Everquest and was enthralled by what had come about. After nearly a year there I happened across the Saga of Ryzom, to my delight, and emigrated. Amongst other things such as the beautiful and living world, I loved Ryzom for the little mysteries the game poses for players, like crafting recipes and the weather influences upon materials availability. Little secrets like these inspire characters to act ingame like researchers and scientists, whether or not they are "roleplayers", finding out what they want to know by asking other characters ingame, or by their own devices. Unless they have learned knowledge out of character, out of game.
Finale: in conclusion.
The author of the original article eventually proposed what I see as a rather stilted, but practical development for games developers to consider, and it is laudable. Allowing players to make choices without being able to know beforehand the likelihood of success or possible subsidiary consequences frees them to play a role with their character, making every player a roleplayer - without, necessarily, the twang of the awful stereotype
.
I think I have made clear what development in the genre I think would bring "roleplayers" and "non-roleplayers" together, bringing all players to a more common ground in our immersion - don't let us see the numbers, only the results!
Disclaimer
This took me an awfully long time to write so I apologise now for any meandering which lead anyone who got this far to lose track of what I was trying to get across. And I never meant no offense to noone, especially playwrights.