Flesh & Blood or Digital Gaming
(RPG & Gaming – How Do You Like Yours?)
© Buzzy Multimeida
(The following article reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily reflect opinions of the staff and management of Buzzy Multimedia.)
All children, except gamers, grow up.
In the beginning there was gaming and it was good. We had character sheets, an array of dice, the occasional painted figurine to represent our guy, and a table around which we sat, looking at one another, laughing, killing, and saving the world every Friday night, like clockwork. Truly these were the best of times. Each of us remembers when we started gaming, and who “turned us onto it,” because like any good addiction, you don’t just wake up one morning and decide today is the day that I will start a new hobby/lifestyle.
I love gaming. As anyone who knows me or has read any of my blogs know, I bleed dice. What better fun can be had than sitting in a room with your friends, enjoying each other’s company, exercising your mind, and all fairly inexpensively? To me, this is what gaming is.
When the video game thing started I was not there. No doubt I was with my friends at the gaming table. I never got into it. We had a Nintendo system growing up but neither my brothers nor myself were all that into it. After we grew up and moved out and had computers we never really explored computer games. Back then they were just like the Nintendo we used to have but took longer to load and cost more money. Besides, some of those early games took up to 56k of memory and who had that to spare on their hard drive? NASA maybe, but not us. Eventually the internet came along (Thanks Al Gore!) and both gaming and computer technology evolved. But still on-line gaming was not for me. Essentially it was no different than playing Nintendo. I never embraced it. Instead of my brother being Player Two who I could turn and punch in the arm when he did something that got me killed, the opposition was a total stranger, one of a million interacting with me in this cyber imaginary world. I imagine hell to be like this.
A dimension that is cold and sterile and so utterly and completely stifling.
Now, before you start lambasting me and pointing out all of the wonderful aspects you enjoy about MUDDs and MMOs and WoW let me say this-good for you. On line gaming IMHO is for Gamers-Lite. There, I said it.
Not that computer on-line gaming is bad, it just isn’t any good. It has its place in Geekdom, and believe you me, I am well aware that there are a lot more folks who game on-line than those who play at a table, but it’s not my thing. Aside from the social interaction that RPGs provide, I like the ability to out-think a module, outsmart the GM, and do something unforeseen. In a computer game, on-line or not, you can ONLY do what the game designer allows you to do, there is no room whatsoever for imagination, creativity, spontaneity, or the ability to say “The hell with this, I’m going AWOL and taking my Halo armor with me. I don’t need or want this.
And btw, it really, truly, deeply bugs me when the on-line types refer to themselves as gamers and that they play RPGs. No, ya don’t. I may concede on the word “gamer,” but frankly, I wish you would use some other word. It’s our word; we had it first and frankly, use it better. But as far as your RPG usage goes-stop it right now. When a computer game fades to a cut scene and your “character” speaks with another “character” in the game, THAT IS NOT ROLE-PLAYING! When an exclamation mark (!) appears over someone’s head that is not a clue, that is leading you by the self-imposed nose ring to move you to the next phase of the storyline because unless you do, you’re not gonna to get there. That is a predetermined computer program doing its predetermined thing. It’s never gonna do anything different, the dialogue is never gonna change, and neither character is ever gonna ask or answer a question that you would.
And don’t tell me that in WoW you can talk and interact with “real people,” I know that, but that is not role-playing either. That is called ‘texting.’ The missions are the same. The world has impassable edges to it. The way to defeat the level boss is always the same and sometimes the patter is painfully obvious. Technology cannot be improved upon or invented in the game. Hell, unless you’re Mr. T and a super hacker you can’t even create your own Night Elf Mohawk Clan, ya gotta settle for the options presented to you. Why? Why settle when you can be the master of your destiny and the captain of your ship? Why can Leon S. Kennedy just set that impossibly large mansion ablaze? Why can’t I throw some of all those hand grenades I have been carrying around at that monster in the lake? Why can’t I save Sebastian? Why won’t the dog come with me, hell, it’s the one who saved me from the ogre. And why can’t I just hire that creepy old guy who sells me stuff to be my scout and have him take me directly to the end of the game. It’s not like Leon needs experience points to become a better shot, he starts the game as an expert, it’s my lousy controller usage that gets him killed time and time again.
I may sound like a crazy person, perhaps a bit touched even, but I can also say this: every computer gamer who I have personally introduced to traditional RPGs loves the freedom and has since become regular gamers. I cannot say the converse is true.
QtR – Theresa Bane, Vampirologist and diehard traditional pen-and-paper RPG Gamer
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Thank you for sharing your pov. I agree that rpg’s are far more mailable than a computer game, but sometimes it just nice to pick up a controller and kill some S**t and not have to think while venting a hard days work. and you can get killed any number of times and just pick up where you left off when you hit the restart button. no emotional investment required.
i don’t know what MUDDs, MMOs, WoW, or IMHO are.
the closest rpg game i have played is fable2 for xbox360, which i love, but i have never played in on xbox live. but i can totally see your point about limited creativity. i mean, there are tons of things i’d love my fable hero to do…but she can’t. which is a major bummer.
i have never played a pen and paper rgp either.
i’d like to; but the drawback to this is that none of my friends are as nerdy or as geeky as i am. your imagery of everyone sitting around the table laughing and killing is a powerful one, but i’d be sitting at the table, uh, playing with myself. ahem.
however, i do have an online pen pal. we used to play a game that was sort of and rpg and sort of fan fiction. we played off of a message board. we each created characters, loosely base off of novels that we both enjoy. we then wrote stories playing off each others writing, sort of like writing a story in roudn robin. for instance, say, i would write a piece of the story, then he would add the next bit of the story with his character responding to what i wrote. it was pretty fun.
to quote you, Ms. Bane:
“…there is no room whatsoever for imagination, creativity, spontaneity, or the ability to say “The hell with this…”
how sad is that?
i think we all need a bit more creativity and imagination in our lives.
so, while, i’ve never played one myself, i find myself siding with you that the pen and paper rpg is supreme.
everything has its merits. i have had g.m.’s that were bastards and made it not fun to play, and i have played games where you couldn’t really enjoy it unless your online(which by the way is not why i would buy a game. it either can stand alone and be played whether or not i have an internet connection or not be bought at all)So ultimately i agree in principle but say to keep your mind open to the fun… and theres fun to be had in both dice and paper, or controllers and powercords.
p.s. we should have a poll and see what rpg’s are everyone’s favourites… (the ones that use dice, and imagination)
or better yet, which of our favourite book series should be turned into an rpg…
This was a really enlightening commentary. It made me think about my various gaming activities in a very different light.
First of all, I should say that while I now play console RPGs, MUD, and MUCK, I am at heart a tabletopper. My Atari 2600 and NES got the usual amount of play from a child with a new, shiny, cutting-edge-of-technology toy (and they still occupy place of pride next to my PS3) but I did not grok roleplay until high school, when I wound up with a tabletop roleplaying book, and had no idea what to do with it. Fortunately a friend at school did – and that was the beginning of the end. Soon every Sunday was devoted to AD&D. When I hit college and found a really, really good GM who ran a story-driven, three-year-long campaign, it turned into twice-weekly sessons. And that’s how it’s gone. Now that I’m an adult – at least nominally – the time I can spend tabletopping is cut down considerably, but it’s my great love in the gaming world. When I think of myself as a gamer, I think of myself primarily as a tabletopper.
But, wait! I said I play “console RPGs.” And I do call them role-playing games, but… this post made me realize that in my mind, a console RPG and a tabletop RPG are two entirely different animals (perhaps the former is the domestic cow to the latter’s American bison). I can’t argue that the former doesn’t allow any of the actual creative input that the latter does. It’s story driven, but the story is confined and contained. Playing a console RPG is like reading a very labor-intensive book, and there is a definite charm in that for any of us who enjoy stories. Playing a tabletop RPG is like writing the book with five or six of your friends. There are advantages to both, but they are distinctly different species.
And the MMO is still another different species. Possibly one from Madagascar, that nobody has ever seen before, with outrageous colors and enormous eyes, and too many limbs for us to really believe it’s from earth. I am not dissing MMOs. I don’t play MMOs because I know they’d eat my soul, not because I am philosophically opposed. But I do think that MMO players who never take a step back to visit the MMO progenitor, classic tabletop roleplaying, are missing out on something grand.
I have the same response when someone tries to tell me how they love RPGs, and then talks about things like WoW or Fable or Fallout. I enjoy computer RPGS from time to time, and I used to play MUDs back in the day, but it’s not the same thing. No computer can give me an experience that’s as fun as sitting around a table with my friends, coming up with our own stories, solving each others puzzles, and laughing at each others jokes. Final Fantasy XII may have sucked up 100 hours of my time, but I didn’t get any stories about when my cleric got thrown at a lich- you had to be there, it was a sound tactical move- or when we had to blow up a museum to get rid of a bunch of vampires or any of a hundred other stories that make me laugh.
Pretty pictures and nice music are nice, but they aren’t nearly as great as having hours of stories and inside jokes to talk to friends about.
I, too, grew up with the “Original” rpg’s, and they, to me, are still the best. I have tried to play some of the online games (my little brother is a huge online player), but they just don’t hold the same fascination for me. There is something truly magical about not only interacting with, but being in the same room as, other people. To me, the social interaction is just as important as the game, and in the “digital world” you lose that. (Please don’t tell anyone I ever said that – I am an IT Manager!!!)
I don’t think I’ve heard of too many MMO gamers refer to themselves as RPG Gamers. They tend to speak mainly in the terms of mmorpg or just shorten it to MMO which doesn’t really rile up any past feelings of fondness I have for my pen and paper RPG Days.
RPG’s where something I originally picked up from my brother, but when he stopped playing I kept going. Unfortunately I no longer get a chance to do actual table top rpg gaming. So MMO’s (when I have time) tend to fill that void a bit.
very interesting site, i have bookmarked your blog for future referrence, thanks