Games with roleplaying characteristics
Tuesday, July 21, 2009Just like drinks with cider characteristics, games today are also pervaded with roleplaying characteristics. Games like World in Warcraft are always stamped as roleplaying games, but what aspects in these games are roleplay? Is it the fact that your characters grows and gets news abilities? or isn’t simply a game with a level-type functionality? Will there ever be a real RPG?
The basics of roleplaying
Roleplaying is about counciously or uncounsiously acting a role in either a imaginative world or the real world. It’s acting with a high level of improvisation in situations where someone acts like a director or in roleplaying situations as a Game Master. The goal is a natural interaction between the participants where each participants takes their role seriously. You immerse yourself in a role through characterisation, where the participants improvisation creates the red thread, and the Director or the Game Masters job is to keep the thing from going out of control and therefore decides the rules which the participants must follow.
The problem with RPGs in digital games.
What exactly makes World of Warcraft or any RPG to roleplaying? Now we now exactly what roleplaying is, is there ever any roleplaying going on in modern games? I take World of Warcraft as the example, it’s a game where the essence of roleplaying has completely vanished. Players creates a character, they create the character with the ulterior motive to make the character as powerful as possible, not with the thought if the character will be fun to roleplay.
Does more points into the Intelligence-attribute mean that you should act like you are smart or does it only give the player access to more abilities or more magic? These are questions a real roleplayer should ask themselves, these questions are not something the average World of Warcraft player would ask him/herself. Why? because real roleplaying does not exist in modern videogames and especially not in games like World of Warcraft. Some players might roleplay, but the effort is lost when only a few is roleplaying and the rest does not. Seeing a level 60 character should not be something you do everyday, because it’s “epic”, a rare occasion. It’s kinda sad when the World of Warcraft players say: “The game starts when you hit level 60.”
Where is the fear? To improvise and acting like a real person inside a fictive world also comes with fear. Fear of a great battle, the fear of dying , a fear of losing everything you have worked so hard for. Maybe some would stop playing if you could die permanently but you would think once or twice before you go into that scary cave without comrades, knowing that it’s filled with giant spiders. Roleplaying digitally over a game could work if every player actually cared enough, right now..World of Warcraft is just a contest, it’s the first to level 60-70-80 that wins, and this thought alone has nothing to do with roleplaying.
