I was reading this article over at Tag Sessions, and it hit a nerve, like when you have a sore tooth you didn't know about. When I was a kid, there was D&D and that's all anyone I knew ever knew about. It was a role playing game or an RPG, but no one cared. It was D&D.
I didn't have D&D. I couldn't afford the books, so I wrote my own on pages of looseleaf notebook paper. No one played, so at first I played against myself, then I programmed the computer to GM for me.
In college I started running into other role playing games like Shadowrun and Battletech. They weren't D&D and in many ways they weren't like D&D. Beyond I heard of Rifts and Gurps and the list grows.
But somewhere in there, something different popped up... Baldur's Gate. It was a video game where you could play D&D characters. Role-playing games had moved online, but like the GM I programmed on my Commodore 64, playing the character was gone. Preprogrammed dialogues let me do prescripted things but not really build my character into a 3D character. It was a choose you own adventure with hack 'n' slash mixed in. Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights... the genre grew. RPG began to mean those other games that had characters but weren't Castle Wolfenstein or Doom... the non-FPS character games.
Now explosions in the industry are bringing out new games across a spectrum that wasn't even defined back then. GM-less games... games with no dice... storytelling games. RPG doesn't even mean RPG anymore... it is some ill-defined term that can't be grasped without context. How do we repair our broken term?
Games are played by players. If you want to define a game, you should define it by the interface between the player and the other components of the game. Of course we can't do that in a concrete way, because then virtual tabletops and video games are the same... we interface to them through mouse clicks, button pushes, and key strokes. The interface must be the human's interface.
There are two ways a human thinks about a game that are very different. Closed games have strictly defined rules for interacting with the system. In chess we can move pieces certains ways on our turn; in Risk we only have a few actions to choose from each turn; in FPS versus a computer, we can hit certain buttons to do certain things and we can learn the rules that the computer uses to react. Closed games are confined by their rules.
Open games, the second version, is very different. An open game allows the player to interact with the game in the manner that they choose, being able to come up with new ideas that could not have been conceived of when the game rules were written. In these games, the human engages the creative side of the brain, performing synthesis of new ideas. The rules provide only a contract for how to interpret these new ideas in a fair and consistent manner. With or without a GM, a human is interpreting the play in the content of the rules.
There is some argument about the nature of the interaction with the rules. Does rolling dice fundamentally change the nature of a game? Let's replace rolling dice with "random element". In actuality, when two or more humans are interacting, we have already introduced a random element, namely the interaction with the other humans. Rolling dice may seem different, but can't you get the same affect by just having another player say your character shouldn't be able to do that kind of thing. Of course, you can't argue with a dice and a rule... it smooths the social contract for figuring out what one can and can't do, and gives "fair odds". As a kid we always played pretend with other kids and remember the escalation of mine is better than yours. Usually it starts with 100, 1000, 1 million, 1 milllion million, and ended with some nonsense about infinity squared +1.
With adults, a significant number of players have a more subtle version of the same problems when playing without rules. As an introverted player I need some mechanism by which an extroverted player can't just sway everyone to his thinking and steamroll my enjoyment of the game. Rules help balance the playing field for the players.
Does that make a RPG -- balanced play? Not really. Games that don't care about balance are clearly RPGs too. Pathfinder, for example, has carefully balanced extensions to the primary rules while Shadowrun adds new more powerful abilities with each new book, but both both are clearly RPGs.
We're circling a definition here. Let's hone in on the exact definition by looking at what isn't an RPG. Poker is not an RPG. Craps in not an RPG. These games have no element of escapism. You are the same person, playing or not playing them.
How about monopoly? Or how about an FPS? Don't we take on other roles in these? Not really -- these are simulations, but still use our own intrinsic skills to solve the problems presented to us.
This leaves a simple definition for an RPG. An RPG is a game where you play a character with different capabilities than you. Let's do a quick check -- does this separate on online MMORPG from FPS? Yes, because FPS games rely on the skill of the player, while role playing games have numbers representing the skills of the character. Does this exclude chess, monopoly, and poker? Yes, because all of those games rely on the player to make the choices that determine the outcome of the game. Does it include games like Fiasco? Sortof, because fiasco does give the character different abilities than what the player could actually do.
So there we have it -- a working definition of an RPG: An RPG is a game where you play a character with different capabilities than you. There are two kinds of RPGs: open and closed RPGs. Closed RPGs have limited options because the options are encoded. Open RPGs have unlimited options because the results are determined by a human.
I didn't have D&D. I couldn't afford the books, so I wrote my own on pages of looseleaf notebook paper. No one played, so at first I played against myself, then I programmed the computer to GM for me.
In college I started running into other role playing games like Shadowrun and Battletech. They weren't D&D and in many ways they weren't like D&D. Beyond I heard of Rifts and Gurps and the list grows.
But somewhere in there, something different popped up... Baldur's Gate. It was a video game where you could play D&D characters. Role-playing games had moved online, but like the GM I programmed on my Commodore 64, playing the character was gone. Preprogrammed dialogues let me do prescripted things but not really build my character into a 3D character. It was a choose you own adventure with hack 'n' slash mixed in. Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights... the genre grew. RPG began to mean those other games that had characters but weren't Castle Wolfenstein or Doom... the non-FPS character games.
Now explosions in the industry are bringing out new games across a spectrum that wasn't even defined back then. GM-less games... games with no dice... storytelling games. RPG doesn't even mean RPG anymore... it is some ill-defined term that can't be grasped without context. How do we repair our broken term?
Games are played by players. If you want to define a game, you should define it by the interface between the player and the other components of the game. Of course we can't do that in a concrete way, because then virtual tabletops and video games are the same... we interface to them through mouse clicks, button pushes, and key strokes. The interface must be the human's interface.
There are two ways a human thinks about a game that are very different. Closed games have strictly defined rules for interacting with the system. In chess we can move pieces certains ways on our turn; in Risk we only have a few actions to choose from each turn; in FPS versus a computer, we can hit certain buttons to do certain things and we can learn the rules that the computer uses to react. Closed games are confined by their rules.
Open games, the second version, is very different. An open game allows the player to interact with the game in the manner that they choose, being able to come up with new ideas that could not have been conceived of when the game rules were written. In these games, the human engages the creative side of the brain, performing synthesis of new ideas. The rules provide only a contract for how to interpret these new ideas in a fair and consistent manner. With or without a GM, a human is interpreting the play in the content of the rules.
There is some argument about the nature of the interaction with the rules. Does rolling dice fundamentally change the nature of a game? Let's replace rolling dice with "random element". In actuality, when two or more humans are interacting, we have already introduced a random element, namely the interaction with the other humans. Rolling dice may seem different, but can't you get the same affect by just having another player say your character shouldn't be able to do that kind of thing. Of course, you can't argue with a dice and a rule... it smooths the social contract for figuring out what one can and can't do, and gives "fair odds". As a kid we always played pretend with other kids and remember the escalation of mine is better than yours. Usually it starts with 100, 1000, 1 million, 1 milllion million, and ended with some nonsense about infinity squared +1.
With adults, a significant number of players have a more subtle version of the same problems when playing without rules. As an introverted player I need some mechanism by which an extroverted player can't just sway everyone to his thinking and steamroll my enjoyment of the game. Rules help balance the playing field for the players.
Does that make a RPG -- balanced play? Not really. Games that don't care about balance are clearly RPGs too. Pathfinder, for example, has carefully balanced extensions to the primary rules while Shadowrun adds new more powerful abilities with each new book, but both both are clearly RPGs.
We're circling a definition here. Let's hone in on the exact definition by looking at what isn't an RPG. Poker is not an RPG. Craps in not an RPG. These games have no element of escapism. You are the same person, playing or not playing them.
How about monopoly? Or how about an FPS? Don't we take on other roles in these? Not really -- these are simulations, but still use our own intrinsic skills to solve the problems presented to us.
This leaves a simple definition for an RPG. An RPG is a game where you play a character with different capabilities than you. Let's do a quick check -- does this separate on online MMORPG from FPS? Yes, because FPS games rely on the skill of the player, while role playing games have numbers representing the skills of the character. Does this exclude chess, monopoly, and poker? Yes, because all of those games rely on the player to make the choices that determine the outcome of the game. Does it include games like Fiasco? Sortof, because fiasco does give the character different abilities than what the player could actually do.
So there we have it -- a working definition of an RPG: An RPG is a game where you play a character with different capabilities than you. There are two kinds of RPGs: open and closed RPGs. Closed RPGs have limited options because the options are encoded. Open RPGs have unlimited options because the results are determined by a human.
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