Cognisant
cackling in the trenches
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- Dec 12, 2009
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I think RPG games as we know them lack meaning, largely lack adventure, and lack actual role-playing too, which are all problems that are deeply intertwined.
A lack of meaning can best be understood by stopping at any point during your next play session and asking yourself, why am I doing this, not just as in what are you getting out of it, I mean why do you want whatever it is you get out of it, fundamentally why are you playing this game? Story is a big part of it, we play to advance the plot, as is combat, we play for the visceral satisfaction of it, but there can be more meaning to it to wanting to advance the story just to see where it goes or engaging in combat for it's own sake. I find games are at their best when they have several layers of meaning, for example killing Lautrec in Dark Souls isn't an especially difficult or novel fight, but it's an act of revenge, I took out his companions first then savoured my fight with him, I enjoyed making him suffer.
Ideally every fight, indeed every action the player makes would be so meaningful and the key to making it meaningful is that something's at stake, the entirety of Dark Souls revolves around having one's EXP represented as a value of "souls" at stake, and without the aid of a bonfire one has a limited amount of health, and with death meaning the potential loss of accumulated souls the loss of virtually any health becomes meaningful in a greater context than the current engagement. So my personal vendetta against Lautrec was just yet more meaning to an already meaningful fight, but meaning isn't just relevant to fighting and to explain that I have to start with what adventuring really is.
As said in the comic above "adventurers gotta eat" which is something suspiciously absent from almost every adventure game, novel and movie, which is especially strange in the context of games, I mean as an adventurer in Skyrim what's your motivation to go adventuring, what's your character's motivation? A house in Skyrim isn't a home, at most it's a trophy cabinet and storage space, your character has no family, a servant and a spouse perhaps but what are they if not simply yet more objects to be collected?
I think an adventurer needs a home life to give meaning to their travels, to create both a juxtaposition and to explain why an adventurer goes adventuring in the first place, of course it would be impossible to script a sedate married life (then again if neither are the talky type...) but if you're just popping in every now and then maybe s/he'll react to how long you've been gone, ask you what you've been up to (to which you'll have several standard replies, plus quest specific ones), comment on any new gear you may have (particularly expensive/unique items), etc, you get the idea.
There could even be periodic scripted events like a dinner party, your spouse proposes it, asks you for money and/or to go get stuff, tells you when it's going to be (like tomorrow night or something), while s/he's preparing tells you to go out so you're out of the way, then when you get back people from around town or VIPs from abroad (depending upon how famous you are) are there chatting, eating, drinking, etc. This opens up the opportunity for new quests, interesting dialogue, potential conflict (if the wrong people show up) as well as introducing you to characters you might not have met or normally can't access, plus the ego boost of people admiring your trophies & home. Or if you're late to the party, don't show up entirely, mess up the preparations, etc, you get berated by your wife/husband, assuming that is they weren't taken hostage by a daedric prince during the party, then you'll get berated after saving them.
Furthermore there's the costs of food, upkeep, keeping your spouse happy, etc, these drains on a player's resources make getting those resources more meaningful, those riches you hear of in a tavern aren't simply riches anymore, they're funds to keep your home prosperous, your spouse happy, your servants fed and the town guard paid off to pay special attention to ensuring your home is kept safe, and any number of other things, which of course makes everything you do to get those riches more meaningful.
Finally actual role-playing, a frustration I had with Skyrim was that it neither allowed me to fully express my character and there was always the designer's intended character hanging over me, the Nordic brute my character was supposed to be. Role playing is all about expression and feedback, the Fable series did this with a morality system and one of my favourite parts of Fallout 3 was going to the main slaver camp just after blowing up Megaton and having the usually difficult door man meekly apologise when he realised how evil I was.
Clearly role-playing adds meaning to one's actions, so the more nuanced the means for self expression and recognition the better, ideally almost everything the player does would affect their self expression in some way (if I let a bandit escape maybe I should get good karma? or at least lose some for gunning them down as they run away) also ideally the game would recognise a wide range of character types, I might be a ruthless prick with a good guy veneer or I might act/dress like a gritty badass but my actions give me away as a secretly decent guy, heck I could be completely random or utterly sociopathic with everyone but a select few, if a game could recognise and respond to these characters it would make role-playing in that game a deep & engaging experience.
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