Why Does Jeff Vogel Hate RPGs?
Jeff Vogel, Indie RPG developer, has been broken. He wrote a controversial rant a couple of weeks ago - part one of two actually - about why he hates RPGs. He states,

"During my recent intense bout of this market research (heh!), I finally came to terms with the fact that, after 23 years of playing them, I hate fantasy RPGs. I hate them, and I hate myself for making them."

I've been mulling this over for a couple of weeks now. Jeff has been personally been responsible for the design and development of more commercial RPGs than about anyone else in the industry --- and I'm including big names here like Richard Garriott. He's got something like 14 different commercial RPGs under his belt that he's personally created. So I figure that this guy knows of what he speaks.

That's a little scary. I mean, the guy has been doing indie RPGs for something like 13 years now, and he's one of the more successful completely indie game developers out there. I aspire to succeed as he has. And I love RPGs (well, I love many RPGs... I've played my share of crap). But I wonder if this is where that path leads?

Film Parallels
I used to marvel at how dissassociated movie critics were when they'd pan "crowd-pleasing" hit movies. I thought it was pure snobbery. As I've watched quite a few more movies in my life, and met a few movie critics (maybe I should call them "journalists" instead of "reviewers" or "critics"), and I now understand where they come from. After seeing the same formula repeated over and over in a thousand films that fortunately most of us never have to see, they become pretty jaded. My wife and I are familiar enough with the Hollywood formulas that we can recognize a formula movie and predict plot twists in a general fashion quite a bit in advance. We're okay with that. We still enjoy the film, even if its underlying skeleton is familiar to the point of being a cliche'.

But we haven't seen nearly the number of films as your average film-critic veteran.

In a similar vein, I don't think I've played nearly as many CRPGs as Jeff Vogel. Maybe that also explains Matt Pekham's sudden attack on the entire genre in his now-retracted Neverwinter Nights 2 review. After a while, that level of familiarity breeds contempt. Maybe. Go ask Scorpia. She certainly sounds frustrated with the mediocrity the genre has settled for, especially after having glimpsed the glorious possible evolutionary path it could have taken back in Ultima IV twenty years ago.

It sound an awful lot like those movie critics complaining about how the last great film to come out of Hollywood was The Godfather, and everything coming out of "The New Hollywood" (created by Star Wars) has been crap.

Mechanics and Story
Breaking down his arguments, though, it seems to come down to two separate complaints (with several examples of the complaints): Mechanics, and Story. Jeff explains, "Fantasy role-playing games are unique among computer games in one thing: they are fundamentally about starting out weak and learning to be strong. And that learning process generally involves a lot of tedium."

The whole point of the game mechanic is to upgrade your avatar (character) over time, to gain enough power to take on bigger challenges. In many Massively Multiplayer RPGs, this addictive mechanic has been exaggerated to accomodate months and years of play, to the point where it is almost a distorted parody of itself, lampooned in some "games" like ProgressQuest and Kingdom of Loathing. Players have come to refer to it as "the treadmill."

As far as story is concerned, the formula is ancient. Called the "Hero's Journey" or "Monomyth," it's a classic story skeleton common throughout literature, movies, folklore, and ancient mythology. It begins with the everyman hero - Joe Nobody, an insignificant person in a world of much bigger people and events that the audience can identify with. He (or she) is the Frodo Baggins, the Luke Skywalker, the Peter Parker, the Ripley of Aliens, and even the Peter Venkman of Ghostbusters orJason Nesmith of Galaxy Quest. This character finds himself propelled by dramatic events into the Hero's Journey.

It's worked thousands (millions?) of times, it'll continue to work long after we're all dead. The formula is branded into the psyche of the human race.

The story structure fits perfectly into the game mechanics of the RPG. In fact, it's arguable that the game mechanics of the RPG have proven so successful over the years because they so closely resemble the classic story structure that is so much a part of the human experience.

Is The Problem In Design Or Implementation?
My big question to Jeff Vogel (which I hope he'll answer in a future column) is if this is a problem with fundamental design, or with implementation?

Is it a fundamental problem with the gradual powering-up of the player avatar, the structure of the Hero's Journey, and the way RPGs have melded them together? If so, then he's basically screwed.

Even though he talks about the gradual powering-up of your avatar (in plot and mechanics) as being something singular to RPGs, the structure is found in many other games genres as well, particular in the most successful titles. In F.E.A.R., you start as the "new guy," someone the real soldiers joke about (right before they are melted to soup-and-bones by the game's principle antagonist). In Half-Life, you also begin as the "new guy," a lab assistant who is little more than an overeducated janitor, who begins his only partially successful save-the-world campaign armed with a flashlight and a crowbar. In Monkey Island, you play a young, naive pirate wannabe.

The increase in power or status may only be evidenced in the story (as in Monkey Island - your abilities stay the same, but you become the captain of a ship and the nemesis of the most feared villain in the game-world), by the aquisition of better equipment (most single-player FPS games), by the growth of other external resources (such as in most "Tycoon" games), within your characters internal capabilities (most RPGs), or a combination of all of the above. Start small - end big. Everyone's dream. Classic or cliche, it WORKS as it has for millenia, and designers deviate from it at their own risk.

Now, the flip side is the actual implementation. If this is more at the heart of Jeff's concern, I empathize. Too many games - especially RPGs, which nowadays have a requisite expectation from players of stretching gameplay out over at least 24 hours of play-time - wallow in the early stages far too long. This doesn't scale so well. From this, you get complaints from players who endure session over session of unheroic "make-work" to prove themselves worthy of getting to the good stuff. Make-work which is both uninteresting from a story perspective, and tedius from a game-mechanics point-of-view.

And this is perhaps the cardinal sin of RPGs - online or single-player. You don't ever want to be boring. Yet a multimillion dollar industry has emerged, called "RMT" or "Real Money Trading," where you effectively trade real-world money for someone else to play the game for you, to get you past the "boring parts" in massively multiplayer games. In the single-player's corner, the Final Fantasy series is perhaps one of the most notable offenders, forcing the player to wade through tons of irritatingly identical encounters between the "good parts." At least in the newest game (which I am still playing), the "filler" encounters aren't just thrust opon you at random anymore.

Jeff complains about having "to spend time wandering around and killing the same wolf 500 times so I could get experience and get stronger. " I think the complaint is right on the money. Tedium should be eliminated in ANY game. It'd be easier if all players got bored by exactly the same thing, so it's not easy to pinpoint.

But the usual suspects keep lurking about. There are millions of variations to the Hero's Journey, yet most RPGs (and too many fantasy novels) don't stray too far from Lord of the Rings. Can't we shake it up a little bit more than that? And we keep trying to entertain players for 30+ hours by giving them 10 hours of entertainment mixed with 20+ hours of filler. We need more meat, less fat.

It's not easy, but I think we can do better.


(Vaguely) related blithering idiocy:
* But Is It An RPG?
* RPG Design: Why Can't I Get Past the Stupid Door?
* How To Get Me To Buy Your Indie RPG
* RPG Twists I'd Like To See
* RPG Design Seed Challenge
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Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:10 AM (Permalink)