Telling Stories: Safe and sound
I would really like to tell a story wherein the roleplaying community is notably different from the raiding community or the PvP community or any other community and isn’t filled with all sorts of creepy players who will make you want to stop playing altogether. The only thing preventing me from telling that story is the fact that it’s not true.
Let’s face it, roleplaying isn’t exactly like any other community, but it still has those hallmarks. There are creeper and weirdos who will make you awkward, people who have no sense of personal boundaries, and a varied assortment that will make you feel some combination of unwelcome and frightened until you just leave. It’s not unique to online games, either. For some people, roleplaying just seems to lead straight into creep-ville territory. It’s gross and unpleasant, but it’s true.
I am going to assume that no one reading this wants to be a big creepy jerk who drives people away from their game of choice, although whether or not you achieve that goal anyway is another discussion. Today, I want to talk about keeping yourself safe and comfortable, though, and it’s a good idea to make sure that you don’t violate anything contained herein if you’d like to avoid being super-creepy. Yes? Yes.
A game like a warm hug
When you were young.
My copy of Secret of Mana is long since dead, and this makes me very unhappy, because it means I don’t have a copy of the game right now. I know, I could buy it on the Wii’s virtual console (although I’d prefer it on the 3DS – Nintendo’s strict limitations on where you can buy older games is kind of absurd), but at the moment I can’t always justify the cost. But that’s not the point. I miss the game and I would play through it again right now, despite having dozens of newer games to play that I’ve never even beaten once.
Is this partly because of the ways that players gravitate toward the familiar over the novel? Naturally. But there’s something more to it. Some games just feel welcoming, even if you’ve played them countless times before, even if the game’s plot is anything but warm and welcoming. There are games that just feel like a big warm hug, welcoming you back no matter how long you’ve been away.
Telling Stories: Keeping the faith
Whatever you believe in your day-to-day life, religion can have a substantial impact when roleplaying. It has some real meat to it, as a topic. There are a lot of ways that you can portray a religious character, a lot of options offered by the game when it comes to how religion is handled, a whole lot of different permutations available. It’s also a thorny issue to discuss, since discussing religion as a category tends to overlap with religions in the real world, and that’s an uncomfortable series of land mines no matter what you believe.
That also is part of why religion is such a powerful force in roleplaying, though. Religion is tied in with your identity, a combination of things that you’ve been told and things that you believe that are tied intimately with your personal identity. Your religion in real life (or aversion to same) informs part of your identity. What your characters believe is just as important to them.
Challenge Accepted: Why fake difficulty is still a thing
Fakin’ it.
Fake difficulty isn’t a term of praise. Which is kind of obvious from the name, I know.
If you’re not well-versed in fake difficulty as a named concept, you’ll still know it when you see it. The mandatory stealth section when this game had not required any stealth gameplay before now. The camera angles that shift when you make a jump. The sudden mechanical shift into a whole new sort of game that you may not be any good at. A hunt for an object that would be easy to find… if not for the total lack of distinguishing marks from the background.
TVTropes does a good job listing the many, many flavors of fake difficulty, but it only briefly touches upon the fact that it’s not entirely bad. There are a few reasons it still shows up in games, though, and while some of them are bad, a couple of them are actually better than the alternative. So why is fake difficulty still a thing?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 