Telling Stories: Being polite to roleplayers
So you don’t roleplay. Maybe you did at one point but don’t any longer. Maybe you never have and are curious, but are a little put off by what seems like arcane terminology and the looming threat of skeevy behavior. Maybe you’ve never cared to but just don’t like being a jerk. Maybe lots of things. The point is, you’re not roleplaying, and you come across people who are actively roleplaying, either because you intentionally chose a roleplaying server to play on or because you just found it lying there.
Because you fulfill the basic requirements for human empathy, you don’t want to be a jerk. But how do you do that? How do you interact with roleplayers, possibly even observing them, without being a twit or in some way damaging what they’re doing? As it turns out, it’s not that hard. So whether you’re just on the outside of roleplaying or you’re deeply invested and want to show this to others, let’s talk about being polite to roleplayers when you aren’t one.
Challenge Accepted: The need for opposition
If games require challenge, why is this still obviously a game?
Defining games is difficult. Yes, despite what one or two people like to claim in every debate on the matter. You can argue a dictionary definition, but you can use the same damn argument to claim that the only real game is animals being hunted for food. If it were simple to figure out what makes a game, there wouldn’t be any discussion on the matter in the first place. (Spoiler warning: there is a lot of discussion, constantly.)
One thing we do agree upon is that there’s a need for some kind of obstacle. A game isn’t really a game if it doesn’t give you a goal and then offer you impediments to that goal. It’s at work in the very beginning of Super Mario Bros. Your goal is to reach the far right side of the level, but there are enemies and obstacles in the way which can kill you and prevent you from achieving that goal. It all seems very simple on paper.
But it’s not really that straightforward. Very few things are.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Despite my best efforts, these installments refuse to be compressed down all that much. I apparently have had quite a bit to say about these games.
But let’s jump right back into the action. After slaying two of the four Fiends and having noted that the remake has a different difficulty curve than the original game (or more faithful remakes), it seems that both the original version and the remake have once more converged upon the same spot. Namely, the part wherein things become quite a bit more dull and slog-like than is entirely necessary.
By this point you have plenty of resources at your disposal and you’re not thrown into a pitched battle for survival every few fights or as a result of a lucky critical hit. Most of the fights can actually be blown through pretty quickly. The downside is that they’re almost constant and don’t offer you much of worth. No useful drops are found, gil is functionally worthless (you’ve got enough to restock and no more shops to spend it in, so you’re taking in far more than you spend), and you wind up wishing to just be done with all the pointless random encounters.
Genre evolution isn’t up to you
The graphics do not hold up all that well after all this time, but you can’t really expect that.
When I was younger, I played one of my favorite first-person shooters of all time: Marathon. The game was atmospheric as heck, but more than that, it was a departure from what the genre had been up to that point. Rather than being constrained by the claustrophobia of the first-person view, it explored it. The entire game was about you seeing things through a narrow lens, trying to assemble a complete picture from snippets and pieces, and in between you were shooting at a whole lot of aliens who started shooting at you first. It wasn’t even entirely clear who was on your side and who wasn’t at a glance.
I looked forward to the future of the first-person shooters as a result; I had enjoyed Doom despite the constrained viewport, and I thought Marathon was a look in the future. Instead, that future was based on Quake and Unreal Tournament and now Call of Duty or Battlefield or whatever game you’d like to name in which a bunch of gray soldiers shoot another bunch of gray soldiers on a battlefield which is itself gray (and sometimes brown).
Is that a failing of the genre? Nope. That’s just how things go.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 