Posts tagged Role-Playing Game
Replayability in Video Games
Apr 1st
Posted by Craig Wells in Blog
What makes a game replayable? There are some obvious answers and Lucian Smith summarized them fairly well into 4 categories: Mastery, Completion, Impact, and Experience. Mastery is the idea that a player gains mastery over the system of the game. This I feel is the most common form of replayability found in video games. Completion is the idea that a player has fully explored every nuance and area the game has to offer. Again this is fairly common in games, most notably in RPGs. Impact refers to the attempt to change the world presented by the game through the systems the game provides to the player. And lastly experience, and this is the most nebulous definition. To replay the game for experience is to replay it in order to experience the same thing a player experienced before. This I beileve is probably one of the most uncommon types of designed replayability, at least in games.
In my post I plan to really examine experience based replayability. I do this because the former two types of replayabilty have been, well replayed a lot in games. Impact replayability is already being explored by a number of games including The Sims, Little Big Planet and to a great extent the World of Warcraft. Expeirnece based replayability on the other hand is not used nearly as much in games and I want to discuss why.
Experience based replayability is an area that I feel has not been explored enough in games. For the vast majority of other mediums experience based replayability is king. Because these mediums are static in nature (and by mediums I am referring to film, novels, and most kinds of art) they are only replayable if the audience wants to experience it again. You can’t change a film to explore other avenues of the story if the director didn’t give them to you. You certainly can’t improve your ability to consume a piece of art (some will argue that you can and there is validity to this, but in the most general sense there is no improvement in your ability to see a painting after you have seen it). The only way static pieces of media are capable of replayability is by means of Experience based replayability. This in fact is why these mediums are good at it, they have to be. You can’t paint the Sistine Chapel every other day so you need to paint it in such a way that it causes people to want to see it again and again.
Games on the other hand are not static by their very nature. Change is inherent to a game. If you play a game where nothing changes, then you aren’t really playing a game. The question I ponder is, does this make experience based replayability inherently impossible? If a game changes everytime you play it because of it’s very nature then is replaying it to experience the things that you experienced before impossible? I believe the answer to this question is no and it gets back to what a game designer is doing when they design games. A game designer is designing experiences not games. The game is the method that the designer uses to create the desired experience. Ironically you’d think that Experience based replayability would be the most prevalent source of replayability, but it is actually the least used method. This is because the systems that designers use to create games make it easier to implement the other types than it is to create an experience worth coming back to for the experience alone.
If the other mediums are good at doing experience based replayability, how are they doing it? Looking at the mediums mentioned before I think the most applicable ones to video games are film and novels. Art is a static medium in terms of time and video games can’t be static in time. Plays seem like a good match, but because they are so similar to video games in their replayability they are not a good object of comparison. Films and novels that have replayability tend to have archetypal stories. An archetypal story accoring to Robert McKee’s book ‘Story’ “… unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression.” That jumble of $10 words essentially says that if a story conveys a true experience in the context of its setting and characters then it is archetypal. The reverse of this is cliches and stereotypes. These are things that are superficially true to one experience, but is not universal. We see this principle apply in many of the classics of both film and literature. Good examples are Lord of the Rings, Chinatown, and Star Wars.
Well how do we apply this to games. I say it is as simple as it is to apply to film and literature (which of course means extremly difficult). At this point I am going to say that experience based replayability is inherently narrative based replayability. This does not mean that the experience we design is not one that can’t be repeated via the Experience model unless we have a strong narrative. Instead it is a failing on my part to ascertain the method to do this. I can only look at this through the lense of narrative. That being said the lense of narrative is one that I feel is very broad and can provide some insight in how to do this in other ways. In order for a game designer to design a game with experience based replayability they need to find a nugget of truth in which they can wrap their story around. This nugget tends to be something very basic like independence vs dependence or powerful vs the powerless. It needs to be something that is diametrically opposed to one another.
A game that has done this well is Final Fantasy 7. In this game the nuggets are nature vs technology, power vs powerless, and family vs clones. These nuggets allowed the story of the game to be multi-faceted and rich. You couldn’t get all of the detail in one playthrough, you needed to play again in order to get the nuances that you missed before. The games mechanics were in general ok, but nothing to write home about and its graphics while revolutionary for the time were frankly a bunch of faceted polys moving together. The reason why this game was replayable was because players wanted to experience it again and again.
Designing this type of replayability is extremely difficult. Most games are twitch based games and while narrative for many is a crucial part of gameplay, creating games that are replayable tends to take the backburner against more important features such as tuning game mechanics and level design. I do believe however that we definitely need to look at replayability as a core game design tenet. With console and game prices continually rising we need to serve our consumer with games that will stand the test of time. No longer are we designing games that are 40 hours long for $50. More often we are desining 20 hour games for $60. Our consumers will start to balk at paying a hefty premium for something that doesn’t last as long as it used to and we as an industry cannot afford to create games with more content because of the ever increasing costs of production. The way to solve this problem is to create games that are inherently replayable.
Other readings on replayability:
Ernest Adams on Replayability Part 1
What is an RPG?
Feb 16th
Posted by Craig Wells in Blog
An RPG is a Role-Playing Game by its acronym, but this title is actually very broad. Yet we as gamers know an RPG when we see one don’t we? I can rattle off about a dozen different games off the top of my head that I know in my heart to be RPGs, distinctly different from other genres of video games. What qualities of an RPG set it apart from other video games? Are these qualities sacrosanct or can they be used in other genres without diluting those genres? Are there qualities in other genres that can be added to RPGs that won’t tip it into another genre entirely? Is defining what is and isn’t an RPG even important?
I recently started asking these questions as I was playing the game Chronicles of Valkyria by Sega. This game markets itself as a “turn-based RPG.” (sega.com) As an avid RPG player I was interested and picked up the game to play. The graphics of this game are superb and beautiful and the storyline is well thought out, however I realized quite quickly that this game was not an RPG by my internal definition. To me, this game is a turn-based strategy game that happens to have a wonderful story and graphics attached to it. This classification is not a slight against the game in any way at all. I do enjoy turn-based strategy games, but I was disappointed by the fact that it wasn’t what I thought an RPG should be.
Now this is obviously not the end of the world, I did finish the game and I was pleased mostly with how the game progressed, but it got me thinking. Is the RPG genre defined well enough? Based on my experience with Chronicles of Valkyria, obviously not. Why though? As I said before most gamers recognize an RPG when they see one. Why didn’t Sega label their game properly? Arguably they have many gamers working for them and they should have recognized this immediately. As with the Supreme Court case that defines obscenity, it is very difficult to define what something is concretely when so many people have different views of the same piece of media. I think that this is the case here. I think that the definition of RPG will be different for every person that you ask. Even with that said though, I do feel that there are some very specific and concrete characteristics that make RPGs RPGs and while it would be hard to define the totality of what an RPG is, we can use these characteristics to at least help us classify if a game really is an RPG.
Daniel MacKay in his book ‘The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art’ defined an RPG as Fantasy Literature + Wargames. (MacKay, pg. 17) While this is a fairly accurate statement, it approaches the definition of an RPG from the rubric of history. I feel that it is more useful to approach the definition by way of the game mechanics. This method is more useful to game designers I feel because we don’t create games based on the way games evolved over history, we base them on mechanics, art, technology and story. We can rule out technology and art because the level of these are fairly similar across all genres in video games and as such are poor indicators of genre differences. Story I argue is also a poor indicator of genre differences because many games which are not RPGs have significantly complex stories and plots. Games such as Bioshock and Uncharted both have very complex and compelling stories, but no one would argue that they are RPGs. This leaves us with mechanics. This I believe is how we can separate genres of video games. A platformer is definitely not a sports game and a strategy game is definitely not an RPG. They can share some very specific kinds of mechanics but the totality of the mechanics in the game is the real test.
So what mechanics define the RPG genre? Specifically most RPGs have these qualities:
- Inventory
- Combat
- Leveling
- Skills
- Social Aspect
- Non-Linear gameplay
That’s a lot of qualities and most of them are very complex and many can be found in other genres. Lets go through them though and define how they differ from other genres.
Inventory in an RPG is very important. In many RPGs, you collect items. These items range from armor and weapons to knick-knacks and literally junk. The value of these items is very particular to each RPG and allows the player to customize and personalize their player character to their liking. This is obviously not unique to RPGs, but in general the inventories for RPGs are vast and wide-ranging. RPG player characters tend to amass large quantities of items both useful and not. In an action/adventure game this kind of inventory would be cumbersome and would probably detract from gameplay, but in an RPG, it is part of the fun of the game. Managing that inventory to keep useful items and remove old and outdated items is for some people very entertaining and can be cathartic when you clean it out.
Combat obviously is not unique to RPGs. It is the culmination of conflict and for almost all games conflict is the driving force behind the gameplay. So why include combat as part of the things that defines an RPG? Combat in RPGs is very complex unlike other games. Many RPGs are turn-based and what skill or attack you use in what order is very important. In many respects it is very similar to strategy games. This isn’t surprising because as Daniel MacKay said, the RPG evolved from wargames which are at its very heart strategic. However I agree with Daniel MacKay that fantasy literature influences removed RPGs from the strategic realm and moved it into its own realm. I bet your asking at this point then ‘Obviously Chronicles of Valkyria’ is a prime example of what MacKay was referring to, why do you think it isn’t an RPG?’ My answer is this, the addition of Fantasy literature to wargames does not mean we tack a story onto it and it is suddenly an RPG. This is a fallacy. In truth Fantasy Literature influenced wargames and in turn many other aspects, including an in-depth story, were added to wargames to make them RPGs.
Leveling is a more unique aspect RPGs. While many games in many different genres have abilities that are added through the course of gameplay, they generally aren’t as explicit as RPGs. RPGs come right out and say “you’ve progressed and this is the results.” They actually refer to them as levels. More importantly during leveling you are given options. Most games just say ‘yay you’ve got new stuff that we defined you should have at this point in the game play. Congratz!’ RPGs generally do not do this. They do give you a specific amount of points you can spend in multiple areas, but how you spend them is entirely up to the player. This gives the player a much greater amount of control and freedom within the game and it can hurt them in the course of the game. This risk though does not deter from game play though. In fact most players revel in the fact that if they choose the right combination of abilities and stats then they can excel at the game as opposed to just getting by.
Separating skills from leveling was a difficult decision, but I feel that skills are actually fairly unique to RPGs and therefore required a more in-depth discussion of them. Skills encompass more than just cooking, cleaning, and sewing for RPGs (though many of them have these types of skills in them). Anything that the player character learns throughout the course of the game is considered a skill. This includes combat skills such as magic spells, different attacks, and healing type mechanisms. Which skills you learn when greatly affects game play and how you use those skills in what combination really define what an RPG is. Additionally skills help players define the character they are playing. An example of this is World of Warcraft. I played this game for years and my main character was a leatherworker. I had multiple people seek me out because I could craft the rarer items since I had been playing for so long. This one skill helped define my character within the world I was playing.
The social aspect of Video RPGs is often overlooked due to a variety of factors most of which can be attributed to one main problem, technology. Unlike their table top predecessors, Video RPGs have been decidedly single player for a while now. This however was not because of a design decision to remove social interaction in this type of game. Video RPGs (excluding MUDs and other similar types of games) tended to be too complex visually and the worlds too vast to properly network. The high latency and low bandwidth of commercially available internet made it virtually impossible to play together in real time. This limitation however has started to evaporate. The immense success of games like Everquest and World of Warcraft have proven that Video RPGs can be highly social. This social aspect of the game of course is not unique to just RPGs. Many first person shooters have a decidedly high social aspect as well, but the nature of the interaction is decidedly different. Players get together not only to fight the other clan for dominance (though this does occur), but to advance the story of the game. This collaborative advancement of the story makes the social interaction of RPGs decidedly different from other games.
When I refer to RPG having non-linear gameplay I don’t mean that they constantly cut between different scenes like a movie does. Instead I mean that you do not have to follow the exact flow of the story of the game in order to advance in the game. The player gets to choose what they do when and in what order. ‘But Craig, the Legend of Zelda allowed you to do that; how is that different than an RPG?’ My answer would be, the Legend of Zelda is an RPG. You play the role of Link trying to save the princess Zelda. How you go about doing that is entirely your decision. A very good example of this is MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or Everquest. In these games you are not required to complete any quests whatsoever to advance in the game. You can if you like, just fight monster after monster and level up on your own. It is of course faster to level up using quests and the like, but you can if you wish do what you want, the game does not require you to play a certain way to advance.
So that was a lot of this is what an RPG is. How do we apply this information to games? Let’s look at Chronicles of Valkyria again. This game has an inventory that you can use though it is very limited. The game also has combat, which in this case is very complex and strategic. The game also has leveling up, but the only choice you have is to level up a class of characters and no decisions on what happens to those characters is given to you. The game really doesn’t have skills which you can exercise per see, just different classes of characters which have different skills that you can use. There is no social aspect to this game whatsoever and the game play is very much linear. Based on the above descriptions of RPG gameplay that I described, this game is not an RPG. There is only 1 aspect of this game that is similar to RPGs and that is combat, and as was explained before RPGs grew out of strategic combat games.
A game like Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins on the other hand has a very robust and complex inventory system. It has complex and strategic real time combat. It also has leveling which allows a player to choose what attributes to improve and it gives the player a variety of skills to choose from. It is sadly lacking in the social aspect being a single player game, but it allows you to choose your path in gameplay. This has 5 out of the 6 aspects of RPG gameplay and therefore we can say that this game is definitely an RPG.