When we talk about video game RPGs—as opposed to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade, or roleplaying performance like acting or improv theater—we’re talking about a set of games with recognizable characteristics. They may be lines of monochrome text, like the original Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork. They might be dungeon crawls with sizable parties, like the Might & Magic series or Dragon Quest. They might be the world-spanning epics we’ve come to associate with Japan, like the Final Fantasy saga. These games cover a disparate range of play styles, play experiences and settings, yet everyone calls them RPGs.
Why?
For one thing, the original console RPGs – Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and the like – were all intended to emulate other things that we called RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons. So calling them the same thing made sense: this is just like the RPG you play with your friends, only you’re playing it on a Nintendo. Even if later games like the Final Fantasy series weren’t meant to emulate the D&D experience, they had evolved from games that had. So we can trace every console RPG through a chain of descendants back to the original tabletop RPGs that inspired them.
And yet.
Would you replace this man with a computer?
Even a casual gamer can tell the difference between a console RPG and a pencil-and-paper RPG. For one, even the most sophisticated video games present the player with a narrower range of options than a tabletop RPG. I might have a wide range of attacks and powers I can select to defeat this bandit, but I can’t bribe him to leave me alone, or reason with him, or climb a tree and wait for him to lose interest, unless the programmers anticipated that option. The most advanced computer in the world has yet to match the improvisation and initiative of a 13-year-old with the Dungeon Master’s Guide and a fistful of dice.
But that’s an aside. Here’s the crucial difference between tabletop RPGs and console RPGs: in a video game, you’re not really playing a role. When a player sits down with his friends to continue the adventures of Lothar and the Hill People, he adopts the mannerisms and attitudes of a muscled barbarian, not the network engineer he was this morning. Different players immerse themselves to different degrees – they’re not all Stanislavsky – but everyone shares that acting-as-other mindset.
Yet you don’t see that in console RPGs.
Now that we think about it, aren’t you playing a role in every video game?
You play the role of a plumber who has to save a princess from an army of oddly aggressive turtles. You take up the mantle of a hedgehog who uses his prodigious speed to defeat a mad scientist. You act out the life of a cyborg marine, exploring a weapon shaped like a ringworld. If roleplaying is pretending, then every video game is a roleplaying game.
We know that’s not a useful definition – if every game is an RPG, then the term “RPG” is meaningless.
Lawful Good Fighter 11 / Ranger 9 / Rogue 6
But the video games that we call RPGs don’t require any more acting or pretending of the player – that’s you, the 18-to-45-year-old white or Asian male holding the controller – than any other games. You don’t have to do improv warm-ups to get “in character” before you play Final Fantasy VII. And if you do, there’s no reason you couldn’t do those same exercises before firing up Gears of War.
In spite of this lack of let’s-pretend, everyone knows there’s a difference between console RPGs and action shooters or platform jumpers. You wouldn’t buy someone Oblivion if they asked for HALO 3, even though both games involve a lot of running, hiding and shooting. Developers and producers market the latest Final Fantasy chapter to different demographics than the latest Call of Duty game. Everyone intuits the distinction, but we can’t quite put it into words.
Well, if Overthinking It has one niche, it’s putting into words a distinction (or a similarity) that nobody saw the need to comment on before. So here we go!
To determine what makes a console RPG an RPG, we need to talk about a game’s criteria for success and failure.
My success or failure in Super Mario Bros. hinges on hand-eye coordination and reaction time. Whether or not I kill that Koopa or get killed by him depends on how quickly I hit the A button. In HALO, my success or failure depends on how accurately I can shoot at targets and how well I can make use of cover. If I shoot better, or with a better weapon, and keep my opponents from shooting me too much first, I’ll progress along just fine.
In Final Fantasy, my success or failure hinges on which party I select and how I outfit them. I have a wide variety of weapons, armor, magic powers and miscellaneous items to choose from. Later games in the series have introduced more development choices as I advance: which powers should I train in when I level up? Which piece of Magicite should I equip? How should I split up the party at this decision branch?
Timing is never as much of an issue as choice is. In Dragon Quest, as in baseball, there is no clock.
In most RPGs, execution is automatic. When I enter a battle, several choices pop up in a menu in front of me. I can choose to attack an opponent, or I can choose to do something else (use a power, use an item, etc). But once I make the choice to attack, it’s out of my hands. An algorithm I never see, taking into account the weapons I equipped and the training I selected, determines whether or not I slay the monster. There’s no such algorithm in Super Mario Bros. If I land on the turtle’s head, it dies.
So while platform jumpers, first-person shooters and fighting games prize quick reflexes and good coordination, RPGs prize resource management. That doesn’t sound very sexy, so let me rephrase: RPGs prize choices. RPGs reward players who can deliberate over decisions. RPGs value the choices you make in the armchair.
The apotheosis of this type of thinking comes in World of Warcraft, the most successful RPG (video game or otherwise) in the history of human civilization. World of Warcraft feels like a very frantic game when you’re playing it, clicking all around the screen. But the difference between successful and unsuccessful WoW players has nothing to do with how fast you click. It has everything to do with which talents you select when you level up and which items you equip. The game even spells out a lot of this information for you, in terms of refresh rates and percentage buffs.
Could use some more data.
An RPG is a video game which values choices prior to the heat of the moment more than choices in the heat of the moment.
Like the other P, of course, it’s not that simple. As video games grow more sophisticated, the distinction grows blurrier.
- Games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 blend FPS and RPG elements.
- RPGs like Shadow Hearts put an added premium on timing your attacks, stopping a needle within a spinning “Judgment Ring” for maximum damage.
- And even tabletop RPGs – the games that started it all – incorporate more elements from their video game descendents. The most recent edition of Dungeons & Dragons defines party roles explicitly. You’ve got your tanked-up defenders (fighters), your roving healers (clerics), your high-damage strikers (rogues) and your battlefield controllers (wizards).
What does this mean? In this correspondent’s opinion: only good things. Console RPGs and action-packed games speak to different parts of the brain: the one which demands long-term problem solving and the one which demands instant stimulation. A game which can satisfy both of these areas should, if done well, create a richer gameplay experience.
But nostalgia’s a powerful lure. Even as the lines between role-playing and action fade, we can’t help but wish for the simpler days of a blinking cursor, four little options, and enemies that waited their turn.