02.28.07

RPGWTF

Posted in Game design, Games at 16:43 by Jonas

One of my game-design-interested friends has serious beef with the genre term “Role-Playing Game”. Of what use, he asks, is a genre that encompasses such tremendously different games as Fallout and Diablo ?

It’s a good question. I’m not certain I really like the genre term either, although I do find it of general (if slightly vague) use when estimating whether a given game is worth buying. But what is an RPG? First… I guess I have to deal a bit with what genre is.

Genre theory

It seems to me there are two ways to categorize a film into a genre. You can either go by iconography or style/themes. The iconography is the setting in which you present and tell your story. It can be a western, a sci-fi, a pirate story, etc. Star Wars could easily have been converted to a medieval-ish fantasy story, and Lord of the Rings might (with substantial effort) have been made into a western, without changing the fundamental themes and the narrative structure too much. The style/themes is the manner in which you present your story and the nature of the story you choose to present. It can be a thriller, a melodrama, an anti-war movie (or can it? Let’s not discuss that here), a comedy, etc.

(Disclaimer: You might think the style and the themes of a story are seperable, and in some cases they may be. But I’d argue it’s hard to make a war movie without involving the theme of war; or to tell a romantic story without dealing with the theme of love. True, tragedy or comedy can be seen as overarching styles that are basically independent of the themes of a story (a comedy can deal with any kind of theme, you can even have a comedy about plague or war), or you can see them as themes in and of themselves. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to consider themes and style two parts of the same set of genre criteria in most cases, so just humour me if you disagree.)

When we deal with games, a third criterion enters the equation: That of gameplay. Ludologists¹ argue this aspect is what seperates games from film and books, and… that’s pretty much true. Gameplay defines how a player interacts with the game and the rules according to which the game operates. It can be a first-person shooter (FPS), it can be a real-time strategy game (RTS), it can be a third-person action game, or… can it be an RPG? The problem here is that gameplay genres are even less well defined than the genres described above, used to categorize eg. movies or books. The popular gameplay genres that I have given examples of were invented somewhat casually by marketing people and critics as they became necessary/relevant. Better, more systematic genres have been invented, but these originate from academic circles and are often too esoteric to make it into the market and gain popular use².

But even so, when a game is termed “FPS”, you know its world is seen from a first-person perspective and that it is played chiefly by applying violence to simple problems. Sure, Half-Life is peppered with puzzles, but it’s still mostly about shooting aliens. When a game is described as an adventure game you expect clicking, exploration, sometimes dialogue trees (or at least dialogue), and plenty of puzzles. When a game is described as a first-person tactical stealth action/adventure game with RPG elements, you’ll either roll your eyes or think “oh, Deus Ex” .

So to summarize:

1. Iconography (Western, sci-fi, medieval, pirates, etc.)
2. Style/themes (Romance, drama, mystery, thriller, horror, etc.)
3. Gameplay (FPS, RTS, adventure, puzzler, platformer - RPG?)

Why, then, the question mark? Is “Role-Playing Game” not a gameplay genre? What actually defines the RPG genre?

Role-playing games

The RPG genre is broad. It originates from and still encompasses tabletop roleplaying games pioneered (and annoying still dominated) by Dungeons & Dragons , and board games such as Talisman . It also covers - to some extent - live-action role-playing. But most importantly, even within computer- and video games, it covers a huge array of different games such as Diablo, Fallout, or Final Fantasy, none of which have a damn lot in common at first glance.

It’s easy to dismiss iconography as a factor in defining the RPG genre. Diablo is set in a grim, somewhat celtic medieval world full of demons, Final Fantasy is set in a high-fantasy fairy tale world populated by overdressed youth and airships, and Fallout is set in an exceedingly unforgiving post-apocalyptic world full of references to old 1950′ies visions of nuclear holocaust.

Style and themes is where it gets a little more interesting. In RPG games, without fail, your character starts out insignificantly puny and ends up a hero of epic proportions (sometimes more epic than others). Thus, the style is usually an epic adventure similar to Indiana Jones or Lord of the Rings, where you follow a person or a group of people in their quest to achieve something extraordinary (embarrassingly often, it’s about saving the world). RPG’s are usually very large and elaborate, though, and thus they tend to incorporate many different styles and themes. For example, pure horror RPG’s are rare, I’ve never played one, but many RPG’s have horror elements in them (eg. the exploration of catacombs full of undead or haunted ships or mansions). Similarly, many RPG’s incorporate one or more romances (case in point: Bioware), some drama, and there is always plenty of action sequences.

But of course the gameplay is the really interesting part, because this is the core of the RPG genre, it’s where most of the games have the most in common. To me, the most fundamental aspect of RPG’s is that the player’s avatar starts out with a rather limited set of skills and then steadily increases his or her range of options throughout the game by acquiring new abilities and equipment. In Dungeons & Dragons, this is best represented in the “feats” of the system’s latest iteration - as you progress through the game, you are regularly given a large set of feats to choose from that can sometimes really change the way you play the game. Many RPG’s chose to copy D&D’s somewhat weak skill system, where you start out being very bad at a lot of skills that will very gradually improve, but Diablo was one of the first games (if not the first) that did away with the gradually rising skills to replace them with skills that could only be upgraded two or three times if at all, and where every skillpoint you invested granted you an important new option. In Oblivion, you have skills that increase gradually as you use them, but when you hit a certain level of proficiency with a skill, you gain an important ability that can alter your playstyle similarly to the Diablo skills.

This is the same in eg. First Person Shooters, where you gain new weapons which give you new options. But as soon as an FPS gives you the ability to change what your character can do (eg. Dark Messiah, which is a recent game that follows the tradition of Diablo, but in first-person), it is said to have “RPG-elements”, which leads to the conclusion that the gameplay element at the core of the RPG genre is customization of the player’s avatar. Other genre stables include character interaction, which you also find in adventure games, puzzles, which you find in adventure games and in some shooters, and a strong emphasis on story, also found in many other types of games.

So far, the similarities; but what of the differences? To my knowledge, you can split the digital RPG genre into three segments: The hard core RPG, the action-RPG, and the tactical RPG. The first is directly ascended from Dungeons & Dragon; it features a complicated ruleset, it places strong emphasis on its story, it gives the player a large selection of options for interacting with its world and its characters, and it often depends annoyingly on chance to determine the outcome of a fight. Examples include Baldur’s Gate, Might & Magic, Neverwinter Nights, and my personal favourite, Planescape: Torment. The action-RPG was born in the form of Diablo; it features a lot of clicking to represent a lot of fighting, a much simpler rule system, a smaller selection of skills and abilities that instead make a greater difference in your play style, and a much stronger emphasis on player skills rather than avatar skills. Typical specimens include Diablo, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and The Elder Scrolls (at least Morrowind and Oblivion, haven’t played the first two). Tactical RPG’s are sometimes counted as a subcategory of hard core RPG’s, other times as the epitome of hard core RPG’s, but I prefer to treat them as categories on equal terms. These games sport turn-based combat as a major feature, and I think the best example of the category must be the Fallout series. I often find it hard to distinguish between tactical strategy games and tactical RPG’s, and I’m not entirely convinced there’s a proper difference, especially with games such as Jagged Alliance 2 sometimes counted among the RPG’s…

So in closing, the RPG genre is unpleasantly wide and covers some very diverse games, and there’s no question that further division is necessary to properly describe a game. But in the end, genres are a strange thing anyway, useful only if everyone has a sufficient library of titles behind them to decypher what a given genre means. I’ll continue to use the term RPG whenever it seems appropriate, and Mads can just sit in the corner and scowl at me if he wants

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Notes:

¹ I speak of the movement of game theorists who focus their studies on rules/gameplay as the aspect that seperates games from older media such as film or books. It’s a reaction that was seen in early film theory as well, and I largely sympathize with it, but I’m at least as interested in narratology as I am in ludology. Important ludologists include Jesper Juul, Esben Aarseth, and of course Gonzalo Frasca.

² A decent example is the article Genre and the Video Game in which Mark J. P. Wolf proposes a dazzling amount of different genres based on the objective of the gameplay (from The Medium of the Videogame by Mark J. P. Wolf (ed.), University of Texas Press, 2001).

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