Role playing games have come a long way from the table top dice events of the early eighties. Using a variety of graphical interfaces, web 2.0 technologies, and major advances in computing and connectivity, the art of interactive fantasy is coming into a golden age.
Amidst these advances, we see the realm of interactive make believe taking up two distinctly different methodologies. On the one hand you have an element that is searching for more complex, visually rich experiences, that emphasize action over story, and the acquisition of money and weapons over friends and experiences. On the other hand you have a simplistic approach being taken by some, where the bare minimum of technology is used to bring together imaginations from around the world.
World of Warcraft is one of many online, multiplayer role playing games, that uses the same basic interface found in an XBox console game. You control an avatar, in this case a beautiful, visually rich 3d avatar that has free reign to run about a computer generated world. Sharing this world are hundreds, thousands, sometimes even millions of other players all with their own avatars, their own personalities, and their own agendas.
In these worlds character interact through a chat feature which allows them to communicate with one another to organize quests, to build clan and diplomatic affiliations, and to just socialize with other people around the world. However the main interaction is just to facilitate the completion of quests and the acquisition of gold and items of value.
The upside of these games is that the world is completely structured for you. You don’t have to do much imagining, because the programmers have rendered everything out for you. The world is what it is, your character is what they will always be. Even if you raise their power level, you will still have basically the same avatar with the same narrowly defined set of objectives.
This makes games of this nature largely about smashing a predefined series of buttons in as quick a manner as possible in order to defeat or overcomes various obstacles. There is a social aspect, in that you do want to gather people with you to help you in your quests, but the point of the game is the quest, not the story, or the interaction.
The real problem with games such as World of Warcraft is that no matter how ingenuous the designers are in adding new and interesting elements to the game play, the game itself can never truly be infinite. Anything that you character does needs to be programmed in by the designers before you even buy the game. Not only that, but your character is also limited in location by what the programmers have defined as “the world”.
The alternative to this is to strip away all but the most basic functionality. In a roleplaying chat room, there are almost no pictures, no graphics, no visual representations of anything. Instead players are forced to imagine the world around them, and to share that vision in a collaborative process with others. In this way the world created in the chat room si much more infinite than any that a programmer could ever develop, no matter how clever they are. The imagination will always give players in the chat room an idea that they would never be able to express in a traditional 3d style avatar game.
However the downside to the chat room is that there is no point of reference except other people’s imaginations. That means there is nothing telling you what the room around you looks like, or whether your in a room at all. You can’t see anyone except as they describe themselves to you. There is no point in time or space at all. Everything that exists has to come from imagination, and this can make the world a little muddied.
There are also no predefined quests in a roleplaying chat room. There is really nothing to do at all, unless you or one of the other members comes up with it. This makes the process entirely social. It’s like a mixture of having a conversation with a group of people, and writing a novel. The process is entirely free form creativity in the most social manner possible.
In general both styles of roleplaying are about imagining yourself as someone else, in a fantasy world of sorts, doing exciting things. The difference is whether you want to exist within someone else’s fantasy, or if you want to create your own.
This article was written by Jim Slate of http://www.RolePages.com – a roleplaying chat room and social networking community. Sign up for an account as a vampire, werewolf, demons, dragon, elf, dwarf, or anything else that you can imagine. Then engage in adventures across a series of blogs, forums, chat rooms, profiles, and group worlds.
