Are MMORPGs CRPGs?

[Eric J.]

Remember, folks, imagination is a precious and fragile resource. Playing with any sensory aid at all destroys your ability to imagine. True Role Playing only takes place in sensory deprivation tanks after meditation to remove the urge to use such corrupting tools as dice, minatures, computers, and other people. ;-)

Exactly!  SIS is very very difficult to obtain even in Tabletop RPGs so what I did was started roleplaying in dark rooms.  I found that things to touch like tables and the like also help to destroy SIS so I built a large tank, gave each player a flotation device and then built a dome around it.  But after that my players got overexposure to chlorine and started passing out, but hey, more imagine space for me.

Sorry.

Actually, I don't think that SIS is essential to roleplaying in the first place or that things like miniatures or computer programs suppliment it.

IMHO, SIS is just a shared world that isn't confined. (Walls, diagrams, whatever).

May the wind be always at your back,
-Pyron

[Christopher Weeks]

...SIS should be somehow "shared" with real people, in real time, in a direct two-way interaction. Which MMORPGs give you (or at least provide you with the semblance of).

...the other necessary part of the SIS is that it should be imagined (as contrary to "imaginary"). Modern multiplayer games are detailed and choke-full with high-res graphics and sound effects, and there is nothing in the game that's not visually shown (and vice versa). There is no imagined content, nothing to visualize. This makes me, the player, an instrument of perception, not imagination.

Wow!  These are really radical stances, I think.  Interesting stuff.

Let's make sure I understand.  A play-by-post game violates the real time criterion, right?  And a face to face RPG in which the GM or players use photographs or drawings to rapidly convey a sense of description reduces some essential quality of the imagined space, right?

I disagree, vehemently even, with both parts of that, but it is exciting to see the variety of RPG philosophy that these recent discussions evoke.

Chris

[herrmess]

James and Eric,

Using your argument this way I could comfortably claim that intravenous feeding is eating, and that a movie is a book ;-)

I understand this is tongue-in-cheek, and since I may have come off too rigid, this reductio ad absurdum has its place... but. This is ultimately a question of boundaries. Moving away from the table-top RPG on all its diverse implementations and various mutations, someplace, somewhere, for me an activity ceases to be defined as RPG. Sure, it shares some common elements (among which are setting/genre, social interaction, and controlling a character) with an RPG. But the criteria for me are tied more strongly to the SIS than to any component of the game space. Maybe the criteria will change, the definitions will shift, the boundaries will widen or contract, and so a CRPG/MMORPG will become a de facto implementation/mutation of an RPG. But I don't see it as the situation right now.

Those boundaries I have set myself, across the domains of "shared" and "imagined". These two interact and intertwine constantly in an RPG. Sharing only is watching a movie together or talking about the weather. Imagining only is daydreaming or writing fiction for yourself. When they feed into each other in a certain way, they create the basis for the social interaction called a roleplaying game. In a modern CRPG/MMORPG one of them is missing or stunted to such an extent that I don't see how they can meet the criteria at all. Why these games possess the "RPG" descriptor is a point I think I've partially answered in my previous post.



Chris,

You can safely scrap the "real time" bit. I take it back and swallow it whole. Thus, an epistolary RPG is entirely possible since the sharing does not have to take place simultaneosly. It's also possible to go out to take a leak in the middle of a table-top session without compromising the SIS ;-)

As for the issue of visualization, it's a tricky one and has to do a lot with the function of such a method and the effect it produces. The visual stimulus does not, in itself, detract from the SIS, but its form, content and use may. If the photographs/drawings leave room for interpretation, if somehow the game space that they created has to be "filled in" by the players' imaginations, then I don't have a problem with your example at all. If those visual bits exist not as an aid and a catalyst for a creative imaginative process, but serve solely to suppress or supplant it (or at best ignore it as a factor of the game and thus don't facilitate it), then the "I" part of the SIS is gone. This is the situation with the MMORPGs of today, MUSHes excluded. Now, I find it hard to think of a computer-aided RPG that produces such effects instead of just digesting and spoon-feeding set audio-visual information to the players. I do not rule out the possibility, I just find it difficult to imagine how such a game will look like (pardon the pun).



This discussion got me thinking about LARPs, though. The visual experience of a LARP is totally perceptive, so there's nothing to be imagined, right? Well, not really. You still have to transform, in your mind's eye, the guy dressed up in rags with paint on his face and a plastic stick in his hand screaming at you into a "real" orc charging at you with his war-axe yelling an orcish battle-cry. You still have to imagine you're not in some suburban park but in an elven forest. And most important, in a LARP you also have to imagine actually being someone else. So even if you get the visual part nearly totally "right" (say, LARPing with a few dozen New-Zealander reserve troops with a ton of makeup), you still have to flex your imagination. However I believe pursuing this will take me beyond this thread, so here I stop.


MarK.

[Comte]

I agree with Gamskee.  They're not roleplaying games in and of themselves, but they are a place and a venue for roleplaying, usually roleplaying of a very freeform type.

This is an important insight.  I've playes a few MMRPGs, I've done my fare share of both mudding and mushing, along with collection of CRPGs which I dearly love.

Lxndr's comment hits the nail right on the head perectly.  Lets take Runescape for example.  Runescape serves as an excelent example because it is both free and browser based so that everyone can go and see what it is that I am talking about.  http://www.runescape.com

Now the activities that happen on Runescape are just about as far away from roleplaying as you can get.  Mostly the point of the game revolves around killing things to get better stuff so you can kill bigger things and get even better stuff.  Skills like fishing and cooking serve to facilitate "buying stuff to kill things"

Now there is no reason that a group of us couldn't get together, and actually try to roleplay in this setting.  We could act and talk in charecter, we can go on quests together or train and generaly roleplay.  We could even get a large group of players together and roleplay a royal banquet in the castle.  Heck the game allows you to cook a wide variety of fish, foods, even cake.  It could be a lot of fun.  There is nothing stopping anyone from doing this other than the fact that people would rather kill things and take thier stuff.  Its fun.

The ignore feature is even robust enough so that people who would like to break up your merry gathering  cease to become a problem.

It is more productive, in my opinion, to see MMRPGs as a medium for a productive RP expeience.

To help clarify consider this example:  I buy certain roleplaying books because I like to read them.  I don't really have any intension of playing most of them, I just find them entertaining to read.  

MMPRG/CRPG's have the potential to work on the same level.  While on the surface they don't really promote roleplaying it isn't impossible.

Also in counter to the play by post thing.  As a game master I hate the nessecity for real time.  If I am trying to play the role of a 3000 year old wizard playing in real time is very difficult.  Espeicaly when my players are skilled at tieing me up.  More than once I have said to my players, "Look Mandar the 3000 year old wizard has a very clever answer to your question.  But I am 22 year old kid.  In order to do this right we need to find a way around this".  Does this make me a bad gm?  Possibly.  But at least with the play by post, non real time environment I am able to better come up with NPC responces that I wouldn't be able to on the fly.  Even with a few year experience under my belt I still get overwhelmed and make mistakes.

To bring this all back around.  I am not so great at multitasking.  Running wity banter between my players and the uber bad guy during a climatic fight scene is every difficult for me.  I've gotten better at it but something is lost while I am caluclating to hit rolls and trying to keep stats straight.  Even in the most rules light rpgs out there I still have this problem.  By taking it to a crpg we got a computer to work out all the little details for us while we can foucus on the cool things like witty banter.  This is part of the atraction of both Larps and Mushes.  But I firmly beleive that the MMRPG can also prodive a role play environment.

Now there is some concern over terminology.  If calling "roleplaying over an MMRPG" a roleplaying game is a source of discomfort.  I will conceade to the point that maybe it should be called something else.  After all the experices I've had with both play by post and mushes are very diffrent than a table top session.  And maybe a new term is in order.

On a final closing note.  Neverwinter Nights came out awhile ago.   It is basicly a D20 AD&D simulator for the computer.  It allows people to make thier own towns, quests, dungeons, even monsters with a few hours of work.  Many people praise the game because playing it feels just like sitting around a table going through a dungeon modual.  While some of us wouldn't consider this roleplaying, it is where our hobby got its start and perhaps there is more than meets the eye to this CRPG thing.

Mushes- Picture a larp only sitting down at the computer.
Muds-your typical DND dungeon crawl

note both are gross steriotypes that happen to work.

[Mike Holmes]

We have to watch rhetoric like Comte's. That is, as long as we realize that "killing things and taking their stuff is a form of roleplaying in terms of defining what an RPG is, we're fine. His use means something like "playing in the first person." Which is a common definition, but has nothing to do, as it happens, with the overall definition of RPGs. That is, there are games where nobody is expected to ever act the part of their character that still firmly fall into the realm of RPG.

Anyhow, I think the point is, that, yeah, it's a medium. But the medium is the message, no? To put it better, the medium tends to affect what people do with it. Since Runescape facilitates "killing things and taking their stuff" well, that's what people tend to do with it. This is nothing more than "System Does Matter." That is, yes, the medium is part of how things get transfered into the SIS. The specific forms of noise and transmission eases of the medium are what translate into play predilections.

Mike

[Andrew Morris]

It is more productive, in my opinion, to see MMRPGs as a medium for a productive RP expeience.

To help clarify consider this example:  I buy certain roleplaying books because I like to read them.  I don't really have any intension of playing most of them, I just find them entertaining to read.

Right, but the roleplaying games are still roleplaying games whether you use them for that purpose, right? A football is still a football, even if you use it as a paperweight.

Likewise, calling MMORPGs a medium for roleplaying as opposed to just calling them roleplaying games doesn't seem to have any value to me. For example, let's pretend I've created a new RPG. On the whole, it sucks. Most people look at it and say, "Hey, it's got a couple of neat ideas, but I'd never play it." Does this mean the RPG is not actually an RPG, but rather, say "an RPG-related text containing information useful in RPG design?" Eh, maybe it does. But I still say it's easier to call it an RPG. Same idea with MMORPGs.

[Troy_Costisick]

Heya,

Im pretty experienced in playing MMORPGs or at least the big one: EverQuest.  To me, it seems like it is a Hard Core Gamist RPG with an electronic interface.  Each time there is a major raid (anywhere from 24 to 150 people involved) there are all kinds of chances to Step On Up.  Sometimes even in groups, if the situation gets hairy, there are chances.  But the game is SO built around hack-n-slash that players result to stealing kills, robbing treasure, using the environment (lots of hostile creatures) to kill off competitors just to swoop in and kill something for the loot that it can devolve quickly into dysfunctional play.  

Peace,

-Troy Costisick

[Eric J.]

Very good ideas all around.  I think that the core to all of this lies in two neigh-unanswerable questions:

What is SIS?
and
What is a roleplaying game?

Since I doubt that we can get everyone to agree on either, never mind most, I'll try to make my argument by connecting compromises.

We'd call D&D a roleplaying game, right?

The basic idea was that a bunch of ner- I mean intellectuals, gathered around in a group and would take on different roles in a purly imagined world.

Now how the hell are we going to define an imagined world?  What is it... a place that existed without a frame of refference?  Well, we all have a frame of refference, whether it be memory or smell or whatever.   The only difference is that we treat the world that we live in as something that truly exists instead of something that acts as a frame of reffernece for different people.

Alright.  That paragraph doesn't make any sense.  Let me try again.

If fantasy is anything of imagination then:
Since the basis for the classic RPG is 'fantasy' we can't define it without clarifying the difference between 'fantasy' and 'reality'.

Well, I think I'll try to clarify what that meant in further posts.  I currently have a headache.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Empyrealmortal