Posts Tagged Role-Playing Games

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

I’ve been caught MUDing again.

Years ago, in high school and college, MUDs were my thing. (Gosh, am I really that old?) I could pretty much play them on any computer with an internet connection and a telnet client, and lacking a good group of tabletop gamers, they let me get my RP fix. My MUD of choice was an outgrowth of my love of the Terry Pratchett Discworld novels, DiscworldMUD.

I watched a lot of the folks I knew on the MUD leave for the “greener pastures” of graphical MMOs such as Everquest and World of Warcraft, and eventually, those and other games also tugged me away from text-based gaming.  I was actually a bit surprised to see as many people logged on, now.  With all the resources out there for gaming and roleplay in a three-dimensional environment, all these people are still playing the lowest of the low tech games.

There is definitely something there to miss. The community is tiny in comparison with the large graphical MMOs, and generally better behaved and open. Roleplay can be enforced, a relative impossibility in higher population games that the companies have yet to find a solution for, leading many of the roleplayers in those games to despair that the company cares nothing for them.

There’s nothing quite so good at spurring on the imagination as knowing the only pictures you’re going to see are the ones in your own head. The MUD community’s still out there (check out http://www.mudconnect.com/ to find MUDs you might like to play), and they don’t require a high-end PC or graphics card to play.  All you need to bring is your imagination and an open mind.

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I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Age: Origins lately, and a lot about it has reminded me of something I’ve been missing a lot of in games, lately: Story.

The games that I remember the most fondly from my childhood are those that had the best stories and character development. Gameplay in some of them might have been simple turn-based “Keep Pressing X” type controls, but the stories were what kept me playing them. My first introductions to PC games were also story-driven games. Some of the best stories I’ve seen in video games were in RTS games in which I might have been controlling entire armies, not just in RPGs where stories are “essential”. (Starcraft is an excellent example of a good, well-written RTS campaign)

The thing is, with the coming of multiplayer gaming, storytelling has pretty much been deemed unnecessary. The best examples of this are in the RTS genre, where the RTS of the past always had massive, story-driven single-player campaigns – campaigns that simply no longer exist in the modern versions.  If an RTS game even has a single player option or campaign at all, it nearly always seems plugged on as an afterthought, a repetitive little bit of narration plugged on what is essentially just a “against-the-computer” battle.  Without the story, there is nothing to make the player care about the characters or races.  It all turns into making a choice between the pure gameplay based advantages and disadvantages of each, rather than because the race itself means something to you.

As much as I love World of Warcraft, MMORPGs took the story out of the RPG just as much as multiplayer removed it from the RTS.  True, these stories might have a large, involved storyline put together by the developers, but the average player likely knows very little of it beyond the names of important bosses in dungeons.  (The exception to this, of course, would be roleplayers, who make it their business to know the lore of the game, but they are hardly the “average” players.)

Dragon Age has reminded me of just what I loved about all those old games with their involved stories and characters you couldn’t help caring about (or hating with a vengeance, as the case may be) – that it’s paired with good, fun, gameplay mechanics only adds to the fun of the game. It also brought to mind just how few truly story-driven games exist on the shelves these days, and just how much I wish there were more.

I’d like to see gaming get back to the point where story is not just an unnecessary and thoughtlessly added bit, but an essential part of games.

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RPGs (either pen-and-paper or online) and fanfiction are hardly the greatest sources of literature available, and have suitable reputations among the literary establishment for being exactly the opposite.  You can easily find some of the worst writing you have ever seen among either community, and without much effort.  The vast majority of role-playing stories, forum roleplay, or fanfiction writing tends to be written by young adolescents playing at writing stories.

There is of course some excellent fanfiction to be found, and a number of authors such as Cassandra Clare and Naomi Novik began as fanfiction writers.  I’m sure there are more that just don’t admit to it. I’ve written my own share of fanfiction here and there and actively roleplay on a number of games.

I’ve always thought that both have a great potential for being good educational resources for aspiring writers: both as a way to practice by dabbling in a universe not your own and without pressure, and as examples of what not to do.

So here’s a few lessons taken from these incredibly humble proving grounds:

• The Character’s the Thing:
  • While a decent plot is essential, a good character is what people will remember first and foremost, and really good characters can keep readers interested even at points when the plot itself may be a bit weak. Good, believable, multi-dimensional characters, much more than plot, can be the foundation-stone of your story and can hold it up on their shoulders when it gets weak.
  • Avoid the dreaded and despised Mary Sue!  A Mary Sue (or sometimes Gary Stu/Marty Stu for male characters) is usually a self-insertion, but a self-insertion of the way the writer wishes he or she really was. Perfect, popular, loved by all of the other characters in the story, capable of solving every problem, and with no faults whatsoever.  Where a good character can carry a weak story, the Mary Sue will send even good stories crashing to the ground.
    • Self insertions can work, if the character is believable and three-dimensional and realistic, but it is generally not advised in any situation.
• There Are No New Stories, only New Tellings of Old Ones:
  • Your characters won’t be the first to fall in love, go to school, have sex.  They won’t be the first to find themselves in the middle of a war, to fight an evil tyrant of whatever mundane or fantastic abilities, or be the first heroes to ever save a life.  Some of the best stories are where the author finds the common thread at the center of those old and over-used plots and twists it. (An excellent example of this is the TV series Dexter, which takes the now cliche and over-done forensic detective series and turns the hero scientist into a serial killer.)
• Sometimes the bad criticism is the best kind:
  • As flattering as it is to get a hundred “OMG I LOVE THIS FIC!” type reviews, they don’t really tell you a whole lot about how you actually did or how good your writing is.   Embrace the bad reviews.  Love them. Whatever you do, don’t ignore them!  Even the most malicious may have at its core some good suggestions for how you may become a better writer.  At the very least, you can use these reviews as an impetus to keep writing and keep getting better to prove that reviewer wrong.

You can learn as much (and possibly more) about writing from reading bad fiction as from reading masterpieces.  Unfortunately, fanfiction, in particular, tends to raise the ire of publishers (less so with most actual authors) due to intellectual property issues.  The fanficcers are generally doing it as a way to dabble in the worlds that they had grown to love and to keep that all-too special magic of a good story  going just a little bit longer, and never get any money from it, but publishers see plagiarists and imitation is only a sincere form of flattery when you’re not going to get sued for it.

I would love to see fanfiction used as a tool in the classroom, as a way to encourage creativity and a way to practice writing skills.  I think it could be a wonderful resource, even if using it just to compare the good writers with the bad and what makes each work or not work.  When a young writer can identify what doesn’t work in someone else’s writing, they’re one step closer to fixing what doesn’t work in their own.

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