by Karen Hertzberg on Jun 02, 2006
Playing A Role
By Mercurie
Ever since I first played Dungeons and Dragons, there has been one thing I have always wondered about. Quite simply, how many people actually play roles in their role playing games? This question could just as easily be applied to MMORPGs as it could the old pen and paper games like D&D. Do most people actually play their characters, much as an actor would play a role, or do they treat their characters simply as automatons meant to collect treasure, weapons, and experience?
I don’t know that I have the answer to that. In most of the pen and paper games in which I took part, the players did play their characters, much as an actor would assume a role in a play or a movie. This was particularly true of my own role playing group. It was not unusual for characters to have their own motivations, their own goals, completely different from other characters in their party. Indeed, it was not unusual for characters to even come into conflict with each other. My brother and I once played a pair of characters who constantly tried to kill each other off due to various grievances they had with one another.
Of course, usually the characters did not have a problem with each other, so much as they did with NPCs. In the fantasy-oriented pen and paper games in which I played (Rolemaster, Dungeons and Dragons), the worst opponents in the games weren’t monsters, but the NPCs. I remember a Rolemaster campaign in which one of the characters didn’t simply have one archnemesis, but an entire rival family with which he had to deal. I once GMed a Boot Hill campaign (for those of you who are too young to remember, Boot Hill was a Wild West RPG) in which the characters had to deal with the corrupt mayor of a town and his equally crooked sheriff. Like the player characters, the NPCs often had complex motivations behind what they were doing and were often convinced that they were the “good guys.”
As I have said before, I don’t have much experience with MMORPGs. I really don’t know if the average MMO gamer plays his or her characters as if they were roles in a play or a movie or not. I do have a friend who does. She has had characters in EverQuest who did not simply rack up levels, but who also fell in love, married, and even “had children.” Another person I know plays a somewhat rougish bard who, given half a chance, will steal the shirt off your back. While I have much less experience, I have, in my short time, had characters who have made friends, set goals for themselves, and developed motivations wholly their own.
Of course, I can see one problem with the whole idea of “playing a role” in MMORPGs. In the old pen and paper games, the GM played all of the NPCs. He or she could then endow the NPCs with their own personalities and even have them react accordingly to the player characters. This simply is not possible (at least not with our current technology) in MMORPGs. By necessity NPCs in MMORPGs are somewhat limited. Controlled by AI, they can only react in a limited number of ways to any given situation and can only speak through pre-prepared scripts. This pretty much limits any meaningful interaction that a player character can have with an NPC. Forget having an NPC as one’s archnemesis in a MMORPG--one can’t even have a decent conversation with one!
Sadly, there isn’t any solution to this problem at the moment. I very seriously doubt even SOE or Microsoft could afford to pay people simply to play NPCs (which I imagine would be a dream job for many people…). And while it is 2006, we are very far away from the sort of artificial intelligence that was Hal 9000 in 2001: a Space Odyssey. As much as I enjoy playing online, the fact that the NPCs can never fully act like real people does limit role play of the sort I experienced in the old pen and paper games.
Of course, I suppose the question is whether people should play their characters as if they were roles in a play or a movie. Ultimately, I think this is up to the individual player. Personally, my thought is that they are called ROLE playing games for a reason. They are games in which the player assumes the role of a character quite unlike himself or herself. The enjoyment of the game comes not from killing MOBs and gathering treasure for me, but from being able to “be someone else” for a brief time. Quite simply, for me MMORPGs are escapist entertainment of the purest kind. Instead of watching John Wayne or Johnny Depp play a role in a movie, I am playing a role in a drama co-written by myself and the game’s characters.
That having been said, I am not going to condemn those people who do not endow their characters with any personality whatsoever and simply enjoy killing monsters and leveling. While MMORPGs owe a great deal to the pen and paper games that went before them, they also owe a great deal to video and computer games. I am sure many of us have enjoyed a game of Doom or even Asteroids in our time. If someone wants to get that same kind of enjoyment out of EverQuest or Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, then more power to them. Of course, then, I have to wonder if this particular style of play can even be called “role playing…”