Editorial Thread

[Idun]

I'm intending for this thread to compile editorial commentary on the industry of RPGs as, contrary to the fact that I do not game as often anymore, I still read about topics.

This was interesting to me:

Last week, I was having a conversation with an esteemed colleague about American-made 1940s and 1950s propaganda, and I made a quick allusion to the Fallout series. This friend of mine, an intelligent young man with plenty of techno-knowledge and pop culture knowledge as well, didn't catch the reference.

To which I said: "Well, you need to play Fallout. You would love it. Everyone does. At the very least, you can play the user-friendly Fallout 3."

My friend's reply was one that struck me upside the head. He informed me, first, that he's really more an FPS guy. Give him a 30 minute no-think, all-act session of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 over RPGs. He then said that he doesn't think he could enjoy RPGs anymore. As a man of the working world, they appear primarily to be a time-sink. "I feel like their target market is 12-year-olds," he said. Strong words. Words that made me think long and hard about my fondness for RPGs.

I then recalled a conversation I had with another friend a year prior. Another like-minded, intelligent young man, although this one enjoyed RPGs as much as he did other forms of gaming. However, he lamented to me that he simply couldn't finish most RPGs he played. At the time he was playing Little King's Story, and though he was really enjoying it, he knew that he probably wouldn't put more than 5 hours into what was likely a 30+ hour campaign scenario.

Putting these two conversations together in my mind, as though my two friends had met, the obvious questions began to surface:

"Who has the time and patience for RPGs?"
"Why are these games so long?"
"What is the point of level-grinding anyway?"

Going back to my first friend's statements, particularly the one about the target market being kids. The idea here, of course, is that kids have more free time, and that the gameplay experience is fairly juvenile. Perhaps there's a knee-jerk reaction welling up in you already. "How dare you say that! You have to be smart to play these games!" I can already imagine that response, and I'm going to ignore it because it's flat-on-its-face absurd.

It is important to note that not only do RPGs as a genre suffer from an internal identity crisis, but consumers seem to be put off by the "RPG" label because of the genre's sordid history. I recommend Fallout 3 to a friend, and he says "I'd rather play Call of Duty." Of course, that series is now riddled with stat-building RPG elements.

On the other hand, I've heard hardcore RPG fans decry games like Fallout 3, Mass Effect, and Borderlands for catering too much to the "casual" shooter crowd. But is that really what's happening? If you're an RPG elitist (that is, you see RPGs as somehow superior to other genres), aren't these popular titles actually pulling the rest of gaming out of twitch-reflex mindlessness?

Outside of the elitists, the rest of us have to ask ourselves: are RPGs really catering to 12-year-olds? I think it might be safer to say that they were, but as the target audience grew up, the industry had to grow up with it. You've heard this argument countless places before, I'm sure. But the point here is that many developers are forced to evolve or die.

Consider that even extremely "oldschool" RPGs such as the Etrian Odyssey series have all manner of conveniences that their decades-old predecessors (namely Wizardry) simply did not have.

I think I've boiled the issue of gaming time to one key aspect, however. It's not necessarily a matter of how long the entire game takes. It is a matter of how much time one can invest per gaming session. Consider that, for decades now, we've been given mandatory warnings in our consoles' instruction manuals to limit our play time (per session) and to take 15 minute breaks. Who among us actually follows that? Even for those of us who do so, it is not due to health concerns. It's because we don't have the time. We have work/school/family eating up time, and no large chunk exists. All-day gaming sessions are rare for many of us.

So RPGs need to cater to the audience and find ways to have meaningful bite-sized chunks. The key here is "meaningful." Having a save-anywhere function is a huge step in the right direction, but it isn't everything. If I save in the middle of some daisy-chained fetch quest and there's no quest log telling me where I was when I last played, and I haven't played the game in 3 weeks (or 3 months)... well, I'm probably just as well off if I start the game over. Even looking at a walkthrough may not help. Stop-and-go isn't easy in the realm of RPGs, but it's ideal for online matchmaking in a fighter or an FPS.

There are great RPGs that have really mastered the art of bite-sized gaming while keeping it interesting with each time the player boots up the game. Half Minute Hero is probably the best example, though that too was an experiment in game design, and probably isn't likely to forge its own subgenre (I could be wrong, though!).

In all of this rambling, I find that my greatest fear is that I'll no longer be able to enjoy epic, sweeping, level-grinding traditional RPGs. But in the midst of that fear, a significant hope to counter-balance it is that I may not have to, as I continue to enjoy RPGs. Must RPGs be "longform" in structure, or narrative, or both? I submit that such traits are not necessary, and we already have examples to prove it.

So, to my dear friend who is averse to RPGs: give some of the newer games a try; they may not be so much like Final Fantasy VII but may yet offer something that the Call of Duty series cannot. And to my friend who was enjoying Little King's Story, perhaps a new measurable standard for good gaming is how well they allow for "breaks" in the game, so that you can leave and come back months later and still enjoy the game.

The fact that I don't game as much as I do probably influenced me to respond to something where I can somewhat identify. And from my situation, I do not believe the target demographic is necessarily what makes me apprehensive of playing RPGs. To be truthful, I have played games like Borderlands and Mass Effect/Halo without thinking twice about my actions as they have tons of gimmicks for me to play them.

A) Auto save. Fucking awesome. I don't have to go into a game realizing I need to make a long commitment to reap any enjoyment out of it. I went through Infinite Undiscovery and the Last Remnant (last boss; yet to beat, blame it on not wanting to dedicate time into grinding at the moment) swifter than the half-completed Disc 4 of Lost Odyssey because I won't be disgruntled if I die and haven't had a chance to save all my progress, etc.

B) Multiplayer capability. Single player gaming is awesome, but multiplayer does at more immediacy (as far as dialog and company is concerned - I'd like to mention I am not including Mass Effect in this) for me. RPGs played to my imagination and loneliness during my childhood, but I am much more mobile and sociable these days.

C) Various non-linear sidequests. Not currently interested in progressing the storyline right now? Go ahead, do this quest that's half or less than half of the time you'd generally invest. (Shout out to Last Remnant~!!!)
---

I haven't sat long and hard about it, but those gimmicks are fairly valuable. At least for me. The last RPG I sat down and *played* after shelving it from a difficult spot was Suikoden V. I don't think the longevity of the game is the issue (though RPGs are too known for being excessively long - perhaps they should work on better story presentation rather than dragging things on--?), but there is rarely any variety. And if an RPG is short --- well that money doesn't compare to the value I'd get out of another RPG that would last longer. Conundrum.

Sidenote: I fucking hate all you bitches who keep beating games like they were flies.

(:

[DjinnAndTonic]

I haven't sat long and hard about it, but those gimmicks are fairly valuable. At least for me. The last RPG I sat down and *played* after shelving it from a difficult spot was Suikoden V. I don't think the longevity of the game is the issue (though RPGs are too known for being excessively long - perhaps they should work on better story presentation rather than dragging things on--?), but there is rarely any variety. And if an RPG is short --- well that money doesn't compare to the value I'd get out of another RPG that would last longer. Conundrum.

Sidenote: I fucking hate all you bitches who keep beating games like they were flies.

(:

I personally really like the feeling of -beating- a game. I don't care so much if I complete every little minute detail, but there's a lot of enjoyment in knowing that I'll have the time/interest/patience/skill to complete a game. Games that promise a lot of interesting takes on the genre, or even just a strong story... AND promise to be -short-, are the games that I pick up and play first.

Chapter- or Mission-based RPGs are great at this. Knowing there's a finite number of missions coming instead of an open-ended 'this could be going on forever!' structure are certainly psychologically reassuring. Suiko Tierkreis, and most SPRGs are pretty good at this, so I find myself playing those simply because I can quantify how long it will take.

Along the same lines, but even more streamlined would be a calendar system. The latest Persona games and the Mana Khemia series are the prime examples. Not only do we have missions, we have a -schedule-! Sure, you get free time to extend gameplay/quests as long as you want, but you just simply click the "Go to next day" button and you're back to story and -progress-. And psychologically, that beats out everything in terms of 'I'm gonna get -through- this game!'.

Of course, these are just things that help with keeping things manageable and goal-focused. If a game is boring, has an unforgivably horrible story/cast, or a really egregious flaw/glitch, chaptered gameplay segments alone won't keep me playing it.

Really short length might... I -did- beat Lunar 3, though my dearth of portable games was the main reason for that, I'd like to think.

[Cmdr_King]

A) Auto save. Fucking awesome. I don't have to go into a game realizing I need to make a long commitment to reap any enjoyment out of it. I went through Infinite Undiscovery and the Last Remnant (last boss; yet to beat, blame it on not wanting to dedicate time into grinding at the moment) swifter than the half-completed Disc 4 of Lost Odyssey because I won't be disgruntled if I die and haven't had a chance to save all my progress, etc.

While auto-save doesn't make sense for every game, the spirit here that you cannot easily be wiped out and lose significant progress is definitely important.  An example, I recently played Birth by Sleep.  Now, since i was playing on Proud mode, random enemies did in fact have the ability to wipe me out... but if they did, the game gave me the option to 'Continue', which sets me at the entrance to whatever room I was in to try again.  So functionally identical to autosave, except I guess i couldn't turn the game off if I wanted.  Similarly, bosses also added a 'Retry' option, which took you straight to the start of the fight.  This was important because, really, an auto-save or Continue was pointless; the last hard save point was at the end of the preceding room anyway, so Retry's function was skipping the intervening cutscenes and getting right back to the fight, so ultimately faster than an auto-save and better suited to the game (afterall, if you COULD save at teh start of the fight, the you wouldn't be able to go back and adjust your setup if you needed).
But yeah, being punishing on loss is silly.  If you want to have it as an option for hard modes or whatever, and give whiny people their e-penis, sure, but don't punish the rest of us to cater to the e-penis base.

B) Multiplayer capability. Single player gaming is awesome, but multiplayer does at more immediacy (as far as dialog and company is concerned - I'd like to mention I am not including Mass Effect in this) for me. RPGs played to my imagination and loneliness during my childhood, but I am much more mobile and sociable these days.

Entirely disagree.  If you want to make a dedicated multiplayer experience, do that, but if you're having a narrative-driven game to start with, don't just add multi-play because it's some sort of requirement of the modern age.  All you're doing is consuming resources better spent on improving your story or refining your gameplay.  Some games do manage to work on multiple levels (Pokémon for the easy example), but plenty more have some token multi-play aspects that aren't even useful or fun or worth looking at (Both handheld KH games, Suikoden Tierkreis, more that I don't have on the top of my head).  So, basically, if you're not going to put thought into balancing it and making it a distinct aspect of the game from the outset, don't put in half baked co-op/competitive modes.  Now, something that does work is having some tangible benefit to being out among other gamers without having it be gameplay oriented.  Pokémon again works on this level too (trading!), but other games have integrated similar ideas, for example The World Ends with You or Dragon Quest IX, where you can walk around with the game in standby and get presents from other players, meaning you're rewarded for getting out and about without having to actually sit and play the game necessarily (although that has it's own benefits, as I recall).

C) Various non-linear sidequests. Not currently interested in progressing the storyline right now? Go ahead, do this quest that's half or less than half of the time you'd generally invest. (Shout out to Last Remnant~!!!)

Almost always a positive, but it must be noted that like above, if you're not satisfied with your primary content you should hold off on the sidequests.

[Idun]

I was targeting "Western RPGs," really when I brought up all three of those categories, including multiplayer capability. It's not a necessity, no. And I can't determine that -not having it- means they will always use their resources properly. But it definitely fits my current lifestyle. I don't think I've played an old school-ish RPG multiplayer, and actually liked it besides Secret of Mana. When I have the time to sit down and pay uninterrupted attention to games (this is invaluable), I don't think about what multiplayer could have done.

Almost always a positive, but it must be noted that like above, if you're not satisfied with your primary content you should hold off on the sidequests.

It's not a matter of satisfaction. It's a matter of time. They can correlate or separate themselves completely from the main storyline. The point is that they're incremental achievements in games that are holistic: moderate grinding, item acquisition, whatever other benefits you can reap from whatever type of game. This makes it much easier to try and hurry and beat a game (depending on difficulty for me), and go through a storyline with no hiccups. Matter-a-fact, if I didn't do the things I did in the Last Remnant, I wouldn't be at the end of the game already.

[Cmdr_King]

I was targeting "Western RPGs," really when I brought up all three of those categories, including multiplayer capability. It's not a necessity, no. And I can't determine that -not having it- means they will always use their resources properly.

Well, my examples are merely pulled from my own playing habits.  The broader point, that half-assed multiplayer is pointless, is universal across not only all RPGs but all games period.  Certainly, say, Knights of the Old Republic wouldn't be enriched if you let a second person manually control a character.  The system doesn't support it.  So while it does work for some games (the Tales series takes on a different vibe with two people, and is increasingly better at it as the series does more to make characters handle differently) it's not something to toss in slapdash either.  And even if those resources aren't really used elsewhere and the rest of the game is the same, at a minimum it's one less thing for the developer to think about, so you'll at least get more timely releases and lower production costs.

[DjinnAndTonic]

So while it does work for some games (the Tales series takes on a different vibe with two people, and is increasingly better at it as the series does more to make characters handle differently) it's not something to toss in slapdash either. 

Aw man, I just want to chime in that this is especially true of TotA, more than any other game in the series. It's a fine variant of the same system they'd been using since ToP in 1P mode, but in multiplayer, the FOF system is ridiculously fun.

I had forgotten that there were actually multiplayer RPGs I liked until you mentioned this.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Lots of games have fairly easy-to-implement simple multiplayer and I do think it's a real shame more games don't make the effort. When I first played FF6, my best friend and I split characters to control, and it was great fun. I never did a full playthrough of the game this way or anything, but the option was nice to have. I did do a full playthrough this way in FFT, and several times at that... but it required the annoyance of passing the controller around, since the game didn't implement it itself.

There's really little reason that something similar couldn't be in most RPGs. Props to the games that do it (one of the few things Tales does right!) Doesn't work well in some games (phase-based like Fire Emblem and Disgaea for instance) but I firmly believe they're the exception rather than the rule.

[Talaysen]

Lots of games have fairly easy-to-implement simple multiplayer and I do think it's a real shame more games don't make the effort. When I first played FF6, my best friend and I split characters to control, and it was great fun. I never did a full playthrough of the game this way or anything, but the option was nice to have. I did do a full playthrough this way in FFT, and several times at that... but it required the annoyance of passing the controller around, since the game didn't implement it itself.

There's really little reason that something similar couldn't be in most RPGs. Props to the games that do it (one of the few things Tales does right!) Doesn't work well in some games (phase-based like Fire Emblem and Disgaea for instance) but I firmly believe they're the exception rather than the rule.

Completely agree.

[metroid composite]

Lots of games have fairly easy-to-implement simple multiplayer and I do think it's a real shame more games don't make the effort. When I first played FF6, my best friend and I split characters to control, and it was great fun. I never did a full playthrough of the game this way or anything, but the option was nice to have. I did do a full playthrough this way in FFT, and several times at that... but it required the annoyance of passing the controller around, since the game didn't implement it itself.

There's really little reason that something similar couldn't be in most RPGs. Props to the games that do it (one of the few things Tales does right!) Doesn't work well in some games (phase-based like Fire Emblem and Disgaea for instance) but I firmly believe they're the exception rather than the rule.

Got brought in here by a spam post.  Was initially going to disagree and mention how much extra work it is for developers and blah blah blah.

Except I'm thinking of online multiplayer.  Offline use two controllers multiplayer?  Hahaha, yeah, whatever, no excuses, that's trivial, especially for a turn-based game where you're just alternating control.  (ATB you might need to make all your menus smaller so that two are visible at once, and that's a pain).

[Dark Holy Elf]

FF5-6 don't even bother showing multiple menus at once. I agree that it would be better if they did, but it's not even necessary for what I'm talking about.

[dunie]

Bump, bump.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t7ttj7u93w55vlw/GamingAttheEdge.pdf?dl=0

I've read Adrienne Shaw's Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture fairly slowly over the course of a year and a half. The book sounded pretty interesting and I picked it up at a conference, but it's written in a way that's not as compelling as my research engagements with identity and representation. Still, I figured: this book intersects with a hobby and something I haven't written down myself whenever I chose to identify as a gamer. It'd be interesting to read!

I'm sharing my scan of the conclusion and footnotes. Be warned: my scans are of poor quality but are legible (typical scholar, sry).

I'm going to dump this quote here and later pull more sections from the book.

In concluding, I offer two final suggestions. The first is practical. Rather than argue that video games should include more diversity because it matters, producers should include it precisely because representation does not matter to players in many games. This argument can contribute to the analysis and production of other media, as well. The second is paradoxical. The goal of those invested in diversity in games should not be to prove the importance of representation but rather to argue for the importance of representation in a way that does not dismiss the playfulness of gaming. This is not just a critique of representation in games but of how media researchers argue for representation in the contemporary media era. 219

Shaw's overall premise is that game producers should work more towards inclusivity, which itself is not difficult to achieve visually. She looks at several cases of "others" to support her exploration into diversity (IE, LGBT, minoritarian, feminist...), but I kept finding myself frustrated by her quick reliance on user responses rather than the connection of these characters to overarching narratives. Perhaps that's me holding onto the development of characters rather than just their appearance, but her study is most definitely missing this important kernel of characters apprehending avatars and so forth.

But this quote gets to a chunk of what they tried to achieve in every preceding chapter, which is diversity is both useful to gaming and productive for the market.

I dare say I'm also interested in "diversity" signifying more than non-whites, but also characterization that moves away from traditional appropriation of Eurocentric/Asiatic myths, kingdoms, kings, queens and binary heroines. A white character in and of itself is not a problem.