Any moderately successful game will be played and enjoyed by a large number of people. Many of these people, who I will refer to as “normal”, will enjoy the game for what it is, and then put it on their shelf of past experiences and get on with their lives. Others, who I will call “a bit freaky”, might express their deep thoughts about the game on an online or print forum of some kind. But, in the fringes of our existence, out there on the very edge of insanity are those who allow the game to take over part of their consciousness. It becomes like a parasite on their nervous system, and they are henceforth unable to form thoughts that are independent of the game and its world. For these there is a special word in our modern vocabulary. We call these people “fanboys”.
Gaming fanboys have an almost supernatural obsession with detail combined with an irrationally narrow perspective on what I will call canonical correctness. RPGs seem particularly prone to this treatment. Fans of RPGs seem to place the most stringent requirements on what must be present in the gameplay mechanics of any particular title before it is allowed to be called an RPG. Any or all of the following apply:
- Progression of character statistics.
- Strict adherence to turn-based combat.
- Some kind of complicated probabilistic engine for determining combat results.
- Highly developed narrative, although the writing itself doesn’t really have to be that good.
- Some vague notion of “freedom of action”, which actually doesn’t exist in any RPG.
- Some vague notion of “a living world”, which also doesn’t really exist.
- Third person cameras. Better yet, old-skool isometric rendering
- Lots of boring dialog trees.
- Lots of tedious inventory management.
If you google around, it’s easy to find multiple manifestos about defining a “real” RPG, and they all contain various amounts of blather similar to the list above. You don’t find people this obsessed with the definition of, say, shooters or platformers. There are no earnest thousand word web page postings outlining the acceptable design parameters of a canonically correct Mario game.
Which leads me to the third axis of the fanboy psychology chart. Fanboys crave acceptance, but marginalization drives them. It’s always the fans of the less popular genres that are the most vociferous and bitter. The single player Western style non-fantasy RPG. Adventure games. And so on. No one worries about shooters and platformers and action games because there are more than enough good games in those genres to go around.
But try to find a decent single player RPG that didn’t come from Japan.
Lacking any real games to play, the sad and bitter fanboy can only wallow in nostalgia and replay his favorite game over and over again. Soon, the details of the game are so familiar that it’s as if they were in his own life. Later, the design of the favorite game becomes the canonically correct design for all games of this type. This is where all those crazy rules come from.
In this state of mind, no new game will ever hold up. All the new games are shallow and stupid, with no real “freedom”, or multiple lines of narrative, or worse: real time combat. Never mind that the old games didn’t really have any of this either. The fanboy’s distortion field projects a platonic perfection on their favored game that no actual game can hold a candle to.
This nostalgia-driven delusion can be a problem for the developer of new games in the genre. Oblivion was skewered by the hard core fans of various earlier instances of the Elder Scrolls games because it was not “as perfect” even though it was better in almost every way. Bethsoft has now set themselves up for even more fanboy wrath by taking on the Fallout 3 project. It seems like they have a masochistic streak in them. Anyone building RPGs in the current fan environment either has thick skin or a love of punishment.
But the truth is, the older games were not that great. The sophisticated turn-based statistical combat engines that the dorks love so much are, in fact, simply tedious. The attempt to mimic the table-top combat rules only results in the player falling asleep as she spends another 15 minutes watching virtual dice roll while she kills her 50th giant rat. The games also tend to feature hideously archaic inventory management and other useless gameplay conventions. And, who can forget the endless dialog trees. Sure, there are some exceptions. The wonderful writing and relatively streamlined gameplay in Planescape comes to mind. But if I’m going to back in time and play a retro RPG, I’m more likely to pick up Chrono Trigger on an emulator than try and play Fallout again. At least the combat in Chrono Trigger doesn’t take hours.
In the end, it’s probably best to treat the hard-core genre fan like the crazy uncle that you don’t talk about much. Let them have their community web sites. Let them have their self-important pontifications. Let them vastly overestimate the value and power of their little clique. But in the end, if you are designing a game in their favorite genre, my advice would be to perhaps listen, nod, and then back slowly out the door and go build your game for normal people.
Weird–the combats in Fallout always went very quickly for me. Start a combat and your character should be dead within a couple rounds.
Old RPG’s do tend to have clunky interfaces, but many of them have virtues that are not easily reproduced, which is why I can still play a game like Dungeon Master or Fallout of Baldur’s Gate 2 even after all these years.
As for inventory management, for some reason people like me don’t mind wasting hours deciding which items to keep and which aren’t worth the weight. It’s not for the realism–anyone who can swing a sword while carrying 300 pounds of loot is not a realistic human. Maybe it’s something in the DNA of old D&D nerds that there should be a risk to reward trade-off for trying to collect too much loot. Of course, save files make the concept of risk almost meaningless in RPGs anyway–the worst that can happen to you is that you waste time going back the last place you saved…
> But try to find a decent single player RPG that didn’t come from Japan.
Ultima. Any of VII through IX, anyway, I’ve not played the others.
Funny, Chrono trigger and fallout are probably my favorite two rpgs of all time. So I’m only half crazy? And I’ve hated every Ultima I have tried. There is something wrong with your healer not getting any better because he can’t club things on the head well. I won’t deny that I’m a crazy fanboy, but I do protest that all aspects of oblivion were better than most other games. I loved the visuals (except all the old worn ugly people, where are my adolescent fantasy images of buxom young women?). But I get bored with being told everything about a quest as soon as I get the quest. Let me feel like I figured something out. There, how’s that for fanboy? I really need to get a copy of planescape one of these days after all the raving I hear on this site. And I’ll faithfully buy fallout3 and complain that it isn’t like either fallout or daggerfall.
I will admit that my raving about Oblivion may exagerrate its strengths.
All I know is, I tried to play Morrowind and got bored after I walked off the ship.
I’m sure that is the reaction my fiancee would have too. The only RPG I’ve succeeded in getting her to play was Knights of the Old Republic. Not that I’ve tried very hard because I don’t see the point in pushing her to do something that I know she won’t like.
Brief Temperament Theory comment… As far as I can ascertain, this sort of obsessive behaviour occurs at the interface between the Guardian and Rational patterns – that is, between Strategic play and Logistical play. This is what one would predict from the psychological model, and on the basis of the work I’ve done in this area, it’s not entirely surprising that cRPGs are the main focus – because this is the key point of intersection between Strategic and Logistical play. Anyway, I don’t have a point, it was just the thoughts that were rattled free from my head upon reading this.
Grognards sort of fit this pattern too, though they have fewer particular franchises to be fanboys of; mostly they relish the mere fact that any wargames are made at all and so will defend even the most dreary hex-based rendition of the Invasion of France against true gems like Company of Heroes.
One of the hallmarks of this sort of thinking is the religious stance they take in an us versus them manner. Not only are they guardians of what a “proper RPG” is, people who like “proper RPGs” are smarter, more mature and probably better in bed. Anybody who likes Oblivion or real time strategy or Madden is a philistine who has been sucked in by graphics, hype or marketing.
Pete, I’m betting that somewhere, someone has written just the article you’re looking for on Super Mario Brothers 2. But I’m fat and lazy and have a Balboa to cook. That said, this is a universally fannish behavior: part of it is just that geeky male need to categorize and systematize everything, part of it is a way to rationalize one’s time-wasting hobbies as not only meaningful, but correct in some presumably objective fashion, and part of it is just what happens when a bunch of people spend their time arguing about this stuff without an outside perspective to suggest a vacation may be in order. Among some of the more fun versions of this I’ve seen have been the argument over whether the anime “Aa! Megami-sama!” should be translated as “Aah! My Goddess” or “Oh! My Goddess”, a very brief boycott of Loreena McKennitt due to suspected Catholicism, and the fascinatingly bizarre Battlestar Galactica old guard who believe that BG:90210 is a communist conspiracy to smear the good name of the late 70′s space disco.
Playing armchair psychologist, what interests me about these fights is that it’s not an argument about opinion, it’s more of a need to demonstrate that something is -objectively- correct, as if adherence to a marketing category was an insight into universal truth. You find this a lot on wikipedia, in particular any description of anything pop-cultural which includes a statement like “some fans”, or “the fan community” or “most fans”. It’s almost a nonstop ride after that into some feverish in-depth speculation on something very very silly. My personal favorite being the awe-inspiring majesty of the Skeletor Article, which among its (many) highlights includes this description:
Langella’s Skeletor was given a depth that had been absent from all prior interpretations. Perhaps the best glimpse given into the villain’s psyche occurs when he is torturing a captive He-Man. Leaning in close to the hero, he inquires “Tell me about the loneliness of Good, He-Man… Is it equal to the loneliness of Evil?”
As well as a two page long discussion on whether Skeletor has a neck. I pray to Jehovah, Allah, Zeus and Colonel Sanders that whoever wrote this article did so tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Oh, wow. That Skeletor article is terrifying.
It never ceases to amaze me that weird geek-culture trivia like this has way deeper coverage on Wikipedia than pretty much anything actually, y’know, useful does.