No Time To Play

There is a gap in my videogame repertoire. Specifically, I don’t do RPGs.

Oh, I’ve played a few of the classics (Fallout 1&2, Planescape Torment, the first Ultimas) as well as the occasional MMO. Roguelikes might count as well, depending on your definition. But for the most part I’ve played RPGs in ways that only involve computers incidentally, or not at all. Namely via forums, text based virtual worlds, or simply around a table with a few friends.

You caught me; I like to read and write a lot. But even if you’re into glitzy graphics, pen&paper RPGs (a.k.a. tabletop) might hold some points of interest for you.

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Less than two weeks ago, I wrote a glowing review of a browser-based MMORPG called Pardus. Yesterday, I cancelled my account.

Before I go into the gory details, remember that negative experiences impact us more strongly than positive ones. You know the saying, “Beauty is skin-deep, but ugliness goes all the way to the bone”? That’s how the brain perceives things. It’s why unhappy customers will complain about your service or product way more than the happy customers will praise it — which in turn is why any business should go out of its way to make customers happy, or at least not unhappy.

That’s also why last time I focused on my positive experiences with the game. I knew the good impression wasn’t going to last. I just didn’t expect things to go downhill as fast as they did.

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Back when videogames were still new, there was no such thing as game genres; the very concept of a videogame was still taking shape. But we humans love putting labels on things, and once certain types of game mechanics proved popular, it wasn’t long before the market settled on a few easily identifiable genres which it exploited. Sure, new kinds of games continued to appear all along the 1980es and 1990es, but they were all promptly milked to death by an increasingly risk-averse gaming industry.

Luckily, nowadays the situation has been reversed again. Not only are indie game developers churning out an impressive array of innovative titles, but even established genres are going right back into the blender. RPGs are borrowing from shooters (Fallout 3, Mass Efect). Shooters are borrowing from strategy games (Team Fortress 2, Tremulous). And strategy games have had RPG elements since at least Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (for a modern example, see Battle for Wesnoth).

But even in the intervening years there were games that dared to break the mold and combine two existing kinds of gameplay into a coherent whole, or even do something entirely unique.

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