The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [100]
The most recent innovation in creating CRPG content for other players is of course Neverwinter Nights. I tried my hand at creating an adventure with the toolset but never finished it. The time investment was more than I could spare.
Participant Roles
In Wizards of the Coast’s survey of gamers, 8 percent of gamers play or played CRPGs, approximately 7.3 million people. Of that group, approximately 4.5 million people, or 5 percent, played CRPGs monthly. Females comprised 21 percent of gamers. Of the computer role-playing gamers, 33 percent played tabletop role-playing games monthly and 13 percent played miniature wargames monthly (2000).
Video games are more and more a common ground for the sexes. Beck and Wade (2004:49) found that female participation rates were increasing.
Player
The world of games is deeply, implicitly commercial (Beck and Wade 2004:61). It is specifically a consumer experience, oriented in a selfish fashion to the player. All the game’s resources are centered on the player—it is, in essence, a carefully constructed piece of theater. It is supremely self-affirming, with few of the consequences that players are likely to encounter in real life.
Character Roles
One of the major differences in a CRPG is the addition of graphical avatars. The appearance of these avatars has a powerful effect in how the avatar is conveyed to the player. They are central to both immersion and the foundation of virtual communities (Taylor 2006:110).
Early games used a tile system to represent characters that eventually evolved into portraits. These portraits in turn became animated, adding audio components that further fleshed out each character’s personality. Portraits became three-dimensional characters, usually in the form of either an overhead view or an isometric perspective. This isometric perspective is similar to the use of miniatures on a tabletop game. Beyond the isometric perspective, threedimensional games place the player in the head of the character, viewing the world through his or her eyes. Barton makes this distinction between playing with tabletop miniatures and a textual description in which players visualize the setting in their own imaginations (2008:317). This distinction is as much about visualization as it is about role-playing. Miniatures on a tabletop provide a literal and figurative form of distance between character and player. Conversely, first-person-perspective CRPGs put the player in the shoes of the character, creating a sense of agency (Pearce 2007:311).
Gender
Like interactive fiction games before them, CRPGs generally avoided distinguishing between genders. But computer graphics required a gender commitment that interactive fiction did not, and thus the majority of player characters were always male. CRPGs that have a female protagonist are extremely rare. Later games gave an opportunity to choose the character’s gender, leaving it up to the player.
As CRPGs became more advanced, gender interaction developed too. Characters could have romances and liaisons, even seducing other characters. Troika’s Temple of Elemental Evil was the first to allow two male characters to marry (Barton 2008:357). More recently, Fable allowed characters to marry, but the act had little impact on the game itself (Barton 2008:380).
It should be noted that pen-and-paper role-playing games introduced gender modifiers to ability scores by race first and Pool of Radiance followed suit. Legend of Faerghail also differentiated gender, providing females with better wisdom and constitution and males with higher strength (Barton 2008:199).
Race
Races across CRPGs vary greatly. Many stuck to the traditional Dungeons & Dragons races identified by Gygax as “demi-humans”; elves, dwarves, and hobbits. Still others branched out. After all, the Original Dungeons & Dragons boxed