The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [130]
On a smaller scale, LARPs have the same challenge. It’s not easy to moderate large groups of people and populate the world so that every character feels real. But there are nonplayer characters played by actual people who fill in the blanks. When you play a LARP or any media-rich game like True Dungeon, you can’t help but be immersed in the game because every sense is plunged into it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the player achieves agency. It’s possible to create immersion, but that requires the right mindset on behalf of everyone involved—players, nonplayer characters, role distance, and environment all cooperating in tandem.
Reviewing each of the gaming mediums reinforced how precious free time really is. As the pace of the modern world increases and other forms of entertainment vie for our attention, games that require long-term personal investments will continue to decrease in popularity. IF and MUDs have lost ground year after year as PBBGs and massive multiplayers became more pervasive. What they lack in immersion these games make up for in convenience. The Internet has given us the world’s largest gaming table, with an endless variety of players to recruit.
The latest gaming mediums will continue to evolve. As the power of computer and console processors increases, massive multiplayers will attenuate to the LARP experience without the massive time investment. Castronova envisions that the convergence of media richness in gaming mediums will eventually become seamless, with LARPs and MMORPGs indistinguishable from each other. Controls and filters that harm a sense of agency will become more smoothly integrated. When you swing a sword, you’ll have a Wii-like remote to do it for you. This kind of physical interface won’t be for everybody, but it will certainly recapture some of the visceral feel of “boffer” style combat in LARPs.
The innovations will not only be in the online social space. I speak from personal experience in first-person shooter games when I say that anonymity harms group cohesion. Teams thrown together who don’t know each other have difficulty establishing leaders or dominance. Strangers worry about themselves first, their team second. However, guilds and clans that work together are considerably more effective because the million little factors that determine our compatibility have slowly been worked out. We know who is better at which game, who should choose the maps, who should lead, what weapon they’re best at wielding, and so on. This group cohesion takes time and effort. It has not, to date, been facilitated by the games themselves. Few MMORPGs have an actual structure to support group cohesion; they rely instead on metagaming techniques like clans to integrate teams. In other words, it’s not necessarily a good thing that massive multiplayers have millions of people playing the game. What’s important is dividing up huge social networks into humanrelatable chunks of compatible players, a lesson PBBGs have learned well.
If one pattern is clear across the various forms of fantasy gaming, it’s that the character/race/class paradigm does not translate perfectly into other gaming mediums. Dungeons & Dragons was originally created for small groups of players sitting around a table. Players had specialized roles and games were moderated by a flexible narrator/referee for up to six hours at a time. Whenever other gaming mediums break this paradigm, the game starts to break down.
Tabletop gaming groups, for example, know each other and play together often. The ever-changing nature of MUDs and MMORPGs detracts from this style of play, with no guarantee that the right combination of roles is available at the right time. Players then resort to solo play to make up for these shortfalls, both in role imbalance and time