The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [6]
But fun has a price. It keeps us from doing work and makes us potentially neglect our other responsibilities. Different forms of gaming have different considerations to retain and grow the player base, not the least of which is replayability. The nature of fantasy gaming is experiencing a role, and the shorter the time engaged, the smaller the window for the player experiencing agency (Juul 2004:131).
First-person perspectives that happen in real time require considerably more engagement. One of the common complaints about MMORPGs is that they cannot be easily entered and exited at the player’s whim. MMORPGs happen in real time, so players have to factor in real-life interruptions lest their entire adventuring party die during a bathroom break. Contrast this time commitment with play-by-post games, which by their very nature require limited engagement and interaction (Douglas and Hargadon 2004:203).
MMORPGs and MUDs in particular have a “grind,” performing tasks repeatedly in the hope of gaining some advantage, be it a higher level of experience or acquiring some item. Players spend precious time grinding through these boring tasks to enjoy access to other parts of the game. Even game designers have acknowledged these boring parts by creating mini-games to keep players preoccupied during the necessary downtime (Taylor 2006:85).
Why would anyone create a game that’s boring? Because the progenitor of fantasy gaming, Dungeons & Dragons, was meant to be played in limited but intense chunks of time. In fact, a substantial part of tabletop gaming is taken up in preparation of the game, as Gary Gygax, one of the founders of Dungeons & Dragons, explains:
The most extensive requirement is time. The campaign referee will have to have sufficient time to meet the demands of his players, he will have to devote a number of hours to laying out the maps of his “dungeons” and upper terrain before the affair begins [Gygax 1974:3].
During play, the Dungeon Master skips over the boring parts and emphasizes the action. Early editions of Dungeons & Dragons were nothing but action interspersed with the potential threat of danger. Early parties spent a lot of time searching for traps, mapping, and meticulously performing tasks that others might find boring, but that were an important struggle for survival within the game’s context.
By taking the Dungeons & Dragons framework and applying it to games with thousands of players and a persistent world, the system breaks down. The fourth edition of Dungeons &Dragons addresses precisely this flaw in revising every class so that there are no “boring” levels.
The temporal cost of fun has repercussions for the future of gaming. Modern economies provide workers with much more flexibility than ever before, but as a result of that flexibility, free time is divided into smaller increments (Thom 2010). Games with easier access that accommodate this new structure of free time are likely to survive as a mainstream hobby (Vesna 2004:250).
American Culture
This book primarily focuses on fantasy gaming through the lens of American culture. Although non–Western cultures were influential in gaming, they are beyond the scope of this book.
Comparing the Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing Game (Fantasy Flight Games 2010) to Dungeons & Dragons illustrates the different approaches to gaming between cultures. Dungeons & Dragons is suffused with hope and power, with gold around every corner. Official campaign worlds for Dungeons & Dragons were slow to come about, instead encouraging game masters to create their own worlds—in keeping with American individualism. Europeaninspired Warhammer, on the other hand, is a world full of rich and ancient history, with a mixture of frail nobility and aging decadence against the backdrop of war. Warhammer captures many of the aspects of The Lord of the Rings that Dungeons &Dragons did not,