Deconstructing the Role-Playing Video Game

I always find these categories frustrating.

A Link to the Past and Chrono Trigger do not belong in the same category. In the first, you have action fights that require quick hand-eye coordination and skilled reflexes. In the 2nd you just choose actions from menus, no hand-eye coordination nor reflexes required.

To me, an RPG, has always meant the latter (choose [attack, magic, item] from a menu). Wizardry, Bard's Tale (Apple II), FF7 are RPGs. A Link to the Past, Link's Adventure, Breath of the Wild, are not.

I know the letters RPG stand for "Role Playing Game" but if we're going to go down that route, Flight Sim is an RPG. You play the role of an airplane pilot. Mario Tennis, would also be an RPG. you play the role of a cartoon tennis players. GTA5 is an RPG. You play the role of a member of a street gang.

Since we know that's not what people mean when they say RPG, we're still left making sure were discussing comparable games. IMO, Zelda games (nearly all action games) are not comparable to Final Fantasy or other J-RPG games (nearly all select from a menu games). Their similarity is at most, they are set in a middle-earth tolken-esk setting where you fight monsters with swords. But that's clearly not a useful distinction as it would leave out Earthbound or any other RPG not set in a wizards & dragons type of setting.

If the author is reading this, I highly recommend you look into the history of text adventures and MUDs (multi-user dungeons), as the post completely omits them despite the fact that they are almost literally "RPGs with command-line interfaces". While old-school text adventures remained fairly primitive in the RPG aspect (and new-school text adventures have trended away from the RPG genre and into interactive fiction), MUDs represent the logical conclusion of the thought process here. For reference, check out DiscworldMUD (http://discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/), which is still actively developed and can be played in your browser: discworld.starturtle.net/lpc/decafmud/web_client.html

> In retrospect, looking at tabletop RPGs felt backward because, by using the video games I already knew as models instead, I was benefiting from decades of RPG system simplifications—half the job had already been done.

This is quite a narrow view. Computer RPGs have, for the most part, focused on the combat aspect of the game as that is the easiest part to implement on a computer. Table-top RPGs have gone in many other directions. I find games that focus on story telling to be much more interesting than focusing on combat, and there are some interesting game mechanics that have arisen in these systems. One example is https://wildletters.itch.io/move-quietly-and-tend-things

Really liked this post, thanks for sharing all the references. I actually did a similar project recently of playing a lot of classic JRPGs, but my research only culminated in a blogpost (https://snav.substack.com/p/26-analysis-rainbow-silkroad) rather than any sort of actual project -- the filesystem RPG is a very cool idea!! Would be fun to get some autogenerated fs dungeons :)

> I’ve played JRPGs long enough that I don’t pay much attention to the characters or the plot anymore; I like the pretty pixels, yes, but most importantly I’m drawn to its underlying systems.

This person needs the https://code.tutsplus.com/bartles-taxonomy-of-player-types-a... Bartle EASK MUD player taxonomy.

They would also benefit from discovering the Inform programming language.

Tangent on the Carmack quote - “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not important.”

I never agreed much with it, as the games I got hooked on as a kid I did mostly because of their stories - however, very recently, I started to like games that are almost 100% story and 0% free-form gameplay. Namely, the "choose your own adventure" stories with quick action events, and such. Bear with me :).

Two strong titles from that category (both 11/10, will play again, recommend to everyone remotely in the target audience):

- Star Trek: Resurgence - IMHO the best Trek game in the past 20 years, and the very one you want if you'd like to feel yourself, if for a moment, living and breathing Starfleet life (not just on the top, but also on the lower decks).

- The Invincible - based on Stanisław Lem's 1963 novel of the same title, it's something you want if you're into hard sci-fi, sci-fi meets philosophy, or that sweet atomic era / Soviets-in-space punk.

Why I started to like this genre? Both games above I could describe in one phrase: Mass Effect but without all the running around and other bullshit distractors.

The games are designed to give you choices (usually time-sensitive) that alter events. There is limited freedom of movement, but it's always obvious where you need to go. The fights, if present, are real, but simplified. The quick action sequences and minigames are designed to mimic context-relevant behavior in the simplest possible way (say "press W" to lift a panel, or "press D + LMB" to push the person to the right away from sudden danger while shooting towards it, etc.). This results in a kind of flow - you have pretty much all the meaningful choices and gameplay of a typical CRPG like Mass Effect (or even more), and zero of the frustration of getting lost, tripping off a ledge, or doing any of the many other immersion-breaking things you would encounter in a typical CRPG on a regular basis.

In essence, this is subverting the article's concept: those games are minimum viable story-driven games, distilled and stripped out of all boring gameplay parts :). Or, in Carmack's terms, captivating erotica that lacks explicit depictions, but achieves the same result by being cleverly suggestive at all times.

> I’ve played JRPGs long enough that I don’t pay much attention to the characters or the plot anymore

> I don’t particularly enjoy strategizing, I just default to punch with warriors and spell with wizards, with the occasional healing potion in between

That doesn't seem to leave a whole lot...

One of the things I liked to do in these old RPGs was find a way to level up to max right from the beginning. Usually it would involve putting a clamp on the controller at a particular point in the game. This worked in Ys and Dragon Slayer and FF6, for example.

In Genso Suikoden, I discovered a way to get so many water seals that I was effectively invulnerable because I'd regenerate 10x my health every round. Unfortunately, there's a vampire boss who's unkillable and is supposed to defeat you as part of the story. So I couldn't progress any further because it was impossible for either of us to kill the other.

Just to comment on the choice to go text instead of graphics.

I actually think it's pretty easy to program a graphic based 2d game. SDL2 is very easy to use and can blit graphics easily. I do agree it increases the complexity though.

Tangent: the novel "Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin is a well-written book about a fictional video game studio. I'm not a game designer but it went into a fair amount of detail and seemed pretty authentic. Curious if others here have read it and can comment.

That's an interesting read, thank you, btw I also contributed to RPG games by making this generator a couple of years ago: https://tabletopy.com

The title of this article threw me for a loop. I was expecting a deconstruction in the literary sense.

Still, I didn't leave disappointed.

> Over in Japan, the Enyx designers combined the dungeon crawling from Wizardry and the over-world exploration of Ultima, adjusting them to the limitations of the Famicom/NES console—and to the tastes of the local public. With a linear story, streamlined systems focused on battles, and a more forgiving difficulty level, Dragon Quest became the blueprint of what would become the Japanese RPG genre.

"Enix", I assume?

Also, while Enix was the publisher behind Dragon Quest (and pretty much made the series the core of the company's identity), the original DQ was actually developed by ChunSoft.