Some Statements Related To Video Gaming That I Take Issue With, Part One

The ol' rage-o-meter just spiked, thanks to this video, or, more appropriately, the text that accompanies it. Apparently, RPG elements improve every game, and now the new Tomb Raider has them!

Why does this enrage me, you ask? Well, because I'm a middle class white American male! I've got to have something to get angry about! And today, "RPG elements" are that thing.

First of all, what the fuck are "RPG elements"? I've played a lot of RPGs in my time, and boy do they have a lot of elements, both collectively and individually. Said elements do in fact seem to be making their way into every single game on earth lately, and I'm not entirely sure that it's reasonable to say that they improve every single one of those games.

Short version: there's a reason that the RPG is a genre. Now, I'm all for genre cross-pollination (in games and also in books, music, movies, whatever), but I sincerely question the validity of needing to inseminate every other game genre with RPGs' fundamental DNA, which includes (often, though not always) leveling, classes, statistical categories, and other often number-based complexities (the things that I assume the IGN author means by "RPG elements").

Long version: Games are systems. They are also worlds. The system (the code) builds the world, and dictates how the player can and cannot interact with it. We're at a wonderful stage of genre cross-pollination right now with regard to games, but it seems like so often the result of the cross-pollination is simply to throw more systems at the player, under the assumption that if you gives him/her enough things to do, they'll walk away feeling like they got their money's worth. And to a degree, I think this works. Learning to master systems, overcoming obstacles, and then learning to turn the rules of the game to our advantage is inherently satisfying, whether we're talking about football or World of Goo.

Button hook on 3?

However, just tossing more systems into the mix willy-nilly makes it difficult to maintain any sense of a coherent world. So yeah, when I play a game like the new Tomb Raider (which I obviously haven't played, but I have played a lot of similar adventure/FPS-type games with RPG elements grafted on to them), there is always some satisfaction in unlocking a new skill by accruing enough skill points, or XP, or whatever it's called in any given game. It's nice to feel like I earned that particular skill and that once I've earned enough points, I have a chance to choose how to spend those points in a way that will suit my play style. So it's accomplishment first, followed by the opportunity to personalize a character in a superficial way (which, for some reason, often gets conflated with "role playing"). The question I have in this situation is "Who buys Tomb Raider to role-play?" We don't. We buy Tomb Raider because Lara Croft is badass and we want to control her and use her powers of awesome to kick all the ass on earth. So while it's a momentary reward of sorts to unlock a new skill for Lara as a result of your awesomeness at ass-kicking, it feels strange to me in the larger context of the game. Why do I need to have a Lara who is a survivalist or a Lara who has better eyesight? Why can't I just have an awesome superhero with all kinds of neat powers and not feel like I need to play through the game 18 times in order to get to do all the cool things in it? Because RPG elements, that's why.

Maybe the best way to explain what the face-fuck I'm talking about is to talk about Deus Ex. Deus Ex is, nominally at least, an FPS with RPG elements. And yet, your manipulation of the game's skill system has dramatic consequences "on the ground," so to speak. If you create yourself to be a master hacker, you can hack your way through shit, but if things go south, you're not going to power your way out of trouble with your rocket launcher, because chances are your character's too weak to even lift and fire the damn thing. Deus Ex makes sure its RPG-style skill system makes sense in the larger context of the world and the way that the player survives and succeeds with in: the system has weight. In many RPG-inflected games since, that hasn't been the case. It's like the industry saw that a few games like Deus Ex successfully put fried onions in a burrito, and so now everything's got to have fried onions in it, even the goddamn carrot cake.

Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?

Sure, in a lot of these games (and I'm sorry for not providing an example right now, my brain is literally seeping out of someone else's eye sockets), you can customize things like Accuracy, Weapon Specialization and such fancy things, but all your choices really mean is that the game is slightly harder if you choose to create an physically weak, eagle-eyed sniper and then plow through while bludgeoning everything with a war hammer. Beyond that, there aren't any real consequences, because (presumably) developers want the player to eventually be able to work their way through the game however they want, so that they keep coming back happy.

Contrast this with, say, Baldur's Gate 2 (since that's what I'm playing now). If you create a Dwarf fighter who specializes in crossbows and axes, just try fighting a high-level enemy with a bow or a knife and see how far you get. At some point, your choices catch up to you, and within the game world, to succeed, you need to play as the character you've chosen to be. Those character-defining decisions carry weight. That's RPG elements for you.

Slapping a bunch of cool "bonus" skills together into a skill tree and requiring the player to kill a thousand bad guys to unlock them all has nothing to do with role-playing, and honestly I have a really hard time understanding how they "improve" anything. Sure, it gives you more stuff to do, but since when has gaming been about giving the player more things to do, just for the sake of doing them?