The Naked Reality of Games
March 19th, 2010
This should be considered a continuation of my last post, although it may end up taking a bit of a different route than I first had in mind. The goal, however, is to still to get to the bottom of the RPG genre, to see what really defines it and what it has that draws people in. I’ll consider this question in light of several recent RPGs (or at least RPG hybrids) that I haven’t fully managed to get into despite high expectations.
I’ll start with Borderlands, which I rented a few weeks ago and played pretty extensively with my brother. I also tried it online briefly without much success. Player levels in the game I joined varied widely and there didn’t seem to be much coordination, with the two higher level characters blowing through everything pretty much on their own. The game is definitely at its best when played in co-op with friends who are all at about the same level. A few times either me or my brother would race ahead a little bit in single player, and then later we’d have to play a bit of catch up to even out our characters again. Not necessarily ideal, but definitely enjoyable.
To put things simply, Borderlands is basically Diablo with shooter mechanics. The story is similarly weak, the shooting feels a lot like hacking and slashing, and likewise there are endles piles of magic items to collect. I call them magic because more often than not their effects seem arbitrary and inexplicable. Now how does regenerating ammo work exactly? A small munitions factory in your pocket perhaps? Or maybe a teleportation device that steals ammo from some warehouse? Irrelevant, right? It’s just a gameplay mechanic, you might say. Just another way of more conveniently replenishing a number. And to an extent I can accept that. I can still enjoy Borderlands for the mindless, shooty, bloody grinding that it is. But I would nonetheless argue that Borderlands is filled with arbitrary number-whoring that threaten to tear open the one great lie of video gaming: that we are actually doing something interesting in some other place, instead of pressing buttons merely to change meaningless numbers. I feel this illusion breaking down when I have to empty five clips of ammo into the center of some guy’s face before he falls down. It breaks further when I can shoot another guy that looks the same, and bring him down with just one shot. In those moments I am no longer on a distant planet, laying waste to a horde of sado-masochistic raiders, but merely reducing a property called ‘hitPoints’ on a virtual object called ‘enemy.’ What is it that I get for reducing all these numbers to zero? Watching the numbers of my character increase? So that I can go to a slightly different place and instead shoot enemies with somewhat higher hitPoint numbers?
Still, raw numbers do have some strange attraction to them, even when they don’t serve as a particularly logical representation of anything. With enough variation in gameplay actions and graphics, it is possible to just enjoy the challenge, appreciate the visual spectacle, and long for those precious numbers to change for the better.
There is another mechanic that in my mind makes the numbers more palatable, and is something that Borderlands lacks in. This, quite simply, is choice. There is some of this in Borderlands, like which class to pick and what weapon to use. But of character customization there is little. There is no visual customization (aside from color), only one active skill to use per class, and stat bonus skills that are often obvious picks. Statwise there is much more control here than in most RPG hybrids (like Fallout 3 and ME2) but it still feels like something’s missing.
To be continued…
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