Computer Role-Playing Games

Since the 1980s, role-playing games (RPGs) have endured sporadic popular and scholarly attention, and the most well-known RPG, Dungeons and Dragons ( D&D ), still endures stereotypical representation in the mass media. However, RPGs gained renewed critical attention in the 1990s because of the popularity of Multi-User Dungeons. (MUDs). These are

text-based virtual worlds in which Internet users can create characters in a shared, interactive space. The first MUDs were built in the early 1980s around fantasy role playing themes reminiscent of Dungeons and Dragons games, concretizing heroic fantasy stories into an interactive, social, distributed form. Currently, there are a proliferation of different types of MUDs with different themes, purposes, and operating systems. (Ito, 1997, p. 89)

The distinctiveness of MUDs owed much to the limitations of early graphical displays, processor speed, and modem bandwidth. If multiple players were to have constantly updated information about a game world in which they were interacting simultaneously, a text-based interface was the easiest way to display it to the screen. To compensate for the subsequent lack dramaturgical cues, such as facial expressions and gestures, players had to experiment with ASCII-character keys and special commands if they wished to express themselves. Many of the typographic techniques and commands for communicating in MUDs quickly became standardised, and helped to define a shared culture of MUD-players. Since some groups of MUD-players maintained long-term contact with one another, MUDs were analysed as “virtual” or “mediated” communities (Rheingold, 1993).

While “virtual communities” have gained increasing theoretical interest, the text-based elements of MUDs are of less critical import given now that networked games are capable of supporting a real-time graphical user interface (GUI). Recent online RPGs, such as Ultima Online , EverQuest and Neverwinter Nights , involve multiplayer interaction a graphical environment, and have become far more popular than MUDs. Friedman has argued that:

As data capacities increase and text-based virtual communities expand to include sound and graphics, it is likely that computer games will continue to have things to teach us about interacting both with software and with each other. Computer games, after all, are where we go to play with the future. (Friedman, 1995 p. 87)

It would seem, then, that any serious research into human-computer relations should forget text-based MUDs, and focus upon these new gaming forms, to see what they can “teach” us about the present and future state of human-computer relations.

However, MUDs and MMORPGs are not simply descendants of the RPG phenomena, they owe much to single-player, graphical, computer role-playing games (CRPGs). There is a distinct tradition of PC CRPGs, including series such as The Bard's Tale and The Eye of the Beholder ; ongoing CRPG series, such as Ultima , Forgotten Realms , and Might and Magic ; and extremely popular variants, such as Diablo and Baldur's Gate , the latter of which used the rules of the recently released third edition of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules. While MMORPGs may be seen as superseding CRPGs and MUDs, form cannot be separated from the history which gave rise to, and determined the use of, that form. It is important, then, to address why CRPGs are usually only mentioned dismissively by those who do not play them, or cited as a historical precedent of MUDs, given that, for those who play them, RPGs, CRPGs, MUDs and MMORPGs are unified by a tradition of “role-playing.” For some players, CRPGs have lost what was important to the “purer” forms of table-top “role-playing” exemplified by the original, table-top D&D ; other players show a stubborn defence of and nostalgia for “classic” or “pure” CRPGs such as The Bard's Tale . Still other players argue that the older CRPGs are unplayable, and celebrate MMORPGs such as EverQuest .

The debate between players, and the absence of critical concern with CRPGs, suggests a need for a clear definition of “role-playing” adequate for its multiple variations, or an evaluation of RPGs adapted to the computer medium. However, if “multimedia MUDs” will, or have become, “a medium in their own right,” as Rheingold (1991) suggests, it is because they have distinct conventions. Indeed, each RPG form had or has its own audience, history and aesthetics, and must be evaluated in its own terms. Yet there is little research on the distinctive aesthetics and discursive practices of computer game genres, and in any case the aesthetics of computer gaming do not map neatly onto existing genres. This is serious problem, inasmuch as CRPGs share aesthetics from shooters, adventure games, simulation games and strategy games, and appropriate from a wide range of textual and visual media and narrative and gaming forms. For example, RPG rulebooks, modules and compendiums draw from history, politics, sociology, biology, mythology and religion in an attempt to fully describe the minutiae of the “game world,” to maximise its believability and habitability.

In analysing the relationship between actual or fictional traditions of “role-playing,” it is necessary to address not only the distinct aesthetics of RPGs forms, but to interrogate the compound terms: “computer,” “role-playing,” “games,” and “play.” This is an unavoidably complicated task, but what makes CRPGs so difficult to analyse is precisely what makes them such useful objects of analysis. Their hybridity makes it difficult to make grandiose claims about the formal unity of a genre. In analysing the compound elements of CRPGs, one finds oneself implicitly analysing aesthetics that cross genres and media and referring to not just a single game or genre's production history, but also to the history of computing, role-playing, and computer gaming in general. Analysing CRPGs, then, forces us to analyse gameplay not in terms of genres or the linear evolution of gaming forms, or even in terms of alternative or parallel ways of adapting textual modes in visual-based media, and of adapting narrative forms to gaming or computing systems. In describing CRPG gameplay, we begin describing a process whereby players negotiate form, aesthetics, and gaming traditions.

Yet I would suggest that it is unwise to readily dismiss as merely ideological, or merely aesthetic, the attempts of players to insist on the unifying “idea” of “role-playing.” While the hybridity of CRPGs may mean that there is no static form, the faith in “role-playing” may indicate a discursive practice, or process, that is evident in the structure of the games themselves. Given the literary origins of much “role-playing,” Mikhail Bakhtin's (1981) argument about the “novel” is of use here. For him, the “novel” is less a “genre” than a “supergenre,” or a kind of literary force that incorporates other literary forms only to reveal their limits. He uses the term “novel-ness” to refer to “whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system” (Emerson and Holquist, 1981, p. xxxi). While there are recurring formal elements that make CRPGs more distinctive than Bakhtin's “novel-ness,” CRPGs—or RPGs in general—may be seen as a distinctive “force” that continually subsumes or governs the work of other media and genres.

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Role-Playing Games

Role-playing games (RPGs) emerged from modern tabletop wargames, in which wars were re-created in “authentic” historical detail, down to the details of the “tin” (pewter) figurine's clothing, field topography, and troop movements (Dunnigan, 1980; Fine, 1983; Mackay, 2001; Meyers, 1986). Chainmail , the prototype RPG, was “a set of rules for medieval battles” characterised by the supplemental “thirteen pages of ‘fantasy' rules which allowed the players to include magic” (Meyers, 1986, p. 2483). These additional rules, designed by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perrin, were subsequently consolidated by Gygax and Dave Arneson in the first official RPG, Dungeons or Dragons ( D&D ), published in 1972. In place of real historical scenarios, the rules and content of D&D were highly influenced by, or directly modelled upon, the fiction of such fantasts as J. R. R, Tolkein, Fritz Leiber, and Jack Vance. While D&D and many subsequent RPGs incorporated wargame miniatures into the rules, the rules allowed players to role-play characters without them, and RPGs became increasingly characterised by improvised verbal and written communication and the use of dice to determine the outcome of events (see Cardwell, 1994; Donaldson, 1996; Fine, 1983; Lancaster, 1994; Mackay, 2001; Meyers, 1983; Myers, 1992a; Toles-Patkin, 1986).

Basic D&D , a simplified version of D&D marketed at teenagers, was published in 1974, followed in 1978 by the more complicated Advanced D&D , which became the archetypal RPG. The AD&D rules consisted of a Player's Manual and a Dungeon Master's Manual. The bulk of the Player's Manual was the information required to create the “characters” players would “role-play.” Character creation was prior to any gameplay, and sometimes took a whole session to complete. Each character had a number of “statistics” (“stats”) or attributes (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution and charisma) whose numerical values were determined by dice rolls. Players then chose a “character class” (Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Paladin, Ranger, Magic-User, Illusionist, Thief, Assassin, or Monk) and a “race” (Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Halfling, Half-Orc, or Human). The chosen class and race determined or influenced the character's initial statistics and skills.

Players then rolled “hit points,” which reflected their character's health. When characters were injured, their hit points were reduced; when reduced low enough, the character fell unconscious or died. Players then chose an “alignment,” these being defined according to two axes: a character's attitude towards law (the necessity of rules to govern social organisation), and a character's attitude towards morality (the rights of humans, or creatures, to life, freedom and happiness). Lawful characters believed in obeying the law to maintain social order, while Chaotic characters believed that individual interests were more important than social order. Good characters believed in respecting the rights of other beings, while Evil characters were unconcerned with the rights of other beings. Neutral characters fell somewhere in the middle of these axes, providing for nine alignments: Chaotic Evil, Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, Neutral Evil, Neutral Good and True Neutral. There was a natural antipathy between creatures of different alignments, and the choice of alignment determined the way a character would be played. It was also generally assumed that players were lawful and good, and fought against chaos and evil, though this was not necessarily the case. The final stage of preparing a character involved rolling a character's starting money, purchasing weapons, armour and general equipment from the lists in the Manual, and choosing which spells (if any) were memorised.

The Player's Manual contained additional information about game mechanics, tips about gameplay, and extensive spell lists and descriptions, but the Dungeon Master's Manual contained all the rules, charts and tables required to run the game. The Dungeon Master (DM) was the only one supposed to know or have access to these rules, and was also responsible for providing the setting, by

drawing maps of the imaginary region, by locating cities and villages, and by detailing places of adventure and mystery . . . with floor plans, drawings and the like. He outlines the history of his world, establishes its social structure and religious and monetary systems, and decides which races-human and otherwise, hostile or friendly-inhabit it. (Myers, 1983, p. 2484)

Published gameworlds, scenarios, and other accessories took away much of the burden of creation, but in the last instance it was up to the DM to narrate and arbitrate the game. At its most general, gameplay involved: (i) the DM narrating a situation, (ii) players discussing and deciding upon their character's course(s) of action, and (iii) the GM determining the consequences using dice rolls, the rules, and his and the players' creativity.

The dice used in D&D were denominated by the number of sides prefixed with a “d,” hence d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20 and d100. Usually the result of a dice roll was compared to a chart or table to determine the “success” or “failure” of an action. Players made their own dice rolls when creating their character, attacking monsters, or determining the success of actions such as climbing or picking pockets. Other dice rolls were performed by the DM, who was the final authority, and had the power to over-ride dice rolls for the sake of the story. Indeed, many DMs worked behind a low screen, and players sometimes had to wait while the DM checked the Manual for information about a rule that was relevant to the current situation. These rules described highly structured sequences of events, as is evident in the following D&D tables for the orders of events in game turns and encounters:

ORDER OF EVENTS IN A GAME TURN

1. Wandering Monsters. DM rolls 1d6 (Normally checked every 2 turns)
2. Actions. Caller describes all party actions (movement, listening, searching, etc.)
3. Results: If –

1. new area is mapped, the DM describes it.
2. an encounter occurs, skip to ORDER OF EVENTS IN AN ENCOUNTER
3. something is discovered (secret door, item, etc.), the DM announces the results.
4. no encounter occurs, the game turn ends; return to #1.

ORDER OF EVENTS IN AN ENCOUNTER

1. Number appearing: determined by the DM (page 22).
2. Surprise : DM rolls 1d6 for each side (monsters and party) (page 58 of the Players Manual).
3. Reactions : DM rolls 2d6 for the monsters' first reactions (page 22).
4. Results: If –

1. both sides talk, continue reaction rolls, negotiation, etc. as needed.
2. one side runs away, the DM handles Evasion and Pursuit (page 16).
3. one side attacks, continue with ORDER OF EVENTS IN COMBAT.

( D&D Basic Set , 1974, p.3)

The frequency of gaming sessions was determined by the difficulty of getting players together, and ranged from a couple of times a week to once every few months. The length of gaming sessions tended to be relatively long: from several hours, to a whole evening, or perhaps even a whole day or weekend. Sometimes an entire adventure, or “module,” would be played in a single session, but most took several sessions to complete, and a “campaign”—a continuous story developed with the same characters—might be made up of hundreds of “modules” and last for years. As Meyers (1983) describes:

A campaign, at the Dungeon Master's option, may be open-ended—that is, it may be designed so as to continue indefinitely; the plots developed in such a game will naturally be episodic or picaresque. Even the most open-ended scenario, however, requires the passage of “game time” at a faster rate than real time: the surviving characters will eventually age, giving a biographic shape to the narrative if the game is well-played. If the Dungeon Master chooses, he may plan a campaign with “victory conditions,” often ones unknown to the players; with achievement of some predetermined goal, a player has won, and the campaign ends. Such a campaign will have the narrative shape of a quest, and failure in the attempt will close the narrative for that character. Yet the failure becomes part of the lore of the campaign, and the narrative grows toward saga as other characters take up the challenge. (p. 2485)

Generally, while D&D was characterised by rather complex and highly structured game mechanics—coordinating player actions, rolling dice, checking charts, double-checking rules, and so on—these mechanics sometimes merely facilitated improvised drama and the narration of a developing story.

Despite the supposed distinction between players and DM, DMs were “players” in that they generated and played the Non-Player Characters (NPCs), monsters, animals and other beings in the game world; they also sometimes played one or more characters in the party. Conversely, players became increasingly familiar with the rules, and often debated their effects on gameplay, sometimes leading to a change in the rules or the way they were interpreted. There was also nothing stopping other players from trying out the role of DM, and sometimes this role was rotated amongst players. The assumption that each player had only one character is also misleading. Players and the DM often ran two or more characters so that the party was an adequate size. For example, if there were only two players—a player and DM—the two might share control over all the characters in the party. The aesthetic enjoyment of both DMs and players, then, lay partly in a growing mastery and manipulation of the rules.

Despite their seemingly innocuous nature, a minor moral panic surrounded the emergence of D&D . The game was seen as “Satanic,” as “corrupting” the “innocent,” and urban myths told of otherwise “normal” children acting out their roles in sewers and killing each other (Cardwell, 1994; Lancaster, 1994). This moral panic was conducted primarily by ultra- conservative, Christians, and was largely based upon misinformation. Consequently, organisations like Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGa) (1988) and GAMA (Gaming Manufacturers Association) began to disseminate information about RPGs and defend them against negative representations in magazines, journals and newspapers. Popular anxiety about RPGs has now been alleviated, but role-playing is still stereotyped as an escapist activity in which socially challenged individuals act out heroic roles they will never realise in real life and attempt to gain a sense of control through the manipulation of numbers and statistics. Because many RPG associations are based on university campuses, role-playing is also seen as a useless academic pastime, a sign of the laziness of students, and may even reflect upon the Humanities, which share its emphasis on literature, history and fantasy, as passe, impractical and juvenile.

D&D is, of course, only one title in the genre of RPGs . While Basic D&D involved players exploring underground dungeons, AD&D expanded the use of the fantasy themes and allowed players to explore cities, countries, and other dimensions. Later RPGs, such as Traveller , Middle Earth Role-Playing , Star Trek: Role-Playing Game , Marvel Super Heroes and Star Wars: The Role-Playing Game allowed players to explore environments derived from books and films in the genres of science fiction, horror and film noir. G.U.R.P.S. ( Generic Universal Role Playing System ) provided rules for translating characters from one role-playing system to another, and, by extension, for role-playing in any fictional or realistic setting (see Myers, 1992). Given the shift from dungeons and fantasy themes, the arbitrator is no longer referred to as a dungeon master (DM), but a “referee” or a “games master” (GM). Nonetheless, it would be counterproductive to place undue emphasis on the often marginal differences between RPG rule-systems. Most RPG systems are derivative of (A)D&D , which has a unique place in the popular imagination, and the third edition of AD&D provided the rules for CRPGs such as Baldur's Gate . It should be acknowledged, however, that White Wolf's Vampire: the Masquerade revitalised RPGs in the 1990s, with its focus on the intrigue between vampire clans. Vampire was adapted as an eponymous CRPG in 1998, and was the first CRPG that allowed a GM (or “Storyteller”) to narrate and arbitrate multi-player games.

Computer role-playing games are not simply role-playing games adapted to the computer. The development of computer games in general was parallel to the development of RPGs, and CRPGs have their own distinctive traditions, determined in part by the history of the computer as a medium and the limitations or distinctiveness of the medium. It is impossible, then, to discuss CRPGs without reference to the emergence of computers and computer gaming.

Networked Gaming: Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs)

The critical attention Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) have received lies partly in the fact that their development shares much of the same history with networking (see Aarseth, 1997; Krol, 1994; Reid, 1994; Rheingold 1991, 1993). The notion of networked communication was prefigured by such technological developments as the telegraph (Carey, 1989; Stratton, 1997), though the ‘Net's technological foundations are usually traced to 1969. Given the limited access to mainframe computers, MIT had given the students of the Tech Model Railway Club the task of resolving the conflict between the cost of computers and the problem of availability. They developed the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS), which allowed multiple users to use the computer simultaneously through multiple ports (Reid, 1994). In 1969, the Department of Defence, concerned by the possibility that a centralised intelligence base could be destroyed in a nuclear war, developed the notion of multi-user systems and built the first computer network based upon the ITS. Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the DARPANET's decentralised network of nodes connected various U. S. military and research organisations. Information was able to pass through any of the nodes, and the destruction of individual nodes would lead to messages being rerouted, rather than lost.

The ARPANET was installed on universities with Department of Defence research contracts, who were free to use it for their own research. In 1975, The ARPANET was made “capable of interconnecting different network technologies” (Aarseth, 1997, p.98) and soon a variety of institutions demanded access. In 1983, the ARPANET was “modernized with the new, flexible internet protocol (IP)” (p. 98) and when, in 1983, DARPA divided ARPANET into a research network and a military network, called MILNET, various Local Area Networks (LANs) were developed between governmental, educational and commercial sites. The transfer of programs and data between remote terminals was augmented by such asynchronous communication facilities as electronic mail, mailing lists, Usenet and other discussion groups. These were followed by facilities for synchronous forms of communication, such as chatlines and videoconferencing. It was only recently, around “1988-89, when the number of user reached the critical mass sufficient to catch the interest of the mass media” (p. 98), that “the idea (and ideology) of the Internet seems to have crystallized,” an ideology that offered unprecedented democratic “connectedness” not only to computer systems but to (supposedly free) information and other people.

Yet it was earlier than this, in 1977, when the text-based multi-user game Mazewar, written by Jim Guyton, was released, followed by WIZARD, and, in 1979, Alan Klietz' E*M*P*I*R*E (later known as Scepter). This was followed, in 1980, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, at the University of Essex, by the first multi-user dungeon (MUD, or MUD1), named after the SUD DUNGEN. MUD1 was followed by Alan Cox's 1987 AberMUD, and Jim Aspnes 1989 TinyMUD, and then a proliferation of other MUDs, each with slightly different technical differences and settings, such as TinyMush, TinyMuck, TinyMOO, MOO, LPMUD and DikuMUD (see Reid, 1994; Aarseth, 1997). MUDs are characterised by text-based interfaces, and proceed with character generation by asking the player questions about their name, gender, class, race and alignment, then asking the player to provide a description of the character's appearance. In MUDs in which statistics are randomly generated, the player may repeat the “dice rolls” till they have satisfactory results. Generally, there are two types of MUDs: on the one hand, there are the combat-oriented MUDs descended from Bartle's MUD1, focused on the puzzle solving and adventuring motifs of D&D and Adventure ; on the other hand, there are the social-oriented MUDs descended from TinyMUD.

Whatever the MUD type, play is organised around a description, prompt and typed input/output. A command is entered, run through a parser, and sent through the system. The computed response appears on the player's screen, and/or, if necessary, other players screens. For example, near the beginning of ARTICMUD, based upon DikuMUD and the fictional world of the Dragonlance (1984) books, the player is offered the following description:

The Reception

The reception contains a small desk. A long hall leads behind the desk here and you can tell this is where adventurers rest and take time off from their journeys. A small stairway goes down towards what appears to be a lively tavern.

A well maintained longbow has been left here.

A small lead key lies in the dust.

A large board with numerous wanted posters tacked on is here.

Viktor El'Tiras, Paul's Apprentice and Protector of Krynn's Advocate is

standing here.

>

Commands such as “look” or “examine” provide the player with descriptions of rooms, objects, NPCs or other players. There are also commands that relate to the movement of the character through the game world, acquisition of objects, and performance of game actions, for example, “go west,” “get sword,” “fight goblin,” “cast fireball.” In combat-oriented MUDs, characters may “join” with other characters in a party, and “split” treasure that they find between them. However, like Usenet and chat boards, MUDs also have commands (“handles”) that enable players to interact with one another in a more meaningful way than fighting. Prefixing a message with the command “whisper” or “tell” allows players to send their message to specified players, while prefixing a message with the command “shout” will send the message to all players on the server. Players have proven most inventive in the messages they send, using “emoticons” such as the smiley, frown and the wink. The “emote” command provides another means of expressing non-verbal information, such as character's waving, laughing or crying. If a player with a character named “Delbar” types “emote wave,” other players will see the message “Delbar waves.” In later MUDs, such as LambdaMOO, which was set up specifically to analyse online communication and communities, commands were developed which allowed users to build their own objects within the game.

In the last few years, text-based MUDs have given way to what are now commonly referred to as massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs). The first of these was Ultima Online , followed quickly by such titles as EverQuest and Meridian 49 , and, more recently, Asheron's Call , Neverwinter Nights , and Anarchy Online (2002). While the structure of these games is little different from most MUDs, they are characterised by the use of real-time graphics. While the interface of Ultima Online was the isomorphic view popularised by games like Diablo , subsequent MMORPGs—like most computer games—have tended towards the immersive 3D interface initially associated with FPS, which generate real-time graphics. Instead of providing written description of the environment, these games allow the character to simply move or pan to look at the environment. Indeed, the degree of travelling to and from significant sites in the game world means that a great deal of gameplay is a tour of digital panoramas. However, the MMORPG interface owes its structure principally to the CRPG. Ultima Online , for example, was the first multi-player instalment of one of the most popular single-player CRPG series: Richard Garriot's Ultima (1980). The interface of MMORPGs is similarly characterised by the combination of text and graphical elements, with a graphical window, text window, character graphs and windows. Actions are usually organised around menu buttons which require the use of a mouse, or “hotkeys,” such as “a” for attack, or “F1” to select the nearest player. In EverQuest (1999), if a player with a character named Delbar types “/emote wave,” the message “Delbar waves” will appear in the text window of nearby players and the 3D figure of Delbar will simultaneously start waving.

The appeal of MMORPGs lies not just their interface but their unprecedented scale. MMORPGs are characterised by an ongoing, developing world simultaneously inhabited by hundreds or thousands of players. While MUDs may have been capable of such scale, they were run by university students and free; MMORPGs are designed and run by large companies which work to maintain and expand their paying user-base. EverQuest's Verant, for example, maintains official webpages, chatlines, and has released three expansion packs: Ruins of Kunark (1999), Scars of Velious (2000), Shadows of Luclin (2001). Each of these has extended the scope of the game world, adding a new continent, world, and dimension, respectively; Shadows of Luclin also offered an upgraded graphical engine.

Mackey (2001) has observed that the designers of action-arcade adventures and computer role-playing games actively incorporated the following RPG elements into their games:

1) 3-D, first-person, perspective, immersive game play; 2) nonplayer-character interaction; 3) responsive environment; 4) quantified assessment of player qualities; 5) access to a map of the game environment. (p. 24, 2001)

These points need some clarification. First, RPGs actually combine the first person narration of the players (“I enter the room”) with the DMs third person description of events (“there is an orc in the room”) and second person narration of what happens to the characters (“you strike and miss the orc”). Furthermore, in CRPGs such as The Bard's Tale a single player controls a whole party of character but sees the gameworld from an omniscient point of view, while in CRPGs such as Baldur's Gate the “character” is represented as a figure on the screen. These and other representations of cross various computer game genres, suggesting that to reduce (C)RPG narration to a generic description of first person perspective is simplistic.

Second, interaction with nonplayer-characters (NPCs) occurs in computer games in that the program, like a GM, controls the NPCs (usually monsters) that the player comes across, even if it is primarily in adventure games and CRPGs that this interaction extends beyond fighting to include lengthy dialogue. Yet without more advanced artificial intelligence, computer-driven NPCs are no substitute for the verbal interaction between a human GM and players. Indeed, third, since computers respond to input, they are all necessarily responsive, and in fact the game engines of FPS offer more responsive simulations of the movement of the character in the game world than turn-based RPGs. The issue, then, is a responsive game world , in which the consequences of player's actions change the way events unfold in imagined world. Certainly, it is principally adventure games, CRPGs and simulations that have taken advantage of the encyclopaedic potential of the computer and created the kind of enormous and dynamic worlds that characterised RPGs. In Daggerfall: Elder Scrolls , for example, the quests a player chooses will alter the relationships between guilds, which will determine not only the attitude of those one subsequently encounters, but the quests that will be offered, shaping the way the game unfolds.

Fourth, while the quantification of characters abilities has its precedent in RPGs, many computer games often only quantify the character's number of lives or health; the use of an “inventory” is perhaps the most distinctive RPG element, and is now found even in FPS. However, while strategy games have details for individual units, this may be seen as merely the transcription of the information about units found in original wargames. Generally, only CRPGs have the complete “character sheet” found in RPGs. Lastly, five, games of many genres have access to a map of the game world. In FPS like Quake , for example, the player usually presses <TAB> to get a map of the level in which they are in, and strategy games, like WarCraft , the player has both a top-down view which itself functions like a map, and has access to a smaller-scale map to monitor troop movements.

While the rules and form of RPGs quickly found their way to the computer medium, it is only with networked games that anything resembling the dynamic personal communication and interaction of the original RPGs could be found in computer games. Of course, while MUDs offer direct communication with other players that is lacking in text-based adventure games and CRPGs, they are limited by their limited sensory channels, leading to a distinctive textual coding of non-verbal information. MMORPGs, however, have made the visual channel available, and the development of polygonal 3D interfaces has allowed for increasing scope and immediacy in the way players express themselves.

In this sense, the movement from text-based adventure games, CRPGs, MUDs and MMORPGs may be seen as a linear development that has increasingly facilitated the freedom of imaginative expression found in the original RPGs. Indeed, it might be suggested that fully-immersive networked Virtual Reality (VR) could provide for an advancement upon RPGs because it would allow players to “role-play” without the encumbrance of any medium, any limitation on time and space. Instead of manuals, rules, dice, and so on, players could simply place on VR gloves and goggles and enter the virtual gameworld. The medium would be completely transparent and players could literally take on the roles of characters.

There are obvious problems with this kind of wishful thinking. RPGs have not simply been adapted to a different medium, but transformed by them, producing distinctive aesthetics. To say VR may allow for unprecedented freedom in “role-playing” conflates different kinds or definitions of “role-playing”: the (improvised) play of children, the scripted performance of theatre, the RPG genre, educational techniques (adult simulation games), and processes of identification and identity formation central to psychoanalysis. Role-playing without the visibility of game mechanics would take away the distinctive form and appeal of table-top RPGs like the original D&D . It would in no way be simply “free” of all the boundaries found in other forms of “role-play.” Even in VR, “role-playing” would require rules, codes and conventions, not too mention hardware few could afford. There would still be skills required by, and limitations imposed on, players, which would mean that it would retain generic characteristics.