by Vivienne Chan
By definition, Role Playing Games feature gameplay that involves individuals who are each designated a specific role or function within a group. Whether you’re playing a tabletop RPG like Dungeons & Dragons, a single-player RPG like Baldur’s Gate, or an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, each individual avatar has a specific, contained, defined reason for being included in a party.
Leader, striker, controller. Tank, healer, DPS. These are the “primary” role definitions you find in most RPGs. The latter three are collectively known as the “holy trinity” of RPGs. All avatars may have secondary roles or abilities, such as trap finder, negotiator, tracker, pack mule, etc, but by and large their abilities are linked to their primary role definition. A ranger is better equipped to understand nature and a rogue is better equipped to steal or disarm traps, for example.
I argue that there is a link between the massive popularity of RPGs and the way many of us understand our place in the world.
People are complex. They may not always be able to understand, articulate, or accept that complexity, but it’s there. We are defined by a veritable spider web of circumstances, most of which are beyond the scope of anyone else’s vision or imagination. Even the very simplest of factors, where we are born and to what parents – easily two of the most influential aspects of a person’s character – are well beyond our control.
We are also organic. We do not think like computers. When we read about telepaths or psychics in comic books or TV shows, the “thoughts” that they hear are total and utter bullshit because we do not think only in words, nor do we think just one thought at a time. We think with images, sounds, and an even broader range of abstract ideas that interact with each other and thus shape our thoughts – any words we assign to them are simply how we would communicate them to other people, or how we make sense of them ourselves. No sentence or even paragraph can ever capture the full meaning of our thought, and that’s due to things like unspoken context (culture, past experience, personality) or even how we formulated that thought in the first place.
When we communicate with each other, we’ve got words, tone, and nonverbal communication (i.e., body language). Those three things, working perfectly in sync and used with deft precision, still fall short of communicating what’s really going on in our heads. Alongside what we choose to communicate is what the other person receives from our communication. So not only is our thought-to-communication process vastly complex (and inadequate even at its best moments), but reception is just as bad on the other end.
Getting the picture?
What we understand about the people around us is limited only to what they communicate to us, which goes through a filter defined by our own contexts. Connotation, cultural subtlety, generation gaps, tone, and body language are all interpreted differently by different people. Ultimately, the message we receive will look pretty different (and far simpler) than the message that was originally sent. Even the clearest conversation is like talking through a broken telephone. And role-playing games are perfect media through which we can examine that system.
Characters in RPGs are, in essence, a manifestation of the broken telephone metaphor. When we look at people, we define them in terms of what role they play in our lives. What do they do that defines them in our eyes? How does that make them different or similar to us, and how does that define the nature of our relationship with them?
In an RPG, that rogue in our party has his own backstory (either pre-written by us or defined by the person playing that rogue), but his value to us, as other members in the party, is his role – he is a rogue. He deals high damage when someone’s back is turned, he is agile, he can steal, and he can set or spot traps. He is useful to us because he can do those things; his story may be interesting, but ultimately he is defined by this narrow sliver of who he really is.
Now I’m not saying that we all surround ourselves with people in vastly different roles so that we are well-equipped to take on the inevitable zombie apocalypse that looms in the not-too-distant future. After all, we gravitate toward people who share similar interests or perspectives, and I’m far from equipped to raid in my day-to-day life. What I am saying, however, is that the way we perceive or define the people in our lives is usually based on just a tiny aspect of who they are. Just like our thoughts lose a lot of complexity when we put them into words and share them with others, so too do people when we meet them.
RPGs reflect this dynamic. By thinking about how we cobble parties together in MMOs, we are essentially navigating an oversimplified social world: I want to play with you because I like you, but you are not the class we need the most for this quest or task, so I won’t play with you right now.
Even in some “non-RPG” games like Skyrim, where you can potentially run off on your own and play how you want to play and thus breaking traditional “role” definition in gaming, you can still choose a party member to accompany you if you so wish. These party members are themselves narrowly defined into easily digestible “caster,” “fighter,” or “ranged” classes.
Ignoring the limited resources that accompany any game’s design, this makes a statement about the greater nature of gaming as a reflection of how we are socialized. It’s easier and ultimately more efficient to compartmentalize people into their roles, or into our perceptions of those roles. It makes them easier to understand and sometimes it encourages us to dictate how they should perform in those roles. In real life, this might result in us forgetting (or ignoring) the fact that we are working or interacting with people who are far more than the just the roles we perceive.
Hence, RPGs are appealing in part because they simplify people; they portray groups of people in a way that is easy for us to understand, that isn’t weighed down by cultural subtext or the complexities of an organic thought process. Person A heals. Person B tanks damage from a foe and protects the others. Person C deals damage to the foe.
Yet, when any one person fails in their stated role, there is a tendency for the issue to expand, becoming a criticism of who they are as a person, rather than a single, role-based failure contained in the task you are trying to complete.
RPGs and their design are a direct reflection of how we simplify group dynamics. I’m not criticizing RPGs for this; I’m only using them to illustrate the prevalence of compartmentalized thinking. I love RPGs, and honestly, the growth of the genre in general is evident: while the Mass Effect games are not role-playing games, the series features a party-based system that has actively moved away from traditional roles. This has demonstrated that it is possible to choose from a wide and varied cast of fleshy, complex, well-written characters that serve to strengthen the story. Some may argue that older RPGs like Planescape: Torment featured equally compelling characters, and I would agree, but it too fell victim to the healer/tank/DPS trap. It is my hope that Guild Wars 2, which positions its gameplay and class structure as actively breaking down the “holy trinity” of RPGs and emphasizing the individual’s story instead, enjoys similar success and acclaim.
I cannot emphasize enough that, in writing this article, I did not intend to put down traditional RPGs, nor to discuss their design flaws or laud their strengths. It’s not about that.
Instead, I wrote this reflective piece as an invitation to all of you to to critically reflect on role definition in your world, be they gender-based, occupation-based, or culture-based. Life isn’t an RPG, and I guess it’s just surprising how many people out there tend to forget that.
