Youth in Gaming
The division between videogames and tabletop games isn't new. I'm sure some kids at some point had an argument about playing D&D when pong was RIGHT THERE. But for my generation, this conflict has gained fresh prominence, and a new, very important slant to the argument; MMOs. I've been asked time and again why I bother to keep playing tabletop games when MMOs now exist. They're simply a superior experience, I'm told, as evidenced by their relative popularity and success, and will soon replace our outdated hobby entirely.
These days, massively multiplayer games are something common enough that everyone, to some degree, understands them, or at least knows about them. Meanwhile, tabletop roleplaying games remain somewhat obscure, despite some promising steps in the right direction. Videogames in general are almost always given unconscious precedence; anyone who designs TRPGs, I'm sure, has had at least a few conversations when they realized halfway through that whoever they were talking to thought that they designed videogames. The confusion between video and tabletop games is something for another article, but the fact that this confusion exists fuels the argument about MMOs and TRPGs. More people understand MMOs and videogames better than they do TRPGs, but many also think that that those things are themselves inherently better than tabletop games are or ever have been.
Gamers who believe that MMOs are superior to, or will even overtake and replace TRPGs, have a few pretty straightforward arguments. I'm usually arguing for TRPGs in these conversations, but I had occasion to listen to some others talk it out, and these were the arguments I heard from the MMO camp. The first is that MMOs allow the game to take place in a GUI: That you can see and customize your character, that you have an animate avatar instead of just a list of stats, and maybe a badly-painted plastic statue if you're lucky.
The second common point I come across is the numbers argument. "How fun would it be to play a campaign with thousands of other players?" they ask. The idea that you can be playing in the same world with not just a handful but thousands or millions of other players is extremely attractive to some.
The third major argument I usually hear is that MMOs take place in a huge, consistent world. The "consistent" is the big part, because it comes with all these lovely little fringe benefits. There are no glossed-over NPCs, no DM railroading and, best of all, no last scene. The game is up and running whenever you want to play, and everything will be exactly as you left in, not subject to the DMs lost notes or faulty memory. Screw scheduling: in the game, yours is the only schedule that matters.
These are all valid points. The rebuttals from the tabletop folks are exactly as reasoned and valid. The first thing I usually hear is that MMOs lack, or at least only posses the shallowest elements of, the central fixture of RPGs; strong role-play elements. MMOs lack that characterization, that depth of personality and story and connection to character that a game that exists in imagination has. Role-playing, the acting out of a character in a story, is rendered empty and meaningless when you watch the exact same quest or storyline played out by the next hundred orc newbs.
Which brings us to the second argument. In a tabletop game, you sit down across from the other players in order to game. Even PbP and Chat games are just a handful of people communicating about their characters and setting. There's something in that proximity, an intimacy that comes not just from the physical closeness of the players but the sharing of imagined space. Acting out lives and struggles in each other's minds is a bonding experience, and a very different beast than playing in a static world with other anonymous toons.
The third and, I feel most compelling point is that of the inherent limits of the MMO. These games are at their core computer programs. They can only depict and allow the actions and scenes that they've been programmed to; if a designer didn't think of it, you can't do it. While a bad GM might put up some soft invisible walls every now and then, the fact remains that the only real restriction on where you can go and what you can do in a TRPG is the player's collective imagination and will. Meanwhile a simulation, no matter how advanced, is still bound by the inherent restrictions of programming.
The whole thing is a fascinating discourse (when it's intelligently discussed), and most of the time I'd be content to leave it at that. It's clear which camp I fall into, but I'm egalitarian enough to see merit in both sides. But that isn't the end of it. MMOs actively defy some of the assertions made about them in some amazing ways, and if fair play is to be given to both sides, that can't be ignored.
The critique of MMOs lacking proximity and community holds merit. It's not nearly as personal an experience as sitting and talking with a handful of friends. Or at least, it isn't by default. But it can be. Plenty of people form local guilds in-game, composed entirely of people they know and interact with in the flesh. Even people in huge, international guilds skype and voice-chat with their fellow guildies, developing friendships and romances. There may be limits on what you can do in a given game, but expansions work to widen the scope and freedom of the game. Patches and Mod-run instances help keep things fresh and interesting. But the most interesting thing for me though is how some MMOs are being used as platforms to run TRPGs.
Most large MMOs have RP servers, where remaining in character is either required or strongly suggested. This doesn't always mean much with the relative depth of a given MMO, but it goes further than that. There are people who do vampire LARPs in WoW. There is, last I checked, a running game of Nobilis in Second Life. These sorts of games aren't the rule by any means, but the fact that they exist at all is intriguing. It means that the lines between the twoÖ platforms? Genres? Isn't nearly as clear as the argument surrounding them suggests. It means that while the two are distinct, they aren't so dissimilar as one might think.
Maybe the whole argument is based on a false premise. Why are MMOs and TRPGs mutually exclusive? Why does one have to be better than the other? They're mediums through which to enjoy oneself via gameplay. TV didn't kill music, the internet hasn't destroyed TV, and MMOs won't "beat" TRPGs. Things will change, certainly, but that always has and always will be true. We get to decide what happens with our hobby, and it seems like so far, we're doing pretty good.
