For Granted

For Score

by Aeon
Jul 30,2002

For Score

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
- Abraham Lincoln, "The Gettysburg Address"

Abraham Lincoln was wrong; all men are not created equal. Well, at least not totally. Equal in some respects, certainly. Equal in potential, perhaps. But entirely equal? Far from it. Take any two people and you can see the inequality begin to stack up. We have different amounts of melanin in our skin. We have different amounts of pigment in our eyes and hair. We have different blood types, different weights, different heights. Different does not equal equal. A 7 foot tall, 350 pound football player is definitely not equal to his 5 foot tall, 100 pound wife, and anyone who says different needs to get their head out of the hole it's stuck in. Even if you take "creation" to be literal, and push things back to the moment of conception, you're already adrift in a sea of different genes and chromosomes. People are different, unequal. And nowhere is this made more obvious than in the world of Role-Playing Games.

If RPGs were "dedicated to the proposition that all (characters) are created equal," then there would be little point to playing the game. Everyone would have the same attributes, the same skills, the same race and class, the same advancement path. But RPGs reflect real life, albeit a reflection cast in a funhouse mirror, and it's that glimpse of ourselves, with big heads and big feet and cotton candy on our faces, that makes the game worth playing. We are not equal. We are different. And we know this in RPGs because we keep score. Not four score, but for score.

Whether it's in the guise of numbers, letters or short descriptive phrases, all characters have scores, and unlike the characters they mathematically describe, all scores are equal, all scores have one thing in common.

Value.

All About Value

Hold it now and watch the hoodwink
As I make you stop, think, you'll think you're looking at Aquaman
I summon fish to the dish, although I like the Chalet Swiss
I like the sushi 'Cause it's never touched a frying pan
Hot like wasabi when I bust rhymes, big like Leann Rimes
Because I'm all about value
- The Barenaked Ladies, "One Week"

Value. It's a little word, but it means a whole lot. It's packed with value, one might say somewhat redundantly. Five letters, two syllables, three vowels, two consonants. First syllable is the name of a guy named Kilmer, second syllable sounds like a sheep, or the 21st letter of the alphabet, or the person reading this article right now. And it means...

Uh...

Well, that's not so simple. For starters, let's look at some places you see the word used every single day:

extra value meal            face value              family values

great value                 highly valuable         inherent value          

market value                old-fashioned values    sentimental value   

shareholder value           shock value             value judgment

It's truly a wonder of the English language that a single word can be used in such contradictory ways. On the one hand, value represents something valuable (duh), cherished, treasured. If something has high value, it often means it probably cost a lot of money, or is at least worth a lot (as in the case of the antique vase you find at the garage sale for a quarter). Market value, shareholder value... these represent something that's got the potential to make someone wealthier. But as our stockholder is chatting on his valuable cell phone in his highly valuable BMW, he gets hungry, and as he asks his stockbroker to cash in some of his high value stocks, he pulls into the drive-thru at McDonald's and orders a Big Mac, Large Fries and a Coke.

An Extra Value Meal.

The meal is valuable not because it's expensive, or worth a lot of money, or highly treasured. No, it's valuable because it represents the exact opposite. It's a lot of food (about 1500 calories worth, in fact, another set of values entirely) for a very little bit of money. It's cheap. It's a value because it's not valuable. If you surf the aisles of K-Mart looking for a Blue Light Special, you're not going to find a valuable diamond necklace, but you might find a good value.

All of this, of course, leaves out the third cluster of values in the above list, which in a way merge the two disparate, antonymical values into one. And it is accomplished in this way: value represents something intangible, something personal, something that cannot exist outside of the person seeking or believing in the value. Family values mean... what? Something akin to good old-fashioned, traditional values, perhaps something along the lines of the sentimental value your grandmother's locket holds for you. But altogether indefinable.

Which is why it's strange (or perhaps perfectly appropriate) that a fourth meaning represents just the opposite: specific, concrete, nigh-universally accepted meanings. Those numbers beside your attributes on your RPG character sheet are values. Nines and twelves and eighteens and twenty-threes and... hey, how did your half-orc get a 23 Dexterity? Let me see that character sheet, buddy.

Value comes from 14th century Middle English by way of Middle French, from the Latin "valuta" and "valutus," the past participle of "valere," which means "to be worth," or "to be strong". This same root, "valere," also gives us the German "waltan," which gives way to the Old English "wieldan," which gives way to "welden" and, you guessed it, "wield." Have value, wield control. He who has the gold, makes the rules. Value, Wield. As in, to wield power, or to wield influence, or to wield a sword.

Or a Dwarven Waraxe, as the case may be.

The Boy Who Fought Your Battles

I'm the boy who fought your battles
And I'm the man who won your wars
Is it over, have you used me
I'm no value anymore?
- Cher, "Fit to Fly"

In Tim O'Brien's "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," part of The Things They Carried, the narrator describes how a group of green berets collected human tongues while in Vietnam. "Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather," he describes them, stitched together to form a necklace around the dainty neck of a young girl dressed in white and pink, a girl who's joined the grizzled vets and become part of the jungle itself. The tongues are a trophy, a measure of value, a means of marking things, of keeping tally. One point, one more girl in the sack, one more kill, one more tongue, one more score. Score, as in to scratch or incise or cut (out?), as in a tongue. The tongues are for keeping score. For Score.

The higher your score, the higher you advance in a video game. You become a better soldier, a better galactic warrior, and the score is a means of proving it, representing that you're better than you were before. More valuable. Scores are values and they represent value. You get the highest score, you win. In some cases, as in the case of any RPG which rewards kills with experience points, or improvement points, or whatever points, your score also represents your level. If you gain enough points, you go up a level. Kill enough orcs, and you become 2nd level. Become 20th level (by raising your experience) after killing orcs and you can gain enough power to go and level (raze to the ground) the entire orc village. The concept of advancement, level, score, and value (wield) is rooted in war, in conflict, in violence. Tolkien knew that. He saw war firsthand. He knew the score.

"Two!" said Gimli, patting his axe. He had returned to his place on the wall.
"Two?" said Legolas. "I have done better, though now I must grope for spent arrows; all mine are gone. Yet I make my tale twenty at the least. But that is only a few leaves in a forest."

Two orcs is worth 300 Experience points. I know this because my D&D Dungeon Master's Guide tells me so. Orcs are valued at 150 a piece (300 times 1/2 for their Challenge Rating). If Gimli were a 1st level Fighter, he would need to kill 5 more Orcs and he would go up a level. He'd get more skill points, more hit points, and better saving throw values. His value would increase. And you can't just grunt and shrug and say "Pshaw, that's just D&D. Everyone knows that D&D is like that. My game isn't like that." Right. Pull the other one.

"Twenty-one!" cried Gimli. He hewed a two-handed stroke and laid the last Orc before his feet. "Now my count passes Master Legolas again..."
"Good!" said Legolas. "But my count is now two dozen. It has been knife work up here."

I'm sure there are games out there that don't have a chapter called "Combat," or at least one that deals almost exclusively with Combat, but I don't own any, and none of my friends do, and I have a hard time thinking of one off the top of my head that I may have brushed up against in a bookstore once long ago. RPGs are, for the most part, all about combat and killing. You kill, you get rewarded. Sometimes you're the good guys killing the bad guys, and sometimes you're just the guys killing the other guys, but it's the killing that increases your values. Kill beastly fido. Kill kill kill.

"Forty two, Master Legolas." (Gimli) cried. 'Alas! My axe is notched;: the forty-second had an iron collar on his neck. How is it with you?"
"You have passed my score by one," answered Legolas. "But I do not grudge you the game, so glad am I to see you on your legs."

And so it goes. Kill to increase value. Also, don't die; die and you stop gaining value. If you are lucky enough to be resurrected, sometimes you lose a level, or some experience. You lose value. So to increase in value, you kill others. Be killed yourself, and you decrease in value. It's not enough merely to survive; your value remains unchanged in that case. No, you must kill others. In games where you play a vampire or a werewolf or somesuch, you literally kill to devour the essence of those that you kill. Like some Immortal Highlander, you kill to absorb the power of others. You steal their scalp, or you take their tongue, and you make a totem out of a piece of your fallen enemy. You take their value, and you add it to your own.

And sometimes, you take their stuff too.

Check, Please!

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.
- Gloria Steinem

The word check is most often used in today's society to refer to a small piece of colored paper which represents a value, an amount of money stored digitally in a computer that stands for a number of other small pieces of colored paper, which in turn stand for an amount of gold that's stored in a vault somewhere, gold that was dug out of the ground via forced labor in extreme conditions, gold that was stolen at gunpoint and cannonpoint by privateers, gold that caused men to war with one another, gold that made such wars possible in the first place, gold that put kings on the throne and knocked them off again.

"Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold," sing Terry Pratchett's dwarves. Tolkien's dwarves sang a similar refrain when they quested to recover their treasure from Smaug in The Hobbit, as did Alberich in his quest for das Rheingold. And aside from gold, what all these dwarves have in common with one another is a propensity for violence (including the latter, who, while not overtly violent, does cause a great deal of death and misery). Dwarves carry picks because they can dig for gold with one stroke, and knock your brains out with the backswing. Gold and violence walk hand in hand. One box for your experience point value, one box for your gold value, often right next to one another.

Little wonder, then, that the word "check" (which stands for gold, remember), is derived from a Persian word which means "king," which is akin to the Greek "ktasthai," which means "to acquire" (as in wealth), and the Sanskrit "ksatra," which means "to have dominion over." He who has the check, makes the rules. If you have a king in check, you've exposed him to an attack to which he must react. If you check a player in a game of hockey or lacrosse, it means you've slammed into him to stop his motion. If there's a check in the little box next to your answer, it means that the value has been verified; in some cases, it means your value is wrong, and in other cases it means it's been validated. Do we have everything for our adventure? Rope? Check. Ten-foot pole? Check. Lots of swords and axes? Check and check. Check also means to break or crack, as in skulls.

Is that check really in the mail?

The history of using little bits of worthless things, like checks, to represent value goes way back to the dawn of human civilization, most likely originating in the Orient, in the form of things like shells (the Chinese character for "money" is a representation of a cowrie shell), bits of leather, and even as actual paper money. Lacking paper on the other end of Eurasia, people were much more fond of using bits of shiny metal to represent value. The earliest coins appeared in Asia Minor in the form of the gold/silver amalgam called electrum (and you thought Electrum Pieces were just a silly RPG device, didn't you?), and the practice of minting coins spread rapidly thereafter, with bronze, silver and, eventually, the preferred gold coins gaining more widespread popularity. These metals were chosen because they were fairly rare, and their relative rarity made them more valuable. Common = low value. Rare = high value.

Of course, once you've got two different types of coins, you throw a monkey wrench into the system of values called bimetallism, which is a standard by which a monetary unit represents a certain amount of one metal, and a certain (but different) amount of another type of metal. The relative value of the money (cowrie, or coin, or whatever) thus varies over time based on the scarcity of the metal it represents. Nowadays, it's based on countless factors, but back in the good old days it was much more clear cut, and represented real gold and silver. The British pound is called a pound because it originally represented one pound of silver. And when Nero intentionally debased gold and silver coins by minting them with less actual gold and silver content, the inflation that resulted was because there was less actual gold and silver in the coins. In other words, the coins were worth less because they had less actual inherent value.

RPG writers and designers don't often delve into the economics of their coinage (and for good reason), and this can lead to some amusing issues if you bother to question the numbers. An article on criticalmiss.com points out that the economy of the Dungeons & Dragons gold piece is quite off base if you use today's numbers when determining the value of gold. Based on the size of the gold coin used in the game's setting (page 96 of the Player's Handbook), a week in a hotel will cost 4 ounces of gold, and an ounce of ink costs 3 ounces of gold. Set the value of a gold coin at $100 an ounce, and that hotel stay costs $1200 (about $170 a night), and the ink costs $800. Ouch, babe. And, as the author is fond of pointing out, "a riding dog will set you back $15,000." That's one expensive mutt. Of course, even if you push it in the opposite direction, it's hard to make the values line up. Nowadays, you can buy ten shiny new swords on the Home Shopping Network for about $300. That's about $30 per sword. Operators are standing by. Which seems to mean that if we go by the short sword in the Player's Handbook, which goes for 10 Gold Pieces, each Gold Piece represents about 3 dollars. Fine and dandy... but now a suit of leather armor also costs $30. A mug of ale costs 12 cents. A pound of flour costs 6 cents. And poor Fido the Riding Dog now costs a much more reasonable $450.

The point is, mostly, moot, but it's an amusing excursion to take, no matter what RPG system you're looking at. Looking at the bigger picture, however, what you need to take into consideration is the fact that it's not so much what items cost, but what the coins used to buy them are worth, that makes the difference.

The gold and silver represented (literally in medieval times, and in RPG settings, and symbolically in an economy that trades paper bills and checks instead) has value, of course, because of its relative rarity. This is evident in the case of the Spanish Conquistadors, who, throughout the 16th Century, readily and greedily plundered gold in the amount of thousands of pounds a year from the Incas and Aztecs. In Spain (and all of Europe), gold was much rarer, and so an influx of valuable gold meant an increase of riches and wealth. To the Incas, who had the golden stuff lying around in carts and barrels, it had little monetary value. They built houses out of the stuff, idols and jewelry and bathtubs. It was beautiful, revered as being the very stuff of the Sun itself, but it was too plentiful to be used for money. It had value when it was used to create works of art, but it didn't have value when it was just lying around. So it was the art that had the value, not the thing itself.

The Spaniards, of course, melted it all down and turned it into ingots, which were easier to transport. Space was valuable on a ship, after all. It still is. Just ask an airline carrier which is more valuable to them - a plane with one passenger, or a plane packed solid with people. Empty seats = lost revenue. Filling the seats increases value. Nothingness, emptiness, bare space has no value; value is in how much of other valuable things it can hold. Don't use the space, and you're wasting value. And it's here, I think, that we start to see the role that value plays in today's Role-Playing Games, the role we all too often take for granted.

Nothing For Sale

To value is to create; hear this, you creators! Valuing itself is of all valued things the most valuable treasure. . . . Change of values -- that is a change of creators. Whoever must be a creator always annihilates.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I"

There's a great little throwaway scene in History of the World Part I in which a string of merchants hawk their increasingly worthless wares; the last loudly and proudly proclaims "Nothing for sale! I've got absolutely nothing for sale!" As if nothingness were something that could be sold.

Fast forward 20 years.

Much ado has been made relatively recently about the unexpected financial impact of Online RPGs such as Everquest, Asheron's Call and Diablo II, both in the real world and the virtual world of the characters within the games. In late January, stories seemed to revel in the fact that Everquest's world of Norrath had an economy comparable to the 77th largest country on earth, somewhere between Russia and Bulgaria when you looked at its per-capita GNP of $2,266. Even if you allowed that the Platinum Piece was only worth one single American penny, that still made Everquest currency more valuable than the Spanish peseta and the Japanese yen.

Diablo II has had similar financial "success," albeit more skewed towards the world of Ebay.com, and item/character trading (which Everquest players have also been involved with). Players who had already completed the game's built in storyline (including the Expansion Set's 5th Act, where you got to kill Baal), soon realized that other players who were less skilled and dedicated to such power gaming would willingly pay real money for make believe characters and magical items, saving them the time of hunting them down themselves. In-game trading soon made the Stone of Jordan ring a standard piece of currency, and even today you can find people willing to trade 10 SOJs for some item, 15 SOJs for another; ask what an item is worth and you'll likely be quoted a price in SOJs. Offline, magical items (in particular, Uniques, which are actually anything but) also get tagged with real life dollar values. A real stainless steel katana ordered from the Home Shopping Network will cost you maybe $99, but an imaginary magical Unique sword from Diablo II might very well cost you even more than that. Items might go for $100, $%200, even as high as $600 for a single, imaginary item that does not exist.

Even Wizards of the Coast is learning to cash in on this increased demand for some means of translation between real life funds and imaginary objects; their online version of Magic: The Gathering ascribes real life monetary values to the imaginary cards in your deck, allowing you (in theory) to wander into any real life game shop to (in theory) get real cash or real cards in exchange for your imaginary cards. It can only get more extensive and tangled and involved from here. And it will.

All this imaginary money (and the magical items, make-believe cards, and other pieces of these virtual fantasy economies) are really no different from the way the real world treats money nowadays. One need only look to the news to see how much imaginary money plays a role in today's economy: collapsing dot-coms, crashing stocks, corporations going bankrupt. If everyone were holding onto gold bars, they'd still be holding some amount of value in their coffers, but instead many are left with nothing. Which is, after all, what they had in the first place, except now it's less valuable nothing.

But the value of these things (characters, gold pieces, stock options, etc.) is not in the items themselves. The value is there because people want it to be there, because they share a consensual hallucination that it's there. Little rocks, bits of colored paper, or gold coins can all be money, but those pieces of money can't hold value unless we put it there. And the value can't be put there in the little empty reservoir called "money" unless it's moved there from somewhere else. Value, then, is valueless unless it's moving. There's no such thing as potential value; it can only be kinetic.

Your 50th level Diablo II Barbarian warlord is not worth a thing until you offer him up for sale on Ebay, or bring him into a game to help level up a newbie character, or even just bring him into your own single player game to tool around with, hunting magic items. In a vacuum, without anyone or anything around to use him, your character has no value, can have no value. You have to bring him off the shelf and throw him into the ring, and it's at that point when value becomes an issue, when he starts interacting with others, real and imaginary, even if the only other is you. It's neither objective nor intrinsic value; it's purely subjective, and it must be, because when there's no subjectivity around, what you have left is nothing, bits on a computer, imaginary objects in an imaginary world in a virtual realm. Nothing can't have value until you fill it up, in this case, with electrons.

In Conclusion

Thank you for volunteering to save the world. Here is a rusty sword and some tattered armor. We will sell you some arrows for 5 gold pieces each. Please save the princess! Hurry!
- Dialogue from any fantasy Role-Playing Game

Fantasy RPGs are quite fond of starting heroes out from positions of low power and pitiful wealth. You're the only one who can save the world from the evil warlord, but you only get a normal dagger and some shredded furs to wear as you head off to do battle. Watch out for those orcs! Or you're the long-forgotten heir to the throne on a quest to restore the kingdom, but you're armed only with a rusty frying pan and a duct-tape loincloth. Thanks for coming to save our city from the ravages of the dragon. How about a beer? That'll be 5 gold coins, please, in advance. Thank you, bold hero.

Of course, this is ridiculous on many levels, and we smirk out the side of our faces as we click along through the game. That's just how games are, after all. But if you take a closer look, it's clear why this sort of attitude is the case; it gives the player a challenge, gives them room to grow and advance, gives them something to do. It gives them a place to move. In Dungeons & Dragons, you start out as level 1, with limited supplies of gold, because the game is about increasing your level and gaining more gold (Oh, and Role-Playing too). If you started out at 100th level with a million gold coins, there'd be no point in playing the game. You'd already have a character that was loaded up with value, and, ironically, this would make that character valueless. He could defeat any foe, buy the entire world and make everyone his lapdog, but there'd be no point, no challenge, no potential for advancement. Once you've bowled a perfect game, you can't get a score of 301. You're done keeping score. You're done with value.

The value in RPGs, then, is kinetic, always in flux and in motion. You start out empty so you can fill yourself up with things, experiences, levels, gold, weapons, armor, friends, encounters. You start out with nothing so you can gain everything. Higher scores are more valuable, and so the struggle to attain those scores increases value, and so your scores are optimally lower to begin with, giving you room to grow. Sure, your new character has loads of values - attributes and skill numbers are values, and your starting money and equipment has value as well. If there are four members in your adventuring party, that's twice as valuable as two members (unless one is a kender). But all these starting values are meaningless until you start playing, start moving, start gaining value. The point of it all, the value, is not in the having, but in the getting, in the seeking, in the finding and gathering. 18 strength is the same as 1 if you never raise a fist in anger, and level 1 is same as level 100 if you never leave the bar, and 100 gold is the same as 0 gold if you never spend any money. Value is kinetic. It wants, no, it needs to be used, in order to exist.

In this way, RPG value is much like life itself. Before you're born, you're not alive. After you're dead, you're not alive. And if you somehow put yourself into cryogenic stasis, you're not really alive either. Life is life only when you're moving and breathing and living, only when you're kinetic. There's no such thing as potential life; either you're alive or you're not (unless you're undead, but that's for the next article). RPG characters, too, are only alive when they're alive, only useful when they're in use, only valuable when they're gaining value.

A tautology, to be certain, but one that's all too often taken for granted.

Next time: For Age (and no, it's not what you think)