Soapbox: About the Industry

Let's Go Shopping?!?

by Sandy Antunes
January 2, 2002

The question was posed to me, whether one can design a roleplaying session about shopping.

This shopping bit has an interesting side discussion, which I'll awkwardly place here at the start. This is popular turf. In fact, shopping could be seen as an important step in the journey towards the Holy Grail of Gaming. One computer gamer who does _much_ online and computer RPG playing has provided the razor "A computer game is an RPG if it allows you to go shopping".

The logic being that shopping is a way to customize and personalize the character, and escape the scripting/railroading of many non-RPGs.

When you consider how auctions have taken fire online, and how much fun window shopping and shopping-but-not-to-buy is with different substrata, it's clearly a winner of an idea. By extension, a game with a strong in-game shopping component has a greater chance to succeed with the almost-mass-market and thus falls within the scope of this column... err, I mean, and thus is a topic fully worth discussing.

So I would say shopping is easy to make fun as game and as roleplay.

Under the Brylawski school of gaming (identify decision points and consequences, and abstract everything else), shopping is not good gaming. But that approach works too hard to disassemble the pieces and not hard enough contemplating the motivation. The decisions made are not logistical, i.e. "does this match" or "do I need this", but are curiosity-based, almost childlike: "this is pretty", "this appeals to my sense", and also has appeals to one's sense of possessiveness.

Logistical shopping, I will dub (impolitely) "guy shopping". As in, "I need a new pair of pants; I go to the pants store and quickly reduce the search to the 3 most likely candidates; I try them on; 1 fits, so I buy it." That, I agree, is no fun.

Shopping as roleplay is more 'chick shopping' (I'm using the gender-based terms just because they're societal stereotypes, not to support the stereotypes themselves, so we'll call them archetypes instead).

This is "I want to go out and have fun; look, a mall!; look, neat things!; Ooh, I like this, I want to play with it and try it on; Ooh, I like this also; Ooh, this is a good deal; I'm done playing and will now go home." Note that actually purchasing something is notably missing here... its presence is, at best, merely an initial motivator to begin the shopping jaunt, but is not the reason for shopping itself.

Put into a roleplaying game, who goes shopping? Chicks? Materialists? Blink monklike isolationists? Giant electric squids? All the above? Shopping does not require a specific character type or personality. It simply requires answering "Why does he/she/it shop?" Shopping can provide resources (for the logical), cultural insight (for the intuitive), entertainment (for the non-materialists), even grist for condemnation (for the righteous).

So what "skills" are needed for shopping? I'd say that 'bargaining', for one, is not primary. Bargaining is good for buying, but not for shopping, and I believe I've made the two distinct enough here. At best, a bargain role would occur at the end of the shopping roleplay session, to wrap up the final cost (if indeed anything was bought).

"Credit rating" would be useful in so much as it would set up which sort of stores one might frequent (and perhaps, have access to, at the high end)... so it applies only as a player background aspect, really.

Important skills would be things like "spot hidden", "detect lie" (for interacting with salespeople), and, depending on the type of shopping, varied character-based details like "history" (if going antiqueing) or "artistic talent" (if looking for a bold new fashion).

Moving to the Costikyan/maguffin school, this branch of gaming involves reliance upon opposition to generation tension, usually centered around a maguffin. This can be worked into the framework of the roleplaying shopper. But first we must realize the point of shopping is not to find the maguffin, because we've already set up that shopping isn't about a specific item goal.

Which also means there's no competing force; shopping is a sensational experience, not a goal-oriented activity (which is why I would say it's the ideal roleplaying experience!) By the same token, it's not chess-like in nature, and pawns aren't required.

In fact, because rpging so often involves conflict (players versus the world), shopping is one of the few 'safe places' where characters can interact with a world in a non-threatening place. So putting it into the framework of adversarial reduces its usefulness as a roleplaying activity. Opposition is not required for roleplay, and in fact the excessive use of opposition can stifle roleplay (by shifting it entirely to a tactical/problem solving experience).

That said, the maguffin is highly useful from the GM's point of view, in that the maguffin is something the GM can use to segue the shopping experience into the campaign as a whole. The shopping can be the environmental framework into which a skilled GM introduces the maguffin and the adversarial aspects, to lead into the adventure proper.

Case in point, the adventure might concern a search for lost relics. But while in Egypt, they stop to do some shopping. Lo, in the bazaar, while shopping, one of the artifacts might fortuitously be available for sale... perhaps with other bidders, or people waiting for a quiet moment to steal it.

So here again, shopping is an environment and an activity around which game elements can be put. It does mean the roleplaying scenario isn't about shopping, anymore than a roleplaying session is _about_ combat, even when a firefight is the main focusing incident that occurs. The game is more than a set scene or single idiom, and it's the interweaving of different activities (not all with a linear point) that makes for a more rich session.

So the challenge is really to the GM, to realize that shopping is like tourism: it's a framework of activity that is pleasurable unto itself, that also can provide a launching point for more conventional game-like activities.

In a sample case, imagine a roleplaying session where the characters are in a strange land, and walk into a store. Is the enjoyment in finding bargains? No, it is in seeing neat things that the characters had never encountered before, trying new experiences, and interacting with a non-threatening local (the shopkeeper, in a decidedly useful unadversarial role). Into this, the GM can insert a maguffin for extra fun, but the focus remains the simple joy of shopping.

In the end, isn't roleplaying always about exploring an environment while wearing character colored glasses? Whereas gaming is about either competition (external) or solving puzzles (internal). And roleplaying gaming is therefore the mix of the two.

"Only shopping"? I think not.