"Totally Righteous, Dude!"

Today I discovered that humans could talk to sea turtles.  I met one particular sea turtle who had a lot of questions for us humans and welcomed us to ask him our own questions as well.  His name is “Crush” and he resides at Disney World on his show “Turtle Talk.”

When you enter the showroom, one wall is arrayed like a window into the open sea.  And after an introduction from the hostess, Crush comes surfing into view and begins to talk to the audience.  He talks not just to the audience in general, but to specific people in the crowd.  He asks one little girl what her name is and calls her by her name.  He asks who brought her here and she answers that her Troop Leader had done so.  And so he starts asking the Troop Leader questions too and calls the Troop Leader by name.

Crush then asks the audience, specifically the children, if they have any questions for him.  He picks the children from the crowd by describing them to the human hostess running around with a microphone.  One girl asks if he likes swimming and he proclaims that he likes swimming, but loves surfing and proceded to demonstrate by swimming around and clocking himself on the window.

The creators at Disney understand the value of a personalized experience and personal interaction.  Relying on animatrons to be hosts and hostesses on popular rides only goes so far, and so adding truly interactive sessions with Pixar characters such as Crush completely change the experience of the audience.  No longer is the experience merely a ride that everyone enjoys, but you truly feel like you’ve interacted with this strange and wondrous world of dreams comes to life.

Neverwinter Nights 2

The technology that makes it possible to truly interact with a sea turtle can one day make it possible for us to create ever more interactive games.  Games like “Neverwinter Nights” makes this attempt by allowing players to create their own campaigns, story scenarios, and combat encounters with the same tools as the developers used.  More and more games are taking this approach and allowing users access to create their own experiences and to tell their own stories and share them with others.

What I believe will replace the MMORPG will be something from the past – the MUD (multi-user dungeon).  The strength of the MUD was the ability for users to create their own content which is lacking in most MMORPGs.  Also, since the primary medium of a MUD was text, it was easy for administrators to describe anything and everything they wished within the confines of the MUD structure of “rooms.”   The power to customize a room was only limited to the imagination (and literary skills) of the writer.

I do not believe that the future of gaming lies in the ability to push yet more polygons to overcome “uncanny valley” or the perfection of “mammary mechanics” as many developers seem to push for.  I believe the future of gaming lies in giving players more access to tools to make their dreams into reality.  While there is an element of cynicism that goes with user-created content, I believe the next big evolution in gaming is pushing for the technology to create and present the imagination as close as possible to real-time:

Gamemaster: “You enter a large dark room…” (clicks a couple settings) “In the room in the corner is a pillar…” (drags) “Where 5 goblins are surrounding it…” (presses hotkey) “And they are worshipping it…” (clicks emote) “Because atop of it lies a statue of Tiamat…” (drag and drops)  “They are currently unaware of your presence…” (sets combat parameter)  “What do you do?”

Player: “I wish to declare myself their new god!” (presses a “Diplomacy” skill check – scores perfectly)

Gamemaster: “For some reason…  They believe you…” (pressing emote button)

And yes…  Someone did pull off that stunt in a game and the gamemaster let him get away with it – simply out of sheer humor factor and lending itself to a great story.

C-3PO and R2-D2 banter while you wait

One of my favorite rides of all time (despite George Lucas’s attempts to ruin it) is “Star Tours.”  In the ride, you go on a scheduled tour of the Star Wars universe and thanks to the bumbling efforts of your ship’s pilot droid, you end up in mortal danger, culminating in taking part in the Battle of Yavin (the end of Episode IV).

One of the great things they do to set up the ride is an elaborate set up in the waiting line to make it seem like you really have stepped into a real space port.  Animated droids are busy repairing ships and making comments to one another and it is humorous to listen to the conversations going on while waiting in line.

For an adult, a certain amount of childlike suspension of disbelief is asked for.  You know that millions of people have taken this ride before and millions after you will as well.  But thanks to a clever introduction, set up and follow through, the disbelief makes it all part of the fun.

Computer games, and especially MMORPGs, also request a certain level of suspension of disbelief.  In the World of Warcraft, the human campaign has a plotline where a particularly troublesome bandit named “Van Cleef” must be executed and the player must take the head back to the Castle as proof of his defeat.

Van Cleef has how many heads?

I found it particular amusing that after Van Cleef’s defeat, my entire party was able to collect multiple heads from Van Cleef’s body, so that we could all complete the quest.  These are things that you allow as part of the fun of a game, but it required too much suspension for me to disbelieve the “amusement park” feel of an MMORPG.

Single player games do a better job of treating the player as special and unique in the world.  In an MMORPG, the plot movers and shakers are people like Thrall and Arthas – computer controlled characters.  You, the player, and the 8 million others players are simply the errand runners in this elaborate amusement park.

Until the tools for creating very unique roleplaying experiences in a short amount of time have been perfected, the only place I can find great storytelling for a group of people is in a table-top roleplaying game.  For as great computer games are, they cannot match what humans are able to create with the power of their imaginations.

In one campaign that I was running as a gamemaster, the players had defeated and captured a female drow (dark elf) bard.  Being a party of heroes, they could not outright kill a defenseless and defeated enemy but as a bard, she had the power to seduce and control the party through the sound of her voice.  So the party kept her under close surveillance.

A Captured Drow

Because of this awkward situation, she took advantage and became a foil for the group.  At every opportunity, she spoke and made the party second-guess itself, and verbally berated them, denigrated them, and humiliated them in gleefully vicious word play.  It became so intense that the cleric, the “holy warrior”, of the group wanted to kill her.  To the intolerant cleric, a drow is, after all, born evil.

One of the players created a monk who spent his days mastering his body through meditation and the practice of martial arts.  He was the crown prince of an kingdom and threw away his fame and fortune in an disagreement with his father over the need to expand the empire.  The monk was sitting and meditating while the party was resting from battle when the beautiful drow sat next to him and asked him a question.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“That my body, this existence, is merely an illusion,” he replied.  The player was using Buddhism as the basis of his monk’s philosophy.

Wryly she asked, “So… Nothing is real?”

“Everything is merely an illusion.  There is no difference between me and the rock I am sitting on.  Nothing is real.”

And with that, the drow coyly drew herself close to the monk.  Being a bard, her features and charm were as much a part of her magic as her voice.  She let the opening on her drow-styled bodice drop to give the young monk a subtle vision of the secrets her clothing hid in curves and mystery and beauty and turning her head, let him brush against her delicate neck.

She planted a deep kiss on the monk’s lips, and after drawing a breath, she parted from him with a deep blush and said, “Tell me I’m not real.”  And with that, she walked away.

The scene I described was not planned by me or the player.  It came and went as a flash in my mind, and the scene was played perfectly by the player whose character was thenceforth flustered and unable to really contend with the drow philosophically or psychologically.  It was her intention to demoralize the monk, one of the toughest warriors of the group.

Instead of simply rolling dice or using rules to accomplish it, we played out a scene that is forever immortalized as a unique and unrepeatable story among friends.  Something that a computer-generated “amusement park” game could never beat.

In gamer terms, “Roleplaying Games” can mean many things. For some, it means games like “Fallout 3” or “The Witcher.” For others, it means something like “Final Fantasy” or “Blue Dragon.” And then, for the select few, it means something like “Dungeons and Dragons.”

I have been playing table-top roleplaying games like “Dungeons and Dragons” for over 16 years. I even owned a first edition copy of AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) which was passed to me from my brother.  I do have a certain level of pedigree for my geekdom and I’m very thankful that my wife indulges them.

If you haven’t sat around a table with some of your best friends with sheets of paper and some polyhedral dice as your only tools to fuel your imagination, you have missed out on something special.

A friend of mine once said that games like “World of Warcraft” will make table-top gaming obsolete. And I will emphatically say that this is far from the truth.

Dwarven Metal Dice

For those who have never played a table-top game before, the “gamemaster” takes the place of the computer. It is the “gamemaster” who tells the players the scenario, comes up with challenges and story plot points for the session. And the players play within a certain restriction of rules and chances which is represented by the paper and dice. And because it is a human being who is running the game, there is no way that a computer can ever beat what a live human storyteller can do.

In the first podcast of “Shakespeare and Dragons” the speaker talks about the situation where the beginning gamemaster creates a really neat and elaborate dungeon where the players are supposed to have their adventure. This can also represent a whole team of developers creating a computer game who have a lot more time, skill and programming talent than the single teenage gamemaster. But then it poses the question of, “What if the players decide never to go in the dungeon and instead go start robbing villagers instead?”

Now… The beginning gamemaster is often at a loss because he has no idea how to bring the players to the story that he wants to tell. So the podcast goes on to tell how a more seasoned gamemaster can easily bend to the thieving players and tell a new kind of story, of freedom and of power, than the heroic adventuring that he initially set them upon. But the computer programmer and game designer is simply at a loss. The only way to really take into account plot derailment is simply to disallow it to “railroad” the plot.

No matter how hard you try, your computer won't let you kill this guy

How many times in a game have you wanted to wander around the city scape, only to be limited by an arbitrary map that “magically” blocks taking alternate paths? Sometimes it blocked by a structure or debris. Sometimes it is instant death. And sometimes, it is literally an invisible wall. But those are only physical blocks that prevent movement. Even in so-called “sandbox” games like Grand Theft Auto, you can’t kill important plot characters whenever and however you want to. But if it was a human who was running the story, you could.

One of the major issues in “sandbox” games is the idea of consequence. I’ve run roleplaying games of dark nihilism like “Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0.” which is a game in which the setting is a society like Grand Theft Auto except applied on a massive social scale. Players can murder strangers on the street with little consequence (or so it can be played.)

But as a gamemaster, I don’t let the players simply use the “services” of a nameless prostitute. I know her name. I create her story. And I can show her humanity by what I describe in their encounter. I describe the scars on her body from past abuses. I describe the drugs she takes to numb the emptiness she feels inside while she performs degrading acts simply to make money. I can tell the story so the players feel the the consequences of their actions, whereas a computer program is not able to custom tailor the story it tells.

Computer games will never make table-top roleplaying games obsolete. If anything, I think more people should play them and realize what they are missing and the stories they could be creating by thinking “outside the box.”