Nothing’s changed in here, I see. On the one hand you lambaste me for having the temerity to say that You Ain't All That, and accuse me of condescension, while in the same paragraph dismissing my preferred style of play as passive and just seeking 'awesome' moments, like Pavlov's dog. If you don’t recognize your own elitism, and the dismissive way you’re categorizing other players, I guess I can’t make you. So whatever.
Some people want "RPGs" to stimulate them intellectually, and in the process stimulate them emotionally. I get that. But I'd rather a game stimulate me emotionally without having to go through a bunch of mental exercises first, as I can and do get intellectual stimulation elsewhere. When a game becomes all about HOW the material is presented rather than the material itself, I tend to lose interest quickly, because that's not what it's all about for me. I’m even planning to give DAO another try, since so many people have said such good things about it, but the abstract wait-and-read conversation method just doesn’t feel natural for me. It takes me to an intellectual place, not an emotional one.
I've had a similar experience with pen-and-paper games. One of my groups embraced 4th Edition D&D, while another did not. I personally did not see a huge difference between the two systems and I don’t really have a preference for either. It's just a set of parameters, it's not the game itself. What matters is the actual content, the story, the characters, etc. If the quality of the story and characters is lacking, that's one thing, but it's not the WAY they're presented that is at fault. That's just architecture, and you can pretty much do anything within the confines of any robust architecture.
A lot of you seem to think that the voiced protagonist is the problem, while I posit that the actual underlying dissatisfaction stems not from the method, but the implementation. If there were 5 different male Hawke voices, and the ability to digitally raise and lower the pitch and resonance of each voice, would people be complaining as much? If you could have your own voice mastered and used as a seamless text-to-speech voice that actually sounded like a legitimate voice acting performance, would you still complain? If you could assign a set of nuanced parameters to guide a voice acting performance in a gameplay options screen, wouldn’t that be a wonderful addition? Sure, right now such ideas are pie in the sky, but they won’t always be. It’s just a matter of technology.
There's much disparagement of the idea that reading and math in a video game should be minimized, but once again, I find this condescending and belittles people who want to have a less abstract, more visceral experience in a game. In a real combat situation, you aren't comparing a bunch of numbers to your opponent's numbers. That's one of my biggest critiques about pen-and-paper RPGs, actually. The combat systems are unavoidably stat-driven, and it's a very abstract system that doesn't feel realistic from a visceral standpoint. I try to compensate by describing the actions of my character in combat, and his or her intent, before rolling the dice, and I also try to have as much of a knowledge of whatever system I'm using to make decisions and resolve die rolls quickly. But it's still a very unwieldy system that doesn't feel at all like heightened state of fight-or-flight the way I imagine real combat is. There’s zero adrenaline during combat at a pen-and-paper table.
It strikes me that the crux of the issue for some is that the voiced protagonist firmly establishes the character as a third-person character, rather than a first-person character. Some wish to inhabit their character more strongly. I get that, which is why I play pen-and-paper games. For the duration of my time at the table, I become Paolo de Luuc, Mahaelis Kreigen, Zdeneka Viridiani, Handsome Devil, Cathexis Aurore or whoever I’m playing. Oftentimes I will create detailed and realistic illustrations of my character, to help the other players and myself visualize how he or she would look, and often that gives me more to work with when I’m creating their personality and psychology, their mindset. That’s the most immersive RPG experience I can think of. But unvoiced protagonists in third-person video games aren’t at all the same thing to me. I’m just picking from a series of options. In a pen-and-paper game, I come up with the options, and I SAY ALOUD what my character says. And I do it in real time. THAT is imagination, that is creativity. Providing your own voice acting in a computer RPG, either aloud or in your head, really isn’t an exercise in creativity or imagination. If anything, it IS an exercise in immersion, but I find myself quite “immersed” in the games with voiced protagonists, whereas with unvoiced protagonists, I really don’t. That does not make me mentally deficient, unimaginative or intellectually inferior, it only makes me in favor of direct emotional stimuli rather than abstract emotional stimuli.
So yeah, maybe I DON’T like “RPGs” as they are defined by established genre conventions. So let’s just come up with a new name for whatever type of game Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age 2 are. And let’s try to find one that doesn’t belittle the people who like it, shall we?
Nah, really, I only look like you because they don't have a nice owl-avatar, and Cauthrien I can live with.
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:D:D
