Role-playing games (RPGs) are an excellent vessel for escapism. For many of us, playing games is partly because we want to shed our real-life identities and take on the role of someone else. RPGs give us absolute freedom to be whoever we want— whether we’re an explorer for Constellation or a simple turnip farmer in Pelican Town, booting up an RPG is a chance to escape into a new life.
But there is a certain uneasiness inherent in RPGs, a sort of Truman syndrome that comes with the fact that you’re not really playing as a different person in a different world. In reality, you are engaging with an experience that was hand-crafted by a game company, a team of perhaps hundreds of people, all working to build an experience around you rather than allowing you to forge your own destiny. Certainly, a good RPG will give the player plenty of options. Still, it is very hard to shake the subconscious feeling (nay— objective fact) that the dungeons were built for you to beat, the quests were built for you to complete, and literally, everyone else in the entire world is just standing around offscreen waiting for you to come talk to them.
This is where MMORPGs come in. The idea that we can take on new identities while surrounded by other people doing the same is cool, right? No matter how much RPG developers claim that their worlds are “living, breathing ecosystems” (whatever that means), machines can never substitute for real people. NPCs will always feel like NPCs. So perhaps roleplaying with fellow humans could offer a unique experience for one seeking escapism.
However, having spent years of my life engaging in proper multiplayer experiences that brand themselves as “Serious RP,” I’m going to make a controversial argument: roleplaying with other people in a massively multiplayer environment is almost always extremely boring.
Put down the pitchforks. Yes, all gamers in the MMO world have radically different backgrounds and experiences with roleplaying, but I think it’s worth getting everyone in on the ground floor with this one. Let’s imagine ourselves as brand new players on an RP server in some hypothetical MMO game.
“No mounts, please. Bruce isn’t lore-friendly in this guild.”
What it’s like to join an RP server
It doesn’t matter what game you’re playing, whether it’s World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, or even less mainstream multiplayer RP experiences like Roblox or Rust. The experience of joining a new roleplay server for the first time will, more often than not, follow a basic pattern.
First, you will join a fresh server looking to tell an exciting, dynamic story with other players. You’ll come up with a new and exciting character— often with pages of compelling backstory, a cool and badass appearance, and/or an edgy character name like “Scar Machete” or something. You’ll load into the world, take your first steps, and set out to find some other players. Excitement will build within you as you imagine all the fabulous adventures that lie in your future. You’ll be busy fantasizing about your first encounter with another player when, finally, you run into them. But when you approach them, try to speak, pull a crossbow on them, or do something else dramatic, something surprising happens. You are ignored. And holy crap, does this ever get boring.
You will proceed to hop from person to person, trying to involve yourself in a story. Whether you’re butting into conversations, using emotes to get people to come talk to you, or even just following other groups around, you’ll find it extremely hard to generate some story or gameplay for yourself. In order for you to actually experience any kind of roleplay, you require people’s attention— and human attention is a notoriously difficult thing to get a hold of.
How to make multiplayer roleplay work
The After The Flash series is one of Roblox’s most popular roleplay IPs. Image: Smithingson via Wikia (CC-BY-SA)
In-game narrative design, there’s a concept called a “plot hook”. These are events within the game world that are built to intrigue the player.
If you want to engage in a story, your best bet is generally to come up with a plot hook yourself. This requires creativity. You are no longer having a story told to you and making decisions based on prompts from the game designers, you are designing the story for yourself. To make the most of an RP server, you must pick your own goals and try your best to make the other players characters in your story.
I remember one time when I was about 13 years old I was playing a Roblox RP game (this was well before Roblox IPO’d and became cool again) called After the Flash. It’s a game set in a post-apocalyptic world that suffers from all the aforementioned barriers that new players face in trying to roleplay. After many hours of playing, I finally got lucky. I was on a server with the right kinds of people, and at the right time, I proclaimed that I was starting a new bandit group called “the Reapers”. I told the other players that I was on a mission to destroy the main city in the wasteland of Hawaii, and at least some of them found my story compelling.
I spent the next few hours roaming the wasteland with my new friends, getting to know them, and developing a reputation for the Reapers. Even though I eventually had to log off and leave the gang behind, it taught me that you have to make your own fun in roleplay settings without pre-determined plot hooks.
But indeed, the people who design and run MMO RP servers aren’t stupid. They understand that if you just chuck a bunch of gamers into a server together, they’re not likely to develop a rich and immersive plot together. In order to keep players engaged, RP admins create their own plot hooks: they put on “events”.
Events are great. Or at least they can be. They are pre-scheduled (or sometimes spontaneous) experiences that the server’s higher-ups put together. These omnipotent narrators can use tools to tell stories of their creation that concern the entire server; anything from a murder mystery to a massive siege of a major fortress. But these plot hooks are top-down— and this comes with its problems.
The RP oligarchy problem
The problem with top-down multiplayer experiences (and, yeah, top-down organizations more generally) is that the people organizing them tend to put themselves in positions of power within the story— they make themselves main characters. To their credit, they kind of have to do this. But I have personally seen far too many RP servers where admins use their massive platform and player base to make themselves badass Generals and Jedi Masters who made the real decisions and ultimately dictated the story on their own.
Whether it’s a privately owned server run by a friend group of admins or a public server with a handful of highly influential veterans, the power structures inherent in multiplayer role-playing games make it difficult for new players to get meaningfully involved in the high-level story. You’re not the overlord commanding his armies to storm the enemy base— you’re the footsoldier. And you’ll probably get sniped about 3 minutes into the battle.
As a newbie in an RP server, if you want to experience a story without being forced to make it yourself, you have no choice but to fall into line. You’re not the main character, and things will happen at you. You will be given instructions that you have to follow. You will be given your rank and position in whatever faction you join, you will sink into the masses, and you will become a cog in the grand vision of your server’s oligarchs.
Is that a bad thing?
The joy of being no one
There’s something to be said for MMOs that lets you be a cog in a machine. Image: Siege Camp
Single-player RPGs not only thrust you into a new life and a new world, but they also thrust you into a narrative (or possibly many stories) where your character is the star. The chosen one. You experience a story that is so big and so world-shattering that every character in the game’s universe, from the most powerful kings to the lowliest shopkeepers, has an inherent obsession with you. They need to have an obsession with you. The story doesn’t work otherwise.
But as I said, after going through dozens of encounters and side quests, RPGs can make many people (myself included) feel like they’re on The Truman Show. It honestly gets really tedious really fast.
So, for all the criticisms I just made of the traditional RP server format, I’d like to end with this: being a nobody like in Foxhole) is kind of awesome. When you’re in an event with your guild or just standing around the base during the server’s off-peak hours, there’s a sense of bliss in the knowledge that what you do and say doesn’t really matter. The fate of the universe is not on your shoulders. You are not, nor can you be, the main character.
RPGs of all kinds are excellent vessels for escapism. But the reason we seek escapism is to get away from the stresses of daily life. And maybe a predictable (if perhaps a bit boring) multiplayer RP experience is the best way to indulge this.
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Roleplaying is hard, y'all
