Micromanagement and the RPG

Welcome to the first blog of All's Fair in Love and Score! Here I hope to openly discuss trends, ideas, and current events that come up in the video game industry. Sometimes these posts may come from my personal experience (limited as it may be), other times they may be important news stories that I find from external sources, or maybe I just became inspired by a really good song. Either way, we're here and we game. Deal with it.

So, into the abyss we willingly fling ourselves!



I just finished my first quarter of my first year of college and everything is really exciting and new and shiny, and the best thing about college so far is that you play a LOT of video games. And as everyone knows video games are the easiest way to make friends. So now I have a bunch of new people I can discuss video games with who have their own views. It's a really great way to get some perspective. ANYWAYS...

One day I was discussing with one of these new friends about a game he should play when he tells me that he hates RPGs. He absolutely can't stand playing RPGs. I was dumbstruck! How could someone not like such a large and accessible part of the video game genre?!

So I decide in my 'brilliant' mind to call him out on it,
"But you like Pokemon! How is that not an RPG."
"But that's diff-", he starts to retort. He looks at me like a dinosaur in the headlights of an oncoming truck, and quickly returns to the fight.
"Pokemon doesn't deal with numbers." He returns. Proud to have found the words he was looking for.

Peeved to be losing the argument and failing to sell him on the greatness that is the RPG genre I begin to pull out the big guns, "What about Fallout 3? That is a fantastic game with colorful characters and [most importantly] guns, it isn't even turn based."
"Nope," he shrugs, "I don't like having to deal with so many different stats and numbers." Now, I finally gave up and let it rest there, but I couldn't see how someone could just turn down a game like Fallout 3 when they spend their time playing games like Pokemon and Half Life 2. Fallout seems like a natural jump to make between those two!

But then I start to realize what he means. It started to become clear how much micromanagement there is in the American RPG, especially compared to the plug and play nature of Japan's cute and cuddly counterparts, but I didn't fully understand until the other day, when I recently discovered a 'new' game.

Dragon Age: Origins. A game that is NEW in the sense that it came out a month ago, even though it is a classically paced and set game--
I felt ready, I had just spent the better half of the day playing World of Warcraft so I felt that I was primed for a classic Bioware RPG experience like Dragon Age. I watched the ridiculous character models dance on by in their silly little storylines, and I laughed aloud while reading the snarky answer paths to the NPCs questions (however, never choosing them, lest I be judged poorly by the NPC. I don't want my virtual mother to think that she raised a soulless punk-demon for a son!) But then we started to get into the gameplay. It took me a few fights to figure out that the {X} button was the 'make things die' button and that the rest of the face buttons were saved as 'make things die faster' buttons and from there it seemed like we were on our way to saving the castle from it's aggressors... Until I leveled up, that is.

DING. [bathed in light]

Oh nice, now I can be stronger right?
Not yet.
First you have to put in your attribute points, then put in your talent point and your skill point, don't forget to check your armor because you have new socks and swords and knickerbockers, and you can't forget to check your allies gear to make sure that their pants are shiny (but not as shiny as yours), then you have to check your enemies gear, the NPCs gear, and the game designer's gear. Vendor the leftover crap, check on Lord Sauron, eat an apple, AND design a rhythm-platformer game set in Prussia during the Austro-Hungarian war.

And you have to do that every level.















Now, I have to say that this does become tedious and nagging - not enough for me to put the game down, because it is a funtasticaly delicious game. But it allowed me to reflect on other games whose stat-building systems got on my nerves:
Final Fantasy X was a big one for me.
The 'magic orb' system WAS unique but very frustrating. So much so that it is top on my list for "Games I got halfway through but still don't really feel like picking back up again"
The other obvious game is World of Warcraft, where, when you aren't grinding, your micromanaging your stats and your items. Luckily, you don't need a brain to do any of this since you can just copy the equipment, talents, and stats of someone better than you.

My experience with Dragon Age, FFX, and WoW really showed me what my friend meant when he said that he didn't like having to manage stats in his video games. I mean, I love that part and I think a lot of other people do to (Or they do a really good job pretending that they do, I'M ON TO YOU!). There is a reason that Fallout 3 was "Game of the Year" last year. And I think that this dislike of the micromanagement aspects of these video games, and spending a lot of time outside of fighting just to make sure your person is wearing the shiniest pair of pants, comes from the fact that video games are an escapism. And if my friend wants to escape real life, that means, as a computer science major aspirer, he needs to GET AWAY FROM NUMBERS: Pokemon? If your number is bigger than their number, then the little number dies. You level up? All of the numbers are crunched for you. You want to influence the numbers and get the shiniest pants for your Pokemon? Just kill a bunch of a certain shaped Pokemon. (That's EV training, the bane of all existence!)

So now I can see how my friend doesn't like Fallout 3 and how he doesn't want to play Dragon Age. But he will spend a lot of time playing Pokemon, DotA, and Half Life. It's not because he thinks he is some self-righteous prick with a stick up his butt (but let's not get started on the DotA and HoN fanbase on our FIRST blog 'see image'). It's because he likes to have FUN when he plays video games. And where I find trying to get my speech stat all the way to 100 so I can make people bend to my will, very enthusing. He would sooner try playing Frogger on a freeway.