Tag Archives: video games

Seven Benefits of Roleplaying Games

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A student at the University of Minnesota Duluth has written a column for the Duluth News Tribune implying that video games, or perhaps roleplaying games, or perhaps first-person shooters, or perhaps tabletop games, or people who dress up in costumes to portray characters, are bad.

I’m honestly not sure which of these elements Jo Cooley objects to, because she (or he) seems to conflate them all together.

Overall, I believe the point of her column is that Duluth does not need a gaming convention. She cites one study purporting to link video games and violence, but seems to believe that video games are the focus of Indiana’s Gen Con. They are not. Gen Con focuses on other types of games–tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering and maybe even Risk and Settlers of Cataan.

Gaming (and I don’t mean gambling) is a huge umbrella term that covers a wide, wide variety of hobbies, from the strategy-wargaming to the roleplaying dice games to LARPing to the many types of videogaming.

Each gaming community is different. It’s just like football fans, who have their own communities dedicated to glorifying the Packers or the Vikings. Just like baseball fans, people get involved at different levels, some just watching a game now and then and others memorizing reams of stats and participating in a fantasy league (which is a form of roleplaying, by the way).

Videogames cover a wide range of topics and the larger, ongoing games have their own individualized communities. Star Wars: Knights of the Republic attracts a different type of gamer than EVE Online does.

Painting every gamer with the same brush is just like making a comment about “the media.” Almost nothing can be said about “the media,” which includes the head honchos of Disney and the small-town reporter who covers high school football games, as well as people who make TV shows, movies and books. The term is so wide it’s useless.

The same is true of “gamers.” I’m a gamer. I do not often play first-person shooters. I do not like strategy games or games with extreme gore. I don’t even usually play more than one video game at a time–I dedicate myself to just one, until I leave that behind for another one.

Currently I’m playing Guild Wars 2, and by the way, the plotline involves saving the world from evil, not being evil. In fact, most videogames I’ve played have been like that. There are a few out there in which you’re the bad guy, and a few more in which you’re allowed to make moral choices yourself, yes, but generally people seem to prefer being the good guy.

This brings me to the benefits of roleplaying–pretending to be a character in a story, either in a video game or in a tabletop game–and yes, I do believe there are some.

  • Roleplayers learn about how story works in an interactive way. I’ve learned arguably more about storytelling from participating in Dungeons & Dragons and games like it than I ever learned in school. You learn the nuts and bolts of character and plot, but you also learn about pacing and theme. All of it’s hands-on, where you’re helping make it, so you get a much better grasp than you would by simply reading the definition of “plot.”
  • Roleplaying gives you a safe place to explore moral decision-making without hurting anyone. Characters I play tend to be theologically-inclined and concerned about ethics, but like people in the real world sometimes they have to make difficult choices. Do you allow a princess to be sacrificed to save her kingdom? Do you allow her to sacrifice herself to do it? Do you save her regardless of consequences, or do you offer to change places with her? In a good game you will be faced with difficult situations and difficult choices over and over again, and it will prepare you to think about ethical choices in the real world, where there will be real consequences.
  • Roleplaying gives you a chance to be in somebody else’s shoes for a little while. If done well, this should lead you to think about what other people’s lives are truly like, and should lead you to empathize with other people’s problems. You can try roleplaying as the opposite gender, or as someone from a totally different race or economic class from your own. What are the consequences of living in a different type of society? What would it mean to live in a society of machines, or people who do not die for hundreds of years?
  • Roleplaying often spurs learning. I once roleplayed as a pirate character, and while our pirates were much nicer people than the real thing (real pirates were generally horrible), I did a lot of research on the Age of Sail and pre-anaesthesia medical practices. Roleplaying has also led to research on early stringed instruments and folk music, the law, folklore, floriography and religion. I have learned all sorts of things from roleplaying.
  • Roleplaying forces you to work together as a group. In most cases, your character will not last long if he or she goes around stabbing random passersby. He or she certainly won’t do well if he or she stabs other party members. It’s like being a member of a rock band–you have to get along with these people, and that’s both in-character and out-of-character. It’s a social hobby, and you can’t do it alone, so you better leave at least part of your ego at the door.
  • Roleplaying can be about forming good values. I’ve been involved in a lot of games over the years, and the most prominent themes have been good conquering evil, family, love, justice and what it means to be human.
  • Roleplaying spurs your imagination. In a movie, you know what the protagonist looks like and sounds like and acts like and wears. When you’re playing a tabletop game, you’re not going to know any of that and you’re just going to have to imagine that red dragon bearing down on you, too. Even if you’re roleplaying through a videogame, most games don’t allow a lot of nuance in body shape or voices, so you’re still going to need to adjust the picture in your head according to what’s said.

Tired of Blaming Video Games

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Are people ever going to stop blaming video games for murder sprees?

I’m getting a little bit tired of these sorts of articles, not just as a person who plays video games but as a person who has more sense than a brain-damaged turnip.

First of all, let’s look at the headline. “Norwegian killer used computer wargames to plan attack.” Which “wargames” did he use? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is not a wargame. It’s a MMORPG. While there are a few large-scale battlegrounds, you’re not going to learn a whole lot of strategy that applies to the real world by playing them unless you can cast magic spells in real life. (Hint: You can’t.)

At least this particular article doesn’t actually go so far as to blame the video games for the killer’s obvious mental issues.

An important point here is that correlation doesn’t equal causation. I don’t know if a lot of murderers play video games or not.

I do know that a lot of murderers wear pants.

Hey, maybe that merits an article.

I already have a headline for it.

Norwegian killer wore pants during attack.

Where Do You Keep Your Socks in a Video Game?

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Nice Barrels.

Nice Barrels. Mind If I Rob You Blind?

My friend walked into somebody’s house, saw two beer barrels, and opened them up. Inside one, he found a pair of pants. In the other, there was a paint brush. I believe the homeowner was probably keeping his beer in his sock drawer, or maybe the mailbox.

Video games don’t make a whole lot of sense, do they? In real life, even if you could just wander into people’s homes and take all their stuff without any kind of protest, what you’d find in a beer barrel would probably be, well… beer.

This isn’t true of video games, and hasn’t ever been, as far as I know. In the old SNES Zelda, you could more or less wander around in people’s houses and check all their pots and urns for valuables. If you found any, you could just take them, even if the owner was standing five feet away and watching. That’s not really stealing, is it? I mean, they’d object, surely, if there was a problem.

Now we have the game Oblivion, which came out in 2006. My friend (we’ll call him C.J. for now)  was commenting on how strange people’s habits were in the game.

He found one of the characters annoying.

“… so I stole her urn and threw it in the river.”

If life were like video games, we’d go into people’s houses and find urns full of coins, glass bottles full of faeries and beer barrels full of paintbrushes. Nobody would keep pants in a pants drawer or socks in a sock drawer. They’d keep medicine in their grandfather clocks (Final Fantasy VI) and store gold coins in bricks (Super Mario Brothers).

We’d go to work and burn down bushes to try to find secret passages (The Legend of Zelda) or arrange pills (Dr. Mario). At the end of the day we’d put on our raccoon tails and fly home (Super Mario Brothers 3).

Then again, we might come home to find our urns vandalized and our precious paint brushes (so cunningly hidden in beer barrels) stolen by adventurers.

Given games, though, I doubt we’d care.

(Photo borrowed from a pretty cool review of Final Fantasy VI. Check it out!)

The Legend… of Awesome

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Kids today have literally thousands of video games to choose from, from puzzle games to farm simulations to role-playing games to first-person shooters, many with stunning graphics in three dimensions and weird equipment shaped like guitars, magic wands and light sabers.

Maybe they don’t have it so great, though. I don’t think most of them have ever laid their mitts on what I consider the best video game of all time: The Legend of Zelda, the first game of a franchise of great games, which celebrated its 25th birthday this week.

Yep. My favorite game is older than a large percentage of gamers. I guess that makes me an old lady by the standards of the geek subculture. Pretty soon I’m going to be waving my cane and shouting at kids to get off my Internet.

The Legend of Zelda was a two-dimensional, eight-bit Nintendo game with a tinny, chirpy soundtrack that could worm its way into your skull and sit there, lurking, for literally decades. To this day, whenever I get a package in the mail and open it, the treasure-box-opening sound plays in my head.

As plots go, the game wasn’t exactly “War and Peace.” You played an elf named Link on a quest to save Princess Zelda, which you were supposed to accomplish by visiting dungeons to retrieve bits of the Triforce.

The Triforce was supposed to help you defeat Gannon, who was evil. I don’t know how we knew Gannon was evil, but we knew it. Games back then didn’t offer a whole lot of moral complexity or choices — anybody shooting at you was a bad guy, because you were the good guy.

Given the Nintendo’s graphical capabilities, Link was pretty much a little green, brown and peach blob on the screen.

He had a sword. You could get a shield, bombs, a candle, keys and a fire-flingin’ wand later, but it all started when an old man (red, white and peach blob) told you “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” Then he gave you a sword and disappeared.

This sets you up for a life of disappointment, by the way. Never once has a strange person come up to me, said “It’s dangerous to go alone,” given me something cool, and vanished.

I spent many hours in my basement, curled up on the hideous orange shag rug and playing Zelda, and so did my mom.

She spent even more time painstakingly mapping out all the dungeons on graph paper for me, noting secret passages and writing down our nicknames for all the bad guys — shield-eaters, sword-eaters, skeletons, red knights and the much-trickier blue knights, which could turn on a dime and gut you.

My mom served as my patient navigator, helping me fight evil by hitting it repeatedly with sharp, pointy objects. With mom’s help, eventually we collected the pieces of the Triforce, defeated Gannon and saved Zelda, and it was truly awesome, even if Zelda was just a red, peach and brown blob.

So get off my Internet, ya whippersnappers! I have a virtual 25-year-old magic sword and a Triforce with your name on it.

The Top 10 Geek Anthems

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Victor Pineiro of Popten published this fun Top 10 Songs of Geekdom list and after listening to the fun version of the Legend of Zelda theme there, it got me thinking about how much I think about video game music.

A lot. I think about video game music a lot.

Most of the time when I’m going on a long walk, I hear the Mt. Kolts theme from Final Fantasy VI in my head, or else it’s the old Zelda (the original) music from the overworld. I know all the words to the opera scene in Final Fantasy VI, and have been known to sing it in the shower.

And who doesn’t remember the loopy, goofy theme song to Super Mario Brothers? 

Other games’ themes have faded from my memory (probably crowded out by my recent purchases of the Sherlock Holmes soundtrack and the music of Quigley Down Under) but I do recall that at the time I really loved them. The Secret of Mana and the Secret of Evermore had great music.

Of course, these aren’t really nerd anthems, per se.

When I think of nerd anthems, I think of "Holding Out for a Hero," because in my very first D&D game that song featured in the plot. (Sadly, this was in the 2000s, not the 1980s. We were that geeky.) Of course, that’s not really a nerd anthem either.

Pineiro picked out "White & Nerdy/Dare to be Stupid" as his choice for Weird Al, but I recall "It’s All About the Pentiums" a bit better. Either of those is a true geek anthem.

I would also recommend Fatboy Slim’s "Weapon of Choice" as a geek anthem, since I’m pretty sure its lyrics are at least partially based on Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic, "Dune."

Any other ideas for geek anthems?