player-bios

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  • Storyboard: Finding what I'm looking for

    by 
    Eliot Lefebvre
    Eliot Lefebvre
    09.17.2010

    Two weeks ago, I made something of an impassioned plea because, while I like to roleplay quite a bit and have had wonderful experiences doing so (even in World of Warcraft, which kind of got turned into the villain of the piece), roleplaying is essentially seen as a non-entity. It's unsupported and generally ignored by development teams, and part of that is our fault for not demanding that it be made more important. So this week I'm going to talk about some minimum and fairly reasonable baselines of roleplaying features, things that already exist in many games but aren't even close to being universal. In response to one of the frequent comments from both sides, it's worth noting that yes, roleplayers are a minority. But then, so are extremely hardcore PvP players, and the people who will rush through all available endgame content in less than a week, and players who can multi-box with five different characters, and so on. The difference is that those minorities stay and grow, because they're given the tools they need. Roleplayers aren't. Sometimes by not creating the market, you're denying an audience you don't know is there, an argument so simple that articles could be (and have been) written just on that principle.