importance
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The Soapbox: It's a game, but not just that
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. There are things about the MMO community that bother me. If you consider the number of Soapbox columns I've written over the last year or so, this will probably shock absolutely no one. But there's one thing that draws more ire from me than any other, one statement alone that implies an attitude that really gets my goat. It comes from MMO players, from non-players, from all sorts of different sources, and it bothers me every single time. "It's just a game." The statement that, say, Guild Wars is a game doesn't bother me at all, just like it doesn't bother me when someone says that Australia is a continent. But that addition, the sentiment that it's just a game bothers me immensely. It's insulting to a lot of people, and it's something that I try to avoid ever mentioning in my own writing because MMOs aren't just games, even though they are games, and the idea of "just a game" alone is missing the point something fierce.
Storyboard: Importance
As I write this column, I am sitting on a train to New York Comic Con, celebrating an industry that has been running for basically forever and seems to be rather steadily dying. I'm sad to say it, because I never really grew out of loving comic books, but sales that 10 years ago constituted a rather dismal failure now constitute a pretty big hit, and we're certainly not getting comics aimed at kids in most circles. (I adore Last Stand of the Wreckers, and it's a wonderful example of doing a mature comic correctly, but I feel sorry for parents who might buy it because their kid liked Transformers Animated.) That got me thinking about roleplaying, something that a lot of people see as being a fossil of the origins of MMOs. I've seen so many arguments that "RPG" no longer means any actual roleplaying is expected, and yet each one feels like reopening a wound. I think that roleplaying is important and that it's a good thing, and while its death may or may not be in the cards (I don't think we're anywhere near that), it's vital that we take a look at what is important about roleplaying and why it means so much to so many of us.
