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Storyboard: Finding what I'm looking for
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.
Storyboard: Demands
Hello, fellow roleplayers! I'm here to yell at all of you, myself included, as well as pretty much every single company producing MMOs at the moment. If possible, I'd also like the opportunity to yell at Gary Gygax for perpetuating certain modes of play far past the point that they were healthy for roleplaying games as a genre, but these days that just seems disrespectful. (Yelling at him about Lejendary Adventure should still be fair game.) What am I so whiny about? The fact that we're now more than a decade into the existence of MMOs as a genre, and yet the most successful games out there don't give the tiniest crap about roleplayers. And yes, you might say, that's their fault for being bad hosts -- but it's also our own fault. Because while the idea of trying to roleplay has been marginalized, we've been sitting by and nodding our heads and agreeing that yes, we're not doing anything important. So it's time for a rant.
