Competition and Role-playing

Serious competition around an idea of simple winning is problematic. Players want to have their success determined in a non-arbitrary way: not by anyone’s subjective decisions. So victory is then logically tracked, made dependent on mechanics. This reasoning cascades from the final victory conditions to every other aspect of the game, leaving something that is primarily about strategy, little about role-playing. Even where joins are suggested by the game text, they will — very logically — be ignored, because they are tangential to the real goal of the game. I see but two solutions.

One method is to accept that joins will primarily be one-way, with the imagined world catching up to the mechanics. But keep the imagined world alive, nonetheless, but providing many small joins instead of a few big ones: tie every mechanic to a very specific imagined element, described and named evocatively to remind players of the connection as often, and unavoidably, as possible. The role-playing element here may still be thin: mostly internal to individual players, or embellishments by them on the meat of the strategic game.

The second method is to shift away from competition in a straightforward sense, where winning is possible, to a much more general one-upmanship or proving-ground of ability; ability which may be acting or imagination, or somesuch, rather than manipulation of rules solely. In this way, there is no specific end-point, and no victor can really be declared, except by group consensus. This is a softer kind of competiiton, but it may allow role-playing.

Can it, though, motivate role-playing? Theoretically, any action, any kind of performance, can be praised at the end of the game, including those that are part of role-playing or associated with it; for instance, acting out a character’s dialog. The problem is to revise rewards for specific actions: simply saying “this action is encouraged” is not sufficient, and to reward “good role-playing” merely shifts the decision away from the game designer and onto the players. Of course, the players must always exerise judgment to mete out these rewards, or we are back in the realm of mechanical victory; but they need tools and guidance for doing so in a somewhat principled, rather than ad hoc, way. Competition then becomes about impressing not the rules but the other players, in ways particular to each game.

Nov 24, 2009 | Filed in design | Tagged: ,