Does anyone stick with a game anymore?
As games have proliferated and entertainment options have become more numerous, it’s increasingly hard to get an audience to truly dedicate their time and effort to the game. This is important, because games rely on people agreeing to play together, and a fractured community means there’s nobody to play with. It happens a lot in board and card games. How much does it happen in RPGs?
When “Favorite” Means “Today”
The word “favorites” has changed meaning owing to Internet Explorer and many music programs where you save your favorites, where this means anything that you like; you can have ten thousand “favorites.” That’s nothing like the old favorite game or favorite anything. I discovered this particularly when I taught video game development. I’d ask students to name their favorite games or game; most could not say, or would only say the game they were currently playing was their favorite.
A favorite game is one you strongly prefer, even though you play others sometimes. I can name mine throughout my life. My favorite games from when I was very young went from Conflict to American Heritage Broadsides, then for maybe seven years Stalingrad and Afrika Korps, from age 19 Diplomacy, from about five years later Dungeons & Dragons and then (from more than 20 years later) the “game of designing games.” When Dungeons & Dragons was my favorite game, practically speaking I didn’t play other games (except video games). I played lots of video games because I was not participating in the tabletop game hobby at large.
Favorites aren’t necessarily great games; they’re just the games you especially like to play. Favorites change, great games don’t. (See What Makes a Game Great?)
Times Have Changed
So how was it 50 years ago? A favorite game was one you’d often play in preference to others that you might play occasionally, and in strong preference to most others that you wouldn’t play at all. Sometimes a gamer would have several favorite games. Some people had a lifestyle game and only played that one game seriously. This game traditionally was (and for some still is) often Chess, Bridge, Diplomacy, Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, or even Warhammer. Your lifestyle game is your hobby.
Of course, in the 60s there were very few “intelligent” games available, that is, games that were not party games or family games, which are much easier to pick up and play without in-depth knowledge of the rules. You could know most of them enough to have a favorite or three.
Now we have thousands of tabletop games, hundreds of thousands of video games. No one can know more than a small fraction. At the same time, the “cult of the new” has become strong in modern society. People assume that something that is new is somehow better despite that being demonstrably untrue (more or less mathematically) for games, so perhaps inevitably this makes favorite games less likely.
People who are tired of learning new rules are more likely to settle on favorite games, so that they can play the games, concentrate on strategy, not on the rules.
Video Killed the Gaming Star
A lot of today’s gaming trends comes from the influence of video games: single player video games have historically been athletic puzzles that you solve. The computer could not put up enough opposition to be counted as a second player, and was predictable once you “beat the game,” which is to say, you figured out the always-correct solution to the puzzle. There was no reason to continue playing. This is why so many of the older video games have speed runs: the “runner” already knows the solution and so can play through very fast. No game that you’re “done” with, that you’ve “broken,” is at all likely to become your favorite.
Think about how on the tabletop we now have a great many games that are parallel competitions, where the person who best solves the puzzle wins the game. There are often “multiple paths to victory,” which is to say more than one solution, but people are still trying to solve the puzzle of what we call a “game.” Most would never become favorites because after a small number of plays you know (or think you know) nearly all there is to know about how to play the game and how to win, you’ve solved it. (This is called a “transparent” game as opposed to a deep game.) You don’t have an intelligent opposition in these games to vary things. In these kinds of parallel competitions, all players are trying to get to the same point but rarely have an effect on each other. A few Eurostyle games and many wargames take a different approach, but they’re the exception.
In this context, RPGs are co-operative games with human-controlled opposition, making them (in my view) the best of all co-ops. (See Tabletop RPGs Are the Most Naturally Cooperative Games) Co-ops are a form of puzzle (a solo game played by more than one) unless there is sufficiently skilled opposition, which RPGs usually provide.
One and Done
I think that most board games are played only one to three times by any given individual, and I suspect it’s much more common than in the past to play an RPG for several sessions and then be done with that set of rules.
Given the large number games available, many gamers are looking for exploration rather than mastery. They want to know how the game works, and how player succeeds, and then they move on to another game. Which makes sense in a universe of thousands of games.
Nowadays intelligent games for more than two players are common. And there’s a social aspect, you play what others want to play, rather than play your favorites. This is a problem sometimes for those who have strong favorites. Moreover, in RPGs you may want to play a game that lots of others play, so that recruiting new players (or finding a campaign) is easier.
For game publishers, this is a very strong incentive to keep a game “fresh” by giving it the veneer of a new version. Indeed, it now seems every game will be updated every so often in perpetuity as long as someone owns the rights to republish it. You don’t seem this as much with board games, likely due to production costs, but it’s certainly become an increasingly faster cycle in video games (issuing new versions with better graphics) and tabletop games (incorporating errata and adapting to current play styles).
What this means then is that games can be less a lifestyle and more an experience; and that’s not a problem, unless you’re looking to play a cooperative game where knowledge of the rules matters. Ask any player of tabletop role-playing games outside of the D&D sphere (e.g., Pathfinder, OSR, etc.) and it’s clear the struggle is real. Here’s hoping that over time, the gaming community continues to branch out and find each other, so that when you want to play your favorite game, you have friends who can join you.
Your Turn: What is your favorite RPG system and how often has that changed over time?
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