Comparing Role Playing Chat Rooms to Other Multiplayer Games

First, a few definitions should be made clear for context. roleplaying is the act of taking on the role of a fictional character, and acting as that person in a given situation. An MMORPG is a massively multiplayer online role playing game and it usually refers to some sort of graphical interface, or at the very least an AI interactive world, allowing members to communicate with one another and the system in various ways. A roleplaying chat system is very much like a MMORPG, except that instead of having an AI controlling the nature and makeup of the world, everything is determined based on the collective understanding of the players involved. Instead, you and the other players all have to supply the environment from your imaginations.

Now that we have that out of the way, we can discuss some of the benefits and drawbacks to these different styles of engaging in imaginative acts.

The most common MMORPG and probably the most popular is World of Warcraft. This is a highly graphical interface that resembles the games played on my popular consoles such as the Xbox or the PlayStation. In the game you create a character based on a number of stats which represent the abilities of that character, such as their strength, health, or intelligence.

The game itself involves having you control an avatar that runs around a graphical world, interacting both with other player characters, and artificial creatures that were added by the programmers, and which can simulate to some extent the interactions of real humans.

The benefit of such a game is that you don’t have to strain your imagination to figure out what’s going on. The world is visible present and easy to see and interact with. You can see the different creatures and what they look like, and the computer crunches numbers to tell you what is and is not possible. All you really have to do is balance these numbers to the best of your abilities in order to achieve a successful outcome in every trial.

The drawback to these games is that your creativity is limited to exploring only that which the programmers put into the system. No matter how many features and enemies and adventures are imagined by the games creators, the players themselves will always be able to come up with more, even if they are only alternatives. The programming of such games restricts that creativity however, forcing people to merely hack and slash at the world around them, according to the limitations of the game.

In a RPG chat room, you have the opposite problem. There is no landscape, there are no pictures, and everything that happens in the game takes place within the minds of the people involved. It is actually a much more difficult and challenging game to participate in. You have to read descriptions written by other players, and gleam details about your surroundings from them, much like reading a book. Except that you then also have to write descriptions, interacting with the other characters, and describing your own little place in this world. In this way, it’s really an interactive writing and reading exercise that challenges the contextual thinking of the players involved.

The benefit to this is that it gives you complete freedom to describe the virtual environment in any way that you want. This gives you an infinite field to play in, without any limits except the belief of the other players involved. The general consensus will reign in gauche attempts to destroy the reality of the situation, but otherwise you have a free hand to do just about anything you like.

Both methods have some obvious drawbacks, but they also both provide a unique set of benefits. In order to find the perfect game for you, you need to understand what you are looking for, and what options different choices have to offer.