Or: not film. This is just something that I've started noticing, and it's hard to ignore. There's a lot of fuss at the moment about computer games eating into the profits of the film industry — just the same fuss, as MovieBob has pointed out in his Studio System set of articles, as there was when TV really got going, for example (1). I kind of heard this from various quarters and didn't pay much attention to it, to be honest. However, recently I've heard ads for some new war film on the radio that turned out to be for, I think, Battlefield 3, and if you travel the tube in London you can't exactly miss that many of the extra large poster spots, that would previously have been taken up by films — even quite obscure films — are now publicising games — and not just one big hit game, but at least four or five different ones. Just now I kicked off an article on the Escapist to be rewarded by a trailer that had me demanding, "Holy crap, did I miss a new fantasy film that's coming out? What on earth is this?" because it was obviously too Nordic to be Immortals or the Clash of the Titans sequel (2). The film? Skyrim, of course.

(1) In fact, historically Hollywood's reaction to an encroaching other medium has been "3D!" and we're currently in the middle of the third rollout of that particular technology.

(2) And, to be fair, I was also saying, WTF horned helmet, because there is no way that any sane man would be seen wearing that.

Might and Magic VII

Apparently there is a continuous plot to these Might and Magic games, but as I only played this one, and then one from earlier in the series about a year later, er… ok, it looks about as comprehensible as Final Fantasy when you start to read up about it, but Lord knows (a) I didn't know any backstory before starting, and (b) I don't honestly think it was needed. The Might and Magic are the same sort of "four guys in a car" party-based RPGs, so your characters exist only as little portraits of people (2) who all skate about the world in magical unison until they get eaten by one of a variety of 2D monsters in various colours (3).  I played this game sort of in tandem with a friend (4) which was lucky, as MM7 has a moral choice moment, and you either end up helping the bad guys take over the world (me) or helping the good guys save it (him). The chief difference is that one region was basically Mexico full of goblins (5) with an underworld of undead, and another area was a floating cloud city full of wizards with an even cloudier upperworld full of angels. Your moral choice dictated where you no longer got invited to… and which place you got to seriously stomp once you'd levelled up. Combat could be either live or turn based, and there was this absurdly dramatic chord when you went into turn by turn, and a similar one for when you finished the fight, and believe me, you would be hearing those sounds in your sleep soon enough.

The MM games were filled to the brim with secret areas, games within games and all sorts of crazy stuff. You could make stuff, mix potions, turn yourself invisible and raid the treasure vaults of your supposed allies, get horribly lost in a teleport-trapped dwarven tomb and decode weird clues so that on one day of the year you could be in the right place to kill a rare monster, and even… guns? And a spaceship? Wait, what…?

You have to remember that the number of fantasy RPGs that are actually pure fantasy RPGs are really very small. If it's not steampunk, it's ancient elder civilisation, and if it's not that it's out and out SF elements. The MM plotline somehow ended with a bunch of aliens turning up in fantasyland and crashing their spaceship, and the two plots both lead to you teleporting back there and fighting your way through the killer robots to either (a) destroy the ship so that it cannot be used for evil, or (b) use the ship for evil by — wait for it — stealing the photocopier key. Hell yes. Along the way you pick up a selection of laser guns, which do low damage but have an insane rate of fire and no ammo requirement and…

Well, remember you're four guys in a magic cart? Once your wizard gets spiffy enough, that cart can fly.

In a nutshell, this is why MM7, and its predecessors (I have a feeling the flying thing got actually taken out in later ones) were so much fun) — and especially in this one when your gallant fantasy aviators could zoom over the very simple landscape armed to the teeth with laser rifles and strafing madly at anything in sight — and almost everything could shoot back, so you had epic wheeling dogfights with acid-spitting hydras and the like, and the game just basically said, all that stuff you've learned over several hours of gameplay? Throw it out now, for you will never cast another spell or swing a sword again.

Wizardry 8

The most recent "guys in an invisible cart" game, this was decidedly up on MM7 in the graphics department, although again the story got somewhat lost because I wasn't paying attention to the opening cinematic and hadn't played the previous 7 games. However, this game also starts with a spaceship crashing into fantasyland, with the added bewilderment of your band of stock fantasy heroes having been on the spaceship, even though you're all armed with swords and bows and fireball spells. This becomes a theme relatively quickly when you meet the three other spacegoing races apparently fighting for control of the planet and the high-tech maguffins that have been lost there. One lot are a galactic empire who mostly rely on blunderbuss-level tech, and the Dark Savant (main bad guy) has a legion of robot soldiers who have no ranged weapon capacity at all.

Wizardy 8's gameplay was further enlivened by a punishingly arbitrary approach to difficulty levels, which played to an insane double standard. Fixed monsters, including the Dark Savant's aforementioned robots, did not change over time, so that every visit to the conquered main city it became easier and easier to swan through the robot respawns until they — the game's main threat — were utterly trivial. In contrast, random wandering monsters seemed to scale to a difficulty level somewhere 5–10 levels above that of your party, so that odds on any encounter with bandits or roving wildlife would end with the entire party massacred, especially if they surrounded you. You'd get out of bed, give the Dark Savant's troops a kicking, and then venture forth with your monster detector on, and hide in a crevice the moment you saw any red dots coming.

Baldur's Gate

Possibly one of the most famous RPGs of all time, and the first in the list where you actually got to see your characters, I won't go into much detail about what it was like because most people will have played it — and if you haven't, think  Dragon Age, which is very much its spiritual successor (and which I'll make some notes on at some point). You wander about a 2D landscape that mockingly mimics a 3D landscape by having areas roped off that you can't get to, and there's some plot about a… honestly, I can't remember. It's another Dungeons and Dragons game, though, and there were plenty of follow ups, including a direct sequel and couple under the Icewind Dale monicker, and they were all good. You start with a single character and pick up others, and then it does something really quite remarkable, because there's this guy called Minsc. Minsc is a Russian-sounding ranger who has a hamster called Boo that he thinks can talk (and fight — "Go for the eyes, Boo!") but he's also one of the handier combat characters in the game, and very useful to have around when he isn't mind-controlled. The hamster, by the way, is actually an item in his inventory, and he won't let you take it away. Minsc joins you because there's this girl he wants rescuing from gnolls, but he'll happily hack the crap out of anything you point him at, and he has the best lines in the game ("Magic is impressive, but now Minsc leads! Swords for everyone!"). And then, after you've blithely ignored his occasional poke about going to rescue this girl of his, he goes berserk and has to be put down. And then you scrabble desperately back through all your save games, and lose untold game progress, in order to find one where you can go rescue her from the gnolls in time, because by that point you really like Minsc (6). This is the first time I ever ran into a character in a computer game that inspired any kind of emotional response. The writers/game creators had made a person, a real NPC that you cared about, and who made you laugh. Again, this presages Dragon Age, where that kind of party interaction is one of the main points, but it was a feat seldom equalled.

Baldur's Gate is also notable at doing its damndest to bring the D&D rules to the computer and getting it wrong a few times along the way. There was this one point in the plot where some evil doppelgangers were going to gatecrash some royal function and kill the local noble. They were said to be hiding in the sewers, but although I ran into all manner of other nasties down there (7) I could never find them, and whilst I could beat them up, what I couldn't do was stop them killing the king/duke/whatever before I'd finished them. So I sat my party outside the room they were all in — courtiers and doppelgangers, knowing that nobody would be starting the party without me, and I considered my options. What I did have in hand was an entire bagfull of wands of summoning that would dispense random monsters wherever I pointed. Delightfully, nobody in the duke's audience chamber batted an eyelid when I dropped a half-dozen gnolls next to the throne. Then some wolves, and hobgoblins, and… basically I filled that room to bursting with monsters of all shapes and sizes, all of them natural foes to mankind if you met them in the wild. Nobody cared. Possibly the servants even offered them drinks. Then I walked in and all hell broke loose. The doppelgangers switched forms, and every summoned monster in the room descended on them with tooth and claw and a sock with a rock in it. My computer slowed down to about one frame a minute. I went and made some tea. About an hour later the doppelgangers were dead, the duke was alive, and everyone had decided never, never to mention the Day the Monsters Came.

Morrowind

Another game that most people will have played (8), and so I won't bother with the detail. Morrowind didn't have a Minsc, but what it did have was plot and world in spades — this was the first game I ever really got absorbed in playing to the extent that I was right there in my character's skull wanting to know what was going on — and when you found out what was going on it was absolutely worth the journey. This carried over into Tribunal, the first sequel (Bloodmoon not so much, as the plot was far more separate) and indeed it sort of made more sense to cut the Morrowind plot in the middle, go do all of Tribunal and then go back. The basic setup was that you had three gods, or godlike beings, and a fallen god bad guy, and a prophecy, all that jazz, but it was a genuinely epic voyage of discovery and (spoilers!) when in Tribunal you find the fate of one of the gods (in whose religion you may actually be quite involved) and when you discover the nature of the others… Also, even though the graphics weren't a patch on the later Oblivion, the world was awesome, and populated by weird monsters rather than the usual fantasy fare (when I first saw one of the big floating tentacle-monsters it scared the crap out of me — and then I discovered that they were basically farmed like cattle) (9). And, it was a very open world, and you could ignore the plot completely, and there was an extremely skilled and active modding community that the game openly embraced. The bit where I confronted the Big Bad on the gantry of his death rocket (10) after obtaining the two sacred weapons of waaa that were the only things that could defeat him, and he stepped back and fell to his death almost immediately, we'll chalk up as either anticlamax or extreme realism.

(1) Though you know this chain of posts is going there.

(2) In the earlier part of the game, often little portraits of dead people.

(3) Those old pre-Quake graphics, eh?

(4) Same guy who was getaway driver for Eye of the Beholder.

(5) It was Mexico. It was a desert full of cactus and, I think, even had vaguely hispanic music. It couldn't have been more Mexico if the goblins had been wearing sombreros.

(6) If you mistakenly rescue the girl before you pick up Minsc then Minsc won't register it, and in fact will be irreconcilably berserk and merrily kill her, sadly.

(7) The lot of a sewer-worker's life in fantasyland is well chronicled.

(8) The new one, Skyrim, is out any day now, I think. I did try Oblivion, but honesty never really got into it.

(9) This is one reason that Oblivion put me off — it was wolves, goblins and bandits, and that, frankly, is just dull.

(10) Technology again — there's a whole elder race/steampunk thing going on in Morrowind.

Eye of the Beholder

Possibly nobody else even remembers this. It was a TSR Forgotten Realms thing way ahead of Baldur's Gate, and it was completely mad on a number of levels, and yet enormous fun — and generally the fun and the madness tended to stem from the same elements. I give you some examples:

1. Your 6–8-man party of random adventurers was set up like a first person(s) shooter, and whilst having Duke Nukem or whoever potter about with a POV camera stuck between his eyes is one thing, this starts to break down when you're basically the shared POV of six people, and there's no head bob for movement, leading myself and my co-player to the irresistible conclusion that our valient heroes had descended into the dungeon on a golf buggy.

2. Although a 1-player game, we found that it actually worked better with 2 — one to control the trolley, usually by reversing at top speed away from the irate monsters, and the other to cast spells, shoot arrows, and throw random items from the inventory. Melee combat basically never happened, but everything in your pack could be flung at monsters for actual damage as your half-dozen characters frantically backpeddled down the corridors, and this was, in fact, what most of the early encounters degenerated into — especially the level with all the spiders, which was one level before you could deal with their poison (sneaky).

3. The monsters, in grand old D&D fashion, could not work the doors. In fact, when dealing with Mind-flayers, as an example of a monster type quite capable of killing off some or all of your party, we ended up adopting the following procedure:

a: open the door, unload all series spells and attacks at the perplexed Mind Flayer.

b: close the door before the Mind Flayer can do anything.

c: rest up for eight hours for the spellcasters to regain their spells.

d: repeat until successful. Fights can be expected to last up to 2 weeks.

4. Given the severely limited flat graphics (like the old pre-Quake FPS's) and general early and rough feel of the game, there were some extremely clever touches that I've never seen since, such as:

a. You had to watch the repeating wall panels carefully because the secret doors were activated by little buttons that relied on the player(s) being able to spot them/

b. The game also took advantage of the repetitive environment by having traps that turned the party around, which was almost impossible to notice.

c. The occasional pile of bones you found could later be resurrected into an additional character for your party.

5. Finally, though, after fighting your way through about 20 levels of slimy, dank dungeons, you reached the Beholder's lair. Which was immaculately done up with white and purple wallpaper, and had dinky little dado rails with plaster eye motifs, leading to the inescapable conclusion that "Changing Rooms" had just finished with the place. This is a monster with a bunch of eyestalks and no hands, and so the logic can lead to either the beholder somehow hiring a team of interior decorators who fought their way through all the same psychotic monsters in order to pimp out its crib, or alternatively the beholder itself doing all the plastering by way of masterful telekinesis. The beholder also had an enormous spike trap in its living room, which served the sole purpose of killing the beholder when you knocked the wretched creature back into it, making this the most hamfisted example of Chekov's Gun I've ever come across.

But it was fun, and it was the first online RPG I'd ever played that didn't come entirely in text asking me which compass point I wanted to take through a poorly described forest. And Baldur's Gate would be for a few years, so it was all we had.

Secondly, some of you may be aware of a dalliance entitled World of Warcraft (1). Well now, one feature of this global pastime is something called the armory, wherein you can look up all manner of things. And search the player database by character name. So, a little gander(2) displays the following

3 Tisamons (a priest and 2 paladins), 2 Stenwolds (priest and shaman), 2 Thalrics (warlock and paladin), 1 Cheerwell (rogue, weirdly enough), an assortment of 9 Tothos, 6 Tynisas (5 of whom are rogues), 7 Achaeoses, 7 Balkuses (3), 4 Scutos and a Sperra.

Now, lord knows I can't claim credit for some of these — names like Totho and Balkus are the sort of thing that people can happen upon quite happily by themselves (4) but even so… the wonder of it all…

(1) Alternatively, a highly contagious life-eating plague called World of Warcraft. Lord knows I'm still not over my case of it.

(2) is that right? Is "gander" look? Is this rhyming slang, and if so, what on earth is it rhyming with? Or is it dadaist rhyming slang: "Goose and gander — look"?

(3) You never think you'll need to work out what the plural of a character's name is…

(4) Case in point: there are at least 20 Felices.

For better or for worse, role-playing games.

There are very few things (2) that a man could admit to doing that would throw more of a pall of geekishness about him. I say “a man” because the quintessential image of a role-playing gamer is male, although more usually portrayed as trapped in that awkward transition between man and boy.

I won’t say that there isn’t fire behind the smoke, but, your honour, I shall try and defend the institution, the old alma mater of imagination. The defence will seek to prove that the image is both inaccurate and outmoded (3).

Way back in the day (4) Dungeons and Dragons was dangerous. It was a stone-cold killer out to get your children. In those days, bizarre to say, D&D (and rock and roll, admittedly) filled the same panic-mongering, knee-jerking, puritanical gap that computer game and video violence fill these days (5). In fact it’s almost certainly the same people and/or institutions banging the drum. Whenever a maladjusted kid takes it into his head to bring military history to life in the classroom, the blame is ladled conveniently and safely onto some pop culture bête noir, rather than, say, wider social issues, freely available automatic weapons (6) or, heaven forbid, something to do with parenting. If someone is sufficiently unbalanced to blow away as much of his life as he can get into his sights before ending it all then one must suspect that no amount of Harry Potter, Golden Compass, Dungeons and Dragons, Iron Maiden or Grand Theft Auto (7) is honestly going to push him over the edge. That edge was crossed a while back, internally, and alone.

The role-playing game industry, then, has had its times of persecution. Anyone, for example, who has watched the execrable hate-film Mazes and Monsters will have felt that persecution quite keenly, if only because the portrayal of role-playing (and live action role-playing too) therein is so woefully inadequate. Man, if I was involved in that campaign I’m not sure I wouldn’t consider something drastic myself… However, whilst there are still a few extremists who no doubt believe that it’s all, basically, down to Satan, the hobby’s public perception has settled on something risible, baffling and archetypally geekish.

There is a rich history there, for those that care. Emerging from the wargaming hobby to spawn Gygax’s Dungeons and Dragons, a peculiar mixture of miniatures battles, Tolkien and Jack Vance, the hobby grew in a strangely organic, even fungal way, absorbing different genres as it found them. Amongst the earlier games, for example, was the Sci-fi Traveller, and the H.P. Lovecraft tribute game Call of Cthulhu, both still going several editions on today. From small-town labours of love the market proliferated wildly into reasonable-sized corporations, producing some wholly original games, some based on books, and a few (to my mind weak) offerings that were cash-ins on the film of the moment. Major milestones include, of course, White Wolf’s Vampire, inspiration for a million moody Goths and itself strongly influenced by the writings of Anne Rice (and the film Lost Boys), and the astonishingly detailed semi-historical game Ars Magica.

Of course, this is all “tabletop”, and the hobby has spread considerably since. I’ll talk about LARP (or LRP, the “action” is apparently negotiable) another time, suffice to say that the term has been legitimised in Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report as part of the evolving English language. However there is an enormous growth industry in purported computer role-playing games, a market now worth some quite ludicrous amount of money. I have to say I’m a bit of a purist here. Single-player games to date have basically given us combat/problem solvers with RPG trappings, and that doth not a role-playing game make. Online games have more potential, if only because of the ability to interact with other human beings (8), but when I see people actually strutting around on, say, World of Warcraft speaking like Prince Valiant, if Prince Valiant hadn’t the first idea about punctuation, I always feel… well I feel, I suspect, like a non-gamer feels listening to gamers. All faintly foolish. I enjoy online games, but for the game. I’ve not yet found one condusive to actual roleplay, and it’s honestly not what I’m after when I seek out the computer.

The current image of role-playing games, however, is undergoing something of a metamorphosis. I won’t say they’re becoming hip. I’m not sure there’s enough pelvis in our sociocultural skeleton for it. However, the foolishness is rubbing off, revealing something almost respectable, almost intellectual, about the whole thing.

The foundation stone for this change is time and money. The people who were those thirteen year old boys being fighters and mighty wizards and wishing they had girlfriends are now grown men with office jobs who mostly have families, and yet those days, those dice-throwing days, were the golden days of their youth, and even if they no longer play, the hobby has a shimmer of pleasant nostalgia. Nostalgia is big business, now. The admen have turned it from a failure of the old into a mass phenomenon. I heart the 70’s! they cry, and television rehashes endless old footage in a bid to waste the cheapest hour of your life. That’s the time. The money is in the fact that an awful lot of those thirteen year olds were into computers, and computers turned out to be quite a useful thing to be into, and suddenly the awkward, derided kids with the glasses were earning enough to buy wholesale all those tough guys who were good at sports. Geek is chic, so to speak.

It’s worth noting that a lot of the increased cool must surely be because the hobby is nowhere near as male-dominated as it once was. This is probably because the style of play has changed from the original “kill things and be powerful” concept that allowed put-upon adolescents to escape from the inadequacies of real life, and evolved (in a very real sense of the word) into something capable of considerably more depth and meaning. At the average LARP event these days you can often find a fairly even gender split.

A major boost to the respectability of the hobby, however, has been the willingness, all of a sudden, of notable names to be associated with it. Such illuminati as Vin Diesel and Robin Williams, for example, are confessed gamers, and that must utterly bewilder the anti-gaming lobby in the States. Moreover, writers are beginning to come out of the games closet. Writers of fantasy fiction, it is true, stand only a step beyond the hobby as respectability goes (9), but that is a useful step. Here is someone who plays those damned games, and not only are they making a living, garnering something of celebrity, but that success must surely have been assisted by their gaming hobbies. To name but two, Stephen Erikson has stated that his epic Malazan Book of the Dead grew out of a role-playing campaign he ran with his friend Ian Esselmont (now also writing books set in their shared world), and Jim Butcher, author of the recently televised Dresden Files, is an acknowledged larper.

So why? What is it that all of these people have been doing all those years, if it wasn’t, after all, something to do with unholy rites? What is the appeal? Why spend seven hours straight rolling dice if there’s no money involved (10) ?

Later, maybe. If you need to ask the question. Later, perhaps. Maybe we’ll let you in on what you’ve been missing.

(1)   The title is Dianne Wynne-Jones’ term in Homeward Bounders to describe the unpleasant god-games played by the book’s nebulous villains.

(2)   Train spotting, however, is definitely one of them.

(3)   Mostly. Mostly inaccurate and outmoded. Lord knows, there are some of the old school left, but we don’t talk about them. A friend sent me a flowchart of increasing geekishness recently, much to my amusement. It can be found here: http://www.brunching.com:80/images/geekchartbig.gif . Whilst the ordering will vary depending on who you talk to, it does rather demonstrate the sheer divisive clannishness that geeks, and especially gamers, are prey to.

(4)   A marvellously indefinite expression. I probably mean the late seventies and eighties.

(5)   Hell, computer games were always violent. Everyone knows of some kid in the 70’s who, after a marathon session in the arcades, went home, dressed up like most of a wheel of cheese and went on a homincidal eating spree. Not to mention the Space Invaders murders… like the police said, “you’d think, when they saw he had a gun, they wouldn’t just keep slowly going backwards and forewards in front of him…”

(6)   It may well be that people, rather than guns, kill people, but the fact remains that people with guns kill people rather more efficiently than people without guns, or what on earth are we giving them to the army for? Similarly, I didn’t ever hear that kind of gun-pundit say, when confronted with some atrocity that was being talked up by the evangelist crowd “Satan doesn’t kill people, people kill people”, although it would, sure as hell, be very true.

(7)   Curious fact – Alan Campbell, designer and programmer on Grand Theft Auto is also a fantasy author, giving us the excellent Scar Night.

(8)   They are. The people who play online games are definitely almost mostly human.

(9)   Indeed, see the diagram at (3) above.

(10) Because rolling dice to lose little Bobby’s college fund is entirely fine and responsible social behaviour compared to having your 18th level ranger kill some frost giants.