It's Magic!

A couple of apparently unrelated posts I read recently, one by Tipa, the other by Redbeard, along with a flurry of first impressions posts on Palia and Baldur's Gate 3, started me thinking about some of the core concepts of the wider RPG genre. Specifically, I found myself pondering the relative merits of games as opposed to virtual worlds, of settings in which magic is taken for granted and of the often unrealistic expectations of the people who choose to spend their time - and sometimes their lives - there.

Any of these topics could sustain a series of posts but for now I'm just going to fire off a few observations that came to mind as I was reading. If I ever get around to writing about any of this in more depth, at least I'll have some notes I can refer to.

The aspect that interests me the most - and the one I think I've seen given the least attention over the years - is the way almost every RPG, online or off, massively multiple or single player, takes place in a milieu where magic - or science so advanced it may as well be magic - is accepted as the norm. It's so absolutely commonplace in just about every game that we almost never think about the implications.

Redbeard's post makes some astute criticisms of the way NPCs in fantasy games tend to spend all their time gussied up in their Sunday best. I'm not sure it's true to say the farmers are all out there tilling the fields in ball gowns and silk stockings - certainly in some games I've played the farmers are a dowdy lot - but it's definitely the case that around towns and cities you do tend to see an awful lot of very over-dressed citizens supposedly going about their normal, working day.

What his post got me wondering wasn't so much why they'd be doing that as why they wouldn't. These people all live with magic as a part of their daily lives. They may not all be practitioners, although many games are remarkably silent on the degree to which magic is available to the general population, but they certainly see it being practiced in front of them every day.

Most fantasy rpgs include some form of illusion magic, meaning you can't be certain anyone or anything is what it appears to be. Magic-users can transform themselves into just about anything. They can change race, gender, ethnicity, size or species. They can make themselves appear to be inanimate objects or ethereal phenomena. 

You don't always have to be a skilled illusionist to pull off these effects, either. Frequently it's possible to buy potions or magical items that create the illusion on request. Those items are often on open sale in shops in the town squares and side-streets. They're not always even very expensive.

If you posit a society where most people have access to the means of looking just how they fancy, wouldn't most of them choose to look their best? Why would you walk around looking dowdy and down-at-heel, when with a click of the fingers you could look like Lady Gaga on Oscar night?

Even if you choose to believe all those flounces and frills are firmly founded, you know they're still  likely to be something very much other than they appear. Even that much-discussed issue, the disparity between what male and female adventurers wear for protection, recognises a real-world social dilemma, not an in-game credibility gap. 

Don't try and tell me that's not practical adventuring gear!

We all know the armor looks the way it does because the developers expect to market their game to adolescent boys and men with adolescent minds but for the purposes of the world in which the characters operate, the chain-mail bikini makes as much sense as anything. If you can walk the streets with a ten-foot, glowing sword in one hand, leading a saber-tooth tiger on a chain with the other, you can pretty much wear what you damn well please.

All in-game armor provides a level of protection out of all proportion to real-world logic, combined with an equally unrealistic flexibility. Adventurers wear plate armor that somehow fails to drag them to the bottom when they leap into a lake. At most it makes them a little less able to roll and kick like a ninja than their counterparts in leather or cloth - cloth that can turn a blade, if not always as well as steel, then still well enough. 

Every piece of armor is magical. We know that because there are numbers that quantify just how magical it is. Once you give your scrap of cloth a numerical value to indicate how much damage it can take and assign it a slot on a paper-doll representation of the physical form, it's allowed that whatever level of protection it provides applies across the whole of that sector, whether the armor visibly obscures the skin or not. It's magic and there's no arguing with it.

Appropriately dressed for a memorial service?

If that's true for adventurers then why would it not be true for nobles or citizens too? Clothing may not be armor but it provides protection from the elements and from everyday incident. Imagine if nothing you wore ever got torn or soiled and even if it did, that somewhere in every town you'd count on finding a smith of some kind who could magically restore every single item of clothing on your body and in your backpack back to new, for only a few coins. If you knew you could have all damage repaired in a moment for the price of a pub lunch, would you worry about the wear and tear to your best clothes when you went to work or would you strut around like Beau Brummel on a bank holiday while you counted out the carrots?

And since I mentioned backpacks, let me address Tipa's points about "how to get those 200-300 pounds of meat and fur back to your home" after you kill a deer or "why would anyone think they’d be able to single handedly clear out a dungeon full of treasure?" The answer's the same in both cases of course: it all goes in your backpack, along with your horse and quite possibly a couple of goblins and a pagoda or two. 

It's magic. Don't question it. You can't. You don't know how it works. No-one does. Least of all the developers.

Palia fashions are... strange.
Although not as strange as
what's happened to her feet...

Now, Tipa is saying things might be more interesting if the games used real-world physics and that may well be so. Games that make that choice do exist. If you take that route, though, you can't also have almost any of the magic that makes the rest of the game what it is. 

It's not just that once you open the door to things like instant travel, no encumbrance or flying mounts, you're into a brave new world of logistics. It's also that you can't easily separate out the magic you want from the magic you don't without creating just as many cultural infelicities as if you'd left it alone. 

Look at a real-world example: AI. Now the large language models are loose it's proving extremely difficult to contain them. Once a principle is demonstrated, applications follow. The culture is already changing as a result and if draconian restrictions aren't applied and enforced, something which will require a cultural change all of its own, then many things will become possible which used to not to be.

A world in which magic is demonstrably real will necessarily have radically different cultural mores and practices from one where it's not. If we're going to start questioning the internal logic of these societies, we should probably be asking why they look so similar to cultures with which we're familiar, not why they don't look similar enough.

This leads directly in to the more pressing question of whether the games are as entertaining as they could be, although even to get there we first have to get past the hurdle of whether they're meant to be just games or something more. The argument over whether the goal is to create the most enjoyable games or the most convincing virtual worlds has been raging since even before I started playing MMORPGs and that was almost a quarter of a century ago. I certainly don't propose to try and resolve it here.

What I am going to suggest is that the two concepts are considerably less compatible than many people have been trying to suggest for decades now. There's a solid, commercial reason why MMORPGs (And, perhaps to a lesser extent, RPGs.) have become more and more gamelike over the years; it's because that's what players are most likely to accept, to enjoy and pay for.

There absolutely is a market for games where, as Tipa describes, you need a wagon to get the carcass of the creature you've killed back home so you can butcher it. ArcheAge come to mind as a game I've played that incorporates such features. But even in those games, such activities tend to be optional. 

It's also not as easy as all that to set up such systems to be consistent with real-world values, even if you wanted to do it. Star Citizen is perhaps the "shining" example here. In attempting to create a gamespace in which everything really does behave in a way logically consistent with real-world physics, Cloud Imperium Games have... not made a game at all.

We all look completely fine.

If and when they do make a game that conforms to that blueprint, it's odds on that most of the game-playing world, having given it a go, will decide they already have one life to live and can't fit the requirements of another, just as nitpickingly tedious and demanding, inside of it. Every action in a game must be easier, faster and more fun than the real-world activity it mimics. Otherwise, why not just go do the real thing instead?

All of which brings me to unrealistic expectations. These days games are expected to be both rigorously realistic and absolutely convenient. If it takes a long time to get things done it's a grind and if it doesn't there's not enough content. If travel is instant it's an insult but if it's not it's a time-sink. If death means nothing but a brief interruption to gameplay it's trivializing the risk but if there's a corpse to be recovered it's an archaic throwback to the bad old days.

There's so much choice these days, no-one has time to put up with anything that's not perfect. But nothing's ever perfect. Or will be.

Least of all this post, which as I said is just a few jottings on some things that occurred to me while I was reading stuff other people wrote. One day someone might knit all this together and come up with the ideal game but it won't be in my lifetime and probably not in the lifetime of anyone reading this, either.

We're all just going to have to get used to some things in our games not being exactly how we'd like them to be, I guess. Which is probably the closest to reality the games are ever going to come.