Terminology Thread

[Aenakume]

RPGs consist of the following elements:

• A complete world. (<-- The most important part.)
• A player character or a party of player characters.
• Some sort of story or goal.
• Some sort of challenges.
• Some sort of character growth.

Super Mario Bros.!!!

• A complete world. (<-- The most important part.) : The Mushroom Kingdom has forest lands, dungeons, deserts and undersea kingdoms!
• A player character or a party of player characters. : It's-a Mario and Luigi!
• Some sort of story or goal. : Save the Princess!
• Some sort of challenges. : Koopa Troopas! (And a world that seems to have been designed by a sadistic version of Escher.)
• Some sort of character growth. : Mushrooms!

Life!!!

• A complete world. (<-- The most important part.) : i love the whole world! Boom-de-yada!
• A player character or a party of player characters. : Me!
• Some sort of story or goal. : To live! Lots of side-quests! Right now, my side-quest is to get food.
• Some sort of challenges. : Other player characters are assholes.
• Some sort of character growth. : Right now, horizontally, around the hips.

Lemma Soft Forums!!!

• A complete world. (<-- The most important part.) : People are here from all over the world!
• A player character or a party of player characters. : Me!
• Some sort of story or goal. : The goal: creating VNs! ^_^
• Some sort of challenges. : The challenge: creating VNs! -_-
• Some sort of character growth. : My ass expands every second i spend on these forums.

(Perhaps a more precise definition is needed.)

[Wintermoon]

Super Mario Bros.!!!

• A complete world. (<-- The most important part.) : The Mushroom Kingdom has forest lands, dungeons, deserts and undersea kingdoms!

Super Mario Brothers does not have a complete world. It has a set of themed levels which obviously only exist as obstacles for the player to overcome. It has, outside of some trivial non-interactive cutscenes, no characters. It has no ecology. You can find some narrowly defined secret, but you can't explore it. You can't go back to visit places where you've already been. You can't sleep, you can't eat, you can't go fishing, you can't interact with the world in any way except running, jumping, and occasionally shooting fireballs.

Super Mario Brothers is an RPG, streamlined to support a particular gameplay mechanic and stripped of all elements that are irrelevant to that gameplay mechanic. In other words, it is an action game.

[LVUER]

Well, I think it's more to the objective of the games itself (what is the developer want their consumers do).
RPG(Role Playing Game) as the name suggest is a game where you play a role of someone. It should be yourself (you name the character, fully control its growth, etc) although most of JRPG lets you play in a role of the protagonist (which is good anyway).
While Mario is a platformer, where basically, you guide Mario through a platform which is full of obstacles and enemies. You don't need to immerse yourself deep inside the game as Mario or think what would Mario do in one situation. Just go to the goal and kick whichever boss' butt dare to stand in your way.

But I think we DO need the clarification of some terminologies, since most of time they are really vague/ambiguous. Especially nowadays where the boundary between games genre start blurring.

I think VN in American/West games are called ADV (adventure). Is VN an adventure game? Personally, I don't think so...

[papillon]

Lumping them in the loose adventure category works well enough for me, but they're clearly not adventure games in the sense of point&click, except when they're hybriding with them. Still, adventure games tend to be more reading and less action oriented, so when you're running a giant game directory and you have to find somewhere to put VNs, adventure seems a better choice than most.

Of course, since classic adventures are a niche genre that mainstream publications are constantly accusing of being dead (despite still being made and sold), some mainstream publications have started calling all sorts of random games adventures. Including platformers.

[Jake]

Super Mario Brothers does not have a complete world.

You can accuse Super Mario Brothers of this, but you can't really accuse Sunshine of this. And that's still not an RPG, by pretty much everyone's definition of the genre.

[Adorya]

The most extensive complete gaming world, beside real life, would be AD&D whole booklet set from 1974 to now and it's still missing many features that only can offer fantasy/sci-fi book.

In any computer game, whatever Role Playing it is called, is still very limited by the programmer data input in memory. A complete game world would be able to handle any player's actions, from digging a hole on the ground with the nose to dancing tektonik with ham clothes in a quiet moonlight, which actually is still not possible unless the player add those new data ingame (eg. Second Life).

[Showsni]

I'd be pedantic, and say an RPG is any game in which you play a specific role... For example, the role of Mario, thus making the Mario games RPGs. Basically, RPG is a pretty bad term for defining the game type it's come to mean, but no one seems to mind.

[LVUER]

Well, RPG originally lets you play the role of yourself in the said RPG's world (not as somebody else). So yeah, the term of RPG is "bad" nowadays. I think it has been discussed somewhere else about how the term Role Playing is inappropriate anymore.

But still, I still think about the objective of the game/developer. Do the game lets/want you to immerse yourself deep inside the game's world as Mario, letting you make decision as Mario, growing up Mario's power, love interest, etc. Equipping Mario new hat, new cloths, new mustache style? Well, there are Mario's RPGs. And Mario's RPGs are really different than the platformers ones.

It's not bad to re-define (or even defining new words) existing words, but we still must think of how much people will be familiar/accept with the new terms. Words RPG, platformers, etc,etc have been around for more than 20 years and I doubt we could just change them as easy as our finger.

[Jake]

To be honest, the distinction for me is similar to the distinction between a VN-with-puzzles and a puzzle-game-with-VN-bits; if the focus of the game is role-playing, then it's an RPG; if it's not, and the focus of the game is jumping on blocks or stomping goombas, then it's not, regardless of the fact that you're playing a role whenever you have a character in the game.

As it goes, I don't think it's reasonable to say that RPGs are always about letting you be yourself in the game world at all - that's how a lot of people play pen-and-paper RPGs, but arguably that's just them getting it wrong. RPGs are about playing a role, and that role could be 'yourself' or it could be 'spiky-haired angsty guy with huge sword' or it could be 'chubby moustached Italian plumber'. The important part is that being that person is a significant part of the game. In Mario platformers, it's not; you could be anyone, so long as you could jump, and it would be the same game. In FF7, however, if you were playing as anyone else, the main plot would be significantly different, so it's reasonable to say that playing as Cloud is an important part of the game.

[LVUER]

Originally, RPG is to let yourself to play the role of yourself in the said RPG's world (hence then name Role Playing). The earliest RPG DID let you play as yourself. Most of American RPG still stay true to this concept.

But most JRPG took different path and create a character for you to play role as. This is still RPG. but this raise a question since now you not play a role of yours truly anymore. Instead you play as somebody else's role (and the game limits you more and more to costumize your characters, like you can't change Cloud weapon to revolver/rifle).

For me, it doesn't matter too much, since you still play a role of somebody (like a theatere/drama).

And Mario platformer is not an RPG (at least for me) because, like I said, the objective of Nintendo making the game not so you play the role as Mario. But there are Mario RPGs and you can see that the game are really different than the platformers ones.

[monele]

I sense a confusion between table-top RPGs and their computer/console counterparts, CRPGs. If basing ourselves on the origin, table-top ones, then the goal is not to play yourself but, indeed, a role, in a fantasy world (fantasy as in "not real").. just like an actor would play a role. As Jake says, you *could* play as a buffed up version of yourself but I think of this as the "first stage" of playing such games. There is so much more to it ^^.
So, then, CRPGs have just transposed (well, tried to) this concept on computers. Western RPGs just tend to give a choice of who you will play, while JRPGs impose characters while leaving you some freedom with stats and equipment (and even, not always).
Technically, both western and japanese RPGs still do the same : allowing you to play a role. It's just that one lets you define that role more than the other.

[papillon]

Originally, RPG is to let yourself to play the role of yourself in the said RPG's world (hence then name Role Playing). The earliest RPG DID let you play as yourself. Most of American RPG still stay true to this concept.

.... What definition of original is this? As far as I'm aware the earliest (tabletop) RPGs grew out of wargaming, where you certainly weren't playing as yourself, into things like D&D, where you certainly weren't playing as yourself - you were rolling up a pile of random stats and then having to invent a character based around them. And the earliest western computer RPGs that I'm aware of worked off exactly the same concept. Your character was created by random dice-rolling and you were stuck with what you got. Over the years, both in tabletop and on the computer, it's slowly come more into fashion to let you decide for yourself where the stats should go instead of random rolls, although a few still do it. NOBODY in videogames that I'm aware of has a character generation system designed to let you model yourself.

(Sure, some players with no imagination named all their characters after themselves, but that isn't the point.)

Now, it is true that most western cRPGs allow you to create/shape your own character (to an extent) rather than being stuck with a premade character who levels at a premade pace. Most western cRPGs allow you to make some decisions about what kind of character you're playing personality-wise, too. You can be a saint or a bastard if you so desire. But you're still not supposed to be 'you', generally.

If you've been in a tabletop group long enough you probably have played at least one game where you all played yourselves cast into a fantasy world for lulz, but it's not the standard.

[Jake]

things like D&D, where you certainly weren't playing as yourself

Actually, in my experience people playing as themselves is remarkably common in pen-and-paper roleplaying. Usually they're playing as themselves-shaped-like-a-hot-female-elf or themselves-shaped-like-a-towering-barbarian-with-rippling-muscles or themselves-shaped-like-a-formiddable-wizard, but generally speaking a huge number of people totally fail to make the connection between the concepts of "playing a role" in a roleplaying game and, say, "playing a role" in a stage play.

The progression goes something like:

Worst: Behaves exactly as they usually do, only pausing to engage in combat
Bad-but-not-worst: Believes that saying 'forsooth' and 'verily' periodically passes for roleplaying
Not Bad: Finally realises that peasants in grimy fantasy worlds don't find Monty Python recitations funny
Good: Finally realises that a character they're portraying in an RPG is actually allowed to e.g. have different morals to them.


(Of course, 'good roleplaying' isn't always necessary for 'having fun', and if playing as a Monty-Python-quoting hot female elf who behaves just like a 20-year-old undergrad is what's fun for your group, it's fine... but it's not necessarily 'roleplaying', just 'playing DnD'.)

[Adorya]

Actually according to wikipedia the earliest rpg come from 19th century theaters, although if we had to be strict it would be 2 millions BC with Indian sanskrit drama and Egypt theater performance

[papillon]

Actually, in my experience people playing as themselves is remarkably common in pen-and-paper roleplaying.

In my experience, people playing the most annoying thing they can think of and claiming it's in character is remarkably common in tabletop. (If the phrase 'kender player' doesn't fill you with fear, you've been in very different groups than I...) You could stretch that to say that if they enjoy being annoying so much, it really does represent themselves...