Opinion: Roleplaying in MMOs is kind of boring. That's why I love it.
Role-playing games (RPGs) are an excellent vessel for escapism. For many of us, playing games is partly because we want to shed our real-life identities and take on the role of someone else. RPGs give us absolute freedom to be whoever we want— whether we’re an explorer for Constellation or a simple turnip farmer in Pelican Town, booting up an RPG is a chance to escape into a new life.
But there is a certain uneasiness inherent in RPGs, a sort of Truman syndrome that comes with the fact that you’re not really playing as a different person in a different world. In reality, you are engaging with an experience that was hand-crafted by a game company, a team of perhaps hundreds of people, all working to build an experience around you rather than allowing you to forge your own destiny. Certainly, a good RPG will give the player plenty of options. Still, it is very hard to shake the subconscious feeling (nay— objective fact) that the dungeons were built for you to beat, the quests were built for you to complete, and literally, everyone else in the entire world is just standing around offscreen waiting for you to come talk to them.
This is where MMORPGs come in. The idea that we can take on new identities while surrounded by other people doing the same is cool, right? No matter how much RPG developers claim that their worlds are “living, breathing ecosystems” (whatever that means), machines can never substitute for real people. NPCs will always feel like NPCs. So perhaps roleplaying with fellow humans could offer a unique experience for one seeking escapism.
However, having spent years of my life engaging in proper multiplayer experiences that brand themselves as “Serious RP,” I’m going to make a controversial argument:
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