Alrik's Different Angle: On Reasoning
by Alrik Fassbauer - 2003-11-10

Well, a few days ago, I thought about role-playing. I thought about what role-playing should be, and came to some different points of view.

In most C-RPGs (that's what I'm talking about now), you are fighting against some enemies, sooner or later. In fact, I can hardly remember C-RPGs you can play without any fighting at all, but that's not the point here.

You are fighting. Against the enemy.

Well, that doesn't involve much thinking. Give the stupid man a gun, say to him, pointing out to some Orcs "That's the enemy !" , and he will quite surely shoot first, and ask questions later (maybe later it turns out that this orcish shaman would have been able to provide some secure passage through orc-controlled territory but that's now history, and maybe too much interaction with Orcs for some C-RPGs).

Well, fighting against an enemy. You know what you are doing, and the borders are clearly drawn. In games like Icewind Dale or Dungeon Siege, this is the preferred method of reasoning your fights.

Well, now here comes the difference.

Imagine, someone gave you (as the role-player) a gun and said : "You are fighting for your family now !"

"Fighting for something ?"

That's totally different. At least from my point of view. And that's different, because you have to act totally different. It's different because you must reason what you fight for.

First, you have a different reason. From now on, it is not the enemy that's in your focus, but rather the thing you fight for, in this example your family. And second, you are now in a rather defensive position, because you are fighting for something.

I don't think developers and publishers would like that, being in a defensive position, because that doesn't involve much action. While fighting against the enemy you can happily invade fortresses, kill people, set whole towns on fire (orcish towns, mostly), don't show any mercy, be rude to others and spit onto the ground. And, of course, you travel. You get to see different countries, architectural different castles from the inside, different monsters, different kinds of magic (all extinct after killing the last surviving member of that school, of course) and different means of behavior (like throwing the flask of poison first and ask questions later). It's like vacation.

Fighting for something doesn't involve all that - except you are a missionary, or you must travel like described above to stop a nasty intrigue, like a dark cult wanting to turn everyone undead, for example. (Of course the cult consists of undead members.)

Fighting for your family - to continue that example, clearly involves more thinking. You must strengthen the walls of your house, block the weak spots of it (windows, for example), build up a good stock of food for bad times, and perhaps build up a militia for guarding the ways to the nearest shop. That's rather strategy than role-playing, it seems, and that's probably why no-one would like to play this. Stronghold is the only game that deals with such things, as far as I know.

Let's go a bit deeper now. I'll give you something even more different.

Let's imagine the following : You are in a country besieged by enemy people. Like in Dungeon Siege, for example, or like in Drakan. An old, very, very wise magician, priest or shaman comes to you, and gives you a new task. "Go out and fight for Love!" he or she says.

"What ? Has he become totally mad ?", you might think. And I guess 80 % of all action-RPG players would simply refuse to carry out this tak, or at least sit there several minutes, blinking. "What am I supposed to do ???"

There are only two RPGs out there I know of which incorporate goddesses of Love, the one is Arcanum, and the other one is the German RPG system DSA, now ported into English as "The Dark Eye", and also known from the "Realms of Arkania" series ported by SirTech long ago. No other RPG system I know of (sorry, haven't ever played (A)D&D as P&P yet) incorporated pure Love as a virtue, not even Ultima (sorry but I'm no expert in the Ultima series, because I haven't actually seen much of this series yet ... my RPG career began quite late). I have seen that in Ultima there are the "Virtues of Love", but not Love in itself.

And now you are supposed "to fight for Love". Apart from the fact that I never ever would expect this from C-RPGs made in the USA, this is quite different from anything I have ever heard of in RPGs. And why is it so different ? Because it makes you reasoning.

Now you've got an ideal to fight for, or even a religious message. "Fighting for Love" of course makes only sense in conjunction with hatred. Hatred personified in evil beings, like undead ones, for example. "Killing foes for peace" (taken from 'Supper's Ready' by Genesis) makes only sense against evil beings, and not against good beings. Except you are a "bad boy" who wants a nice, quiet town without fuss for yourself.

Of course, this could also lead into an intrigue, too : A corrupt priest taking the "fight for love" or "fight for your country" message as a reason to fight everyone who might disturb his power, for example, or simply as a reason to suppress a people of friendly orcs, who are erroneously put as beings of hatred. Like what happened with the original inhabitants of South America.

But having to reason why you are fighting and what for should at least put some sort of thinking into the game. Philosophy. Of course, the developers of action- RPGs don't like this, because ... well it's too little action. They want the players to have fun, and thinking isn't fun. At least that's the message standing behind games like Dungeon Siege. But on the other hand, with this kind of gameplay you are developing a generation of gamers who believe thinking is something bad, "thou shall not think", and thinking is evil, because only evil beings think, otherwise they wouldn't have such a sophisticated kind of intrigue the player has to fight against. That's why Planescape: Torment isn't really liked among players of the action-RPG genre, I fear.

There is a serious thing pointed out by Ekim, who had read this text before. He said, that fighting against the enemy in fact means fighting for your life. From that point of view, this is correct. The enemy could slaughter my char at any time, so that's what I'm actually doing : Fighting for my life. And the lives of the family, for example.
From my point of view, this is a question rather of the direction which action takes: Fighting against something seems to me like taking a rather aggressive direction of action, while fighting for something seems to me rather like a defensive direction of the action taken.
I had thought of fighting a boss monster in any game, let's take the nameless hordes in Blizzard's famous action-RPG, for example (and, yes, I'm not writing this name down on purpose). They stand for hatred, destruction, pest and so on. Imagine you go out meeting one of them. In a dark, deep buried hall you might stand before this boss monster. You can see this one. He sees you. You know, you must fight this out to the end, there is no try, you have only one chance. There you stand, eye to eye with this evil being personifying hatred, and you cry out loud : "I fight for Love !" Both of you know by now, where the border is. Love against Hate. One of you both has to die.
A different approach would be this, I think : Imagine the exact same scenery. But instead, you cry out loud : "I fight against you !" Or "I fight against hatred !" In my view, the "fight for love" is a more defensive position, and the "fight against you /against hatred" a more aggressive position. That's what I meant : The reasoning in the "fight for" approach could make more a defender of yourself, instead of an aggressor. At least that's my point of view. I admit that this is highly discussible, and I'm open to logical reasoning convincing me that I am wrong.

If you are fighting for something ... well, then you must be aware of its implications. Let's take a look at Terry Pratchett's "Night Watch" , for example. Mr. Vimes of the town's Night Watch is fighting ... well, originally he simply wants to keep the boiling town at peace, or at least a part of it. It's Revolution Time. He gets heavy problems with his "fighting for"-thing when he is presented a new chief : Now he is the subordinate of that chief (who thinks differently than the former one), and has to carry out his decisions and orders. One of these orders is : Fight against the people ! Kill the revolutionists! Mr. Vimes doesn't want that. He simply wants peace. So ... where does he stand, then ? If he's fighting for Peace, then he must knock down his own chief; if he's fighting against the revolutionists, then he must carry out the given orders - and thus throwing (in a non-literal sense) a can of explosives into the boiling town (apart from the fact that a huge part of the killed ones would be rather innocent people seeking shelter from the revolutionary boiling that's out there in the rest of the town). He's "between the chairs" , like a German saying goes. And that's why he has to reason on what he actually does and wants. From that point of view, fighting against the enemy is easy: Just kill all of the revolutionists. To fight for peace is a little bit more complex: The chief has to be convinced that it isn't any good killing so many people. (The other men are always on Vimes' side at this point.) And killing those people would rather make the survivors (if any) more angry - and if the survivors call for help in the other streets, Mr. Vimes and his men wouldn't be able to stand the public fury for long. From my point of view, the "fighting for" part needs more reasoning, while the "fighting against" doesn't need it - at least until you are presented a similar choice of decision. ("Fighting against Goblins ? Why ? - I was raised by them !") (To be honest, this whole article was partly fuelled by this book. I really recommend it.)

Fighting for Love ... I don't think I will ever encounter a game with this task for my whole life, and that's sad. Because strangely, and that's the thing that started this article originally, there are no games out there which are giving the player the task of fighting for something positive, except peace maybe, for example for beauty, love, your family, for nature maybe (imagine undead ones killing and burning every tree in your country - with what are you going to warm your house, heat up your oven when there's no tree -> no wood out there anymore? What are you listening to in the Spring when there are no more birds?). In Ultima, you have the virtues. Even the Virtue of Love. But outside Ultima, things like virtues are rarely to be seen. These things aren't standing on the fact sheets of developers with the title "good ideas". Fighting for Nature - why ? This sounds too dull. And therefore no-one ever made an attempt to make a fascinating game out of that. Because no-one can imagine one. That's not creative. I fear we would need companies like Bullfrog or Shiny for those kind of games (and yes, I know that the first one isn't there anymore). Just because they made games that were different from what the gaming world had seen before (Dungeon Keeper is imho a good example of "switching the point of view". No one had ever before asked what the inhabitants of such dungeons might think about heroes invading them ;-) ). Fighting for Love - that implies fighting against hatred. And fighting against something - that's what gamers always do in combat-driven games. That's where the circle closes. "This is the enemy !" -fight without asking. Fight without reasoning. Have fun.