Do you remember Seinfeld, the television show? Well, reruns are still playing on a lot of cable channels. I'm sure most of you will know that show, even those in Europe. It was popular enough to have been translated in a few languages, and ran for many years. For those who don't know it, this was a sitcom about nothing. No, I did not make a typo. The show really was about nothing. They even made a point of making a whole series of episodes relating their adventures about selling the idea to a major television studio.

Wait, I have a point to make I promise, stay with me. This show proved that you didn't need a recurrent theme to be successful. In fact, it went so far as to prove that it's probably even better not to have some kind of universal theme attached to a sitcom to be funny and popular. Now, with a success such as the one Seinfeld earned as a television show, couldn't such a concept be applicable to other medias to an equal degree of popularity?

Less is more
How about a game about nothing? How about an RPG about nothing? A few weeks ago, when I had just started roaming around the RPGDot message boards, I participated in a very hot discussion about linearity and open-endedness in Role Playing Games. This discussion made me think about how a game could completely lose the sense of linearity and give complete freedom to do as you choose within a game. After much reflection, my answer is this: lose the story. Make the game about nothing by putting less emphasis on the plot. At the same time, make it about everything, make it about the player's actions.

To do this, the game developer would need to create an extremely rich world, with an ongoing history and inhabited by different factions at odds with each other. The player would be put in the middle of this world and be free to take on a career of adventuring as he/she sees fit, free to make whichever alliances needed to accomplish the personal goals the player sets for himself. The world would need to be dynamic to be interesting, so that if the player would look at the world around him 10 game years after he started, it wouldn't be quite the same, both because of his own actions but also the dynamic history moving around him. Think this is silly? Perhaps.

How about Morrowind?
Recently, Morrowind came close to achieving this. It put you in the middle of a very hostile land, free to move about as you wished. The problem is that you're never really free of the main plot line even if you can choose to completely ignore it. It is aggressively hinted at right from the start, giving you a contact to seek out and get you started on the ever present " main quest ". And the problem is that the world never really evolves, either on its own or by the player's actions. Even once the main quest is completed, you are still treated with the same general responses from NPC's and main factions.

Don't get me wrong, I simply loved Morrowind. It's one of those memorable games that give you just enough open-endedness to make you believe in your relative freedom. But we can't say that Morrowind is a game about nothing, can we? Since there is this main quest to solve which is constantly lurking in the background, that makes it about something. It's about getting through the mystery of the Sixth house and the Nerevarine Prophecy, among other things.

You could always say that MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) actually achieve this, but that is only by accident in my opinion. Most, if not all, MMOGs have a main plot of sorts. Anarchy Online has the conflict between OmniTek and the Rebels, DaoC has the frontier wars, Asheron's Call had the Olthoi infestation (although this one evolved beyond that by now I believe). These are all themes within those games that insure the players feel as if they have some kind of role to play in the bigger story. Most players end up choosing to ignore that plot, but that's another story. Suffice to say that MMOGs are far from being about nothing.

A diamond in the rough
There was a game that was made a while back that came even closer to this notion of an RPG about nothing. This game was called Darklands. For those uninitiated to this little gem of a game, I would describe it as it was pegged by the developers themselves at the time of its release in 1992 : a medieval simulation. This game let you loose in the area of medieval Germany and its surroundings in a time when the church was struggling against witchcraft and robber knights. There was a main quest in this game, but it was never made obvious. It was quickly hinted at in the game manual, but never really outlined until you almost stumbled upon this narrative track within the game. Through investigating a few encounters with witches, you would uncover a bigger plot. But this main quest of sort was never imposed on you. You didn't really know it was the main plot until you completed it and was treated to an ending of sorts.

The concept behind Darklands was of a simulator, but it really was an RPG. It allowed you to create realistic characters, educate them in whichever carreers you wanted them to follow. They aged, and with age their abilities would become less effective. The world around you was faithful to the real medieval time in which you were in down to the small hamlets around the larger cities. You could interact with that world, and choose to play in whichever way you thought fit for your band of adventurers. You could be the local heroes of one of the larger cities and its surrounding villages, and be totally unknown at the other end of the region. Unfortunately its world didn't evolve, but it still was an accurate and rich world. There were so many things to do, so many paths to follow, so many little details, like the economy, and the alchemy or religious systems, that you could literally get lost in it (in a good way!). You had to take up work while resting in an inn for a while and study alchemical potions, learn about new saints that could help you avoid battles. It was astounding and very well put together.

Are we ready for... nothing?
Unfortunately Darklands didn't do very well, and the promised expansions and follow-up games never came. Which brings me to my next set of questions : Could such a game, an RPG about nothing, really work and sell in today's world? Was it the lack of maturity of the market at the time of Darklands' release that prevented it from selling more? Or is it that gamers in general, even today, cannot assimilate games that do not have a strong central storyline to follow? Must we always save the world? Must we always be the hero of the day? Can't we just experience the life of adventure and become local heroes in some parts of the world, while being nefarious scoundrels in others?

Those are big questions. I personally do not think that the gaming community is ready for an RPG about nothing, a game that would simply give you your weapons and a little starting money and let you loose in a rich, living world, leaving you free to do in it as you please. Most gamers crave for a path, a yellow brick road that leads to the evil castle and the dragon. I'm sure most of us would not even know what to do with a game that gives such freedom. And that's possibly what was Darklands' ultimate downfall. Most people, even some RPGers, simply did not know how to take that game.

An RPG game about nothing? I'm sure most of you are laughing at my idea by now. Perhaps you would be right to. In my mind though such a game would be about nothing in particular, but also about everything all at once! And perhaps with such a game the most wonderful of all adventures would unfold: the player's very own. And a different adventure it would be for every single player that would give it a chance.