Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
For some fans of text-based role playing, virtual reality is all in the mind.
Nov 19, 1999 | "There will always be a market for the graphic -- you know, point-and-click, bash heads, blow snot, take the monster's stuff and run," says Sean Patrick Fannon. But the director of Obsidian Studios is convinced that text-based gaming -- Dungeons and Dragons-style campaigns played by e-mail and in online chat areas -- is here to stay. "There still is and will always be a community of people for whom the written word is their most profound form of expression ... It's in that form that they are able to truly come alive in a way that they can't in their normal lives."
Fannon has spent over a decade writing and producing gaming titles like The Mutant File and Champions Universe, but his audience is small compared to the millions who shoot their way through the animated worlds of games like Quake, Doom and Tomb Raider. The 3D graphics, video effects and multi-player environments flaunted by these games are just about the closest anyone's come to that most coveted grail of the personal computer game industry, virtual reality.
Still, Fannon's fans and other devotees of text-based gaming -- a small but stubborn community of role players -- find that V.R. is less important that good old-fashioned storytelling. At Web sites like WebRPG and The Play-by-Email News, gamers busily conduct text-based Dungeons and Dragons campaigns with players from around the world. WebRPG claims 2 million page views per month and runs thousands of games through its message boards, while the Play-by-Email News carries announcements for hundreds of e-mail adventures of every conceivable variety.
"You can get more depth out of a text-based game than a graphic game," says Rick Loomis, president of the Game Manufacturers Association and owner of the Flying Buffalo game company. "This is less true than it has been in the past, but the more graphics and music and everything else you add to it, the less depth there is to the game."
Fans of multi-player titans like Ultima Online and EverQuest might disagree. And there's certainly no reason to believe that some gamers wouldn't be happy hopping between an imagined world that they shape as they write and the rich, graphic experience of multi-player adventure games. But it's clear that there is a hardcore group of gamers who eschew the Ultima Onlines and EverQuests -- with their seven-figure development costs -- in favor of the orcs and saving throws of that tabletop classic, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).
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