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By Mark Damon Hughes <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>

   "Briefly, I have said that games, such as SSI's goldbox games, have already been given the name "RPG", even though they do not fit a rigorous definition. What can we do about this? Will the genre ever be well-defined?" -Psychochild

   I wouldn't categorize them as RPGs at all - they're KTATTS ("Kill Things And Take Their Stuff") games and nothing more. They have plenty of options, but when you get right down to it, there's no character interaction in them. IIRC, you get a menu of a few options in some encounters, and can pick up and lose some NPCs from the party. There's little reason to identify with or do deep role-playing with any of the characters, let alone with a whole swarm of them at once, because any characterization you put into them isn't going to show in the game. That's what "role-playing game" is all about.

   KTATTS games are best described as that, or more politely as "adventure games" - "games where you control a character or characters who kill things and take their stuff, maybe solving some puzzles to get to those things", but there's no way to force people to stop using the more prestigious term of role-playing game - "a game where you create or take on the persona of a character and act in the way that character would act, using cooperative story-telling and/or interaction with the world to express that role-playing" (a vague definition if ever there was one, but best I can come up with right now).

   The classic problem with the term "RPG" is that it's a player state - with the right mindset, almost any game *CAN* be imagined to be an RPG, but a "real RPG" would facilitate role-playing, not require spending most of your effort on sustaining your SOD.

   Many of the Infocom games were single-player role-playing games. Alternate Reality, too - your morality and actions made a significant difference in how your life went, though interaction with NPCs was pretty shallow. Ultima IV also did this, but I think it was too heavy-handed, so it came out as more of a matter of optimizing your virtues instead of living them. Only one of these (Planetfall) had anything like a decent NPC... Iolo is not my notion of character development.

   "BTW, I like the goldbox games for what they are. You can't discount the fact that people do like the "Kill things and take their stuff" games. Not everyone's hooked up to the internet, mind you...well, not yet at least. :)" -Psychochild

   Oh, indeed. I've spent far too much time playing Rogue/Omega/Nethack/ADOM, Doom solo (mostly on 3rd-party levels - a lot of those are brilliant, as far as KTATTS games go), and so on. For that matter, most of my MUD time was on Dikus and Circles, which are, ah, not always known for role-playing, to put it mildly (they CAN be, but it takes determined admins and players).

   An interesting thing to try in Doom is flipping to map view, turning on the "display everything" cheat (iddqd, I think), and playing it that way (though you can't tell what anything is, sadly - a proper one would have single-color sprites instead of triangles). Switch the sound to just the speaker, too. Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear...

   I've said it before, and I'll say it again: 3D first person makes games feel more immersive, so you think there's more to them than there really is. That's why Diablo shocked so many RPG enthusiasts, because it has as much gameplay as many so-called RPGs, but in the more detached third-person view it's obviously just a "kill things and take their stuff" game. That's why experienced pencil & paper gamers usually deride dungeon crawls, because they're just "kill things and take their stuff" games, not RPGs, even if they're couched in terms of role-playing.