What Makes Us Roleplay? - Why Game Worlds Feel Real - Extra Credits

Games often condition us to go through the motions of solving the puzzle or saving the world without really asking us to take on the role of the character we're playing. But a few games, by intent or by accident, manage to make their world feel real to us, and invite us not just to play the game but to put ourselves in the same mindset as the people on screen.

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♪ Intro Music: "Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM

♪ Outro Music: "Neonature" by nervous_testpilot

[rogerclanka]

I was playing For Honor when I got a silly helmet for my Gladiator, it made him look like a fish so I ran around screaming "I AM FISHMAN! FEAR MY POWER!". I was basically a fish super hero. I named all my moves something dumb like "Strike of a Thousand Piranhas" or "Salmon Slam". About halfway through my 3rd match as Fish Man, I kept getting killed by a Shinobi, and from that match forward, that Shinobi was my arch-nemesis "Fisher's Hook" and I wouldn't stop playing until I bested him. Finally after like 6 or 7 matches I managed to kill him multiple times without dying once to him, it was a great feeling of relief and victory.

[moff]

The thing about permanant death in games is that in can indeed break immersion. Not just because the players gets frustrated about having to restart, but also because when a game is too hard, players stop immersing themselves so that they can get the best loot.

[DylboScratchins]

I remember playing League of Legends and everyone in my game got really into character. After about an hour of playing the game and both teams banter back and forth as we thought the champions would, someone on the enemy team pitched an idea. Since we were all full build and max level, the enemy Lissandra suggested we should implement a perma-death style method of game play. Since we were at pretty much a standstill with both teams repelling each other easily at each push, it seemed like the only way to make them game end. If a player died, they sat at fountain and did nothing but offer banter the rest of the match. If a team lost all of it's players, they would agree to surrender. This added so much tension to the game. Every brush became deadly, every space in the fog of war terrifying, knowing death was one five man death bush away. After about five minutes we were down to three players on my team while the enemy still had their full roster. I was one of the last surviving players on my team and I knew that the next fight would come down to mechanical skill alone to determine the winner. So I got my remaining teammates to hop in a Skype call with me so we would be able to effectively communicate the next fight. When it finally came time, we led one last push Zulu style with our Poppy charging at the enemy straight down the mid lane as they pushed, and our Brand and myself (Ashe with Guinsoo's and a Ruunans~) flanking from either side of the river. I was the first to die off but I managed to take two of the enemy with me and burn Lissandra's ultimate so the rest of my team wouldn't have to worry about it. Once Brand got a good Pillar of Flame off the enemy minion wave was decimated and he got one good ult to kill the rest of the team while Poppy did her best to peel for him. The enemy team surrendered and I've been great friends with the lot of them since. It's surprising how much fun one can have roleplaying in a MOBA when all ten players are having a good day and feel like having a bit of friendly RP, and how tense the game can become.

[Darkerxz]

Not having your choices labeled as "good and bad" or "blue and red" or "paragon and renegade" really helps the immersion. Most people would probably project themselves as the good/blue/paragon character. Just look at the statistics for inFamous 2, for example.
This leaning toward good really break the immersion, because you are constantly looking for a way to get that "good ending".

[Words-erez]

I found meta-RP on a PVP server in WoW. I had leveled my rogue back in the day when Thousand Needles was not shit and while I was there I had been constantly harassed by enemy players. So when I made it to level cap, I came back to Thousand Needles and acted as a guardian angel for the horde playing there.

I would stealth around watching people level, if they were going to die, Horde or Alliance alike, I would leap out of the shadows and slaughter the mobs that were about to kill them then vanish into the dusty winds of the salt flats. As long as players didn't harass each others, I was helpful.

However when I saw higher level players or groups of enemy players ganking lowbies I descended on them like the angel of death and over time that place became *my* territory. People would message me when ever they were getting ganked, even total strangers, and ask me to come defend them because it was MY God damn race track and no one got ganked on my land.

I also got really into the RP aspect of Alterac valley back in the day. I use to TORMENT the alliance by stealthing into the towers and stealing them right out from under the guard's noses. I got reported for hacking so many times that I had to make a video about it to show what I was doing so that when the admins contacted me I could just point them to the video and show them how I was doing the seemingly impossible. It's still up on youtube called "Surprise's Rogue Guide to AV".

Again, my Rogue became semi-legendary because I picked this one thing I was really good at and made it into my art. The horde rarely lost when I was with them because I gave them all the time in the world to win by resetting all the enemy timers over and over. I became a ninja-saboteur, insuring my army's victory through the use of stealth and guile. All meta-gameplay but it was fun!

[stevensomers]

I played a game of Civ 5 a while back where I fairly early on used two catapults to take over Babylon. One survived, was upgraded to a Trebuchet and helped take Amsterdam. More than two thousand years later and that unit, now a rocket artillery, helps to break the defenses of Berlin granting me a Conquest victory. In my head they were a family of siege engineers that generation after generation served my nation in conquering the world.

[klakkat]

Oddly enough, my favorite moment came in a turn-based strategy game: Alpha Centauri. Early on I engaged in a land grab that put me in conflict with another civilization, which eventually lead to war. He had been colonizing some land that I had already established myself on, and I quickly started winning the land battle. He was a aquatic-focused civ, so he could have weathered that for a long while, but he offered peace terms where he'd give me some tech, pay some money, and give me one of the cities on that continent we were contending, so I took the deal.

After that, relations improved; he soon became friendly, and later we became allies. I was a little shocked at this, since most strategy games once you go to war with someone it never ends in a lasting peace, but this time it did. We became strong allies with trade and research agreements, both carefully planning our settlements not to encroach on what we perceived as the other's territory. This was an AI-run civ, I'll remind you.

Later on, I got embroiled in a war with another civ that proved to be mostly a naval battle, which I was not at all prepared to fight. So, I went to coordinate with my ally, and he gave me 50 Needlejets, which more than quadrupled my air forces at the time, and shared plans that he was going to attack a specific city.

At the time, this all made sense to me. I sent him some tanks (since his ground forces were less than mine) and we proceeded to conduct a coordinated war against our foe, later joined by his ally. We won that war, and we continued like that for the rest of the game, steadily expanding, trading units back and forth, and coordinating attacks. The relationship never soured. I even ended the game early so that we wouldn't have to come to conflict on who was the 'real' winner.

On reflection that one relationship has been my favorite moment of roleplaying and strategy at the same time, and I've never been able to replicate it. Most modern strategy games have enemies stay as enemies for the rest of the game; any reconciliation is token and temporary. When I play turn-based strategy games I always plan on going in as the victorious loner; one who can do no wrong in the long run and will have no permanent friends, only temporary non-enemies. But for one solitary game of Alpha Centauri, I feel like I actually made a friend, and they certainly had a friend in me, even though we started as enemies.

[PROTOBLUES]

I was playing Pokémon Y a few years back. I took a right turn and found myself at victory road and caught myself a baby lucario.

That lucario was X. He was my friend.
We challenged every gym together, every event, and beat the elite four. We caught every Pokémon and he never left my team.

Every time he shed a tear and shook off a killing blow to keep fighting I felt proud.
I equipped him with the moves he needed to cover ANY fight.

And at the end of it all I cried when I put it down for the last time. I know he’s still there, waiting in our home. Waiting for the kid that caught him and built him into a proud lucario.
He never needed the mega stone to win a fight, so I never gave it to him.

[ashleybanks]

Playing civilization. A unit lived with a sliver of health. The last survivor defending my country from a hostile invasion. Later the unit became a veteran and I got to rename it. This made that unit legendary for ages. When it finally did fall It was right in the feels. Lol 😆

[aaronnielsen]

I remember playing Doom 3 in my friends basement late at night.

It was dark, we had this sense of being in a place we shouldn’t be because it was probably 1 or 2 in the morning.

Every sound, every sight could just as easily be in the game or right there next to us in the basement.

I remember several times having to pause and rip the headphones off because it was just too real. Like I was the one chainsawing demons and running away from monsters rather than the character.

[charade]

One of my runs in Rimworld gave me the most tragic story. Started tribal, two people, a muffalo, and a pet wolf. We start out okay, getting set up, nothing too bad. My colonists fall in love! And then immediately after one of them gets the plague. I only have herbal medicine and know that despite my best efforts...she's going to die.

On her deathbed, my other colonist proposes to her. Literally minutes later she passes away. Her pet muffalo goes wild with grief and starts attacking everything, beating the pet wolf until it can't move, then my other colonist. After this, while both are still disabled...a wild wolf comes up and kills and eats the pet wolf, all within mere inches of my fallen colonist, forcing him to watch. He slowly starves to death, mere feet away from the entrance to their little home and safety and food. It has been probably 2 years since that scenario plays out and it STILL gets to me.

[arteriop]

I know this whole story is gonna sound childish but I was playing Minecraft on hardcore. Ya know, delete the save when I die. Every step and every action I made was careful and calculated. My goal? Build a medieval castle in survival. I did and I was so proud. I was walking around in game in my garden one day and thought to myself “aww heck, why not make a flagship and a fleet?” So I got the materials and got ready. A few seconds too long underwater and I drown. I straight up cried because I had gotten absorbed into being the kindly lord of that town that I forgot I was on hardcore.

[joesphistalin]

The one time I was playing Halo 2, and I was on a beach on the mission called "Day at the Beach" I'm fairly certain. I was in a Warthog (Which is just a cool jeep with a gun on it) and had 2 marines in it with me.

At one point I was driving along, awesome music playing in the background, the guy in the turret going at it like crazy, and enemies falling all around me. A pretty awesome show either way, but then, When my Gunner died and I was going to replace him with the other marine so we could survive, I went on a jump very strangely. I ended up flipping the hog, and it ended a little ways away from me.

Instantly I started running to the hog, and I crouched behind it since it was now destroyed, and used it as cover. The marine was as well, each of us taking one side of the hog to shoot from behind.

And then there was a line of explosions coming up to the hog, suddenly the area around me went black, and everything seemed to explode. All I heard other than the boom was a scream. A scream of the man next to me. Everything went silent after that, since the warthog shifted and I was now completely covered from the enemies so they didn't fire. The body of the marine was laying in front of me, the crater from the explosion that killed him, and his blood a short distance away.

It was chaotic, and kinda meaningful, since those two marines fought to the end to defeat the covies and help save Earth. It was awesome.

[connorpatton]

A good example of permanent death would be Shadow of Mordor. In the game, when you died, you came back to life because you are a wraith. But everytime you die, the orc that killed you will grow stronger and more powerful, harder to kill and more likely to cause problems for you later in the game. Orcs also remember you if they kill you and your choices effect them if the run away or kill you. This way, you had to research each individual orc, what their fears and strengths were, so you could defeat them and prevent them from fighting you again or make them run away and loose their power. This also gave more character to the Orcs more than the books ever could have. Because there are more Orcs than humans or any others, you cherish the human, elf, dwarf and halflings that you do run into.

[Croccifixo]

Me and my friend went through an entire campaign of XCOM on the PS3, where every single member to join our forces and surviving their first outing received their own full backstory and complete interaction with the other members of our main crew. One of them, Wagner, died on his first mission, but was the best friend of our silent, heroic sniper Xiao who saved many a campaign. At the end, we had about 10 A4 pages of notes written about our different characters. Because of this, we refused to use the save and reload system, a dead character was dead, and it's one of the best campaigns of XCOM I played, fully abiding to the Ironman condition without playing on Ironman mode.

[MrShinyObject]

When I first played Bastion, and I got to the very last level, the game gave me a decision. It was simple, straightforward, and entirely binary, but no right or wrong or good and bad. Bring Zulf back to the Bastion. The game had no moral choice system prior to know, and it caught me entirely by surprise. I considered everything about this character, what he's done for me, what he's done for my character, and whether I could trust him. And what followed after that was eye-opening, and even more so when I saw the alternative in my next playthrough.

[jesternario]

I think it'd be interesting if an RPG kept all the skills and abilities completely under the hood; a game where you don't get to see what your character is capable of, and at the same time, the more you do things, the better you get. You wouldn't get to see the mechanical effect, but you would know that your abilities in the game have improved through doing.

[nyramakani]

First time I played Skyrim: It was the first game I'd ever really played, so I had no idea about the conventions such as dungeons, loot and the like. So when I walked by the stables of Whiterun and saw there was a horse I could buy, I went back to Riverwood and spent days chopping wood because that's the only way I knew how to make money. I loved that horse and it was incredibly precious me since I'd done hard honest work earning the money to buy it. I left it in towns before heading into dungeons so that it wouldn't be hurt in the wild and ran away from conflicts I could have won so it wouldn't die.

[Ianthe]

Oh man, Nuzlockes...
I was playing FireRed (a Kanto remake for GBA) as "Chai" and did food-based names. Squirtle "Soup" and Pidgey "Chicken" were a favorite duo for a while. Then I caught a male Nidoran. I LOVE Nidoking, so I was ecstatic! I named him Carrot and he stayed on my team as much as possible. He even solo'd Sabrina, a psychic user!

Well, I was heading up to the Elite Four when Gary-MF-Oak showed up. I thought "Okay. We got this. Come on, team!"

It was tough. I was winning, but most of my Pokemon were on low health. He sent out his Alakazam, so I weighed my options. Carrot was at full health, and a high level to boot. Sure, he was a Poison-type, but he'd solo'd Sabrina. This punk Alakazam was nothing to his boosted speed and attack.

Except it went first.

And it crit.

I can't remember who avenged him, only that I'd won but wasn't happy. My husband was cooking dinner and had to turn down the heat to give me a hug, I was crying like a fool. I lost Carrot.

He suggested that I just trade him to another game instead of releasing him or to just continue using him because he was my favorite, but that just felt wrong - like necromancy or something - and I'd gone that far with following all of the rules. Chai would have buried him with honor. So, still teary-eyed, I released him.

Then that left me with a hole in my party at the very tail-end of the game. I didn't want to go through grinding again, not that late in the game, but no one was really strong enough to go into the Elite Four with any hope for survival.

Then there was Tofu. He was the Hitmonlee I got at the fighting dojo in Saffron after beating Sabrina, and he had already survived a decent amount of level-grinding so he wouldn't take too long to catch up. He still went into the Elite Four a little early, but I was hopeful.

I blazed through the Elites, but then got to Gary-MF-Oak again. It was tough. I lost a lot of Pokemon, used up almost all of my Potions. We were each down to one. He had an Arcanine, I had Tofu, and very little hope. Extremespeed is a bitch.

They traded blows back and forth. Then came the choice: How did I want to lose? If I healed, it would get me another turn, but I'd still get hit and I'd be right here again. If I attacked, I'd be too slow because of Extremespeed, and worse, the best attack I could use had a decent miss-chance. Unless he didn't use Extremespeed, or didn't attack at all, or my hit landed... Longshots, but I'd come this far and it was the final moment. I couldn't just turn around and call it quits.

I finally just kinda looked at the little sprite on my screen, nodded, and issued the command to attack.

Extremespeed hit first.

But Tofu clung to life with a single hit point and struck true, finishing off the offending Arcanine with a risky Hi-Jump Kick!

Dinner tasted better than usual that night.

[cdtlnc]

One of my best and most immersive gaming experiences came from Napoleon: Total War. I was playing as Prussia, and I had to command my weakest army against three full-stack revolutionary armies.

Being composed of mostly veteran Landwehr (Militia) and a few standard Line Infantry, I knew I didn't stand a chance, so I decided that I would bleed them white in their assault! I placed my Landwehr on top of a small hill, where I knew they'd have a height advantage (as well as extra momentum if I ever need to have them to charge) and kept by Line Infantry behind for reserve.

Surprisingly, my Landwehr put up a good fight! More than I expected, as the revolutionary force's Line Infantry (the filthy traitors!) marched closer to the hill, they fired volley after volley, covering the base of the hill with smoke! And once I could see that the enemy started to waver, I ordered a bayonet charge, and the first wave was routed, much to my delight!

The next treat was the cavalry, my Landwehr weren't disciplined enough to form into square formation, so I had them shift ranks with my Line Infantry. However, the enemy launched a surprisingly coordinated assault, combining cavalry charges followed up with lines of infantry to cover their retreat! Having to fight coordination with coordination, I spent most of the battle in intense micromanagement, shifting Landwehr and Line Infantry to maintain my height advantage.

As the muskets silenced and the men retreated, we were victorious - But for the last time. My units were tattered and fatigued, my general had fallen, and the enemy still had fresh reserves, which were being brought to the front. No amount of tactics or micromanagement could save them now. Sensing the moment of truth, I had what was left of the army form a line on the base of the hill, and once the enemy was close enough, ordered one last bayonet charge.

They fought tooth and nail for their lives, but they too had reached their limit. The battle was lost, my forces either dead or routed.

It was a costly victory for the enemy, however! Most of their regiments were tattered and fatigued, and one of their generals had fallen. My remaining forces had been more than a match for them after that, and the rebel scum were crushed under the heels of the king!

I still fondly remember the regiments that fought in that battle:

27th Landwehr
28th Landwehr
29th Landwehr
30th Landwehr (This one was the most veteran of their peers, and routed two units during a bayonet charge!)
31st Landwehr
32nd Landwehr (This one had felled a general!)

15th Regiment of Foot
16th Regiment of Foot (They were part of the climax of the battle - Fought to the last!)
17th Regiment of Foot

22nd Hussars
23rd Hussars

While you couldn't actually do it in-game, I always liked to think that there was a statue erected in their honor at the site of the battle.