Cumulative Character Games: The Devoted All Go to Heaven

Cumulative Character Games : The Devoted All Go to Heaven

Best represented by the fantasy role-playing (FRP) adventure genre , in these games you can get there through devotion alone. Nobody, regardless of native skill, intellect, reasoning ability, or reflexes, can be anything more than meat in these games until they've put in time acquiring attributes and qualities bestowed by the game. Being smart can help you become a force to be reckoned with faster, but you have to pay your dues.

Although at first these may seem purely achievement-oriented games, probably because you usually spend your first few hundred hours acquiring skills and game goods, they do evolve into development games. Players either acquire so much stuff that it loses its meaning and utility, or they carve out a niche for themselves , deciding, in effect, to leave the rat race behind them. In either case, players will eventually develop beyond, or in spite of, the reliance of these games on game-created goodies to drive their game mechanics. Although most examples of the genre are established in early medieval settings, online FRP design is dominated not by the pre-Christian mythology of swords and sorcery, but by pure, raw, unseasoned capitalism . You are who you are because of what you have, what you've acquired , and what you can afford to buy.

But, like the occasional over-wealthy soul, player communities move from achievement to development when they learn there's more to life than money, and you're not something special because you have more of it. Just like the meritocracy-based game, cumulative character games over the years develop rich and warm societies that value their members and bring out the best in them. And just like the meritocracy game, they do so for reasons that seldom have anything to do with the intended design of their creators .