The Significance of Statistics in RPGs

Mass Effect 2 just came out, and it is incredible. It's not without fault -- if I wanted to, I could pick out plenty of gripes both minor and less than -- but these faults are only apparent to me when I analyze it from outside the experience. At any time that I have actually been playing the game (and that's nearly 40 hours at this point), I have been absolutely enthralled by the characters, the story, and the gameplay.

One thing that the developers did in an effort to make the game more accessible was to streamline the combat and the bookkeeping. There's much less equipment to deal with and fewer abilities for each character to sink experience into. Looking at reviews on Amazon, I see that this has caused a furor among many shut-in genre snobs complaining about how this somehow diminishes the game as an RPG. To these folks, I have one word: bullshit.

In the days of pen and paper role playing, stats were assigned to player characters to allow the game master some way of determining what was feasible for the players to do in the game world. It's that simple. In the modern era of videogames, no human being needs to determine what players are or are not capable of doing. We can write elaborate rules that determine that for us and hid them away behind the scenes in physics engines and other computations. Even if hit points and damage modifiers are in effect, the player only needs to be made aware of their existence and general impact, not every specific facet of how they work. This allows us to have rules governing player behavior that are infinitely more complex, which allows for scenarios that are more consistent and more elaborate, and the players' blindness to the exact functioning allows for an experience that is more engrossing.

In the early days of videogames, it wasn't possible for players to have any control over the plot or the game world. For the most part, if there was any sort of significant plot, everything ran on rails with the player being the vehicle for advancing the plot, not an agent actively participating in its progression. Combat, then, was the only thing that the player had any sort of say in. So, in order to give a sense of individuality, games gave players more control over how they were to engage in it. Statistics and customization, tools that formerly existed to provide regulation of the game world, turned into mechanisms by which players were allowed a sense of personal identity in their character. Certainly, pen and paper games had player controlled proficiency development of this nature before the era of videogames; but they weren't essential to the genre. Unfortunately, the proliferation games allowing player directed character growth and boasting that they have "RPG elements" has apparently made it the defining aspect of the genre.

Truth be told, these sorts of customization options only lead to min-maxing and metagaming, the eternal enemies of immersion. Agonizing decisions about what's best instead of what's fitting; elaborate plotting of intended builds and ideal combinations; overwrought mappings of stimulus to optimal response. How can an interactive story survive when the player is more concerned with how he or she intends to play it than with how it will unfold? How can you effectively extend yourself into a character when you are entirely preoccupied with controlling him or her?

Statistics and customization are not the defining characteristics of the ideal role playing game. They are a cancer. What was once a healthy, functioning component of the genre has swollen and now threatens its very livelihood. They are a parasite, slowly killing the host on which they rode into popularity while simultaneously attempting to assume its identity. The folks at Bioware recognized this and have made an attempt to put them back in their proper place, and the result is hatred.

Statistics do not make an RPG. Role playing makes an RPG, and the Mass Effect series, taken as a whole, allows for deeper role playing than any computer game I've ever seen. I never could have predicted the way that certain decisions I made in Mass Effect 1 could have impacted the game world in Mass Effect 2; and I've spent the last couple of days consumed with questions about what the final effects of choices I made in this middle chapter will turn out to be. I am very nearly as curious about what this universe would look like for characters with other tendencies (as anybody who has heard me discuss a hypothetical "violent space lesbian" is aware). I am more attached to the character of Commander Shepard as I have brought him to life than I have been to any other character I have ever played.

Certainly, there is nothing wrong with player control over statistics or ability development. They allow you to impart some notion of who you feel your character is and how they interact with the reality around them. When they become the focus, though, something has gone terrible wrong, at least if you're trying to create a pure Role Playing Game. Anybody who discounts Mass Effect 2 not as a game, but as an RPG because they tried to relegate character growth to its proper place is missing the point and shutting themselves out of one of the best gaming experiences of all time.