For the best part of a decade, the RPG was the genre you would invoke when you wanted to talk about all that was predictable in gaming. With its loot, grinding, endless reams of dialogue and stoical pixies, the RPG symbolised videogames hemmed in by their own traditions, and stood for play at its closest intersection with work.
For the best part of a decade, the RPG was the genre you would invoke when you wanted to talk about all that was predictable in gaming. With its loot, grinding, endless reams of dialogue and stoical pixies, the RPG symbolised videogames hemmed in by their own traditions, and stood for play at its closest intersection with work.
Over the last few years, however, the RPG has started to get exciting again, largely because it’s gone viral. Levelling up has worked its way into platformers and puzzle games, while shooters like Borderlands are borrowing the genre’s handy reward schedule to shower you with trinkets and baubles at every opportunity. I’ve started to roll my eyes like a dimly amused ancient whenever a developer tells me that its new game will feature RPG elements, but secretly I’m delighted: because I know they work, and I know I love to see them work. They give a familiar, welcome shape to things, a pleasing acknowledgement of a central structure. They offer the warm embrace, rather worryingly, of toil.
At this year’s Develop conference in Brighton, almost everybody I spoke to was certain about only one thing in gaming. 3D was questionable, movement controls were dicey, and the triple-A boxed game was bleeding from the ears and walking into walls, but RPG elements were just about to really take off. They would be involved – intimately involved – in everything from productivity software to electrical appliances. You’ll be completing missions while you slog through Weightwatchers meetings, and, if you enjoy Pop-Tarts enough, one day you might hit 70 on your two-slice toaster.
All of which brings me to two recent iPhone releases, both of which put their own clever spins on the idea of the RPG: EpicWin and Godville.
EpicWin is the simplest to describe. Built by a brilliant and unholy alliance of Tak Fung, the creator of MiniSquadron, and Rex Crowle, the artist behind LittleBigPlanet, Grip Wrench and far too many other projects to talk about, EpicWin is a task list app that has been weaponised with RPG components. Set chores, assign them a value and a stat type, and then tick them off once completed to level up, advance across a dinky little world map and score meaningless loot.
I’d love to tell you that this hasn’t made me any more productive, but the truth is that, at just a single week in, it’s turning my meaningless little life around. The feedback is brilliant, which counts for a lot – pushing against a completed task and watching its health bar diminish is profoundly satisfying – but there’s a deeper, and far more worrying truth here as well. As the modern first-world life is increasingly robbed of undue access to genuine drama – as we’re sealed off for the most part in a sanitised cocoon composed of Spotify log-ons, Krave cereal boxes and apps that help you track down the keys to your stretch Hummer (they were under your Moleskine-alike iPad case – who knew?) – we need a little jolt of fiction, no matter how knowing, to coax us to do even the simplest tasks. EpicWin is a testament to our gleeful ability to lie to ourselves: it dangles the promise of numinous self-improvement and adventure to anyone who’s willing to do the vacuuming with any kind of regularity. Which is a long-winded way of saying that it’s brilliant, basically.
Godville wants to comment on the RPG a little more openly. Pitching itself as a zero-player game, and a clear progeny of Progress Quest, Mikhail Platov’s offering allows you to create an RPG hero, assign him a name, and then set him loose in a cheerily ridiculous adventure world. There’s little in the way of direct control. As his god, you can monitor your hero’s idiotic derring-do through the app’s equivalent of Twitter posts, and speak to him or deliver the occasional perk – although he may not understand what you’re saying, suggesting the whole thing is parodying a lot more than just the games us humans play.
It’s shameful to admit this, but Godville is darkly rewarding in its meaningless levelling and incessant battles even before you take into account the smart writing. Although the main event is wilfully empty, I can at least kid myself that the real fun might in fact come from helping to improve the game itself, as the app comes with handy tabs allowing to you suggest bug fixes, correct grammatical errors, and even suggest your own quests and hero dialogue. In reality, though, the promises of numbers that get larger and larger over time is enough to keep me checking in each day.
Productivity and intoxicating idleness, then: in recent years, the RPG has turned satirical as well as ubiquitous – and the punchline, increasingly, is us.