Well, this thread has wandered all over the place, but I suppose I may as well toss my thoughts into the ring. Uh... warning, very long post, so I've used spoiler tags to help reduce the length.
In general, I think most complaints about an RPG being "videogamey" break down into one of three different categories.
1) A player sees something happen in a game that reminds them of a videogame, and this bothers them because it
breaks their suspension of disbelief. You've got an order of warlocks who collect 'soul shards', and suddenly he is thinking of WoW. You have a rogue do a 'double jump' and he thinks of Spiderman. You have a fighter calling himself a 'tank' while the rogue does 'DPS', and he thinks of an MMORPG.
[sblock]But the thing is, this isn't really tied to videogames at all. It can generally crop up just as easily with other references. A player has his 'deck' of power cards and someone is bothered because it reminds them of Magic the Gathering. The group embarks on an Underdark adventure and the writer has wittily described it as a "maze of twisty little passages, all alike". A player shows up whose character is named "Driziitz" and everyone groans. After the group sees the movie Equilibrium, the DM includes an NPC who dual-wields hand crossbows and has a martial arts style designed around using them in melee.
Sometimes this is an issue of including an easter egg or reference to another source. Sometimes it is about drawing upon mechanics or ideas from another game.
Either way, for some people, it is cause for complaint. Not because of the mechanic or name or reference itself, in isolation, but because of what it does - breaks the bubble of disbelief. Momentarily takes them out of the game.
I find this, in many ways, simultaneously the most understandable complaint, but also the hardest to address. Some people like these clever references. Some people feel that good mechanics are good mechanics, regardless of the source. It is unfortunate if their presence bothers someone else, but there is really nothing that can be done about it. I certainly can't blame someone for being bothered by such a thing - but I also don't want to see the game change in response to it.
So, sure, sometimes someone will complain about something being 'videogamey'. It isn't that videogames themselves are bad, though - it is because the person finds themselves reminded of something outside of the game. There are plenty of other things that could trigger the same sort of response.
Sometimes, that's just the way things are.[/sblock]
2) The second type of complaint is generally about something being 'unrealistic', and the reference to video games is usually in reference to them often having mechanics that are exceptionally abstracted due to, well, that being the nature of the game.
[sblock]The problem, of course, is that this isn't about the video games themselves, and it also really isn't anything new to D&D.
Hitpoints have always been abstract. We've never really had an 'accurate' wound system. So when someone says, "This bothers me, because hitpoints are too videogamey in this system"... well, people tend to object. Both because 'videogamey' itself isn't a part of it, and because the problem isn't anything new. Thus, the person's complaint seems more like they are trying to justify it by implying that there is something instrinsically bad about video games, and
that is the reason why they are objecting now, when they've had no problems with such things in the past.
Now, that said, I don't think this is always the actual case. Instead, I think this often develops because their experiences with a video game may have helped
demonstrate to them the abstraction of mechanics they had never really thought about
before.
Say I play a 3rd Edition Barbarian who rages every day, which lasts a certain duration and then goes away. I see no problems with this. Then I play a video game where I have similar effects - I use a power that boosts me for a few minutes and then has a cooldown.
Suddenly, I sit back down and play that barbarian again, and it feels 'videogamey' - but only because seeing that mechanic stripped down to the bare bones helped demonstrate the abstraction of it. The barbarian certainly wasn't designed to feel like a video game.
Instead, the mechanics for the barbarian and for the video game just had the same design philosophy going on behind the scene. And once I become aware of it, I associate the two in my mind. And when I make a complaint about it, I thus phrase it in terms of video games, rather than addressing the underlying issue of realism vs abstraction.
These sorts of complaints are the ones I think Dannager is trying to point out as problematic. When someone complains about something being videogamey because they find it unrealistic, they aren't complaining about it being videogamey - they are complaining about it
being unrealistic. And thus focusing on this unrelated connection helps prevent any real discussion from taking place.
When that discussion does take place, at its heart, video games aren't really a part of it. How much of an RPG should be abstract is a debate going back to the start of the game - and changes wildly from one person to the next based on personal preference. Video games are simply on one end of that spectrum, and they themselves cover a wide range of different approaches.
If it wasn't for that, I could see the use of it for shorthand. But since there
are so many different reasons folks complain about stuff being 'videogamey' - and since there isn't one default type of video game in the first place - tossing it in as a reference tends to just confuse the issue. [/sblock]
3) Finally, we have the complaint of something being videogamey referring to
character options being limited.
[sblock]I think this is a
stronger complaint to make than the others, since limits are pretty much always going to be built into a video game. If the game doesn't want to let you explore off the path, you just can't do so. If the game says you can only defeat enemies by making the basic attack (A button) or super attack (B button)... well, then you can't find a way to defeat them by grappling with them and drowning them in the swamp. If the game says the only way you get into the palace is by disguising yourself as a palace guard, that is what you have to do - even if you think you
should be able to try stealth, violence, magic, or countless other approaches.
Now, again, there are a great many video games, and so this reference isn't universally true - many gives plenty of options or try to accomodate as much choice as possible. But what is written into the code is ultimately an absolutely restriction, and so this comparison is probably more true than the other comparisons, and so as a reference, I think is the most legitimate one.
Unfortunately, it also tends to be the least useful as criticism, since a roleplaying game system will almost never be enforced like this. If something is limited in such a fashion, that almost always comes down to the
DM more than the rules. Or perhaps you could apply it to an adventure (with the adventure writer taking the place of the DM in this case).
So you might say, "Bob's campaign is too videogamey because we are always running into
plot doors." And it could be true, he could have one solution in mind for every obstacle, and intentionally foil everything the PCs do unless it is explicitly what he has in mind.
Or an adventure could say, "The only way to get through Crazy Eddie's Door of Torment is to say 'Wicker licorice handle', which the PCs can find out by discovering the note on the Archpriest of Ravens." And if the party tries something else, whether divination, or blowing up the door, or teleportation... then the DM has to either let it happen (and risk the adventure falling apart completely), or just declare it doesn't work (and try to come up with a reason for it, and deal with players frustrated over lack of agency.)
But a game system itself will rarely have this sort of limitation. And so if someone says, "4E is too videogamey", and this is the reason why, it tends to not make any sense.
If they instead say, "4E adventures are too videogamey", and this is what they mean... well, that could be a more legitimate complaint.
But at the same time, I'm not sure how much is served by comparing it to video games. For one thing, it invites confusion, given the other possible complaints that could be meant by calling something 'videogamey'. And for another... I mean, this sort of behavior has been around since the start of RPGs. Video games had nothing to do with it. It is almost more legitimate to criticize it as being too much like a novel - since that tends to be the real problem, a DM who has a single story in mind and doesn't want to let stuff play out any other way. [/sblock]
In the end, the problem is that simply dismissing something as "videogamey" reads as "This is bad because it is like video games, thus implying that video games are themselves intrinsically bad." That's pretty much never what someone actually means, though.
They mean it is bad because it has some aspect the person associates with video games. And if that association
alone is the problem (as in example 1), it is understandable to make that comparison.
But usually it isn't about the association at all. It instead is about some other underlying problem, and one that usually has nothing to do with video games. And so the suggestion that one is better served by focusing on the problem itself
from the start... well, that seems like a reasonable suggestion to me.
) in that it seemed everyone had a certain little tree or two of powers to draw from that they could use all the time. Whether that is a true complaint or critique of the system wasn't the point to them; they thought of it as too limiting for what they wanted to do.
