Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 74)

Trigger Happy
76
They are very popular, especially since, as with
wargames, their relatively slow pace ensures popularity
on the Internet. In April 1999, a player’s “character” in
Ultima Online, with impressive quantities of treasure
and magic amassed over a period of six months, was
sold at auction for hundreds of dollars in real money. If
you can’t be bothered to construct a new identity for
yourself, you can always buy one.
We can see immediately an instructive contrast
between the appeal of traditional RPGs and that of God
games. If God games hold out the opportunity of
transcending one’s individuality, RPGs offer the player
a chance to be fully individual in a world where an
individual has real power, where the inexplicable is no
longer actually supernatural but domesticated and
quantifiable (magic, assessed numerically, is stripped of
all its magicality), and where actions always have
deterministic consequences for character or events. It is
a seductive simplicity. But what RPGs really have
going for them is the sense (or perhaps the illusion) of
being involved in an epic, mythical story, however
clichÉd its details might be. In this way they also have
roots in the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks written by