Trigger Happy
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
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