The Nature of Freedom in RPG's and Computer Games

This essay is a product of a lengthy—and ongoing—argument I have been having with a friend of mine. A little background will serve to set it up.

I was raised in a household where television watching was kept to a minimum. I rarely played video games and, when I did, I was particularly bad at them. Additionally, my attention span regarding video games was, and still is, quite limited. I can play them for at the most an hour or two before growing bored.

My friend, on the other hand, watched a good deal of television as a child and spent at least as much time playing video games. He owns nearly every console system released and has a capacity for playing them far in excess of my own.

Six months ago, my friend played in his first pencil-and-paper roleplaying game. I ran him a few other people through one of the Unknown Armies adventures in the One-Shots sourcebook. He had a good enough time that he played again in a couple of other things I've run. Recently, I started a campaign of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game from Wizards of the Coast. My friend opted to play a Jedi. At about the same time, he was making his way through the newly released Jedi Knight II computer game and was enjoying it considerably. During our weekly RPG session, my friend complained that he didn't feel he had as much freedom in the Star Wars game as he did when playing Jedi Knight II. This struck me as strange because it seemed a matter of no dispute that pencil-and-paper RPG's offer more options to the character than their computer counterparts. After some questioning, he maintained his original opinion.

I will now present my analysis and refutation of his position.

To begin, I present the following claims about the nature of freedom in the two types of games:

1. Pencil-and-Paper roleplaying games unquestionably allow for a higher level of flexibility in the actions players are capable of having their characters perform. In fact, they are, strictly speaking, unlimited in that the actions of the PC's are not even bound by the same rules governing the actions of the players in the real world, namely the laws of physics and the physical limits of the human body.

2. Computer roleplaying games offer less flexibility. Only that which is programmed can be performed. The player is totally and without fail bound by the limited imposed by the game's developer. He can no more break those rules within the game as the player can break the laws of physics outside of the game.

If the above are true, it should be obvious that more freedom exists in pencil-and-paper RPG's than in computer games. However, this is only the case when dealing with the strictest sort of freedom, namely absolute freedom of action. That a player has literally greater or fewer limits placed on what his character can do by each of the two types of game is, in the end, not necessarily as meaningful as the level of freedom the player feels that he has. A healthy slave can be shown a free man who has lost the use of his limbs and told that, strickly speaking, the slave has a higher level of freedom because he is capable of performing a greater variety of actions. Yet the slave would be justified in feeling that he has less freedom because he is, after all, a slave.

This difference in perceived freedom can be attributed to the visibility of what I shall refer to as the “Method of Control.” Defined simply, the Method of Control is the object, whether it be person or computer code, that is the cause of limitations placed on the actions the player can have his character perform. That a Method of Control exists in both computer and pencil-and-paper roleplaying games cannot be disputed: in the former, the code fills the role, in the latter, the gamemaster. However, they differ greatly in the overt presence of the Method of Control during play.

In a pencil-and-paper roleplaying game, the Method of Control, personified by the gamemaster, is sitting at the same table as the players. They must look to him for permission for every act they wish to have their characters perform. As such, his presence is both overt and conspicuous. Additionally, because the Method of Control is human, he may not always appear to be fair.

Computer games have a much more hidden Method of Control. The code that dictates the possible actions the character can perform is usually never seen by the player. He merely enters the world of the game and begins to interact with it. Anything he tries to do that has not been explicitly programmed to be allowed cannot be done, but the fact that it is undoable seems as inevitable and unremarkable as the fact that the player outside the game cannot act against physical laws. Rarely does a person in the real world feel limited by those laws. He knows he cannot perform a given set of actions and so he puts his time into performing others. If he had to ask before performing any given action and then wait for a “yes” or “no” answer, the sense of limitation would assuredly feel greater.

When looked at from this perspective, the More Free/Less Free ranking appears to be reversed: computer games are more like the quadrapalegic free man, while traditional roleplaying games bear a striking resemblance to the slave.

Yet this new view forgets an important fact about pencil-and-paper games: it is not in the gamemaster's best interest to overly limit freedom. While theslave master will inact whatever rules are necessary to ensure the work of the slave, the gamemaster is not only seeking his own benefit but also that of the players. The gamemaster, as final mediator, has a simple mission: to maximize the fun being had by everyone at the table. Part of that fun—for the players, at least—is bound up in the level of control they feel they have over the situations within the game. If the gamemaster is too limiting, he will quickly lose his players.

It is this fact that once again reverses the ranking. Computer games, taken as a whole, display a sizable spectrum in their number of allowed actions. Some games present the player with a wealth of options. Others are severely limited. To draw an analogy, a computer game that only allows the player to move his character straight forward through an empty room is similar to a domineering—and bad—gamemaster. But a skillful gamemaster, on the other hand, can provide far more freedom than a computer game will ever be capable of.