General News - The Essence of RPGs

HiddenX spotted a series of articles on ihobo.com that tries to offer an answer to what the essence of RPGs is.

It comes in three parts:

The Essence of RPGs (1): Children of TSR

Near the beginning of my career as a game designer, one of my first speaking gigs was at an event in London where I was scheduled to appear with Warren Spector. Unfortunately, Warren was attending via webcam and the conference organisers took so long to set him up that my hour presentation on non-linear storytelling in games had to be condensed to ten minutes. By way of apology, Warren and I had a good exchange of emails where we discussed, amongst other things, some of the issues that Deus Ex faced during its troubled development. One thing in particular stuck with me. From the beginning of the design process, it was agreed that Deus Ex was going to be a role-playing game (RPG) – yet the many designers working on the project did not agree what an RPG was.

The other two parts are:
The Essence of RPGs (2): Rule-play
The Essence of RPGs (3): Role-play

More information.

Nice analysis …

(… of course he could just have taken a look at RPGWatch's CRPG Analyzer)

The essence of RPGs: give players what they want.
Simple as that and led to the current situation as players want everything but roleplaying.

that first link should end with .html not .htm

Originally Posted by edj123
that first link should end with .html not .htm

Corrected. Thanks!

No - that's the link

I meant on the front page. The discussion thread is not automatically updated because it freezes the status at the time of the first discussion post.