everybody loves stats, stats stats stats. every rpg, every rts, gotta have stats. lots of shooters too. nobody thinks about them they just add them into the game. the kids go crazy for these. put it on the back of the box, do what badgame broderlands did and call it an ‘intuitive reward system’
that actually isnt a bad term because stats are rewards. a lot of people think stats represent things. they dont. the difference between john folluat having 3 charisma and having 8 charisma is nothing. its just a number. it’s a complicated and vague concept being abstracted to the point of irrelevance, just like the ‘power’ of a gun or john’s ‘barter’ ability.
so why do people like stats. it’s because they’re easy. they are so so easy to understand. the higher they are the better, and they can be raised linearly. they can also be lowered and we dont want that. maximizing stats is an extrinsic motivator. it has nothing whatsoever to do with the internal qualities of the player. but people don’t think about it this way. a level 2 player may in fact be much better at the game than a level 40 player, but in a game that revolves heavily around stats, he will lose every fight between them. so the primary goal of the game, the activity that will give the most advantage to a player character, instantly becomes to level up. not to get better at the game.
this is so easy. it’s like a drug. people grind for hours on end in wow and honestly think that they are having fun. if you talk to them about it they’ll be dismissive and say it’s fun for them. but it’s not good for them.
fun is about learning. games are about learning. you might not think you like learning, but your brain does. your brain makes you very happy when you first learn to do something correctly. remember how happy you were when you first beat the first level of cnotra. why were you happy. it’s a vapid electronic diversion with no relation to your actual life, right. you were happy because your brain was firing off signals in response to having learned how to do something new. this reward of happiness for personal advancement is called an intrinsic motivator. that’s a positive kind of fun.
raising a stat doesn’t signify anything with regards to your personal advancement. it makes you content in an accumulating sense, the same kind of contentedness you’d get if you bought another instance of something you collect. the feeling it gives is shallow and materialistic.
while stats for RPGs originated in tabletop games as a way to objectify the otherwise subjective world (‘no john your character can’t just push the tree over he’s got like 2 points of strength’) it’s funny how quickly they became the entire focus of so many games. i don’t think there is a man alive on this planet who could actually tell me every single rule in dngueons & dargons 3.5. people fell for the stats because they’re so easy, and the stats became the game.
but with video games this doesn’t make sense. the world of a video game isn’t subjective at all. there are obviously stats for literally everything because a computer is processing all of it. but instead of doing the intuitive thing and hiding all of these machinations from the player, the ever-increasing trend is to make them as transparent as possible. ‘i can’t pick this lock because i need a skill of 75 to do so’ is not something that anybody in the real world has ever thought, but gamers accept it in every single game where lockpicking is a skill. we also don’t choose in real life which skills we want to arbitrarily improve and by exactly how much at distinct points in time. and yet leveling up remains a mainstay of video games just as in tabletop ones.
of all the buzzwords thrown around by game designers today, ‘immersion’ is the most backwards when applied to the stat-drenched rpgs that modern audiences expect and even claim to have fun with. the biggest step towards making that claim true is to make a statless game wherever possible. don’t be afraid to be vague. don’t be afraid to tell me my character isn’t very strong rather than telling me he has 4 strength. don’t ever tell me i can’t persuade someone of something because my speech is 64 and the target DC is 65.
and one final thought: don’t be afraid to let me actually play a role. one of the most frustrating aspects of stats is their tendency to needlessly infringe on player autonomy. in the recent fulalot: nwe vages, there is actually a stat for being gay. there’s a stat for being gay and if you don’t take that stat you can’t be gay. your character will literally be unable to say gay things. this is ridiculous. if someone is not gay in real life that does not physically prevent him from hitting on men. what prevents him is the fact that he is playing the role of himself. so why does it need to be different in a game.
