The Echoes of Genre

Over on ihobo today, a reply to Jed Pressgrove's blog letter about defining RPG genres, exploring the plurality of what the role-playing game genre entails. Here's an extract:

It is worth being clear that generating a  character - valorised in the Western cRPG culture as an expression of agency - was not essential to the tabletop games. Some game systems (e.g. TSR's The Adventures of Indiana Jones), and even more individual scenarios, allocated specified characters to players, inviting players to take on that clearly-defined role. This may seem to resonate with the Japanese lineage - except in those games the developer did almost all of the role-playing when they sketched out the narrative during the early stages of the project. The players of the Japanese RPGs are left with limited opportunities to play as the roles given to them. And ironically, in the Western lineage the dominance of agency as an aesthetic value means that you can do 'anything' as long as it doesn't involve expressive character interactions (the quintessence of 'role-playing'), which cannot be easily modelled on computers. So neither lineage takes up the torch of the 'role-playing' aspect very effectively, and instead both follow on directly from the 'game' aspect of early RPGs.

You can read the entirety of The Echoes of Genre over at ihobo.com. This is my eighth blog letter since December, so I am more or less on target to deliver my target of twelve before the close of the Gregorian year.