Quote from: RandallS;426463While that makes much more sense than what I thought Ryan was saying, the fact that this adds up to 100% makes me somewhat suspicious of the results. There were no gamers surveyed who did not clearly fall into one of these five clusters? Possible, but it seems a bit unlikely.

The 12% is the catch-all category.

It seems to me that mmos won't really hurt the creative aspect of rpgs until they can provide the imagination's ability to fill in details.  See, computers need everything defined, yes you can have random generators and such but even those need to be defined.

What imagination provides is a world of base assumptions that already fill themselves in.  You say "You see a dirty little village." and people's brains fill in a lot of the details.

Now my own Mmporg wish list is a bit different.  I want a first level character to be able to kill a 50 if they get the drop on them and a little luck.  I want half a dozen first level characters to be a fair match for a 50.  I want to be able to build a house and hire laborers to work my fields.  I want to be able to burn down other people's houses and murder their laborers.  I want to be able to fight from horse back.  I want to be able to buy a ship and sail it into uncharted waters in search of adventure, standing at the helm in the midst of the storm.  I want to ride my motor bike up the ramp into the hold of my ship, jump off and dash to the pilot's seat to make a daring getaway without shifting the game play interface.

Really, it's ridiculous.  Mporgs will NEVER get there.

More realistically I want WOW Kinect.  I want 15 minutes of cardio when I run from Goldshire to Sentinel hill.  I want to build muscle by wearing arm weights as I swing my sword.  Because combined with a headset for talking that would be really really cool.

Quote from: David Johansen;426480It seems to me that mmos won't really hurt the creative aspect of rpgs until they can provide the imagination's ability to fill in details.  See, computers need everything defined, yes you can have random generators and such but even those need to be defined.

What imagination provides is a world of base assumptions that already fill themselves in.  You say "You see a dirty little village." and people's brains fill in a lot of the details.

Now my own Mmporg wish list is a bit different.  I want a first level character to be able to kill a 50 if they get the drop on them and a little luck.  I want half a dozen first level characters to be a fair match for a 50.  I want to be able to build a house and hire laborers to work my fields.  I want to be able to burn down other people's houses and murder their laborers.  I want to be able to fight from horse back.  I want to be able to buy a ship and sail it into uncharted waters in search of adventure, standing at the helm in the midst of the storm.  I want to ride my motor bike up the ramp into the hold of my ship, jump off and dash to the pilot's seat to make a daring getaway without shifting the game play interface.

Really, it's ridiculous.  Mporgs will NEVER get there.

More realistically I want WOW Kinect.  I want 15 minutes of cardio when I run from Goldshire to Sentinel hill.  I want to build muscle by wearing arm weights as I swing my sword.  Because combined with a headset for talking that would be really really cool.

NOW YOUR TALK'N!...man would I ever love to have a rig like that...:cool:
hook me up and LET THE CLARET FLOW!

One thing which occurs to me is that people's preferences aren't fixed and consistent over time. I mean, I might be in the mood for MET-LARP at one point in time, then for boffer LARP later on, then for TTRPG after that. So, by that logic, there's no necessary reason why WoW would take a substantial portion of TTRPGers out of the hobby, or substantially diminish the new blood, though it might compete with TTRPGs for gamers' time.

Another thing is that MMOs are really partly competing with TV and general internet surfing, not strictly as "passive" entertainment, but as immediately accessible solo entertainment. Who's not going to be sick of WoW after a while if they play it every evening 7 nights a week? OK, so not many people can sustain that level of play into their 30s... but surely variety is the spice of life. People want their solo entertainment, they want their freeform socialising and they may want their structured socialising / organised group entertainment too.

Dancey gives the example of people not predicting that online poker won't be a hit. But do you see casinos disappearing off the face of the earth any time soon? Did TV destroy the cinema? Sure, it forced it to rationalise; we don't get the B-movies any more like we did once long ago. Casinos might be closing. But there will always be cinemas and there will always be casinos. People like the dedicated entertainment experience and they like the group atmosphere.

Maybe there might be fewer people playing TTRPGs now than if MMOs didn't exist at all. But I'd hazard a guess that the total numbers of TTRPGers playing now are still comparable to the numbers in the 1980s and won't dip much going forwards. There might even be a suck-up of MMO players who search on the Interwebz for RPG and find real RPGs.

Quote from: Benoist;426464In my mind, it's like asking if television will soon have better pictures than radio.

Television did kill radio as a medium for fiction ("Video Killed the Radio Star"), and pretty much for news as well. It's not that I believe the argument Ryan's trying to make, but c'mon.

Quote from: danbuter;426473The 12% is the catch-all category.

Actually, the claim is that there were four distinct clusters and fifth cluster "in the middle". That's not a catch-all category; if it were, there'd be no fifth cluster, just a shallow "waterline" with the other clusters standing on top.

The best way to make sense of the claim is that that there may have been a few people who didn't closely match any of the "clusters", but they didn't add up to more than a couple percent and are rendered invisible by rounding.

I'm still very skeptical of any empirical study that results in four compact clusters that are almost exactly equal in size, plus a fifth cluster that sucks up all the remainder and sits precisely in the middle.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426496Television did kill radio as a medium for fiction ("Video Killed the Radio Star"), and pretty much for news as well. It's not that I believe the argument Ryan's trying to make, but c'mon.

You think I haven't thought about that? It's still an accurate comparison (quoted from Gary Gygax, by the way).

If you are comparing the two media under the terms outlined by Ryan, MMOs WILL kill TRPGs, if that's not already been done. In any case, making the comparison all the more obvious by copying MMOs structure (encountardization, strict scripts to follow therein, etc), rules, aesthetics and the like ENSURES this will/does happen. That's actually my first point.

But in any case, my second point is that radio DOES have better pictures than television, if you think about it a certain way, which happens to be completely compatible to what TRPGs are, appealing to imagination, your own personal view of the game world, and not the passive submission to the way designers choose to represent said world on a screen. This is one of the specificities of TRPGs which no amount of graphic beauty, photo-realistic and otherwise will ever be able to replicate, short of plugging electrodes right into your brain, reading whatever you visualize in your mind's eye and translating it in real time, as it unfolds, onto the screen for you to see. But then, one day, sooner or later, a guy would come in and ask: "why the hell do we need the machine to translate what I see in the first place? It's prettier in my mind!" So it'd still be a win for TRPGs in the end.

Quote from: Benoist;426500*snip*
 TRPGs are, appealing to imagination, your own personal view of the game world, and not the passive submission to the way designers choose to represent said world on a screen. This is one of the specificities of TRPGs which no amount of graphic beauty, photo-realistic and otherwise will ever be able to replicate.

absolutely,good points here...that is why people tend to "zone out" with comp. games and tune in with (well designed/run) RPG...well, at least those who engage the hobby on multiple levels.

(cont'd)

The fact is that customers who do not care about distinctions such as the one I just made above are unlikely to stick to TRPGs in the future, and/or did migrate to MMOs already. That's it. That's a battle which, for these people, is over and done with.

What I do not understand is why making TRPGs even more comparable, through structures, rules, etc, to MMOs would help keep the people who stuck to TRPGs. It just destroys what is left in TRPGs that make them interesting as different, though maybe complimentary, activies compared to MMOs. There is no reason left to still be playing TRPGs whatsoever.

So in the name of seducing an audience that migrated to MMOs and doesn't give a shit anymore about TRPGs, and will not come back, we're just making TRPGs look more and more like contrived MMOs, which makes people who stayed wonder "If RPGs are going to suck so bad now, be so much trouble to play, or feel exactly like Final Fantasy or Warcraft or whatnot, with so much prep and this and that, why don't I play World of Warcraft/EVE/whatnot already?"

This is a truly moronic design logic, to me.

I guess if MMOs were going to take up a lot of people's time meaning they spent less time on organised social activities like TTRPG and more time on solo entertainment experiences... I wouldn't want to participate in that, as I don't think it's socially beneficial. So, this is the moral/purposive dimension, as opposed to the factual/speculative dimension.

One advantage TTRPGs will have for a LONG time, even if MMOs allow players to get creative, is the IMMEDIACY of creation with TTRPGs - you need literally but say the word, and it is so. Until we have Ziggy-level intelligence for our computers, you won't be able to conjure up whole worlds with but a word.

A very important advantage of small games is the special snowflake effect. This is automatically present in TTRPGs, though it could be present in CRPGs if you had, in effect, a private server, or if it were an offline game - but in the CRPG the smaller size of the server would mean you were relying more and more on the intelligence of the computer to make the game-world interesting, so TTRPGs win out for "special snowflake" games.

To explain:- the larger a game gets, the harder it is for YOU to be THE special snowflake. I mean, in games I ref, players can play legendary paladins, demigods who are the patrons of major cults, etc. There can only be a finite number of slots in the game-world for people with a particular level of reputation or people with a particular level of influence over the game-world. And it's not so great being the only Sk8rboi-Ninja with Poison-Bladed All-Stars if some 12 year old from Des Moines Iowa sees you at it and copies your style... in a small game, that can't happen.

Quote from: RSDancey;426424My intuition tells me that a lot of books being sold for 4e are being bought by storytellers but never used in games (ala 2e).  That can only last so long ... at some point, if that game isn't being widely played, now that there are options (OGL/D20, MMOs, etc.) the player network should decay much more rapidly than it did in the 2e era.

I can see the "storyteller" types picking up 4E titles like DMG1, DMG2, and maybe Manual of the Planes, Plane Below, Plane Above, etc ...

Though I don't really see the "storyteller" types picking up the more crunch heavy 4E titles like the Power books, Adventurers Vault, etc ...

Quote from: Benoist;426500...
But in any case, my second point is that radio DOES have better pictures than television, if you think about it a certain way, which happens to be completely compatible to what TRPGs are, appealing to imagination, your own personal view of the game world, and not the passive submission to the way designers choose to represent said world on a screen. This is one of the specificities of TRPGs which no amount of graphic beauty, photo-realistic and otherwise will ever be able to replicate, short of plugging electrodes right into your brain, reading whatever you visualize in your mind's eye and translating it in real time, as it unfolds, onto the screen for you to see. But then, one day, sooner or later, a guy would come in and ask: "why the hell do we need the machine to translate what I see in the first place? It's prettier in my mind!" So it'd still be a win for TRPGs in the end.

An interesting take on a classic argument. I dunno. I generally find LARPing (when it's done properly) considerably more vivid an experience than TTRPGs. But with the right GM, who knows. My current interest in acting methods as a route to immersion is born I suppose of a desire to replicate the intensity of experience that I get with LARP at the table. I would have thought I would find a holodeck-type LARP experience the most vivid of all and some of the graphics Dancey has linked to would definitely be competing with TTRPGs for vividness of experience for me, though not with LARPs. I still wouldn't touch the online games, but maybe that's just me. :-D

Quote from: Omnifray;426512An interesting take on a classic argument. I dunno. I generally find LARPing (when it's done properly) considerably more vivid an experience than TTRPGs. But with the right GM, who knows. My current interest in acting methods as a route to immersion is born I suppose of a desire to replicate the intensity of experience that I get with LARP at the table. I would have thought I would find a holodeck-type LARP experience the most vivid of all and some of the graphics Dancey has linked to would definitely be competing with TTRPGs for vividness of experience for me, though not with LARPs. I still wouldn't touch the online games, but maybe that's just me. :-D

Maybe you're more of a LARPer than you are a TTRPGer, and that this sort of holodeck MMO experience would strike a chord with you in particular that would make the TTRPG experience moot to a greater extent? Not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with that, mind you!

Quote from: Benoist;426514Maybe you're more of a LARPer than you are a TTRPGer, and that this sort of holodeck MMO experience would strike a chord with you in particular that would make the TTRPG experience moot to a greater extent? Not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with that, mind you!

As a player, I would put boffer LARP first, non-boffer LARP second and TTRPG third, but I would rather GM/design TTRPGs, not LARPs. In fact, I've never reffed a LARP. Also, boffer LARPs in particular take a lot of energy. I wouldn't want to play one every day. In my ideal world there's certainly a lot of room for me to be TTRPGing, as well as LARPing; if anything it's the non-boffer LARP which would get squeezed out, but only because there would be a boffer version of it built around the same style of social interaction...

Also the variations between individual games matter far more than the variations between boffer/non-boffer/tabletop. I'm currently putting MET-LARP ahead of two boffer LARPs that I COULD play with about the same effort and inconvenience in terms of travel. I can imagine circumstances where I would put TTRPGs ahead of LARPs. It would depend exactly what games were on offer and who was playing.

I doubt the holodeck would ever make the TTRPG completely moot, but computers could kind of help TTRPGs and LARPs to merge if you had Star-Trek level AI.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;426498I'm still very skeptical of any empirical study that results in four compact clusters that are almost exactly equal in size, plus a fifth cluster that sucks up all the remainder and sits precisely in the middle.

So am I. Reality is seldom that "nice". I'm not saying it's impossible, but it seems a bit unlikely. I'd love to have access to the raw data, but I know that is much less likely than these "perfectly balanced" results.