Him:
“if you can’t create your own character, it’s not a role-playing game”

You:
“Which leads to me my take on the RPG, at least in terms of daily use. “RPG” is a purely historical thing. ”

“It just means “mechanics derived from D&D””

Plus you didn’t even really talk about the Witcher.
Classy.

They give you beautiful and detailed depictions of the women (or woman, or nobody – that part is left for the player to decide) you chose to sleep with, more so than any ingame sex-scene could ever strive to. Then you get to keep that intimate insight as a memory and review it whenever you want. If there ever was an adequate reward for having sex in games, this is it. And as to wether or not there should be any reward – as far as I know, sex is pretty rewarding experience, so it would be weird to skip the rewarding part.

It’s critical feminist, theory. There are all kind of techniques used in films and subsequently in games, that tend to draw on films for inspiration, to manipulate the viewer/gamer. Visas like many female characters is designed to be a sexual image, the bright red lips are a common theme and the covering of the woman’s eyes allowing her to be looked at without looking back is important symbolically.

I know it seems like nonsense but once you know about these things, you see them cropping up repeatedly all over the place. Watch any Hitchcock film the way women are filmed and made-up to look a certain way.

‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ by Laura Mulvey is an interesting essay regarding images of women and the male gaze if anyone is interested.

It is funny Bloodlines got mentioned, vampires in Victorian literature are all about the threat of sex. The bestial and seductive male vampire that threatens women’s virtue, and the female vampire threatens the male with an act of penetration (biting) Bram Stoker describes this in very sexual terms. Also the vampirism disease passed through the blood via the act of biting is often associated with sexually transmitted diseases.

Perhaps this close association with sexuality and vampires is why seduction felt less intrusive in the vampire bloodlines game? The two things are synonymous with one another so thematically it was a better fit.

In any good RPG (as in life), your character is the sum of your choices – not just a byproduct of their origin. If the sum of your choices and actions have consequences on the environment/story, it doesn’t matter if (as in life) your name, ancestry and back story are already chosen for you.

I remember playing KotOR2 with Visas Marr and being stunned by how fetishised she was. Instead of using the traditional route of busty, scantily clad nymphet Obsidian chose to use a serious of coded images to portray a sexualised woman.

She was blindfolded, her eyes covered preventing her from seeing the main character in a normal way, and instead what she saw was something else, an idealised thing. She was featureless apart from her pouting, bright red lips, pursing suggestively as she spoke in a sultry, reverent voice. The only thing they didn’t do was put her mouth on sideways.

I guess in a way I admired their effort, at least they used certain cinematic techniques to create the fetish doll, that was Visas Marr, rather than breast physics or dressing her in a thong and nipple clamps.

I don’t see the point of this debate, however. Surely the game should just be judged based on how good it is, not how it conforms to certain genre conventions? Who cares about genres, anyway?

What I expect from a game carrying the RPG tag is a little bit different, and would probably require a bit more thinking not to be easily debunked by “then game X/Y/Z is/isn’t an RPG” questions, but with the entry getting older, I guess I’ll take my chances proposing it as is.

An RPG game should, in my opinion, make a fair effort at recreating the experience of the pen and paper games, in particular the software should be able to simulate the role of a decent Game Master.

A CRPG should both offer a living, immersive world and the ability to react convincingly to the player’s choices, while granting a certain variety of possible approaches to the game, be it at a problem-solving level (for example, diplomacy or brute force?), moral level (that is, so far, good or evil I guess) or acting level (creation of a personalized character story through game choices).

The numeric aspect of classic RPGs has never been particularly prominent in my roleplaying experience, just a way to fit a formal system into a mainly narrative world: it can make an entertaining game into the game at times to optimize character stats or gear, but that’s not what makes an RPG to me.

I could probably make some sort of list of game design features that contribute to make a game an RPG to me, but given that my definition is highly subjective (the game need to fool *me* into being in a living world and create a similar experience to the pen and paper sessions) it would probably be a bit pointless.

As for the question that started the querelle though, I guess we could say that according to my definition, it’s irrelevant whatever or not the role I’m playing it’s fully decided by me or not.

I suspect I also don’t like someone making my shagging around in games feel so seedy. I mean, as anyone who’s read ErotiSim knows, sex in games isn’t exactly one of my problems.

KG