Designing Goals for Online Role-Players

The increasing popularity of persistent worlds and the predicted rise of pervasive gaming, both having a strong inherent potential for role-playing, stress a classical challenge of persistent world industry: in addition to the regular gamer audience, the role-player audience is growing. Catering to role-players requires re-thinking in the design of game structures and narrative structures. The most fundamental conceptual differences between role-player and regular gamer playing styles regard goals, game worlds and the idea of meaningful play. Keywords goal, rule, role-playing, MMORPG, larp, persistent world, meaningful play BASIC STRUCTURE OF ROLE-PLAYING Recently, role-playing activity has been seen as separate from the actual games used as the basis of role-playing. Seeing it as a way of playing a game, rather than a game in itself, role-playing can be perceived as game playing motivated with narrative desires [10], focused on creating imaginary worlds [17] and based on making decis...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: DIGRA
• Authors: Markus Montola
• Keywords: Computer Graphics, DIGRA 2005, Game, Persistent World, Role-playing