RPGs get funny the more people you have involved, reaching a kind of critical level of foolery with MMORPGs. The basic old skool unit of RPG is a few bozos and a GM, or in video games, a few bozos you control vs. designed world/story. In the original Final Fantasy you control the prophesied ‘warriors of light’ who have come to save the world, because crystals. A small number of important bozos can be main characters without pushing believability too much, but what happens when you have thousands, running around doing dances? When everybody has one black wing and one white wing and an eyeball that leaks golden sparkles and the death scythe of wunkred +20?
Perhaps in response to that vibe, I wanted to make a character that looked like an NPC in the one MMO I ever played, The Secret World. Unfortunately the name I wanted was out, so I gave up. Just as well, it’s all wasted time. Fine Paper Gifts the NPC-turned-PC was not meant to be.
But as I’ve been turning over a story idea in my head, this feeling was coming back to me. When you have adventures, romances, thrillers filling the libraries and virtual storefronts of the world to the brim, you’ve got thousands and thousands and thousands of specialest people in the whole world. Even when they try to cut against that grain, the circumstances surrounding them make it clear that isn’t true. Just because you have brown hair doesn’t mean you’re not special, when all the sexiest dudes in the world want to make you their faerie queene, or when you have a certain set of skills that lets you save tha white house from nucular terrorizzin’.
This is a variation on “why write when there are already so many stories? why does mine matter?” Probably just the feels of any artist during some grey time between here and there, nothing deep. But I’m kinda like this. If I make another special bozo to launch like a solitary molecule into the specialbozosphere, they better not cloy. They better not annoy.
Best way to avoid making people feel the teeming masses behind your characters, I think, is to have a better story. You’re not going to out-batman Batman. That problem solved, well, we just have to figure out how to tell a better story. That shouldn’t be difficult, right?
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I think this issue with MMORPGs – this sense of “too many special protagonists,” or narrative saturation collapsing into absurdity – comes from treating them as if they were scaled-up single-player RPGs rather than something structurally different. In such games (e.g. World of Warcraft and the like), the authored narrative is really just a shared scaffold; the actual substance is the social, improvised layer that emerges between players. The point isn’t that thousands of characters are all canonically “the chosen one” in some serious literary sense, but that the framework allows people to participate in a shared space where meaning is continuously generated in small, contingent moments – successes, failures, coordination, chaos, and reaction. Judging that experience by the standards of tightly authored fiction is a category mismatch; it’s closer to improv than to novel-writing, and improv is doing a different kind of work entirely.
That connects to the broader question I think you are alluding to: why create anything at all when so much already exists? Why write, draw, dance, play music, etc. in a world already saturated? The implicit assumption behind that question seems to me to be that creation is primarily a form of contribution – that its legitimacy depends on whether it meaningfully adds novelty or value to an already complete cultural space. But that doesn’t really seem to match how creation functions in practice. I would argue creating is fundamentally a human impulse rather than a strategic intervention – people don’t primarily make things because they have identified an empty niche in the cultural landscape; they make things because doing so is expressive, pleasurable, socially connective, or psychologically necessary. In many cases, not creating feels less like a neutral choice and more like suppressing a basic mode of thought and engagement with the world.
At that point, the objection naturally arises that not all creation is equally valuable. That’s true, but it doesn’t actually refute the underlying point – it just shifts the level of analysis. Evaluation belongs to reception and criticism, not to the basic permission to create. We don’t require speech, play, or experimentation to justify themselves in advance in order to be legitimate activities, even though we absolutely evaluate their outputs afterward. Creation is ubiquitous because it is a mode of participation in experience; quality is uneven because people are uneven. Those two facts coexist without one invalidating the other.
A further complication is that value is often not intrinsic to the artifact alone, but heavily dependent on context, relationship, and circumstance. A poem written by a lover may be formally unoriginal or even clichéd in its sentiment, but its meaning is not exhausted by those properties. Its value can be anchored in who it comes from, when it is given, and what it is doing socially or emotionally in that moment. The same text in an anthology might be unremarkable, but in a specific relational context it can be significant in a way that is not easily reducible to aesthetic novelty or technical merit. The same applies more broadly to small acts of expression, private jokes, or emergent moments in social play (such as in RPGs!). Meaning is not only a property of the thing produced, but of the situation in which it is produced and received.
Seen from that angle, the unoriginality problem starts to look less like a failure state and more like a feature of a system where expression is widely distributed. The noise, repetition, and occasional absurdity aren’t deviations from the point – they’re what you get when a lot of people are allowed to participate in meaning-making at once.
I don’t object to the desire to make one’s creative output meaningful in some sense, but I do think it is worth appreciating when such a desire is not universal. Or, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, we’re here to “fart around” – and most of what we call culture is what that looks like when scaled up and shared.
top notch comment, amigo. i likely won’t get the sauce to respond meaningfully, but it doesn’t really need a response. i will re-read it at a more thoughtful pace later, i’m sure.
Thank you, and likewise I appreciate your posts!