A light-hearted look at our passion

By Mike Koss | April 12, 2008

A week or so ago, the May ‘08 edition of Paste magazine found its way into my mailbox. For those not in the know, Paste is a monthly magazine that covers music, film, and culture while generally hovering over the Indie interests in those areas. It’s all part of the necessities for one to keep their ear to the street and maintain their Indie cred. Now you’re probably asking yourself what does a magazine that is mostly about music have to do with video games. Well, besides an article about independent game developers making their way into the mainstream, there’s a piece entitled The Diary of a Video Game RPG Hero.

In this first-person perspective of a standard video game RPG, the writer holds no punches while poking fun at all of the ubiquitous elements that comprise the genre. The first diary post starts off with the adventurer, who looks strikingly similar to Link (as also noticed by my 1 and 1/2 year old daughter), recalling how he was selected for this mission to save the world from ultimate destruction. In a recap of the conversation between himself and the ever-present, but always powerless gods it’s quickly noted that even though he’s completely under-qualified for the task they couldn’t find the one they were really looking for. The character then goes on to lament that even though he’s tasked with saving the world, he’s still performing mundane tasks like finding things for villagers or having to kill many creatures, that no matter their size always seem to have money as well as items, to afford the next required item. And last, but not least, is the fact that even though you’ve summoned down the most powerful being/spell/attack in existence, and sat through its after-the-tenth-time annoyingly long video, the evil creature is still alive like a bad episode of Dragonball Z. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that it is then defeated by a simple low-value attack from another member of your party.
All in all, it’s a good read and I recommend it for anyone who can get their hands on the hard copy of the magazine. Now, this is not the first time that this topic has been approached by written media and is often explored by some of our brethren in video game-based comics. One of my favorites that mimics this exact formula is a web comic known as RPG World. Although it focused more on the Final Fantasy series, and more specifically Final Fantasy 7, the ideas still hold true for games stemming from the same vein. Each time this topic is broached, I love reading about it because it reminds of some of the ridiculous things we can and have to do in our favorite video games. It’s just part of the intricacies that make our passion, video gaming, lovable to us and ridiculous to the outsiders.