The Implications of Virtual Gamespace

Something is lost when gamers simply consume their game, rather than collaborate in its creation.

Recently, I was introduced to a virtual tabletop website called Roll20.  It offers a suite of mapping tools to create a real-time virtual gamespace with features like live webcam, a well-stocked library of images, objects, maps, and music, and the ability to create and save dice macros.  At the time of writing, it's still in beta, but my group and I have been pretty damn impressed with the service as a whole.


Gaming in virtual space isn't anything new; it's been around since the first MUD launched in the late 70s and is presently a cultural juggernaut.  For all those years, tabletop games, especially D&D, have a direct influence on the ways in which online games have been created and consumed.  MMOs like World of Warcraft have built the fundamental mechanic of their combat encounters (coordination between Tank, Healer, Damage, and Crowd Control to defeat the enemies) around the four iconic classes of the original D&D game (Fighter, Cleric, Thief, and Magic-User).  Subsequently, when Wizards of the Coast rewrote the books for 4th edition, they codified what Blizzard and others had been doing in online games, identifying the four roles of Defender, Leader, Striker, and Controller.  Cynical reviewers scoffed and threw up their hands, saying that Wizards wanted to make D&D into World of Warcraft.

Though some of the gameplay features of D&D and WoW bear some similarity, the two are worlds apart.  I've played a lot of both, and the real distinction is the presence or absence of user-created content.  From the very beginning, D&D was always about creativity: you create the characters, you create the world, you and your friends tell whatever story that you want to tell.  MMOs like WoW are limited by the fact that they cannot be user-created, only consumed.  I have seen some decent role-playing take place in WoW, but the constraints of the virtual world were always something that we had to ignore, overcome, or work around.  Ultimately, if your interest is in creating content and exploring character roleplay, sooner or later that model is going to leave you cold.

I'm not trying to force a dialogue about tabletop-vs-MMO; that's a tired and pointless conversation that I'll leave to the fourteen-year-old sages that inhabit the rest of the internet.  My point here is that the gaming industry as a whole has gotten amazingly good at creating incredibly stirring, exciting, overwhelming products that can be very entertaining, but leave a certain fundamental aspect of the gamer's spirit unfulfilled.  We're constantly busier and busier, and the convenience of online gaming can be made to fit our schedules more easily than traveling to a friends' house for an evening.

Playing D&D via Roll20 was a revelation.  Before we ever had our first session, I had a blast just creating the dens of happy little goblins that my friends would soon be murdering.  As a GM, creating was always fun for me; Roll20 just made it a lot easier to address my relative lack of artistic and technical ability.

My players, to varying degrees, participated in that creation in the way that players always do: creating a character, and shoring up the statistical skeleton with their fictional background.  To varying degrees, of course: not all of them are as interested in story, but that's fine.  Once again, what we're enjoying is collaborative creativity, and that seemed to come through Roll20 just fine.

Once we got to actually playing, the user interface tripped us all up a bit at first, but we got comfortable with our macros, and with the slight lag in the webcam windows, and before long we really seemed to forget that we weren't all around the table with each other. 

The virtual tabletop was a success because it enabled us play our game together.  It exceeded my expectations, because it enabled us to create and to socialize, with minimal impact on these sort of higher-order functions of the gaming group. 

We've been told this was coming for years now; it makes me smile that the ones who delivered on the promise were a bunch of guys who funded the project on Kickstarter so that they could offer it free to whomever wanted it.  Talk about user-generated content.