Rinse and Repeat II

In the first part of this blog entry, I have provided a short introduction to Arthurian romance and Role-Playing Games (RPGs). In this second and final part, I will speculate on some of their similarities.

A recent shift in RPG development has been their explosion in content: large open worlds to discover are becoming the standard, at least among the largest publishers. The need to fill these worlds with tasks for players often leads to repetitive activities. You don’t get to do a bank heist once, but every single time you enter a new town. Every crossroads you pass while exploring will have some bandits at a campfire next to it and a prompt to get rid of them. You get the gist – everything is content, right?

While the many battles of Arthur’s knights served a purpose in their stories, of course, I couldn’t help perceiving them – very subjectively – as somewhat similar to these rinse-and-repeat quests. They seem set to take up a lot of space or time, are largely similar to each other, and get more and more annoying with each go-through. Arthurian romance (more specifically, continuations of it) has a tendency, as Jane Taylor has observed, to “pursue a dynamic of accumulation, […] to prefer to multiply episodes and characters and marvels and to postpone completion” (“Rewriting” 2017, 171) – a trend that seems to apply to many recent RPGs as well.

The crucial difference between reading an episodic, repetitive, digressive story and playing it is of course that, as a player, you can choose to avoid all the digressions: while some side quests may marginally affect the main story (for example, a character you saved in a side quest may come to assist you in the final boss fight), most of them, and especially the rinse-and-repeat content, doesn’t. You can also choose (usually) to do side quests and so on after finishing the main story, and it is your playstyle and what you make of the content offered to you that govern how you approach the game and its story. If you want to, you can stall the ending by dozens of hours, and this need to stall seems to be present in many. This is also facilitated by the common distinction between main and side quests in the journal or quest log.

These explorations into some structural similarities between (Arthurian) romance and RPGs have been interesting, and it would be cool to expand these to medieval storytelling and video games more generally. It seems, for example, that some episodes of Arthurian romance are lived through by several of his knights (a time of madness and recovery, for example), just as many RPG main quests feature, for example, a task for acquiring a mount or vehicle. How these building stones function in similar ways for these two genres and how they interact with the readers’ or players’ expectations could be interesting to explore further – possibly in a future blog entry.

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