Ah. Table-top and pen-and-paper Role Playing Games (RPGs). What a lovable piece of collaborative creativity that dwells in hobby-experience gaming. What is it really that pulls people into the grip of this style of gaming?
With videogames like Half-Life, Final Fantasy (MMO and not) and The Elder Scrolls series, among other games, usually video games, that are immersive it’s kind of hard to tell why someone would go for the more imaginative gaming. There’s less to do to set up. To go through the motions of the game you just use keyboard and mouse or a few buttons on a gamepad and you don’t need others, unless you’re playing the multiplayer component to a game. Pretty much hardest thing about the immersion gaming is the name of a character, if it even allows you that luxury.
So I’ve brought up hobby, imagination and immersion. Immersion gaming is simply that the world is there in front of you to work with as you see fit. Nothing else matters while you’re in that game world, unless your computer, game system, monitor or TV blows up. Some coders do an incredible job with making the world as believable as possible. In Crysis, you are on a small Pacific Island. Half-Life and Half-Life 2, you are in the military labs of Black Mesa and cursed Combine infested world. In The Elder Scrolls series, you are in the Empire or one of its surrounding lands. Even Doom 3, you are on Mars trying to save yourself, and potentially mankind. The missions, if you’re really invested as a gamer, are what matter while you are playing. It can be quite difficult to pull yourself away if you have a gaming rig that can actually support a game.
Imagination and Hobby gaming are linked because you have more influence. Rather than going through normally scripted events, you and your campaign members directly affect the world in which you are residing. Since it is usually imaginative, it’s easier to pull yourself away from the game when you need to. Since it’s a hobby, even when you’re done playing for the day or week, you still want to do something with it.
You want to write stories, since you’ve just essentially taken part in making an interactive fan-fiction story. You want to draw because, if you’re playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, Dark Heresy or any other games in which you can use miniatures, you end up constructing the world and doing some art for the game anyway, even if it is just making tactical maps to show the lay of the land. If you’re doing a series of one-shot campaigns (RP-games that can be finished in a single sitting), you want to talk about the possibility of what will happen in the next campaign.
Both the immersive and the imaginative sides of gaming are fun. However, it’s the creativity and collaboration that goes into imaginative hobby gaming. You get out of the experience precisely what everyone involved in the game puts in. If you’re a gamer and you’re interested in trying out the imaginative hobby gaming, seek out a group and give it a try. Just remember. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Then pray it’s only a game character.