One of the things that turns me off roleplay in World of Warcraft is the way the game encourages your characters to exist in a very linearly defined space. The factional divisions are big and broad and simple, and the lack of communication between sides means that the conflict that drives the setting is enforced and simplistic. There are no stories like the soccer game in No Man’s Land, no tense short-term alliances against greater threats, no opportunities to humanise the other. In essence, World Of Warcraft style roleplay is one that takes a large body of players and subdivides it down into smaller and smaller groups not in order to make it more manageable, but to coerce a group of players into being an uncommunicative monster for another group of players. Very functional, very useful for things like Battlegrounds, but as roleplay contextually relies on creativity, communication and expression, this model works against that. What’s more, the notion that ‘they are other, so fuck them‘ gets to permeate the whole setting, which I believe is why you will find human-only, dwarf-only, elf-only RP groups in that game, people drawing tighter and tighter lines around themselves. Basically, the setting encourages you to see things in simplifying, dehumanising terms.
Now, I want to stress in this context lore and canon are important principles because they give the story people are collaboratively creating some contextual clues. It means a very different thing to be an Orc in Azeroth than being an Orc in New Jersey. But the way the factions are handed are not with implicit demonstration – Blizzard can do, and have done in battlegrounds, warzones, cut-scenes and lore – but instead with some really immersion breaking explicit boundaries.
In The Secret World, those explicit boundaries don’t exist, and one of the things that the setting does really well is humanise your oppositions. All of them. Literally every faction has moments of humanising and sympathy, and the way the game handles it explicitly is to usually let you talk with people from other factions, work with or work for them, but also, occasionally, try to kill and fight them. This isn’t just true for player factions – this is true of groups that include demons. The Council of Venice are feckless and useless, the game tells you, but they’re also trying really hard. The Phoenicians are pirates and thieves, but they’re also survivors who struggled through three millenia of attempted genocide. The House In Exile are fucking demons, but you can work with them for now.
It’s a good system, and one I like a lot, in particular because in a roleplay space, it gives players room to expand on themes, and create in these spaces. After all, one of the undertones of The Secret World is that all myths are true – there is a hodge-podge mix of every mythology under the sun in the setting. I’ve dealt with numerous people roleplaying as unwitting assets, faerie princesses, sentient animals and gods. The thing to remember in these contexts, for my tastes, to keep true to the game, is to try and humanise these things. To recognise that you can oppose someone – even fight someone – without turning them into an unperson.
Back in City of Heroes, I watched a tragic tangling and untangling of a half-blind, ex-villain super-cop and the cthulhoid monster from another dimension that was inhabiting the motile corpse of a young woman. I saw a dog with a jetpack barking at a kleptomaniac catgirl who had created a vast underground vault. I got to play a surly empath being haunted by a god of death while he struggled to dismantle a friend’s mutant supremacist worldview. That’s the sort of narratives you can get when you look at the people in stories as people.
I find games more interesting when we understand one another, when we interconnect our stories, and when we show respect for both what people are doing and what people are trying to do. I don’t feel this obligates anyone to engage with anyone’s story in particular – I mean, there’s so much stuff I hate in narratives that I’d be a hypocrite to assert people had to engage with things – but consider, in roleplaying spaces, if you’re treating the people you’re dealing with as humans or as factional forces to be killed for a battleground flag.