Recent Interviews in European Publications

My desktop when playing a game: game, draft blog post, map workbook, and spell list. I mocked this up for the interview (I played Might & Magic more than three years ago), but it's a faithful re-creation.

Today, my blog was featured on Spiegel Online, one of Germany's premier online news sources. When the author first contacted me for an interview, I was aware that it was a pretty big deal but I didn't realize how big. In the 24 hours following its publication, my blog got more than 10,000 hits, dwarfing the previous record of 2,293, set in September 2012, when the blog was featured in Austria's Der Standard. Between these two sources and the recent interview that appeared in the Finnish magazine Pelit, it's possible I now have more European readers than North American ones. I don't mind this at all, of course, but why hasn't USA Today come calling yet?

Unfortunately, the publishers over at Spiegel put the wrong links to my "Master Game List" and "Game Rankings" lists in their sidebar. I don't know exactly how links to Google Drive documents work, but the links were apparently such that the readers didn't go directly to the viewable documents but rather to a page that forced them to "request permission" of me before they could view them. I received more than 400 requests in less than six hours, so I had to remove the documents so they'd stop coming into my in-box. I've asked Spiegel Online to remove the links. Either way, I'll put the documents back online again in a few days, when the article is no longer fresh.

The article worked in a number of the things I said during the interview, but I thought I'd offer the entire text of my interview below for English readers. The interviewer asked me a bunch of discrete questions, but I synthesized my responses into long paragraphs instead of doing a standard Q&A format. He began by asking a little personal information and later clarified that "Chester Bolingbroke" was, in fact, a nom-de-plume.

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Text of the Spiegel Online Interview

I'm 41 years old. As for my job, I deliberately keep it secret (I don't want people in my profession to find out about my gaming blog!), but in broad strokes, I'm a professional, and I work as a contractor in the public sector. The nature of my work keeps me traveling most of the time (about 3 of every 4 weeks). I do all of my game playing on my laptop, sometimes on the road, but usually on weekends at home in between trips. I prefer to play at home, when I can arrange the game window, the manual, my notes, my maps, and my draft blog post across multiple monitors.

I remember being first exposed to games on friends' Atari 2600s. I don't know the first, exactly, but I can recall spending inordinate time on Space Invaders, Combat, Asteroids, and all the other Atari classic games. They were fun, but none of them really gripped me. That didn't happen until I was visiting a friend who had a Commodore 64, and we played Questron. It was the first time I realized that computer games didn't have to be arcade-style games, and it was thus the first game I became addicted to. I can't say I really "fell in love" with a game until Ultima IV, which occupied a huge part of my life from ages 12-15. For years thereafter, I compared every game to Ultima IV and found it wanting.

I played a few sessions of tabletop RPGs, but I never really enjoyed it. They were too difficult to organize, they took too long, and if the dungeon master turned out to be a jerk, you were at his mercy. I respect the more open-ended nature of tabletop RPGs--something that computer RPGs will probably never be able to replicate--but I didn't like the other people.

I play an average of 10-12 hours a week, including blogging, but this is extremely variable. Last week, I didn't play anything at all, and this week I've probably put 20 hours into gaming already. It depends on my schedule and the other items on my task list.

My wife likes to play games with me, but not any of the games that I play for my blog, so every once in a while we head down to the store and pick up a few games to play together on the Xbox. (I prefer PC games, but it's easier to play console games with another person, on the couch, in front of a big-screen TV.) We just played Red Dead Redemption and we're working on Dragon's Dogma. Yes, I did get the Skyrim bug in 2011. I sank maybe 250 hours into that game between November 2011 and January 2013, when I finally sold my copy back to GameStop just to remove the temptation. For the most part, though, I don't feel like I'm missing anything by not playing many modern games. I often find them too frenetic and confusing, and I think role-playing games peaked in quality around 1995-2003. I'm looking forward to getting into that era again.

For the last few years, I've been losing time. It took me 18 months to cover 1988 and 14 months to cover 1989. So I'm not sure I'll ever arrive at the "present." Nonetheless, I imagine I'll keep playing and blogging as long as I'm alive, blogs exist, and the games are available.

Earlier RPGs were much more cerebral and challenging games than we have now. The player had to invest some time, effort, and intellect. He had to make maps, take notes, solve puzzles, and carefully plan his explorations. In the modern era--at least in the major commercial markets--all of this has been replaced with automatic dialogue options, automaps, quest logs, quest markers, and so forth. As much as I liked Skyrim, I didn't like the way it babysits the player throughout. Whatever we've gained in graphics and sound, we've lost in the thrill that a player gets when he solves a difficult puzzle or pages furiously through a notebook to find the answer to an obscure question.

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The interview for Pelit isn't available online. It's a much larger one, but if you're interested in reading the entire Q&A, I've pasted it below.

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Text of the Pelit Interview

1. The "Why We're Here" post details why you started The CRPG Addict. Was it a spontaneous thing that came out of your 72 hour Oblivion session or did you plan the project out carefully and well in advance before doing any writing? Did you have any idea in the beginning that you would actually keep going even after three years and 500 posts?

It was spontaneous, but not because of my “lost weekend” playing Oblivion. I was so disgusted with myself for that that I threw away all my games and decided to quit cold turkey, only to (of course) relapse several weeks later. Rather, it came out of winning Rogue. I spent 80 hours winning that game, and when I was done, I sat there staring at the winning screen thinking “I need to share this with someone.” So I posted it on Reddit, and that’s where someone suggested that I start a blog.

The funny thing is, for years I’d been mentally composing “articles” about things like game economies, combat tactics, and encounters, with this vague idea that if someday I wrote them up, I might be able to get a freelance job with a game magazine or web site. Somehow the idea of blogging never occurred to me. So when the anonymous Redditor suggested I start one, it meshed well with a desire to write about games that I’d been entertaining for a while.

2. The same post gives the impression that for you playing CRPGs is not only about entertainment or pleasure, but that it's also a some sort of compulsion. There's no way NOT to play them! Writing the blog has in a sense validated this obsession, but do you ever feel that it would be better to quit playing completely and do something else? Is it a waste to spend so much time on CRPGs?

Like everything else in life, the key is moderation. Every harmful compulsion or addiction has a point at which it’s joyful, even enriching. But just like an alcoholic who can’t stop at one drink or a compulsive gambler who can’t stop when he’s lost only $200, I often can’t stop playing a game after a reasonable amount of time has passed. I spend all day on it, when I should be working on other things, or I stay up until 3:30 in the morning and ruin the following day.

Almost all the time, I feel like it would be better to quit playing and do something else. I want to finish my PhD. I want to learn to play an instrument. I have a couple books in the works. And I’m self-employed, so every hour I spend on a game is an hour I’m not spending billing a client.

But as I’ve discovered, there’s no guarantee I’ll do all those other things just because I quit playing games. When I tried last year, I just ended up wasting time in other ways. Perhaps the game-playing is less a cause of my low productivity and more a symptom of some compulsion to burn a certain percentage of valuable time. I’m not even sure how to tell.

In some ways, my blog is an indulgence in my compulsion. It virtually guarantees that I’m going to spend too much time playing games. There’s no way I can crank out a blog posting every couple of days without spending four or five hours playing during that same period. And I have to spend time writing and responding to comments, too! But in other ways, it turns my existing compulsion into something valuable—maybe not as valuable as getting my doctorate or learning how to play the piano, but still valuable.

3. In 2012, you came close to putting an end to The CRPG Addict, but continued after a brief break. Have there been moments since then when you've felt that you can't keep going on or have you committed yourself to the task for good? How far do you think you are going to make it? Will we ever see a "Game 1189: Will Fight For Food"? :)

I think I’m committed at this point. Quitting and returning in 2012 was a bit of a catharsis. It was something I had to try, and I failed, and that’s the end of it. There will be other hiatuses in the future, when work gets too busy, or when I’m on vacation, or when I just lose interest (that never lasts more than a couple of weeks), but I can’t see any situation in which I’ll try to stop completely again.

As for how far I’ll make it, I find it best not to think about such things. I’m losing ground right now: it took me longer than a year to complete 1988, and it’s taken me longer than a year to complete 1989. Perhaps at some point, I’ll reconsider how I approach the chronology. But as long as I’m making some progress and I have readers, I’m not going to worry about it.

4. You obviously have dedicated readers who are very enthusiastic about The CRPG Addict. But how about people you know in real life, have you told many about your undertaking and what have their reactions been like? I remember reading that you even told your wife about it only when you were pretty far in your blog posts?

I don’t really tell anyone I know in real life. None of my friends are RPG fans, and my project is not the sort of thing that non-RPG fans really understand. Plus, almost all of my friends are associated with my profession, and the last thing I need is colleagues and clients noticing that I’m four weeks behind on a project but during the same period, I managed to make time for 22 hours of Keef the Thief.

5. Can you tell me anything about how CRPG Addict The Book is coming up? Will there be a lot of revised or new content that hasn't appeared in the blog? Any estimated release date?'

I envision the book as a first of a series, each one covering one of Matt Barton’s “ages” of RPGs—the first will cover both the “Dark Age” and the “Bronze Age.” As I’m planning it now, it will be half essays on RPG development, theory, technology, and game elements, and half condensed versions of my reviews. The first book will also have full reviews of the PLATO games, not all of which have appeared on my site, as well as a few others from 1980-1981.

The book is a struggle for me, because every time I write something in it that I think is good, I want to post it on my blog. My coverage of Dungeon Campaign and Wilderness Campaign were originally meant for the book alone, but I liked them so much, I went ahead and posted them.

Anyway, I’m shooting to have it ready for my fourth anniversary, in February 2014. My wife will turn 40 that year, and I have this dream that I’ll make enough from the book to take her on a nice trip. Or at least a nice dinner.

6. What are your thoughts on why you are drawn to CRPGs in particular, and not some other genre?

I think they manage to achieve just the right balance. They have a lot of logistics, but not to the mind-boggling level of simulation games. They feature tactical combat, but not to the overwhelming level of strategy games. They tell a story, but without the completely deterministic world of adventure games. They’re exciting, but without all the frenetic clicking of action games. I love the sense of progress and development in great RPGs, where every hour brings a new level, a new piece of equipment, more money, an upgraded ability, or a quest reward. There’s always something to give you a shot in the arm and keep you playing.

I also love the true “role-playing” aspects of RPGs, but these don’t really come to maturity until the 1990s, so I can’t say that they’re responsible for all my playing during the last four years. But I love entering a world in which I can define my character and express that character through dialogue options, encounters, and choices during quests. I really look forward to seeing these options grow as the years progress.

I should say that I don’t like CRPGs exclusively. I’ve had a lot of fun with non-RPGs, including Half-Life, L.A. Noire, Red Dead Redemption, and Assassin’s Creed. But I almost always find myself wishing such games were more like RPGs, offering more character progression, choices, and true dialogue options.

7. What makes a good CRPG? What is your favorite CRPG of all time and why?

My top elements of a great CRPG are a large, open game world, memorable NPCs, flexible dialogue options, and plenty of side-quests that offer role-playing opportunities. I can never fully enjoy RPGs that are completely linear, even if they feature good gameplay otherwise.

For my favorite, I can’t decide between Baldur’s Gate or The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Each has different strengths. I’ve never been so immersed in a large, open-ended fascinating game world as in Morrowind, and I despair that I ever will be again. (Oblivion and Skyrim are good games, but they both chipped away at what made Morrowind so great, and they significantly dumbed down the quest system.) I love the factions of the Elder Scrolls games, and the creators have done such a fantastic job developing the history and lore of the setting.

A lot of people prefer Baldur’s Gate II to Baldur’s Gate, and I can see why they would: the second game has better quests, more role-playing opportunities, and greater NPC interaction. But to me, the first game wins out for the open game world and the huge variety of encounters you find there. Yes, there’s a main quest, and it’s somewhat linear, but before, between, or after the stages of the quest, you have a huge area to just wander around, finding all kinds of fun and bizarre encounters. The dialogue system and NPCs are nearly as good as the sequel. And I just find it more satisfying to go from Level 1 to Level 6 than from Level 6 to Level 20. Finally, the interface is fantastic. I think the Infinity Engine is one of the best RPG engines ever made, and Baldur’s Gate was its best game.

But neither game is perfect; neither would score 100 on my GIMLET scale. There’s still plenty of room for a game that fuses the best of Baldur’s Gate, Morrowind, and host of other games in my top 20. Perhaps I’ll encounter it during my quest.

8. Could you share some of the best and the worst moments you've had while playing through over a hundred old CRPGs in the past 3,5 years? What games have really imprinted themselves on your memory, for better or for worse? Any big surprises?

There are good moments in almost every game I play, especially now that I’m blogging about them. Even “worst” moments are somewhat enjoyable because they produce enjoyable blog entries.

There have been a handful of games that everyone already remembers and loves, and all I did was confirm why they’re memorable and lovable. Ultima IV (1985) and Ultima V (1988) hold up well after all these years, and the D&D “Gold Box” games, starting with Pool of Radiance (1988), remain some of the best CRPGs ever made. I had never played the Starflight games (1986 and 1989), but I saw immediately why people remember them fondly. The early Might & Magics (1986 and 1988) are just awesome in their open worlds and variety of side quests, and Wasteland (1988) pioneered a unique setting and skills-based development system that we still see today. Hero’s Quest (1989; later Quest for Glory) might be the most literally “fun” game of the era; I think I grinned the entire time I played.

Of course, it’s always fun when a little-remembered game comes along and surprises you with how enjoyable it is. There’s a shareware roguelike called Omega which is just staggeringly good for its era. I just finished Sword of Aragon (1989), a game I nearly dismissed as a strategy game, and I loved how well it blended strategy and RPG elements. The Dark Heart of Uukrul (1989) is one of the best dungeon-crawlers of the era, and I think maybe a dozen people have played it. I just finished some retrospectives of the early Stuart Smith games, Fracas (1980) and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1981), as well as the Robert Clardy “Campaign” games (1978-1980), and while none were quite advanced enough to score high on my rating scale, I loved how innovative they were in use of elements we rarely see today.

My best individual “moments” can come from any game, even if it’s not a great game overall, and they generally occur when I’ve invested a lot of time and sweat into something and it pays off. Winning Wizardry was an early one. I played that game completely blind and completely straight; I accepted permadeath and didn’t back up a single character. I reached the endgame almost by accident, killed Werdna on my first try, and I was just thrilled to tell my readers. Ascending in NetHack after 262 hours invested was also a major highlight (if also a point where you start to wonder if you’ve been making the best time management choices). There were moments in Knights of Legend, an otherwise faulty game, that were enormously satisfying, such as when my last standing knight managed to track down and drop the last two enemies moment before he would have otherwise passed out from exhaustion.

In terms of worst times, they almost always come when the game is overly-relentless in its combat and doesn’t really offer much else. I was extremely disappointed in the second and third Bard’s Tale games. Everyone seems to remember the series so fondly, but for me they were just endless barrages of combat that provided little character progression or plot progression. Most other games that I’ve ranked poorly have at least been bad in ways that don’t take up too much time and leave me with something fun to write about. I thought Rance was horribly offensive, but I can’t say I hated writing the blog posting.

9. You play only CRPGS, that is, computer RPGs. I think you cited technical difficulties for not including  console RPGs: screwing around with emulators, cartridges, consoles etc. But how do you feel about console RPGs in general, since they tend to be a kind of genre of their own? Do you, for example, enjoy JRPGs like Final Fantasy or are you strictly about (western) CRPGs?

My experience with console RPGs is too limited to have much of an opinion, but I get why PC gamers don’t like them. I don’t think you could import the Infinity Engine games to a console: there are just too many interface elements that require the flexibility of the keyboard and the ability to see details close-up. I’ve never seen a great tactical combat system on a console, and I suspect this is why. The situation must have been even worse back in the 1980s, when controllers had fewer buttons and options.

That said, there are some games that work just fine on a console. I’ve found playing the Elder Scrolls games much more fun on my Xbox, where my 60-inch plasma TV really takes advantage of the games’ graphics and sound. In reviews of Oblivion and Skyrim, commenters say that these games were “dumbed down for the console crowd,” but I don't know if I agree. I mean, I agree that they’re dumbed down, but I don’t see why consoles have anything to do with it.

The same goes for JRPGs. My experience is quite limited, but in general I prefer nonlinear games with open worlds, and I get the impression that JRPGs tend to feature the absolute opposite. The few I’ve played, like Lost Odyssey and one of the recent Final Fantasys, I didn’t like for those reasons. Again, though, there’s nothing in particular about consoles that makes these games linear and deterministic. I’d rather talk about game elements than platforms, and all platforms have some great games.

10. What are your thoughts on the evolution of the CRPG genre? Have we gone a long way or are we still doing the same old games, only with better graphics? Are new games better, or are they too focused on linear gameplay or multiplayer? Do you have a favorite "era" of CRPGs or do you enjoy all of them equally?

You have to understand that I’ve only played about half a dozen games that were produced in the last decade, so my thoughts are biased towards a handful of them.

I do think we’ve come a long way in terms of the substance of RPGs. Throughout the history, things like story, NPC dialogue, and role-playing choices get continually better. Naturally, improvements in technology mean better graphics and sound as well as larger worlds. These are all things that I welcome.

At the same time, I think it’s too bad that players no longer have to do any real work when completing a game. If I just wanted something mindless, I’d play a first-person shooter. I like having to make maps, take notes, prioritize quests, remember keywords, hold onto key pieces of inventory, and solve puzzles. But as the years pass, games remove these investments on the player’s part and do everything for you, until we reach the modern era, when every game has an automap, an automatic quest log, quest markers telling you exactly where to go, undroppable inventory items, and puzzles in which you just choose from a list of options instead of actually figuring out the answer.

I also think it’s too bad that so many RPGs have done away with turn-based tactical combat in favor of either action combat or concurrent tactical combat when everyone is acting at once. The former substitutes dexterity for intelligence; the latter means that you generally issue broad orders and watch what happens instead of plotting individual tactics. I don’t want to over-emphasize this feeling of regret, though, because the games I listed as my favorites—Baldur’s Gate and Morrowind—use concurrent tactical combat and action combat, respectively, and they do it very well.

On the whole, I feel that the peak era for RPGs was about 1996 to 2002. It was an era in which graphics and sound were good enough to produce very immersive games, and when plot and dialogue development had reached maturity, but before game developers started to assume that everyone had Internet access all the time, wanted to share their gaming with friends, and cared about “achievements.”

I have no interest in multiplayer games, and I do sometimes worry that most of the market is being driven by MMORPGs, but as long as there’s a reasonable number of fans dedicated to classic, single-player RPGs, I think we’ll still see game developers taking advantage of that market. If nothing else, independent creators can step in. The recent success of numerous classic-RPG-style Kickstarter projects has shown there’s still a market for them.

11. Should younger gamers try getting into classic eighties CRPGs or are they too cumbersome for someone who didn't grow up with them? That is, is their value now mostly historical or have they stood the test of time?

To me, that’s like asking whether younger movie-lovers should care to watch Humphrey Bogart films or whether younger jazz lovers should bother listening to Sidney Bechet. Sure, there will always be movie watchers, iPod-owners, and gamers who think anything made more than five years ago is too old to bother with. These aren’t the readers I’m targeting with my blog, nor are they people whose opinions I particularly care about. So I wouldn’t presume to speak to “younger gamers” as a whole.

What I’d say is that gamers of any age with intelligence, taste, and discernment should definitely try the classics from this era. They might require a little more effort in terms of mapping and note-taking (and frankly even this goes away by the late 1990s), but they offer a more varied and challenging experience, and they lead to a different quality of satisfaction. Most important, for gamers who think of themselves as hobbyists and not just casual players, playing these older games can provide a sense of history and context for games released today.

12. Anything else you would like to say to Finnish gamers?

I’ve never had a chance to visit your country, and I hope I do someday. I hear it’s lovely and that Helsinki has a nice jazz scene.

In the coming years, I understand I’m going to encounter a few games—SpurguX, IVAN, and the Hurvana series—released only in Finnish, so I suppose I should get started on my linguistics now. Kiitos käsittelyssä!