Why Zelda is not an RPG (And why Halo is not, either)

If you like to talk about video games or even just listen to other people talk about video games, chances are you've heard someone argue about what makes an RPG an RPG. And you will hear a lot of varying answers and may conclude that there's just no real definition.

Genres. Who needs 'em, anyway?

Recently, on a game dev forum, there was a discussion about what favorite aspects of roguelikes. Shortly into the thread, we realized we were all talking about a different genre. Well, you can't talk about what you like about roguelikes if you can't even define what a "roguelike" is.

And before you claim "Sure you can! Everyone can just use their own definition!" Well, that's a bit pointless. If we wanted to talk about our favorite qualities of foxes, because someone wanted to create their own fantasy fox breed, and I said "I like how they live in the water, have gills, and eat smaller foxes to survive. It's cool when their fins come out of the water, too." How is that helpful? I could just say "Well, my definition of shark and fox is the same thing. So it's only fair that I use my own definition of fox and not one that we all agree upon."

As you can see, there are times when you really do need to define things.

So, users on the forum started trying to define "roguelike," and some people claimed that the definition should be kept vague. It ended up bursting into a string of people saying "By that definition, Halo is a roguelike." Then everyone would just compare ever definition of "roguelike" used in the thread to Halo and see if it worked. People got mad.

However, this is the correct way of going about things.

The purpose of genre is to distinguish different things. The purpose of categorizing anything is to distinguish. So if you can't distinguish between things using your definitions, you need to define your categories better.

It's like taxonomy. What makes Periplaneta burnnea (the brown cockroach) different than Periplaneta americana (the American cockroach)? Most people would say, "Hell, I don't care. They're both roaches and pretty much the same." And most of the time, that would be fine. But there are certain times in which you must say one is a different species than another -- that's the entire reason we have taxonomy. Without it, we couldn't study biology properly.

If you're talking about why you like RPG's, you're talking about why you like them compared to other games. If there's nothing to define it and separate RPG's from other games, what are you even talking about? You're just talking about what you like about games in general.

And we can't just have a vague description. If we just said "Well, if they have legs and crawl around, it's a cockroach." Then, well, your pet dog is a cockroach and an elephant is a cockroach, too. And obviously, that doesn't work for most people, and would make a conversation about cockroaches quite difficult, if anything that fits that definition could be a cockroach.

So if we want to talk about RPG's, we have to define what an RPG is, or else we're all just talking about elephants and sharks when we're trying to talk about roaches. And we have to define it very specifically.

With that out of the way, let's talk about what actually makes something an RPG.

Just what is an RPG?

Firstly, people will look at the name "Role Playing Game." One of the most unproductive things I hear in these kinds of discussions is the "obvious" fact that RPG's must be a game in which you "play a role."

Of course, that not only is so vague it barely makes sense, but it's very rare that you don't play a role in a game. You play the role of Sonic in Sonic the Hedgehog. You play the role of a soldier in Call of Duty. You could even say you play the role of a doctor in Dr. Mario. Does that mean those games are RPG's? If you don't think so, your definition of what makes an RPG is flawed and needs some work. Remember, we need to find a definition that separates the games we call "RPG" from other games.

Then there are some arguments that seem to make some more sense. People will think about RPG's and try to find things they all have in common. Well, you level up, you collect weapons, you take turns, etc. This puts you on the right track. But of course, you need to think about how disputable these things are.

You take turns in Checkers. Is Checkers an RPG? You level up in Halo's multiplayer. Is Halo multiplayer mode an RPG mode? You collect weapons in Grand Theft Auto. Is Grant Theft Auto an RPG? Also, are these things true in all RPG's? You don't collect weapons in Pokémon. You don't take turns in Secret of Mana. You don't level up in Romancing SaGa. But those are all considered RPG's by a vast majority of people.

At this point, there are lazy people who give up and say "RPG doesn't really mean anything, then, I guess!" But then, why would we even have such a term in the first place? And are all these people who consider themselves RPG fans just playing whatever games come their way and pretending they have an interest in a certain genre?

Of course not! A big problem is that the term is used incorrectly or loosely in casual exchange -- but this doesn't mean we can't define it! It just means we're going to have a lot of frustrating opposition (like with the examples above, and whatever else people may want to throw our way).

Let's look at the early history of the genre. Role-Playing Games actually start out as just that -- games that revolved around creating a fantasy in your head and acting it out. Now, as children, we just call this "playing make-believe" or "playing house" or something like that. But when older people do it with a set of rules and turn it into a sort of strategy-based game, we called it "role-playing games." It was still a group of friends getting together and making up a story together, pretending to be in that story, but now it was a bit different.

Made famous by games like Dungeons and Dragons, it's no surprise that fans of these games who came to love the numbers and statistic crunching involved in those structured make-believe sessions to see the computer world as a great opportunity to expand on this. With a computer, you could have even more complex rules and formulas without having to worry about calculating them yourself and distracting from the fantasy world you were creating.

But the computer opened up another opportunity -- you could create a single-player campaign! It would have to be a little more structured, but just create your world and a story, and allow the player to experience it in the same way as they did while playing a pen-and-paper game like Dungeons and Dragons by building their character, interacting with things in the way they wanted, and rolling virtual dice (which don't even need to be displayed anymore) to determine their success... Now you could share your creative worlds, or experience a friend's, without having to get a group of dedicated followers together twice a week. It was a gaming miracle!

Of course, the popularity of this kind of software quickly spread, and people started to create all kinds of games using these systems. People enjoyed the actual numbers gameplay and character building so much that a lot of the storytelling aspect was lost in favor of things like exploring massive dungeons that you had to map out with a pencil and graph paper in order to win.

Of course, as computers became more powerful, we didn't have to describe the environments with text anymore. We could display a graphical world for the user to explore. And as technology advanced to what it is today, we were able to even tell a cinematic story along with the gameplay. So, that aspect of creating your own make-believe characters and adventures in your head has been somewhat lost in certain types of computer RPG's today, while parts of it retain in free-roaming RPG games like the famous Elder Scrolls series, where the game is like a very, very illustrative Dungeon Master. We still, however, lose the spontaneous creative quality of playing with humans.

So through all of this, what factor brought over from those tabletop imagination games has stuck around? What has never gone away or changed, that we could say "makes" an RPG what it is? What quality do these games have that other games, both then and now, didn't have?

Numbers. The beautiful numbers!

Well, if you go to you're friend's Vampire: The Masquerade night and take away all the humans, what are you left with? No, not vampires. Well, you have a bunch of rules, a bunch of numbers, and some dice.

All games have rules, of course, but what make the rules of an RPG different from that of another game? I mean, basketball has rules, too. So does golf. But of course, those aren't the same type of game! What makes them different? Well, the rules and equipment you use. What makes RPG's different from other games is like that, too!

Open any RPG book at your local bookstore or hobby gaming store, and read the rules. They will completely cover how to make and build characters within the rules, and how to determine success of actions. They'll also tell you how to tell good stories and work together, but again, we're using the computer to replace that human interaction part now.

And those things are what all those numbers and the dice are for. Still, all video games have numbers and formulas (Pac-Man uses numbers to track your score and number of credits, and even the speed of the game), and almost all video games have some kind of random number generation (Damn you, Clyde!!)

So those rules that tell us how to use those things--that must be what sets an RPG apart from other games. And indeed, in all my time working to find a good definition of what makes a video game an RPG, this has proven to be the best answer.

In an RPG, the numbers are not already determined for you. In an RPG, an important part of the game is being able to influence those numbers on your own. When you played the pen-and-paper games, all your friends' characters leveled up together -- but when Frank's mage leveled up and Susan's warrior leveled up, they didn't grow stronger in the same way. Why? Frank and Susan got to choose how those numbers affected their characters. The numbers were user-influenced. Mario is going to have the same running speed no matter how fast you want him to run. Mega Man can only shoot three bullets at a time no matter how much you want him to shoot more.

Now, we're still going to run into problems with using this as our definition of RPG's. If just having user-influenced variables made a game an RPG, then a ton of games could be an RPG again. In Dance Dance Revolution, I can influence the difficulty of the song by choosing a difficulty level (which is represented by a number), as well as alter my score by stepping on arrows at the proper time. Hey, I'm influencing values, right? Well, of course, that's not an RPG.

So let's think again about those rules. What makes the user-influenced numbers so different in an RPG? Let's think back to those rulebooks and what we're doing with the numbers.

There's a core difference that we haven't mentioned -- remember those dice? That's right, the entire point of these numbers is to use them with those dice. In an RPG, our "stats" determine whether our actions succeed or fail, and to what extent they do. When we want to do something difficult, we roll a check. When we attack a monster, we roll a check. And when we hit? We roll for damage.

That makes our numbers a bit different. We now have user-influenced variables that are used for the purpose of combining with random numbers to determine our success and level of success. And when you think about the actual gameplay elements of an RPG, the stuff we're using the computer for, that's pretty much the entirety of it.

An important part of this definition is that these random numbers combined with our influenced variables determine our success. What determines if we succeed at an action and how well we succeed is not anything else. In Karaoke Revolution, what determines if we pass the song is how much our voice stayed in pitch. In DOOM, what determines if we hit our enemy is our aim, not our accuracy value plus a dice roll.

In a non-RPG, you will have pretty much the same success rate defeating a boss or attacking it no matter how your random numbers or user-influenced turn out. Even if in a first-person shooter, there is a random amount of damage done to an enemy when shot, and you can level up your shot power, killing that enemy may take you between 5 and 10 shots. No matter what. 5 if you're lucky or powered yourself up a lot, 10 if you're unlucky or haven't powered yourself up a lot.

But in an RPG, it's not like that. My character, who I purposely didn't level, so they're only level 2, and I put my few points into magic, may take 24,593 attacks to defeat a boss with my normal attack. But my friend, who is level 100 and poured all their points into strength, could defeat it in one hit! That's a very different experience even though we're playing the same game -- and the entire reason it is different is because the core system of the game is about these user-influenced variables mixed with random numbers determining our success.

Any game can have some numbers and random influence, but when it's the core system and those numbers significantly determine the success rate and severity of success instead of your ability to press buttons in timing or something, and what takes you from the beginning to end of the game is your personal manipulation of those numbers and choice on how to use them -- that's an RPG.

Now, there is a sub-genre of RPG in which action can play a major factor in certain pass/fail situations. Mostly this has to do with replacing dodging/accuracy with the players actual timing. For example, in Kingdom Hearts, if you run out of the way of an enemy's attack, you will not get hit. So you could argue that your timing abilities are a key element here, which they are. But the fact remains that a player who created a magic-focused Sora and is level 55 is going to have a very different experience fighting a boss than a defense-focused Sora at level 7 fighting the same boss. When the experience changes greatly depending on the way these user-influenced variables and random numbers are put together, the game can be categorized as an RPG. Even if there's action involved, that core of user-influenced values changing the game greatly is what creates that action-RPG subgenre.

But Link has a sword, guys!!

But wait! You don't like my definition, because you love The Legend of Zelda, and that's totally an RPG! But my definition doesn't fit Zelda, so it must be wrong. There must be something missing from my definition, because this really cool RPG that everyone loves can't even be qualified in that way! It's not fair to say it's not an RPG just because Link doesn't level up! He still gets swords and new weapons that change how much damage he does!

Oh, I've heard it all. First, if you're going to stretch the definition of your categories, you have to make sure that all games that fall into this new stretch you are willing to accept as an RPG.

Link gets new weapons that make him better. Yes, and I get new parts for my car in Gran Turismo that make it better.

Link does different amounts of damage depending on what weapons he has. Spencer does more damage in Bionic Commando depending on what weapons he has.

Link can explore a big world with dungeons and stuff in it while collecting items that help him on his quest. Olimar and Louie explore a big world with dungeons and stuff in it while collecting items that help them on their quest in Pikmin 2.

In the game, you play the role of the character Link. In Kirby's Epic Yarn, you play the role of the character Kirby (and hey, it even says "Epic" which describes RPG's, right??) ...

The aspects that people claim make Zelda an RPG usually apply to almost any gave ever.

Let's look at the history of games like The Legend of Zelda. I consider the game to be an action-adventure game. This is another term that gets used loosely, and I don't want to go into it as much as I've gone into defining RPG here.

Do you remember the classic adventure games? A lot of people called them "point-and-click adventures," and that's still the true definition of an adventure game. You don't even have to go on an adventure, really. An adventure game is test of the player's wit. There is a puzzle that is solved by clicking on various things and seeing how they interact with your click. Sometimes you solve mini-puzzles. There is a specific solution, and every time you play the game, you must use that solution to win. Remember MYST? That's a perfect example. Even though you can kind of explore the world and everything, you don't progress until you solve the puzzle in order. These games always have a "solution" that is defined and rigid.

You can even experience these pretty easily by playing something like the classic Crimson Room online.

Now what if you took that type of game, and instead of clicking, you threw a user-controlled moving character on there? And now instead of clicking on a box, you moved your character over to the box and pressed an interaction button? Yeah, you just created an action-adventure game. And sure, you can have some combat in there, but there were point-and-click adventures with combat (you'd click on an enemy many times to defeat it, or in a game like Clock Tower, click on things in the environment to attempt to use those to attack, or if you have things in your inventory, they'd automatically be used at certain points...)

The action aspect of action-adventure games makes for all kinds of new and interesting ways to solve the puzzle, but you're still just solving a giant long puzzle, and that's the key gameplay system. Zelda is a lot closer to MYST or Dreamfall than it is Final Fantasy or Persona. In fact, Zelda is closer to Super Mario 64 than it is to an RPG...

In conclusion, if you're going to categorize games into genres, these genres must be unique in that only games you want to put into that group can fit. If other games that you don't consider a part of your genre fit all the requirements you have for your genre (In Halo, you play the role of a character, explore a world, collect items, fight, and power yourself up! It must be an RPG, right?) then your genre definition is flawed and you need to reconsider. There is no point or use for a vague or undefined genre or category.

In the same way, you can't create definitions that don't apply to all games in your genre. You can't say "An RPG must have this!" when there are RPG's that don't have that quality.

So in order to create a proper genre definition, you must create a list in which all games of that genre (ever last one!) contain every quality you define, and in which no games outside of that genre (none at all!) contain any of those qualities you define.

Of course, you can have sub-genres within genres and stuff. Like Illusion of Gaia, Final Fantasy Tactics, Dragon Quest, Secret of Mana, Eternal Eyes, and Lost Odyssey are all RPG's by my definition. But there are things that set them apart from one another... So we can say when there are certain elements, games like Illusion of Gaia and Secret of Mana can be Action-RPG, Dragon Quest and Lost Odyssey can be turn-based RPG... and even further, a sub-sub-genre of turn-based RPG can fit Tactics and Eternal Eyes and we can call that Strategy RPG or whatever.

It's a lot like biological taxonomy, if you recall. A tree, mushroom, and frog are all certainly living things, but they're in completely different kingdoms. But not all plants are trees, either. And not all animals are frogs. And then even among amphibians there are things other than frogs. And then there are different kinds of individual frogs... there are tons of sub-sub-sub-sub-groups.

Because of that, I've found that the best definition for an RPG in video gaming is a game in which the core system revolves around the fact that there are user-influenced variables, and the success of a player's choices is solely based upon calculating and comparing these variables in combination with random number generation. When the player's experience can change greatly and the success rate of actions is changed significantly depending on these user-influenced values, the game is an RPG.

By this definition, I cannot think of games that don't hold this definition that I would still want to call RPG, and I cannot think of games that hold this definition that I would not want to call RPG. So I feel that I have settled on a currently-working definition of the RPG genre in video games. And I would be more than happy to change or tweak it if I find games that break my definition in either aspect (RPG's that don't fit it, or non-RPG's that do).

This is how classification and categorization work. There's no other way to do it, or else you're missing the whole point of classifying things. And there are times when things need to be classified. So make sure when you do classify things, you categorize responsibly!