No More Heroes...

With so many people playing MMO's, there is a trend that is returning to video games. In olden times, characters in video games fit nicely into pre-set molds that determined the overall outcome of the character's design and abilities. An example of this would be Cecil (Final Fantasy IV). Eventually there came a new model where the player would determine the growth and direction of a character like in KOTOR (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic) or Final Fantasy VIII. This provided designers with new freedoms in terms of mechanics and story development. Today, this has evolved into whole new genre of games called MMORPG's. These types of games concentrate on giving the player seemingly complete freedom to develop their character as they see fit. At first this seemed like the greatest thing since sliced Jewish Rye. Eventually a disturbing trend began to emerge: generic character development within the distinctive set types (i.e. warrior, wizard, archer, barbarian, etc.). All characters started to fall within these categories, and the once percieved individuality began to fade. Even Fable (single player adventure/RPG) lacked true freedom for chacter development; every character eventually ends up with all the same abilities and looks relatively the same.

The Bartle test in somewhat misleading. Dispite seemingly differing results, the characters developed by most gamers end up being stale and generic, often comforming to the previously mentioned character types. Since no characters stand out anymore, what is there to define a true hero? This test is telling me that dispite the player's tendancies and intentions, there are no more heroes. Every character is cut from the same cloth and the molds are well worn. What hope is there for the future of MMO's or even games in general?