How Roleplaying in MMO's helps me write

What is Role-Playing?
This question pops up a lot in a lot of places, and the genuine answer is it's the adult term for the art of playing make believe. Another word for it is acting, but there's no stage or camera pointed at you. It's the time honored art of putting on a fictitious show in a given medium. Some jobs use Role-playing as a tool to illustrate a point or scenario. A simulation if you will.

I've been Role-Playing as a hobby for a very long time. Before the internet, me and my brother and school chums would play pretend we were characters from popular cartoons and whatnot, engaging in made up battles or scenarios using whatever was handy. When the internet became a thing I was exposed to the wonders of chat room role-play in circa 1999 when Geocities chat was still a thing (it might still be, I haven't checked back on that).
Eventually the medium moved out of the chat rooms and into the chat bars of Online Games. Even though the show itself is taking place in the chat, the visual aid of having characters and scenes at the ready helps tremendously. It's a beautiful collaborative practice in storytelling, where each person involved brings their own personalities and characters to the proverbial stage. Over almost 20 years of engaging in it, I've written enough stories with people across the internet to cover several trilogies of books, and enough characters I keep a personal lexicon of them, all very dear to me, and who occasionally wind up in my personal writings.

What is an MMO RPG?
I'm pretty sure by now you've heard of World of Warcraft. It's 2018. You have, right? It's only the most successful online Role-playing Game in the world right now. You can plug that question into google and get a definite answer if you want. I'll just say it's a video game connected to the internets and there's a lot of other players running around the game world. I'm just going to assume if you're reading this you've at least played an MMO. If not, I'll include the names of a few you can play for free at the end of this blog entry.

Why do you role-play?
Primarily because it's great fun. It can bring people closer together, and you can learn a lot about a person from how they role-play. Also for me, it's a means of escaping from the stresses of real life for a period of time and immerse myself in another world. Also as a writer, it allows me to experiment with a variety of character types. What some people call being an "Alt-aholic" (term for person who rolls up many characters in an MMO), I call fleshing out a roster and tackling a different character type.

But you're already playing a game, why play make believe in a--
Let me stop you right there, because yeah that comes up a lot. Everyone has their thing in an MMO. Some people are in it purely for the combat. Some are into doing nothing but running dungeons and demolishing everything in their path. Some are all about that PVP and pitting themselves against other players. Others seek to create the prettiest or most outlandish character they can imagine, and then some. Then you have people like me who like to get together with friends and invent our own stories and situations within the game world for our own amusement.

How does Role-playing in an MMO help you write?
Excellent title drop.Let's get to that part, shall we?
Inspiration- The lifeblood of any writer is the ideas on which we build upon. Every story, every article we write can be traced back to that "Ah Ha!" moment. A scene with friends online might just click on that light bulb for that sword and sorcery epic you've been hashing and rehashing in your brain for five years. Perhaps a scene or session just finished but you have an awesome follow up scenario come to you afterwards. One thing leads to another, and you build and build on it.

Working on our flaws- As a writer, I admit to making a lot of mistakes in the storytelling process. I tell people in my personal circles that I can always tell a fledgling writer or inexperienced role-player, because they always put more focus into describing what their character looks like over their personality. Granted, MMOs being a more visual medium, I personally find describing one's look to be a moot point, I can see what you look like. I want to know about them, not their clothes. Or maybe say I'm having a bad time in my personal life and it's reflecting in my role-play. How's my grammar? How's my writing flow? Am I writing too much or too little? Is my brevity making people think I'm not really feeling this scene? Am I not really feeling this scene? Role-playing is like equal parts dress rehearsal and opening night all at once, where you have the freedom to adjust as you feel you need, and learn from your mistakes.
One of the biggest lessons you can learn from MMO's is allowing yourself the ability to have your characters change over time. Allow them to evolve with the stories they participate in. They may be digital constructs, but their personalities and likes and dislikes are all your invention.

Testing out concepts- Role-playing in MMO's gives you a lot of freedom to experiment with storytelling conventions and character types. You shouldn't be afraid to try out things to see if they stick, you can always go back and retool a characters personality. Don't think everything is set in stone. It's a very fluid medium. Sometimes it even means rolling a level 1 character of a different type than you're used to and see the world from a different perspective. Admit it, you see a game world through very different eyes as a magic user in an MMO than a Melee class. You approach situations differently, you focus on different skills and abilities. It broadens your horizon, and maybe gives you a little more appreciation for the healer in your dungeon group when you yourself walk a few miles in their shoes.

I wouldn't be as passionate about storytelling or writing as I am today if it wasn't for playing a lot of MMOs. Working with other players to tell a story that's satisfying and enjoyable for everyone involved is to me more fun than actually playing the games' content the developers spent years cooking up. Exposure to other people and their ideas can help us formulate our own ideas, our own storytelling voice and flow that can carry over into our own original writing works.
So if you're interested, there's a few MMOs on the market as of this writing (but I certainly hope they survive well into the future) you can play for free without much restriction and not a dime spent, but they will certainly tempt the ever loving hell out of you.
-Wildstar
-Star Trek Online
-Blade and Soul
-The Elder Scrolls Online
-Black Desert Online

Gives these a spin and see which is to your liking, see what speaks to your creative muse. Take a chance and see what stories come out of it.

Loot Boxes and Cash Shops: A Love/Hate Relationship

Loot Boxes in video games are not new. They've been around for a good long while now. A lot of online games I play ranging from Wildstar, Star Trek Online, to prime linchpin of the Loot Box debacle, Overwatch. They're a micro-transaction that people hated from the get go, because they are not a guarantee that you're going to get the super cool shiny item you had dangled in front of you in the ads, and while they are not expensive, the unprepared could find themselves near 30$ in the hole because the gambling aspect of it kicked it and you told yourself "Okay one more go around, we can do this, big money big money no whammy".

Star Trek Online is perhaps the worst offender for me. Not long ago when Star Trek Discovery was hot, they had a loot box campaign featuring ships from the show. That's what sells the keys for those Loot Boxes in that game, the ships. People want the ships, and they don't drop often if at all...or at least for everyone but me, because I always wound up with nothing but crafting materials and Lobi Crystals (a residual currency given from opening the boxes you can spend at a specific merchant). Being a potato, I've probably spent more than 100$ on loot box keys for Star Trek Online because...well, they give away the loot boxes themselves like their candy in random enemy drops, you can wind up with 20 or 30 of them on a good afternoon depending on what you're doing, but you need keys to open them. How do you get keys? Right now I'm doing that rubbing my fingers together gesture to indicate the expenditure of currency. 

And you gotta know what's in the box right? It's right there in your inventory...what are you going to do, Jimmy? Discard it? Oh you could, probably. You could use your common sense, but there's always that part of your brain that makes you go...you know what, I feel lucky today.

There is a game out there that is purely about opening loot boxes, to unlock more loot boxes, to try and get rarer loot boxes, all a testimony to the mentality these things entail, which is akin to the joy we feel ripping the wrapping off a Christmas present.
Loot Boxes also serve as a means of revenue for the company. Me and others I know often will make the excuse (if an excuse you would call it) that there's no sin in tossing a company I like a few extra bucks for providing me with enjoyment. I know keeping a game online in today's market isn't easy, if not impossible. It's never long before 80% of all MMO's start subscriber only and eventually are forced to go Free To Play purely for the survival of the product, and that means the game needs to earn revenue somehow to offset costs. Game developers and their employee's don't work for free, so in that I can understand the philosophy behind the necessity of cash shops and loot boxes...and the RNG is just the spicy little detail that keeps you coming back for more. Have you ever looked at an update to a games cash shop and saw something you just had to have? Sure, possibly purely cosmetic, but you needed it, for whatever reason you favored. I fell into it with Star Wars: The Old Republic years ago when the game rolled out loot boxes containing costume pieces from the Knights of the Old Republic series, and there was a piece I desperately wanted and probably spent way more than I'm willing to admit on trying to acquire it, instead acquiring pieces that are backlogging my storage space in the game and just won't sell on the in-game marketplace.
Eventually, though, I got what I wanted, and I didn't feel a shred of regret or remorse except a scoff at the fact I paid possibly 50$ (rounded) for a virtual jacket. And to think I used to give Blizzard lip for charging 25$ for a mount.

Am I going to tell you to avoid Loot Boxes and the services associated? No. If you're reading this, I take every confidence you are a well adjusted adult or teenager who can make their own financial decisions. If tossing a couple dollars at a game for something that brings you a bit of happiness is your call, then I'm not going to judge. But I will warn you of games that make it feel a jaunt into the cash shop and rolling the dice is the only way to make progress in a game. The biggest offenders are on the mobile game market, that allow you to progress a ways into the game before it starts making it very apparent they want your money, and will bog down your progress until you're just frustrated enough to give in.
Black Desert Online is a big offender. A game I overall have a love/hate relationship with. Perfectly playable free, but where it gets you is not the cosmetic items in their cash shop...No, it's the utilities. With such limited carry capacity in your inventory, and the inventory weight system, you'll find yourself spending more time trudging back to a Warehouse to store your goods...unless, of course, you pony up the cash for a sufficient increase in your inventory and weight capacity. To me, this is just greedy. I could also point a similar finger at Elder Scrolls Online, where your inventory will be constantly buggered, unless of course you're a subscriber and get access to an infinite capacity crafting materials bag, which alone sold me on the mere 15$ a month charge, since now I could play the game longer than 15 minutes without needing to visit my characters bank or a vendor.