"Lets go back to Doom and Bioshock: Infinite and the idea of "assuming a role." These are game pawns you control. They are the shoe in Monopoly. At best you are joint role-playing these characters along with the script writers and voice actors. Even when playing with a premade PnP character at a convention, I get to choose how to express their personality and mannerisms, their voice inflection, I get as many ways of handling a situation as I can come up with within the limitations of my avatar, etc. Even when that premade character's personality is defined for me, I still get to be the writer and performer. The closest video games have come to this is allowing you to choose from different dialogue choices, choose a win pose, shit like that. Doom and BI offer none of this. They are weapons in space, tank turrets you control."
A response to the oft-used statement that you role-play in every video game.
New money-grabbing scheme: VR D&D. No real friends? No problem!
Actually, I was just thinking about that yesterday. VR could expand the limits of video game role-playing since you yourself would be able to act out your character's mannerisms and gestures, and voice recognition would probably be a given at that point . Then imagine other people in the simulation with you. It's basically be electronic LARPing at that point.
I was thinking about trying to role-play Borderlands. You can build your premade character to some degree by the items you choose to equip and the skills you select in the skill tree, but by and large, you are very limited in being able to role-play the character in any meaningful way. Yea, you can let your imagination run wild, but that's just in your head, not something you could show someone else.
Well, if you play with other people, you can get a little bit closer to (non video game) form of role-play since you can verbally act out your interpretation of your character's archetype. Isn't that kind of what people do on RP servers in MMOs?
Yea, I guess so.
I think there was a little Role Playing in Mass Effect. I kind of created my Shepard based on what she said and did, and by the end, she was very real to me.
It had the multiple dialogue options, which is about as far as you can go in video games. The only other thing you can really do is have lots of different solutions to problems/quests, e.g. New Vegas.
I imagine once the tech exists to have truly autonomous worlds, then we'll see some insane decisions.