Editor's note: Cameron thinks RPGs need atheist and agnostic perspectives. But rather than simply adapting Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy or Ocatavia Butler's Parable of the Sower series, he suggests including freethinkers in traditional fantasy settings who deny the existence of the gods that most people believe in. And I think that's a fantastic idea. -James
The controversy around Final Fantasy 13 has gamers thinking about the future of RPGs. Should subsequent entries in the genre lean toward FF13's streamlined battle system and fast-paced action? Or should they follow Dragon Age and go back to the genre's roots in hardcore PC gaming? Whatever the answer to those two questions may be, I want to offer a completely separate formula for the success of future RPGs: atheists.
It's not all that often that I find myself wondering about the religious affiliations of video game characters, but it happens frequently when I'm playing fantasy RPGs. Gods tend to engage in some pretty ostentatious displays of power in fantasy worlds, which is hardly surprising when you consider how much they tend to crib from Christian authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. In a world where priests can shoot beams of healing light out of their hands, it can't be easy to take after Richard Dawkins and rain on the faith parade. But think how fun it would be if someone did.
I speak from experience here. Back in high school, I irritated the guy who ran my Dungeons & Dragons game to no end by playing my character as an in-your-face atheist. Our campaign setting was no different from any other when it came to the willingness of gods to bestow amazing powers on mortals who licked their boots thoroughly enough. But my lawful-evil mage had a great time trying to convince those people that their powers were just part of the natural order of things and were in no way indicative of divine favor.
I was mostly doing this to amuse myself, but it's something I'd like to see tackled in a video game. Developers can get really hung up on justifying characters' super-human abilities, and in fantasy worlds, gods are a really convenient (read: lazy) excuse for such things. But why not create a world in which magical things happen and people don't know why? Of course in such a world, some people would attribute it to divine intervention. But naturalists would be getting all Occam's Razor on that explanation. Hell, that alone would be a vastly more interesting conflict to have at the heart of an RPG than yet another quest for the magical world-saving MacGuffin.
At this point, even fans of RPGs (and I'm a pretty big one) have to admit that the genre has, at best, moved sideways in terms of narrative since its transition from dice and paper to pixels. Whatever mechanical changes the genre may or may not need, it undoubtedly needs new perspectives on storytelling. A fantasy world that not only made room for religious skeptics, but actually took the time to include some in its primary cast would be a great start. So how about it, Bioware? When can we expect Dragon Age: The Maker Delusion?