Editor's note: Liam looks at where games are trending toward nowadays, with some interesting observations (even referencing Dungeons & Dragons) and one pretty cool analogy that I really dug (paragraph six). -Shoe
You can find thousands of versions of this argument. With first-person shooters, it's Halo vs. Team Fortress. With role-playing games, it’s the single-class character vs. the multi-class party. What all of these boil down to is whether you want to do one thing very well but not do anything else…or do everything but none of it particularly well. I like to call the argument "specialism vs. generalism."
You can make numerous cases to be made for either side, from many areas of our culture. Since this is a gaming website, however, I’ll focus on how games deal with this debate.
Generalism is very prevalent in games — most notably in mainstream shooters. Whether it’s Gears of War, Halo, or Call of Duty, you can pick up any gun around and start firing it with extreme prejudice. You are a one-man army, with 30 different guns strapped to your back, running around and blasting everything that moves.
Whenever I see this, I think of that scene in the Matrix where Neo, the main character played by Keanu Reeves, learns how to do every martial art known to man (and three known only to dolphins) in about five seconds via a download straight into his brain. I always like to imagine that beneath those helmets, soldiers in these games have an umbilical cord running back to their base where people continuously drag 'n' drop files with names like “M-16” into folders marked “brain.” Two seconds later, that soldier is running around firing an alien weapon that no human has ever laid eyes on and requires tentacles to operate.
Shooters nowadays, however, with the increased prevalence of online multiplayer, have started to lean toward specialism. Notable entries in this category include Battlefield: Bad Company, Call of Duty (yes, I know I’m double dipping), and, of course, Team Fortress 2. These games all have class systems, much like an RPG. You can be a medic, sniper, demolitionist, etc. These guys all excel at one or two things and are absolutely worthless at anything else. The fun part of these games is using the strengths of these classes and working as a team to cover each other’s weak points: The medic heals the soldier, who protects the medic.
In essence, these games are still generalist, but the level of abstraction has moved up one. Instead of the individual being the army, the team is now the army. The team as a whole can still use every weapon, but each individual can’t. To use an analogy, the team is to the one-man army as the teammates are to the guns belonging to the one-man army. In these games, you as an individual don’t win — your team does.
Damn commies are everywhere.
Another genre where you can see the division between generalism and specialism is RPGs. Dungeons & Dragons is a prime example. Each character is a specialist, although to varying degrees. In play-testing his game, however, Gary Gygax, the creator of D&D, no doubt found a glaring problem with specialism: It gets old.
Being a warrior and hitting people with a sword is no doubt fun for the first couple of hours. The classes can very quickly lose their sparkle, though, even with the whole leveling-up thing. So, Gygax included a key ingredient to his game and, as a result, to almost every single RPG to come after: the team. Instead of being a lone warrior hitting people with sharp things, you could play with a mage, thief, and a hunter in your party. Suddenly, the possibilities were endless. Suddenly, the game was fun again.
This illustrates a key point in the debate. Specialism is boring, except in very rare cases. It seems like a rather obvious point: Hitting the same few buttons every time you run into an enemy isn’t much fun. Too many developers miss this. It’s true: Variety is the spice of life.
RPGs like Final Fantasy are another good illustration of this point. If you have ever played Final Fantasy, you know what I mean. When that first screen pops up and asks you to choose the classes of the four members of your party, everyone’s first thought is, “But I want them all!” Yes, people play through with four red mages or four warriors, but nobody plays that way on their first time. Everyone instinctively wants variety.
I am playing through Final Fantasy 12 again right now. The game has a “License Board” system that lets any character be whatever you want them to be. Hypothetically, you could create a party entirely of mages or warriors or healers that is basically the ultimate illustration of specialism. You could also hypothetically have every character be the same blend of magic and attacking, the illustration of generalism. Both times I have played, I did neither. I made a party that was basically a blend of the two.
While specialism can be boring, generalism is quite often just as boring. After all, what’s the fun in just being mediocre? Granted, you’re mediocre in everything, but still, you are never as good as you could have been if you just focused on one thing. Playing through Diablo is, according to many people, more fun and rewarding if you focus on only one stat (like strength) and let the others lie fallow. Sure, you get dropped in one hit, but who cares when you can kill the final boss in two hits?
See what I mean about there being multiple sides? I personally fall on neither side and prefer a blend, like what I did in FF12. This debate runs throughout the past and present of gaming and will no doubt stick around for a while in the future. If you take a look around at other forms of media, technology, and lifestyle choices that people make, you can see this debate run through it all. I don’t think that people are naturally jacks of all trades and masters of none, but neither were we meant to be as specialized as we are becoming nowadays. Your opinion on the matter, as always, is up to you.