Or, Embracing the Metagame.

It may shock you all to learn that I am as much of a traditional gamer as I am a video gamer. Actually, that was presumptuous. It would shock you, if anyone gave a crap about some schmuck on the internet. Nevertheless, the fact is out there. So enjoy it, you lucky dog, you, for learning my deep and terrible secret, one which requires an exorbitant amount of my monthly budget to spend on dice.



(Before I continue: The TL;DR of this is that I think the Cerberus Daily News site is great, and more people should use it.)

For instance, in a recently-established Shadowrun campaign I play Joseph "Sloppy Joe" Crowe, a notoriously messy, alcoholic troll hitman who nevertheless has a soft spot for his buddies and his mother. Likewise, in a long-running game of Green Ronin's A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game, I play Edmund Gallows, an evil knight who puts on a brutish, dumb-muscle facade to conceal his role as the mastermind of a conspiracy to seize the throne of the noble house he serves.



For those'a youz who ain't familiar, we in the hardcore traditional roleplaying community tends to fall into sep'rate schools a' thought. There's the Real Men, the types who go up against Renraku corp like it was nothin', and expect to come out unscathed. There's the Munchkins, little twats who won't be satisfied till they get themselves a gun with more mods than a freaking Hollywood tartlet. And then there's me. I'm a Thespian. And in case youz can't guess from the sudden change in my tone, it gets us off to make like our characters, see?

One of my greatest displeasures when playing video games is that there truly is little room to actually roleplay, especially compared to pen-and-paper RPGS. Moreover, unless you're playing an MMO or something along the lines of Dragon Age: Origins (admittedly, it was basically a single-player MMO), you don't often have your choice of character. No matter how enticing a given game world may be, you're always going to be mister bland-and-mute (or alternatively, mister bland-and-you-choose-from-a-selection-of-dialogue). That's what attracts me to old-school dicerolling and even freeform, statless roleplay: I have complete freedom to create the character I want, and play them however I want. It's a medium that blends gaming and novels. Mind you, these are my two favorite visual media.

Also, don't take this as a complaint that games cannot be as interactive as the whole of freaking human imagination. I realize the limitations, but that doesn't mean I like them.

So, I look for opportunities, naturally, to roleplay in the worlds of my favorite video games and novels. I like the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, hence I play the (quite good) RPG. I will be running a D20 Modern (think DnD but with more guns and less elves) campaign set in the Zone of Alienation as my tribute to the novel Roadside Picnic and the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. And so on, and so forth. Unfortunately, a few worlds that I'd still like to explore with my own characters remain mostly unadapted, chief among them Half-Life and Mass Effect.

Which leads me to why I love the Cerberus Daily News, or more specifically their comments section.



Though we are aware that the Cerberus Daily News site admins are fans of Mass Effect and not Bioware employees, we believe the site to be a step in the right direction for hologames that are heavy on exposition, immersion, and lore. This platform, at the very least, enjoys the opportunity to leave Shepard-Commander's form temporarily to access the Extranet and provide for the organic races our own point of view on the goings-on in the Mass Effect universe. It satisfies our urges to act, while simultaneously immersing us deeper into the world.

Error. World is an incorrect term. It immerses us deeper into the galaxy.

We find it illogical that games producers do not often offer this sort of of outlet for their more theatrical fans. We lament that there is no way to become so involved in the universes of, say, The Elder Scrolls, or Deus Ex.

So, we ask the more roleplay-inclined of you organics to visit the site, and to comment in-character. To embrace the metagame is to appreciate the game universe on a greater level.

And, we hope for games producers to embrace the roleplayers in their fanbase, and to expand into more interactive settings for such fans, even merely in the form of a message board or comments field. These make worlds-error-galaxies of difference.

We will now take our leave and allow you to continue perusing the site with your outdated methods of ocular input. We have a consensus to reach.