This is all part of an ongoing rant. I will add more to this section in the future as time sees fit. This is mainly a section devoted to rants about "genre-lising" and game content. Expect to see controversial material placed here. If you disagree with any of it then feel free to comment, as all of this is open to debate, though my views will not change towards what is posted below. Enjoy

I cannot believe that it took me so long to write this little rant. It is the basis to making a game that people will love playing. Although it is the basis, it does not guarantee that the game will be great, as there are several other factors involved as well as peoples' personal preferences. Let me now continue with my ranting.

Consistency is one of the great keys to immersion. Consistency basically means that the rules that govern your game are uniform for all those within the game and all those who play the game. I.e. if NPC's can teleport wherever they want but player-characters can never learn to teleport then the game becomes inconsistent. If the rules governing teleportation infer that a player-character must be of a certain class to learn the spell then it would be consistent.

Immersion is the absolute key to maintaining a player's interest and for creating a good game. Immersion comes from many aspects of the game and includes:

• Sound – Creates the feeling of the game around the player. This is one of the most important aspects when trying to immerse the player.
• Graphics – that portray the scene that you want with the most appropriate view. They don't have to be great graphics, just suggestive.
• Plot and storyline – without holes
• Characters and their characterisation
• Consistency- because consistency is the ability to create a world that flows and a story that does not have holes. A consistent world is a world that is governed by laws that everything obeys. When a world is consistent, the player does not feel cheated.

Reasoning is one of the important aspects of maintaining consistency. Without reasoning, the player feels that the world is jumbled together, rather than living together. If you want to have a dragon in your game then great! If the dragon has no reason for being in your game then it should not be… This is reasoning.

Each of these reasons has an important place in creating a game that involves the player and allowing the player to become part of the game. If the player cannot understand the game, then they are likely to hate it. If the game doesn't make sense to them then they will think that it is ill constructed, not that they should even think that it was constructed at all.

Well, I eventually got this into the document. I was going to leave this out, because at the time I considered that I would have to remove every word 'RPG' and replace it with an alternative. Anyway, here is what the Game Developers have decided about the term 'RPG'.

The term RPG is non-descriptive and is obsolete. When the term RPG was invented, it was for the purpose of categorising the pen and paper games that were around at the time. Along came the computer, and people wanted to play in fantasy battles. The term CRPG was invented to term the RPG's that were played on computers, but since then the term has dropped back to RPG. It was used loosely to categorise games in which the player characterised a hero who walked the imaginary lands and carried out deeds that pertained to their role.

How does genre-lising stop advancement you ask? Well, if you are creating a game that you genre-lise as an RPG then you are already limiting the elements that you are going to put into it. From a development point of view there should be no genre classification on any games that are being made. This allows any NEW and INNOVATIVE ideas to be implemented without people saying, "but RPG's don't have that"! By genre-lising you limit the elements that people will expect in your game, and you also place the pressure on yourself to include elements that people familiarise with the term RPG.

I am not asking that the term RPG be removed for good, or that genres should not be used to classify anything. All I am saying is that from a creation point of view, they should be considered obsolete, so that new elements and attributes for each game can be explored. Games that are on the shelf can be classed by genre, because the consumer will identify with this, but your game has to be classified an RPG by people AFTER it has been made. You can't just say, "I will make an RPG", because some people might argue that your game does not fit in that category. I don't think that any game really should fit in any one category because to do so would be limiting the opportunity for freedom of expression.

I think that I have now ranted enough on this topic, so I would just like to see designers think in terms of elements that they could put in ANY game and what might be relevant to their current project without thinking if it will be classified in any genre. Genre-lisation is what is killing game ingenuity. Games like "Thief" are games that decide to take a cross-genre approach. Why can't your game do the same?

Clichés are a very destructive force that is threatening the broad "genre-lised" RPG band. These days I hear a lot of people complaining that RPG's are "Only Medieval" and that there are too many clichés in these 'types' of games. As much as I hate to typecast, I have to agree that, to a certain extent, clichés are destroying a great deal of these types of games. There seems to be little reason to include certain aspects in games other than "everybody else has them" and "they are always in these types of games". At least if you are going to include a clichéd element, then reason as to why that element is included.