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Gaming Is Serious Business – The Min-Max Road Less Traveled

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I’ve always been an RPG fanatic when it comes to video games. The reason for this is partially the satisfaction of watching characters develop from newbies with swords into forces that can change worlds and defeat powerful enemies. From the first RPG I ever played, Final Fantasy, to my most recent defeat with Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins, I’ve always loved the process from beginning to end with my toons. In this case, it is most certainly the journey that is more important than the destination.

But for some, it seems that that isn’t quite enough. Not satisfied with simply defeating something, most take the statistics and numbers game to the extreme, tuning characters to an ideal collection of gear, skills, and math – in short, the perfect equation. This is most commonly known as “min-maxing”, and it’s a practice that has become common among the most obsessed of RPG players. For these players, creating a party of characters with the best possible outcome to give themselves an advantage is perhaps the most appealing thing in the RPG experience. In MMOs, where raid and group makeup can make or break you, this is taken to the extreme, as discerning players accept or reject others based upon their ability to crunch the numbers to their whim.

While I’ve never been one to fault a certain way of playing, I can’t help but wonder how reducing RPGs to their various bonuses and numbers is not so much a game playing experience as much as it is an exercise in complicated mathematics. While not every min-maxer is like this, I have met some who travel this road who are as rigid as the numbers they worship. For these folks, there is one way of doing things, and whether it’s on a console or online, they do whatever they can go get to that ideal, whether that is kitting out their characters in the best mix of gear possible (a process that sometimes takes hours if not days) or grinding their noses silly with an experience gain meant to serve as a means to steamroll enemies.

As with a lot of things that I talk about in this column, the priority for me has always been creating a challenge and an enjoyable journey with my RPG games. That sometimes means that I choose characters or makeups based upon what I think might be intriguing to play rather than what will give me the best chance of winning. In Dragon Age: Origins, for example, I played a mage with a ton of area-of-effect damage and a bit of melee power via a specialization allowing me to wear heavier armor. In my party, I also paired together a mishmash of characters for the fun dialog options and ambient conversations as I played. Now, my party of too-many-ranged-toons may have been harder to play overall, but I sure had fun adjusting my strategies to fit my  choices as well as see the hilarity between morally grey and heroic characters.

In MMOs, I put even more emphasis on what is fun to play rather than what is numerically correct to play. Because of the persistent fee and the nearly unavoidable experience treadmill of these games, it’s important to me to actually play a game and have relative fun doing it, and for me, that means not sitting around trying to mix my gear together into the ideal set of ownage that I plan to deliver. Exploration, experimentation, gut feeling – these are all things that perhaps game players discard in favor of “beating” a game (especially an RPG), when perhaps beating the game doesn’t mean beating its numbers.

If you’re a min-maxer and you enjoy what you do just as much as I enjoy throwing together misfit character parties, then more power to you. But I do hope that those out there who constantly play the numbers game realize that there is A)always more than one way to do things and B)the “math is hard” group of us might just surprise you in a party one of these days. If RPGs were meant to be nothing but statistics, they’d have long since gone the way of the dodo. But the realization that such games are all about a more well-rounded experience means they become more fun than they could being reduced to its min-maxed bits and pieces. Trust me.


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