How to Level Up, Part 1

One Christmas morning, almost twenty years ago, I received the original NES Dragon Warrior as a present. It was an all new style of game for me. At that point, my Nintendo was still fairly new--I had gotten it for my birthday only a few months before--and I was still enjoying the novelty of side scrolling adventures that had an end, as opposed to endless repetitive rounds that led to inevitable defeat.

It did not take long before I immersed myself in the world of Dragon Warrior. I studied the maps. I calculated how much gold I would need to buy the next item. I made raid after raid on one certain dungeon because the treasure inside would regenerate. But most importantly, I learned the joy of leveling up.

RPGs of this style have been criticized for making leveling up such a large part of the gameplay. After all, say the critics, isn't the point of role playing... well, playing a role? You're the daring warrior who solves the ancient puzzles and saves the princess, right? Not an exterminator whose job is to suffer through countless random encounters.

I will admit, random encounters are very annoying if you're playing the game for the story. But the story of Dragon Warrior was paper-thin. Collect the ancient armor, save the princess, find a way to the bad guy's lair, then kill the bad guy. Nothing more to it than that. Later RPGs have had a much more involved story, both in the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest series, and in the better known Final Fantasy series. But early on, the story was just the excuse to get out there and kill some monsters. And level up.

What is the fascination that some people have, myself included, with leveling up? I've thought a lot about this question, and I think there are two major elements to it. First, there is a certain satisfaction that comes from achieving any difficult task. At its core, leveling up is practice, and the player gets the satisfaction of being set a difficult task, working to make it possible, and then achieving it.

But there's more to it than that. The second element is something I like to call the "guarantee." You can see exactly how main experience points you need to achieve the next level, at which point the skills you need are simply granted to you. You have a built in assurance that the work that you are putting in will have the intended effect. How comforting is that? There's no such thing as wasted effort!

Except, in one very real sense, it's all wasted effort. I'm a fan of RPGs, but I also know that they are dangerous, even addictive. About six years ago, over a three month period, I played an unhealthy amount of Everquest. In one respect, that game is an RPG-lovers dream--you can invest an almost infinite amount of time into, and there are still new skills to achieve, still new areas to explore. And therein lies the danger.

Understand that I'm not speaking out against RPGs, as long as they, like anything else, are consumed in moderation. But after spending a considerable amount of time and having nothing tangible to show for it, I decided that I needed to take a different approach to my life.

And in my next post, I'll tell you all about it.