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player a range of free choice reminiscent of a considerable scope of real life.

Many more recent RPGs, most notably the latter games of the Elder Scrolls series, Morrowind and Oblivion, have left little even of the broad determinism of the intermediate-stage games. These still have a main set of "missions" for the player to complete, but this sequence is buried among tens, if not hundreds, of equally complex, engaging, and time-consuming "side quests": missions from a particular guild or organization in which the player wishes to advance, or missions relating to a given geographical location of a world often as extensive as an entire small country. It is possible to play such games for days without even beginning to progress along the main plot and without coming anywhere close to exhausting their possibilities. Combined with impressive graphics, such games create a world whose complexity probably rivals that of any historical ancient city-state or medieval principality. The player has an incredible range of possibilities in this world; he can genuinely invent a part of a life and see it lived down to the minutest details of food and sleep.

This is not to say, however, that the player-determined RPGs are necessarily superior to the deterministic RPGs. While the former can generate far more variety and intricacy, they also occupy far more time, which to most people is not readily available or not available at all. The deterministic RPG, played for an hour each day, can easily be completed within two to three weeks. After two or three weeks of playing a newer player-determined RPG for an hour each day, one will have scarcely begun it. Only a person of considerable wealth and therefore great leisure, or otherwise of firm security in the success of his future real-world endeavors without an additional time investment on his part, can comfortably and reasonably afford to engage in such a luxury as delving into an entire alternate world. For anyone else, the absorbing qualities of that world will serve to draw him away from the far more important concerns of daily life, upon which his continued prosperity and genuine happiness depend. But just as he can easily afford to read many good books without infringing on his work and relationships, so can a person who pursues a valuable employment and maintains a family comfortably play many of the shorter deterministic RPGs, whose overall time commitment might only range from six to twenty-four hours, which can be distributed over weeks and even months.

Role-playing games constitute a cultural advance which, with prudence, can greatly improve the character of the populace at large. Instead of being passive receivers of outside information or "entertainment," the RPG players actively engage the world before them: a lesson they can apply to their physical lives as well. With the proper focus, an RPG can be a safe and enriching means of performing intellectual experiments in matters from tactics to ethics. However, the RPG can only become this means of improvement if it is used to supplement, not distract from, the more significant concerns of real life.

Learn more about this author, G. Stolyarov II.
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