Progress Quest

You may be familiar with the land of EverQuest. A huge sprawling MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), it's a nerd's delight, sometimes being referred to as "EverCrack" in regards to its potency and the all-too-real addiction that some gamers experience.

EverQuest starts you out with a nobody, a character who can barely attack a rat and live. Over months of incessant play, your character will become an incredibly powerful hero, whose stats are pumped and spells are massive. Where you once were wearing a loin cloth, now you are donning Donal's Armor of Mourning, and swinging a Withered Totem of Widdershins. Or something like that.

EverQuest is so popular that its per-capita GNP, based on eBay sales, is about as strong as Russia's.

More likely, many more of you are familiar with Diablo, in either its I or II editions. Created by Blizzard, the Pixar of the video game industry, Diablo takes the stat-building promise a bit further. Diablo II actually expects you to play through the game several times in a row, filling the same quests and hearing the same identical dialogue, all in pursuit of the perfect rack. Of equipment.

With sets of matching armor, a magic cube that will blend items into new and more powerful configurations, Diablo boils it all down into a never-ending clickfest, an endless cycle of slaughter, sale and suiting up.

So with RPGs getting more and more boiled down, where does it end? How streamlined is too streamlined?

Enter Progress Quest.

Progress Quest is a game only in the loosest sense of the word. Once you've downloaded the installer, and put the game on your desktop, you go about creating your character. At this point, it is basically identical to every other RPG out there.

You pick a race, choose a class, and roll your stats. Then you are ready to go. It is here that Progress Quest takes its bold leaps ahead in game design.

There is now no longer a need to find the village chieftain to hear about the evil loose on the land. There is no slowly scrolling backstory with made up words (you can get one on the website, if you want). In fact, there isn't even a village. There is nothing but your stats, and sliding blue bars that fill up and empty, marking your progress.

You don't actually even play Progress Quest. You just turn it on, and watch your characters stats and equipment increase as they massacre a text-based countryside of monsters.

That's not even entirely true, even. You don't even have to watch. You can just turn it on, go have a sandwich, and come back and check on whether you've upgraded that +40 Heavy Pronged Halberd yet.

Progress Quest is more than just a joke, though. It raises a couple of interesting points about videogaming, and videogamers.

Progress Quest most obviously makes a point about the current trend in RPGs. It has stripped out all elements that require any type of personal involvement or interaction with the player, and left only the character building elements. The games language itself is a mockery of traditional RPGs. On your quest bar, you have to do inane tasks such as "Placate the Treants" or "Exterminate the Jubilexes," or my current favorite, "Deliver this lunchpail." Your spell list includes things like "Spectral Oyster," and "Animate Nightstand."

So what we are looking at here is a game that is constructed as an exercise in satire. This game's reason for existence, at first glance, is to critique the current trends in RPGs. But there is more to it.

People love it.

There is a strategy guide. There are fan sites. And perhaps most tellingly, there are thousands of characters and countless CPU cycles. Think of it as a distributed client that uses your computer's spare time to accomplish absolutely nothing. Forget SETI@home. Bring on the Porn Elementals.

I'm actually running Spazzo, my 54th-level Lunatic-Bastard Battle Finch, right now. He has a +41 Stabbity Steely Broadsword, +21 Cambric Gilded Plasma Vambraces and a CON of 373. And climbing.

So whatever joke there may be in the creation of the game, the fact remains that people are enjoying it. It's a common complaint amongst hardcore RPGers that there is not enough plot and character in today's games, that they are just clickfests, and that they are all about the stats and stuff. The hardcore contend that the average gaming consumer really wants content and nuance.

It appears that the hardcore are wrong.

— Dan Norton (dan@flakmag.com)