Before embarking on their adventures in an open world, players must select and customise their character, known more commonly in nerding circles as their playable avatar. This is their digital representation, and the character they control throughout the game.  The ability to customise one’s avatar opens a fascinating door into the psychology of the player. Every aspect of an avatar's appearance can be customised with laser precision, from height, weight, and body type to the width between the avatar’s nostrils and the arch of their eyebrows. Research has claimed that players commonly attempt to design their avatar as a digital representation of themselves, be that authentic or idealised. The psychology of why gamers design their avatars to look a certain way links explicitly to Erving Goffman’s work around identity construction in the study of human interaction. Goffman (1990) analyses interpersonal interaction and how individuals 'perform' to project a desirable image, using the theatre to illustrate individuals’ contrasting front stage and backstage behaviour. When in front stage, an actor is conscious of being observed by an audience and will perform to those watching by observing certain rules and social conventions, as failing to do so means losing face, and failing to project the image/persona they wish to create. Interestingly, this front stage behaviour can not only be observed in multiplayer games, where numerous players are able to be seen and heard at the same time, but can also be seen in solo games, where the appearance of the avatar is observed solely by the player.   

Importantly, and in relation this study, it has been proposed that online environments provide their users the potential to perform and present different identities. The distance between performer and audience that physical detachment provides makes it easy to conceal aspects of the offline self and embellish the online. Baptista (2003) considers that new identities are not created online, but division of the self can be found in everyday face-to-face interaction. In this instance, the 'online self' can be thought of as a facet of a wider identity, joining the self in other offline contexts. In contrast, Vaast (2007) discusses the creation of 'new selves' online, arguing that online identity facilitates persona adoption, while Waggoner (2009) advocates that the term ‘real world’ should be replaced by that of ‘non virtual’, stating that “virtual identities, created and maintained by users' non-virtual identities, may be just as "real" to users as their non-virtual identities”. 

Once the player is satisfied with their character's appearance, they enter the game environment ready to begin something that forms the very backbone of many games genres, but is vital to RPGs: earning experience points.

Experience points (XP) are awarded differently, depending on the difficulty of the mission or quest that the player must perform. Points are meant to recognise the time and effort that the player invests in completing a mission or quest. From the player's perspective, they are an indicator of accomplishment, showing that they have completed a difficult job (Park and Kim, 2022). Leveling up is core to playing a wealth of video games, and OWRPGs are no different. The more your character 'does',  the more experience points they earn. The more XP they earn, the higher their level. The higher their level, the more skill, ability, or perk points they are rewarded with. And the more of these they are rewarded with...well, see number 3, below.

I am a big fan of two things: playing the long game, and grinding. Wikipedia states that grinding is: 

"...a term used in video game culture, referring to the act of repeating an action or set of actions, including non-repetitive tasks to achieve a desired result at a level of certain difficulty, typically for an extended period of time, such as earning experience points, in-game loot and currency or to improve a character's stats" (Wikipedia, 2024).

This suits my playstyle too - as a tank, it helps greatly to spend many, many hours trudging around various locations, simply laying into anything that crosses my path just to earn XP. Earning these points allows me to 'overclock' my character, and means that by the time I hit level 250, I feel confident that I can obliterate the end of game boss (who is at level 150) without repeatedly losing,  getting impatient and frustrated, and ultimately having a hissy-fit and giving up on a game I've spent hours invested in. 

But it's not just earning XP that is important; it's how you earn them, and that's where individual play style comes in.

Should players decide to engage with the game’s quests, their approach to completing these is completely autonomous. They may take a non-lethal approach, where enemies are avoided or knocked unconscious rather than shot or hacked into a million pieces. Conversely, they may decide to use a bow and arrow, fragmentation grenades, or a gun equipped with a silencer to pick enemies off one by one at a distance, or they may decide to vanquish their foes with fireballs that emit from their hands or lightning bolts shot from magical staves. My preferred approach is violent, brutish, and more ‘up close and personal’, armed with a melee weapon such as a sword, a baseball bat, or a dragon scale two-handed warhammer. I'd like to state, at this point, that this is NOT because I'm some sort of psychopath-it's purely that I'm absolutely rubbish at using guns or bows, have never made it past level 1 in HALO as a result, and avoid First Person Shooter (FPS) games like the plague. 

Many players use a slow and steady, stealthy approach. They sneak past foes silently, or take them down them with swift flashes of a poisoned dagger, dressed to blend with the shadows. Others lay traps, magical or rogue-like in their construction, and some disregard the traditional elements of the game, and instead spend their time fishing, or mining, and building vast outposts, settlements, farms or dwellings, never once thinking to look for a side quest, let alone attempt the main storyline. 

There are 'speedrunners', who race against the clock to complete the main quest as quickly as possible, taking the most direct route through the game as they can, ignoring everything extraneous of the main quest to score the fastest completion time. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the spectrum are the 'grinders', who fastidiously explore every nook and cranny (and treasure chest, locker, ammo box, and first aid kit), engaging with every side quest or hustle, burglary, assassination, or simple fetch-and-carry job to earn every experience point, and squeeze every drop of gameplay out of it as possible.

And finally, there are gamers who specialise in playing as assassins, or mages, or thieves, or fighters for hire, and never consider being anything else. And there are Jacks of all Trades who have been exploring the open world for so long they have had time to level up core skills in all of these 'vocations'. 

The geographical route gamers take is free from parameters, meaning players have complete autonomy over the style in which they approach the gameplay. Similarly, they can also choose (as is traditional in all RPGs), on which side of the moral compass their character will fall.

Linked implicitly to play style is the moral code your character adheres to. I may be a gung-ho, psychopathic idiot when it comes to the foes I encounter in games, but I always try to do good by the townsfolk and quest givers, and to the factions that have the same type of political beliefs as I do in real life; generally left-wing, want everyone to be provided for and have a nice life, and not really into hoarding vast amounts of *money. 

Weaver and Lewis (2012) designed an exploratory study to look at how players made moral choices in video games and what effects these choices had on emotional responses to the games. Participants filled out a moral foundations questionnaire and then played through the first full act of (lone of my favourite OWRPGs), Fallout 3. Game play was recorded and content analysed for the moral decisions made. Players also reported their enjoyment of, and emotional reactions to the game and reflected on the decisions they made. The majority of players made moral decisions and behaved toward the nonplayer characters (NPCs) they encountered as if these were actual interpersonal interactions. Interestingly, behaving in antisocial ways did increase participants' guilt, but had no impact on their enjoyment.  This interests me from the perspective of my own research, and I'd like to find out if my participants' moral alignment within a game are direct representations of their personal code of morals, or if, like some players I know who happen to be thoroughly decent chaps in real life, the chance to be morally bankrupt for fun is just too inviting to pass up on. I wonder whether people with a good moral compass in real life play an OPRPG with a moral code just shy of Genghis Khan's, not just as a chance to operate outside the law, but with no consequences, other than (the unintended consequence?) of feeling a sense of freedom they cannot experience in their own world because of the constraints their moral coide places upon them.

Freedom. The one word that keeps cropping up time and time already in these early days of research. Freedom to explore, to play as who you want, how you want. And for many gamers, the freedom to ignore the game's main quest for long periods of time to set up a home, a family, or a mining outpost on a far-distant planet.

*I have, however, hoarded vast amounts of cheese in one of my homes in Skyrim. So much so, that the game starts to lag when I visit my Cheese House. Why did I fill a house with wheels of cheese? Because I can.

In many OWRPGs, players can build houses, settlements, outposts, farms, and even nuclear fallout shelters. They can then go on to buy or create the furniture they wish to decorate these with. In many cases, there are also opportunities to build display stands to house their favourite equipment, crafting workbenches, research stations, and even shared spaces in which players hang out with other gamers. 

Such activity is supplementary to the game, so whether the player chooses to build and decorate a homestead has no impact on their ability to complete the game. One area that interests me is the dichotomy between the perceived 'manliness' of gunning down Super Mutants, slicing and dicing Space Pirates or cleaving dragons into pieces and the 'femininity' of interior design. In his paper Signifying Play: The Sims and the Sociology of Interior Design, Charles Paulk states that “millions of men are putting aside their Big F*cking Guns (BFGs) to furnish "a computerized dollhouse". It would seem The Sims confounds conventional notions regarding gender-appropriate pursuits in more ways than one. Not only is gaming now safe for the ladies-matching curtains has become increasingly safe for the boys."

While the Sims is solely about the minutiae of daily life, (getting a job, establishing fruitful relationships with others, buying a house, decorating that house, expanding that house, having children, getting a promotion, etc), this ‘Sims lite’ part of OWRPGs is something that players of all genders enjoy. I often spend several hours building, furnishing, and decorating my multitude of mining outposts (Starfield), underground shelters and shanty-like dwellings (Fallout), and a variety of homesteads across Tamriel (Skyrim) as a palate cleanser between bouts of hedonistic violence, or when I want some time to let my mind focus on solving a work-based problem or dilemma, or my real life to do list. Interestingly, I am not a fan of The Sims, and don't consider it to be an OWRPG. Yay!

Creating a homestead also provides the opportunity to display favourite weapons, armour, and costumes. Or cheese, as mentioned above. There is something satisfying that appeals to the completionist in me when I find a legendary (or just aesthetically pleasing) sword or suit of armour and then display it. It helps to tell the story of my in-game journey, reminding me of the literal or metaphorical battle I survived to secure said piece, and also feels like a medal of honour to some extent. That's something I may want to pursue further in my research: does 'achieving' something in a game have to be linked solely to the number of XP you accrue, or are there other more 'meta' states of achievement that can be...achieved...by building and furnishing your 'space', or by curating artifacts that record your journey so far?

Linked explicitly to building is crafting. Build a house, then build a crafting workbench (for armour, weapons, medication or spells) in your house, collect some ingredients, then forge some armour, or some weapons, or some jewellery, or some health potions, or some *shepherd's pie! All of these can be found across the open world you're adventuring in, but you earn a lot of XP from crafting items from scratch. It's an integral part of grinding, and well worth the reward considering you had to walk for miles to mine for gold nuggets, dig for radishes, hunt for lambs, or scavenge for duct tape. Or kill for it. Or buy it in a shop. 

In many games, once the player has levelled their crafting skills sufficiently, they can then go on to build only the rarest, strongest, and best equipment the game has to offer, and rarely just stumbled across in a random cave. And after creating these, they can be displayed proudly in one of the gamer's many dwellings, or used as an integral part of the character's build..like the dragonbone armour I've been wearing for eleven years in Skyrim, that can't be found anywhere, has to be crafted by the player from scratch, and requires a stupidly high 'heavy armour crafting' ability to be able to even contemplate making. 

Not only does the ability to create specialised armour, costumes, magical items and weapons add to the personalised elements of the player's experience, it also provides an alternative pathway through a game. Rather than focusing on the cut and thrust world of quests and side-quests, a number of players prefer a more 'Sims-like' experience, where items can be created, customised, upgraded (see below), and sold to traders, who can then afford to upgrade their homes and their furnishings. Often they start the cycle again elsewhere, building more homes, farms, and outposts, and even trading posts, where they live to make more profit, and never as much as punch an orc in the face.

But the building and crafting doesn't end there. Because then there is upgrading!

*You can actually do this in Starfield.  

When I crafted my much-loved dragonbone armour in Skyrim, I wanted more than just protection...and, admittedly, to look cool. I also needed to add some magical attributes, not just to upgrade its overall 'tankness', but to add further character perks, like self-healing, and the ability to swim underwater without needing oxygen. 

Similarly, I also wanted my dragonbone war axe to not only cleave monsters in two, I also wanted it to shoot lightning bolts as it did, and award me 100 health points whenever I used to it kill a foe. This is where upgrading items comes in. 

Any item, found, stolen, looted or created can be tweaked and upgraded to assist with the players gaming style preferences. I'm a tank, I like heavy, impenetrable armour, and I also like the added benefit of self-healing. I'm crap at games and need as much damage mitigation as I can get my clumsy hands on. Others will tweak a costume so they are invisible, add attributes to a dagger that makes them silent, or enhance a helmet that allows them to see in the dark and give them an extra 10% of gold when selling items to traders. 

This final step on the building journey allows for complete autonomy over every aspect of their character, their clothing, decoration, powers, abilities, weapons and even their ability to make that shepherd's pie. It's a wonder anyone wants to leave...

Another characteristic of many game genres, and often central to the OWRPG experience, is the option to play alone, to team up with a NPC (often something that has to be done, be it temporarily, to progress a narrative), or to form an online alliance with another gamer (or group of gamers). I'm definitely a solo player, and whenever a questline calls for me to team up with a NPC, I try and whiz through the quest as quickly as possible so I can play alone once more. And in terms of those online OWRPGs with hundreds of real life players, I just don't engage. As a very shy individual, I do not join guilds or team up with random players, but do occasionally pop into a group event, pick up any loot I've earned, then run off to be on my own again.

There's something here about gamers as introverts or extroverts, I think. And in terms of unintended consequences, I am interested to know how sharing the same digital space as actual human beings effects players in terms of their gender, age, sexuality, or ethnicity, and what consequences occur as a result. 

If being a social player, and enjoying the social elements of gaming is a preference, then coming to the end of a game and severing alliances with others may prove more stressful than when playing alone. This is why I've selected the ninth criterion: the ability to keep playing long after competing the main storyline.

When the main quest has been completed and the end credits roll, I usually feel a rush of conflicting emotions: while there's the unquestionable elation and even triumph at beating the game, there's often a real sense of grief at the sudden end of a journey. I've often spent hundreds of hours playing the game, and to have it end can be genuinely traumatic - and I've been known to shed a tear when a game I've invested in emotionally and by way of sheer 'man hours' comes to an end.

In open world games, the completion of the main quest is just another 'job well done', and players can continue to live and play in the world for as long as they want, finding new locations, new side quests, or continuing to build, mine, or farm. Games studios are continually updating games, with new areas, quests and side stories added regularly, and long after the game's initial release, showing the sort of investment in players that players have in a game.  

There is no law that states that you have to enjoy things you are good at, though I think there is a low-level assumption in society that this is the way things should be. I am a pretty good cook. I make a mean (real life) shepherd's pie, a pretty decent roast dinner and, for some reason, I have a knack for making muffins. But I hate cooking, so nobody knows about my secret ability.

Conversely, I am absolutely rubbish at playing video games. Totally inept. I can barely pick up an Xbox controller without dropping it. I have appalling coordination, the fine motor skills of a dead slug, and the depth perception of  crayon. I can't drive, I can barely ride a bicycle, and I trip over my own feet at least once every two days. But I LOVE gaming.

Because I am so achingly bad, one of the first things I look for in a game is a difficulty setting. This isn't a deal-breaker; the first game I ever mastered was Tomb Raider back in the 90s. Tomb Raider has no difficulty setting and yet somehow I still managed to complete it. 

Returning to the unintended consequences I experienced that got this whole project rolling, I was able to enter a state of flow because I was playing Skyrim at its easiest setting. If I was playing on 'Hard' as opposed to 'Very Easy', I would be in a constant state of anxiety, filled with adrenaline and scared of every passing foe. Or the constant dying and reloading would just frustrate me to the point of giving up. When there is no threat - and for a tank playing on Easy there really is no threat - there is no unwanted adrenaline, stress or anxiety, and it's much easier to reach that flow state.

That's not to say that my research participants will be selected because they play on 'easy' settings - there are gamers who are able to reach the same state of flow on much harder settings - but as far as my future recommendations go, I want to speak to all HE students, not just those who are habitual games, and tell them that gaming can be relaxing and enhance wellbeing, but you don't need to be a hardened gamer to benefit.