How do video games inspire your campaigns, worlds, and style?

[RFTD-blog]

I've been thinking a lot lately about how video game narratives can transfer over to roleplaying ones. I bet many of you wonder the same things when you are designing campaigns because video games have such vast pools of ideas to draw from. I have noticed in quite a few threads the passing mention of a video game. So I thought I'd ask: What video games have influenced the foundation of your campaign setting, DM style, or narrative structure? How/Why?

For myself, I've been thinking a lot about worldbuilding. Games with big, immersive worlds have always been some of my favorites. I think The Elder Scrolls, myself being most familiar with Morrowind, does a great job structuring economies and societies, as well as drawing upon historical concepts to formulate lore. I also enjoy the way The Legend of Zelda, myself most familiar with Wind Waker, imitates the properties of parables and uses myth instead of reality as its guiding structure when designing the rules of the universe. In fact, I thought about them so much this past week that I wrote two articles on it, the first about Elder Scrolls and the second about Zelda:
http://www.reflectionsfromthedungeon...worldbuilding/
http://www.reflectionsfromthedungeon...worldbuilding/

I'm curious to hear your opinions on this topic of video games, as you all seem to have smart things to say.

[Fiery Diamond]

I just read your Wind Waker article. That was really good.

Anyway: Unique cool items (like from the Zelda series) is one thing inspired by games (the Zelda series, specifically. :D)

I don't tend to analyze what inspires me, as a general rule. So... I dunno.

[Yora]

Two of the greatest settings I've seen in recent years are Dragon Age and Mass Effect. I've been spending quite some time thinking about what makes them great, and I think it mostly comes down to the well thought out and developed interconnections between the factions of the settings.
In Skyrim, you have the Imperials and the Stormcloaks, who are fighting over control over Skyrim. It's a decent start and the game does some effort in including many NPCs who make clear statements about their personal reasons for picking a side in the conflict. It's not a simple black and white conflict, but individual people are in different situations, which results in different priorities that lead to their own individual conclusion about who is right or wrong.
That's good, but Dragon Age and Mass Effect take it a bit further. There are not just two primary factions, but half a dozen or more. In Dragon Age, there are the Chantry, the Templars, the Circle of Mages, the Dalish, the Qunari, the Tevinter Empire, Orlais, Apostate Mages, and the Dwarves. In many cases, these factions even overlapp. You can have an Orlaisian noble who is a Templar for the Chantry. But the best interest for Orlais, the Chantry, and the Templars are not always the same and may even be in direct conflict with each other (seems to be the central element of DA3, from what little I've seen so far). Or the priests of the Dalish are automatically apostate mages, but that doesn't mean that they like other apostate mages. Both Dalish and Qunari fight the Chantry, but for completely different reasons, and all three of them are enemies of the Tevinter Empire. Who is an enemy or an ally does not so much depend on the ideologies of the factions, but on the specific current situation in which individual members are currently involved. This complexity of relationships makes things really interesting.
Another big difference to Skyrim and Morrowind is, that the conflicts in Dragon Age and Mass Effect are not about control over a specific territory. Many of them are not even about ideology, but they are primarily emotional. It's not that the factions are currently fighting over something specific, but they have very strong emotional ties to each other, because of things that happened in the past, often long before any of the currently living people had been born. It's not a logical or rational hostility between them, but a culturally inherited one. And in those two settings, those events don't need to be many. In Mass Effect, everything really comes down to four events. Humans had a short war with the Turians, before they made peace and became allies; humans got in a particularly brutal war with Batarians are keep clashing ever since; the Turians and Salarians dropped a bioweapon on the Krogan, from which the Krogan still suffer, but the other two still defend as appropriate and neccessary; and the Quarians build an Artificial Intelligence that kicked them off their own home planet. And somehow they managed to make three games in which almost all conflicts between NPCs can be somehow linked to or traced back to these four events, without ever becoming stale and repetitive. You can't squeeze out new storylines from them indefinately, but even with just four sources of hostility, you can get a suprisingly long way. And because those hostilities are mostly emotional with no clear achievable goal, they will never be solved. You can continue using them over and over and over.

If you write a specific storyline, then having the competing factions fight about control over X does the job perfectly adequately. But I think to build whole settings, I think it really goes a long way to spend some thought on the emotional interconnections of the factions. Even when circumstances make members of two factions temporary allies, there's still the cultural emotional reactions they have towards each other, which complicate things, or in some cases can be exploited to manipulate them.

[Comet]

Playing Dark Souls and Spiderweb Software's games (Avernum, Nethergate) lately has given me a bit of a revelation for tabletop exploration in general and dungeon crawling in particular:

The world needs to be big, yes, but above all else it needs to be full. Dungeons, among other locations, need to have switches, secret passageways, containers, drawers, slopes, stairs, tightropes, fountains and whatever else you can throw in there. Basically, players have the most fun when they arrive at a location, hear the basic description of what's going on and then proceed to pick that apart by bashing, turning, burning, pulling, pushing and examining those initial elements until one or more of them turn out to be more important than they might have otherwise realised.

This turns the dungeon into a living environment that the players need to pay attention to and interact with instead of a series of rooms that might or might not have monsters or traps or treasure in them.

[Airk]

I'm the opposite; I see big, complicated worlds built by whole teams of developers and go "Nope, interested in anything like that."; Instead I tend to pick out themes, or ideas, or worldbuilding concepts. Those sorts of things are much more useful to me than fully realized worlds.

[Gemini Lupus]

I draw all manner of inspirations from video games. Most of the time it is from the world that the video games create, such as organizations or characters, but occassionally I'll use some other element. I've created magic items, spells, and feats from game mechanics and occassionally take story elements or plotlines.

Video games can be an inspiration just like books, movies, and tv shows and are a wealthy mine to extract from.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

For the sake of adding a dissenting voice - video games are not inspiring.

There are very few video games I like, and even those don't contaminate my pen'n'paper RPGs.

[Yora]

We are all clearly doing it wrong and should stop having fun.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

We are all clearly doing it wrong and should stop having fun.

Yes. I insist.

._.

[Airk]

For the sake of adding a dissenting voice - video games are not inspiring.

There are very few video games I like, and even those don't contaminate my pen'n'paper RPGs.

Don't worry, I'm sure there's plenty of other stuff contaminating your games.