Attributes

Attributes are the fundamental properties that define a character. Because they are tangible, they should properly only rate physical qualities, such as the character’s strength and manual dexterity. However, under the influence of table-top role-playing games they often include non-physical concepts, such as intelligence and wisdom. This just about makes sense to a hard role-player, who can work with “My character is stupid,” but it has its limits: “My character is a genius” would for most players entail pretending to be cleverer than they really are, which is not quite so simple. For most virtual worlds, though, these “mental attributes” are merely convenient labels: Intelligence is used primarily as a fiction to determine how much magic a character can use, and wisdom serves the same function for priestly types.

Attributes also are meant to be relatively fixed: If you have a poor constitution, tough luck, you just have to live with it. Aging effects could perhaps make a difference (older characters might gain wisdom, but lose strength), but on the whole attributes aren’t supposed to change much, thereby preserving basic differences between characters. There has been increasing slippage in this over the years, however, with the old notion that attributes should indicate intrinsic abilities increasingly falling out of favor. Instead, attributes can be improved on by action or training, which makes them more like skills (discussed shortly). There are several reasons for this, having to do with fairness, motivation, and choice.

The result is that after a while character attributes ¹ become fairly homogenized: In the real world, people can be any combination of good-looking/ugly and strong/weak, but in virtual worlds they usually have to start off more one than the other (for balance). They won’t end up being high in both. It may take considerably more effort to raise an originally low attribute to a high value than it does to raise an originally high attribute to it, but that doesn’t present a total barrier. Normally, one stat is raised relentlessly as far as possible first, with the lower ones being neglected until it’s their turn; this leads to a world packed with puny geniuses and muscle-bound simpletons.

The problem with attributes is that they do make sense in real terms, but this isn’t a sense that many players are willing to accept. Some people are simply never, ever going to be as strong or as fast or as tall or as fit or as good-looking as others no matter what they do, but part of the attraction of virtual worlds is that these physical limitations don’t apply. In design terms, fixed or ever-rising attributes are also undesirable: If you decide after some time that you want your character to become a ballet dancer but you built her like an ox so she could become a boxer, well, ballet dancing is out of the question.

For this reason, the trend is to treat attributes as little more than symbols during character creation, so that players have to think about their characters as they individualize them. This gives characters direction, but only in the minds of their creators; in practice, the relative differences between a character’s attributes are not usually all that important in the great scheme of things, especially if values are regularly boosted as a reward for achievement ².

The idea of attributes as important, player-defining properties is probably here to stay. However, whether they remain relatively fixed (as they do for most other objects) or they rise ³ over time (as do skills) remains to be seen.