What is LitRPG and why does it exist?

I like thoroughly fiction. I promise I ’ thousand literate. But I spend most of my koran time listening to “ okay ” sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery novels on Audible. I pepper in classics and non-fiction, but nothing spends my audible credits better than pulp about magic trick swords, mind implants, and private detectives .
A couple weeks ago I ‘d finished or abandoned all my existing audiobooks, and decided to find something new for the commute. On a caprice, I typed in “ cyberpunk ” in the audible search measure to see if there ‘s something I ‘ve missed. What I found was not cyberpunk. It was this :



survival Quest ( The Way of the Shaman : Book # 1 ), by Vasily Mahanenko .
here are things I dislike about this book at first glance :

1. The name Survival Quest. It’s like calling a road trip movie “Journey Drive”
2. The word “Shaman”
3. The apparent mixture of fantasy and sci-fi, which is a big nope from me
4. How completely egotistical and flavorless I can imagine the protagonist is, based on this depiction

If there ‘s one thing I ‘ve learned about books, you can and should judge them by their covers. The aesthetic judgements of the publisher gives you a fortune of information on what you ’ re about to put in your brain .
But the book did have two things going for it :

1. Over 500 reviews with close to a five star average
2. It’s about a guy who gets trapped in an MMO

so I bought the bible. And everything changed for me .
Look, the theme of going inside a WoW-style MMO as a plot element in sci-fi is not new to me. I have a couple books in my audible collection with this trope : Daemon, by Daniel Suarez ; Halting State, by Charles Stross ; and Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. I besides have a real paper copy of Neal Stephenson ‘s Reamde on a shelf somewhere, but who has time to read books with eyeballs ?
Grinding feel and gearing
survival Quest was different, though. It ‘s not a book about shared on-line experiences, or about the indistinctness of substantial / virtual distinctions. It ‘s not flush in truth “ science fiction, ” in the sense that it does n’t seem to be posing any questions or what-if scenarios for an imaginative proofreader to unpack .
No, Survival Quest is about what MMOs are actually about : grind experience and gear. It ‘s a novel about the pleasure of leveling up .
literally. The supporter ( conceited and bland, as I assumed ), is imprisoned in a full immersion VR capsule to serve out his prison conviction in an MMO copper mine. He feels pain amply from every fink morsel, and the exhaustion of chipping away at mining nodes all day, but he besides feels an addictive euphoria when he levels up his character ‘s jewel-crafting skill .
MMOs are typically sold to us as exalted fantasy adventures, but they ‘re very and rightfully about min-maxing. certain, you can turn your brain off for a while and follow some quest lines. possibly even read the NPC negotiation. But when it ‘s time to get serious you pull open your stat sheet and start read. Video games hide the “ die rolls ” that used to be then obvious in tabletop RPGs, and it ‘s the game ‘s speculate to rediscover the mathematics behind their success and improve upon it .
survival Quest is a atrocious fresh. unsympathetic characters, casual sexism, and a plot wholly bent to the main character ‘s progress — far beyond the usual flex I allow in any Frodo-inspired fantasy fresh. But it besides includes farce like this :

wrong taken. Hit Points reduced by 5 : 11 ( weapon price + strength ) – 6 ( armor ). total : 35 of 40 .

And this :

yellowish brown gained : Strength +1, Energy loss reduced by 50 %. Duration – 12 hours .

How could I not love it ? I blazed through the first base fresh, dedicating every free moment to listening. then I bought the sequel : The Kartoss Gambit. And then I was out of monthly Audible credits, so I went and got AlterWorld by D.Rus on Kindle Unlimited .
D.Rus is actually credited with creating the “ LitRPG ” music genre in his Amazon bio, but it ‘s hard to tell precisely. I have n’t found a authoritative history anywhere. These MMO-in-book-form novels are apparently popular in Russia, Japan, and Korea, and largely written by authors of those nationalities in their native languages — the versions I have of both Survival Quest and AlterWorld are adequate english translations from russian .
I have n’t finished AlterWorld so far, so I ca n’t speak to how music genre defining it is, but it does have the most important character :

You ‘ve been hit by Messenger Gnoll ! damage sustained : 16 points. Life 44/60
You ‘ve been hit by Messenger Gnoll ! damage sustained : 12 points. Life 32/60

If I can extrapolate the unharmed LitRPG view from Survival Quest, I ‘ll say this : it ‘s the most perfect word picture I ‘ve ever seen of what I truly want from an MMO, and what I ‘ll never have. The fiction here is n’t the grand fantasy environment and plot, it ‘s the idea of a game where I ‘m always leveling faster than I thought I could, meeting challenges I think I ca n’t beat and then beating them, finding shroud quests and talking to never-before-seen NPCs. Survival Quest is a illusion about having a hyper-immersive MMO, with a multi-billion dollar budget, played by millions of people all around the earth, being all about me .
This past weekend I reactivated my ‘World of Warcraft ‘ account

I ‘ve given up on childish fantasies of finding the One True Sword, or destroying the Ring of Power — those are myth. But video games are real. I ‘ve turned dollars into in-game gold, I ‘ve read the wikis, I ‘ve spent hundreds of hours grinding, I ‘ve abandoned work and family responsibilities, and I ‘ve ultimately depart in frustration. All because I want to be the hero of a virtual earth. It ‘s not going to happen for me. But that ‘s precisely what happens to the protagonist in every chapter of LitRPG .
An MMO ca n’t ever meet our world power fantasies, because we all want to be god. And, if you subscribe to Kant ‘s categoric imperative, you ‘ll know that will never work out : if everyone ‘s The Hero of Azeroth, no one is .
This past weekend I reactivated my World of Warcraft account and rolled a new character. It ‘s not a shaman. I ‘m having a good time .

source : https://gametracker.one
category : Recommendations