So why do people like litrpg?
So I’ve been kicking around this topic for a couple of weeks now: what is it about litrpg that makes people like it? Now I talk to a lot of fans of litrpg, a lot of authors, a lot of narrators, people from all around the world, from all stages of life. The majority of fans, though, are between 16 and 35 or so, best I can figure. Certainly there are some older, some younger, but the largest group is in that range. Now I’m not capable of speaking for everyone, but I have some thoughts as to why it’s exploded in the past few years.
“They’re Saturday morning cartoons for adults” - Steve Campbell
One of the things about litrpg that I love is how pulpy they are. They’re in a similar vein as the Edgar Rice Boroughs novels of old. It has a charm: Good guys vs Bad guys. Heroes and villains. Fantastic powers. Gods and men. The stage is grand and wonderful. Characters are all larger than life, the shoes are larger than men. There is a quaint exaggeration of existence that happens in litrpg, something that makes your protagonist the best he can be.
It’s always a story of grand adventure, even the most mundane of adventures ends up being a life or death experience. Whether we’re with a necromancer or a farmer, everything about their experience is stakes of life or death. The most humble start leads to the most dramatic life. All of this leads to one of the reasons people like litrpg: what our hero does matters. Many fans are millennials and zoomers. We’ve grown up in a society that looks down on us. “We’re lazy” “we’re snowflakes” “Everything has been given to us” “We killed [insert boomer industry]” On and on, we hear negative messages about our peer group. Litrpg is written to those who grew up gaming because we couldn’t go outdoors like previous generations. “Why don’t you go outside?” has an answer: Because it’s too dangerous to go wander off alone. So we explored worlds from inside our computers. And those worlds don’t suck. We can make a difference. We can control them. And we can get better.
“One can grow strong through personal achievement and proper mindset” - Dakota Krout
The second thing that draws folks in is that people get better. Whether it’s flower picking or dungeon clearing, practice, a good mindset, and perseverance results in tangible, concrete improvement. Litrpg keeps your achievements visible and measurable. You grow by doing, and you can tell. And everyone else can tell too. The modern world is full of situations where improvement is ephemeral, achievements fleeting, and accomplishments get swept away by a single flaw. One has no idea how they stack up, no way to know if they’re getting better, and the most tangible method of measuring oneself is perverted by nepotism, gatekeeping, and politics.
In litrpg, achievements grant boons, experience is numerical, and skills are quantified. What you can and cannot do are apparent and quantified, and the path to getting the skills you want is, if not obvious, at least much more apparent than it is in the real world. Skills are discrete things which can be improved in isolation or together, but the ability to do so is quantified and measured. If I want to get good at designing 3d models for printing and painting right now, I need to learn how to use a 3d modeling software, learn how to sculpt, learn what can and cannot be achieved by a 3d printer, learn how to use a 3d printer, learn how to support my print, and then make sure none of my hardware fails. All of this requires hundreds of dollars in hardware and software, and there’s no “here’s how to go from nothing to expert”. Now I’m not saying that in litrpg, such a task would be trivial, but the path would be fairly straightforward, and the “game” or “system” would provide some guidelines for how to proceed and get better. At a certain point, I would know enough to know what the next steps for improving are and I could plan them. And I would know how good I was at any given time.
As an electrical engineer, a writer, a parent, and all my many other roles in society and life, I often have no idea how good I am. I’d like to think I’m competent. I often find myself knowing things that nobody else I know has learned. I’m also not deluded into thinking I’m the smartest person ever. I have met people smarter than me. I have huge holes in my knowledge where I know nothing. I make mistakes and often they are forehead slappingly obvious. Sure would have been nice to have a skill check come up with a “YOU HAVE FAILED” when I made such a mistake. No, I have to rely on others to evaluate how I’m doing and often they make mistakes, and somehow a trivial error slips through 5 people staring at it.
“People don’t want to have relatable MCs, they want to self insert” - Nick Kuhns
Litrpg is not about some hero the author dreamed up. OK, it is, but not really. The MC is not some well rounded fully fleshed out character with a life like real people do. He’s there to be a framework, a blank slate, with either problems so relatable that everyone has had them, or so alien that nobody has. He’s there for you to map yourself onto and be him for the course of an adventure. Or several adventures. It’s not about him, it’s about you. It’s about your adventure, your experience, your escape into a world where the banality of every day life falls away and you can become the hero, save the kingdom, rule the world.
That is the magic of litrpg. It’s pulpy, quantified, but most importantly, it’s about you. It captures the experience of playing DnD with friends, or raiding a World of Warcraft dungeon, and turns it into the narrative you told yourself about that experience, sans all the boring mundane scheduling details and bathroom breaks. And you’re not confined to experiencing that with anyone else, with interpersonal drama and favoritism and other boring details that get in the way of the grand adventure. It’s yours, on your schedule, about you, for you, and you always win. That is the magical thing about litrpg. Even when it’s contrived, it’s about you and not rando hapless adventurers in this book. It’s okay that it’s contrived because it was contrived for you. Having an entire world contrived for just you is a pretty special feeling, one that virtually never happens in real life. We’re all just the rando hapless adventurers, getting beat up by goblins in the real. But not in the story. In the story, we are heroes.
That is special.
In Conclusion
I love litrpg. Perhaps you do too, but feel like my description of why people like it is totally wrong. That’s great. You don’t have to agree with me. This is why I think people like litrpg. These are reasons why I love litrpg. I write about it because I love it. If you think I’m wrong, feel free to let me know. Let me know what the reasons you love it are. Perhaps I’m just totally blind to what makes you love it, my perception stat may just not be high enough. Or maybe, if you’re honest with yourself, I’m right, but your other reasons are also valid and you feel safer admitting those than these.
May your adventures be as grand as your drink
-Wo’ah the Wise