The Importance of Having a Stake

Recently if I have some spare time during lunch at work I have been watching some recordings of Warhammer Total War 3 on YouTube. Don't judge me. 

One of the things I have noticed is that there is something which makes some of these recordings much more compelling than others, which I would with some reservations describe as the feeling that there is something at stake in the outcome of the battle.

Now, obviously nothing is at stake in the outcome - it's just a recording of a load of computer sprites brutally murdering each other, whichever way you cut it. But the action is more compelling when it feels as though who wins and loses is in some sense important. If it's, say, Bretonnia or the Dwarfs or the High Elves against, say, an army of Nurgle or Tzeentch, one cares about the result. One feels the same way if it is a, for want of a better term, intra-goodies conflict, like High Elves against Dwarfs (or whatever). One even feels that way, to a slightly lesser degree, if it is an intra-baddies conflict, like Orcs against Dark Elves. But it is hard to summon enthusiasm for a battle between, say, two armies of chaos demons, or between Nurgle and Khorne, or between a chaos army and an undead one, or between two undead ones.

The reason for this I put down to the fact that human beings, while very imaginative and empathetic, are only so up to a point. A battle between computer sprites who represent ordinary flesh and blood has a kind of weightiness to it that a battle between computer sprites who are themselves the stuff of magic or pure 'spirit' does not. The latter has too many layers of inconsequentiality. I can care about imaginary Bretonnians because I can empathise with their situation and become invested in what happens to them. I cannot care about imaginary Demonettes of Slaanesh. Not only are they not real (the Bretonnians are not real, either); they are even unreal within the fiction. A battle between two demonic armies reduces the observer to a neutral spectator rather than one who is rooting for one team or the other. 

For much the same reason, it was never possible for me - or, I imagine, you - to care about the Blood War, the great multiplanar conflict supposedly taking place across the AD&D multiverse in general and the Planescape setting specifically. A total war between Chaotic Evil tanar'ri and Lawful Evil baatezu just didn't capture the imagination. It was a bunch of demons fighting each other across an infinite landscape. Again: too many layers of inconsequentiality. Nothing really at stake. I feel the same way about what I have read about the setting of Age of Sigmar, too. Infinite interplanar conflict may as well not be happening at all, because why does victory or defeat actually matter within that context? 

This is also why I think in the end it has never been possible (yet - there may be a man who knows how) to make an interesting game set purely in a dream world or a world of illusion - again, a fantasy world on its own can still feel as though it has consequence, but a world of dreams that takes place in the heads of people in a fantasy world feels weightless. Again: nothing is at stake. Reality is at too far a remove.

It follows from this that if one wished to make a game in which the PCs are, say, elementals, or ghosts, or demons, or angels, or what have you, then one ought most likely to relate the action something that feels concrete or real. A game in which the PCs are all ghosts in a ghost world has the feeling of lacking what I will call 'stakiness'. A game in which the PCs are all ghosts and they haunt real world locations populated with real people has a much higher 'stakiness' content.

The funny thing about 'stakiness' though is that you can have too much of it. Our real lives are 100% staky. But where would the fun be in roleplaying that?