When we talk about video game RPGs—as opposed to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons or Vampire: The Masquerade, or roleplaying performance like acting or improv theater—we’re talking about a set of games with recognizable characteristics. They may be lines of monochrome text, like the original Colossal Cave Adventure or Zork. They might be dungeon crawls with sizable parties, like the Might & Magic series or Dragon Quest. They might be the world-spanning epics we’ve come to associate with Japan, like the Final Fantasy saga. These games cover a disparate range of play styles, play experiences and settings, yet everyone calls them RPGs.

Why?

For one thing, the original console RPGs – Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and the like – were all intended to emulate other things that we called RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons. So calling them the same thing made sense: this is just like the RPG you play with your friends, only you’re playing it on a Nintendo. Even if later games like the Final Fantasy series weren’t meant to emulate the D&D experience, they had evolved from games that had. So we can trace every console RPG through a chain of descendants back to the original tabletop RPGs that inspired them.

And yet.

Everybody told me that season three of Lost was kinda sucky.  It got better eventually, they said, but the beginning was just not as good.  Only after episode 14 did things get back on track.

So I watched episode 14: “Exposé.”  It was a weird episode.  It almost seemed experimental.  It left a bad taste in my mouth.  When I looked it up on Wikipedia, the section labeled “Reception” said the fans and critics didn’t much care for it, either.

So of course I said, “I’m going to write a blog post about ‘Exposé!’”  The first question is, “Why don’t I like it?”  The second question is, “What does it say about Lost?”

But, first, the summaries of the episodes I watched last week, to refresh your memories…

Robert Mugabe may be a Fighter, but is Barack Obama a 6525th level cleric?  Because that’s apparently what it would take to cast a “World Racial Healing Spell.”  That’s right, the worlds of politics and Dungeons and Dragons have collided on the campaign trail.