Computer role-playing games -- what kind of connection do they have with the more sophisticated pen-and-paper and non-computer role-playing that hundreds of thousands of people (if not more) engage in each year?  Read the list of credits at the end of the recent movie Gettysburg and notice how many people it took to re-enact the Civil War battle scenes.  That's certainly role-playing on a massive scale!  And that's just one of a number of such wargame-oriented role-playing re-enactments that take place around the country (is this a peculiarly American phenomenon?  Readers elsewhere, write in and let us know) yearly.  There are people who re-enact American Revolutionary War and World War II scenarios each year as well.  And that's just the beginning.  There's the Society for Creative Anachronism, of course, the fantasy medieval dudes; and a host of other kinds of adult role-playing conventions and activities that could be referred to.

	And then there's computer game role-playing.  Until relatively recently -- and even for the most part these days -- CRPGs have been a truly niche genre.  While they might make use of systems created prior to the advent of computer gaming (the TSR series with SSI being the most famous), serious computer role-playing games have mostly focused on combat.  Where they've attempted to focus more on plot and character, they've become adventures.  A few designs, such as Origin's Ultima series and Sierra's Quest for Glory series have managed to blend both story and combat elements, making for something closer to a true role-playing style of gaming, but even here, the opportunities compared with non-computer role-playing have been limited.

	So we've had mostly hack and slash CRPGs, and then a couple of good adventure series with CRPG elements.  Now comes the push to CD-ROM and multimedia, which means either lots of voice acting and digitized video, or super-high-quality computer animations of creatures and 3D spaces and movement.  Designers are throwing in movie-like elements as cut-scenes between the main parts of a CRPG, or are using actual video during gameplay itself in some cases.  In other cases, designers are focusing on a 3D environment and enhancing the hack and slash aspect of CRPG gaming by making the face-to-face combat all that much more realistic and graphically flashy.

	Does this all enhance actual role-playing possibilities, however?  It's not clear yet.

	Here's an interesting idea, though:  what if a computer game could rely on the player's prior immersion in a fantasy world and function as an extension of that immersion?  In other words, what if a CRPG could rely on the fact that the player is already familiar with the characters and storylines and situations the game represents from their development in another medium?  

	With the TSR/SSI line of Gold Box CRPGs, this assumption was always there, but the audience actually making the crossover from using the TSR system in a non-computer environment to working with it in an SSI game turned out to be pretty small.  While the Gold Box games (and SSI's more recent AD&D work) turned out to be quite popular, you didn't find lots of conversation on-line or in computer magazines about whether, say, Tasselhof was represented accurately in a Dragonlance-based game.  People were more concerned about how to get through this or that puzzle or combat situation in the game, and pretty oblivious to the connection with the larger role-playing environment from which the game derived.

	With Paramount Interactive's upcoming Deep Space Nine: the Hunt (DSN), however, we have an entirely fresh situation.  Here's an extremely popular (and well-conceived, written and acted) television series which literally millions are watching each week.  The series has been running for long enough that people are familiar with all the major characters in the series, and have expectations for how these characters are going to behave in a new episode, based on their previous experience with them.  So the role-playing world, the characters, the ability to imagine what character X will do in situation Y have all been put into place.  In essence, the multimedia presentation that other designers are trying to incorporate in the actual game design has already been set up for DSN on TV.  Think of each week's episode of Deep Space Nine as the multimedia component of the computer game DSN and you've already got a better multimedia presentation than any pure computer game could ever come up with.  You've also got a much richer set of role-playing possibilities.

	All of the above would be all well and good, but cynics might suggest that such tie-ins have been done before, primarily as marketing schemes (Batman the crummy platform arcade game released in conjunction with Batman the movie, say), and that such tie-ins are doomed to fail, primarily because too much money's been spent on licensing costs.

	Fortunately, and perhaps for the first time in the industry (in video/film terms, at least; some excellent games based on books, such as Neuromancer, have appeared), the game Deep Space Nine: the Hunt looks to be as solidly conceived as a game as it is a tie-in with the TV series.  The design team -- Tachyon -- consists of a bunch of veteran adventure/role-playing designers who've had extensive experience in the industry, some of them with computer adventure gaming giant Sierra, whose California offices are literally right across the street from Tachyon's (yes, some of the Tachyon team are former Sierrans, but they're not duplicating Sierra's fundamental game design philosophies or structures in DSN in any way.  This is not your father's adventure game).  The game interface itself features cutting-edge elements which provide the range of interaction and information typical of the best adventure and role-playing games currently in development.  The SVGA graphics look as good as or better than most of the new adventures and CRPGs on the way, and feature a number of different view perspectives appropriate to the action happening at a particular point in the game.  The voice-acting -- featuring a number of the cast members of the TV show -- is superlative.  And the script for the story is not only serious and professionally written, and in-character for each of the game's characters (and all the major characters from the show are present), but flexible enough to give the player a chance to work out a host of different journeys through the world of DSN.

	The player will be able to select one of the main characters from the series as their in-game character, and will then play through DSN in the role of, say, a Cardassian, a Klingon, a Human or a Ferengi.  The game is structured so that -- based on the character chosen for play -- thinking like a Cardassian, Human, etc. will net benefits in the role-playing situation.  

	In other words, the player will able to actually role-play one of the races from the TV series, without having to be locked into exactly what, say, Quark would have to do in this or that situation.  The designers have been very careful to avoid creating a story which simply replicates one of the episodes in the TV series, so that while the player will have an understanding of the locations, characters and possible interactions between them, the actual story and role-playing situations will be absolutely fresh.

	Deep Space Nine: the Hunt, because it's being designed for an audience not locked into the expectations already set up by the genre of CRPG (i.e. hack and slash and/or adventure), is structured to be elegant and simple to get into, so that the game's interface falls quickly out of the player's attention and gives way to immersion in the actual story and situation itself.  It should thus appeal at a very wide level, and avoid the kinds of pitfalls newcomers to computer gaming get easily stuck on, while providing the kind of depth of gaming experience missing in all but a few of these days' CRPG/Adventure designs.

	Most importantly, however, DSN looks to be something we haven't seen yet in computer gaming: an honest-to-goodness role-playing game that can rely on plenty of excellent story, characterization, and multimedia (i.e. the TV series) without being trapped by it.  That, my friends, is a real accomplishment.