EB hasn't yet brought me to a state of self-ruining obsession, so it's not quite WOW-level addicting, but it's pretty gosh darn fun. It's well-written--atmospheric, evocative, and even funny. That's not why it works as a game, though: the tricks it uses to pull the player into the world, to make us care about it, build on its narrative strengths but are operating on a different plane. They're some of them borrowed from pre-existing RPG traditions, but some of them are new.
Take EB's morality system. It's become de rigeur for RPGs to offer a way for players to become good or evil over the course of play, and typically the choices extend precisely that far. For someone like me, who is psychologically incapable of playing as an evil character, this is minimally interesting. Eb does things very differently: rather than imposing a binary good/evil morality system, there's a number of non-linear "personality traits" that one can cultivate over time, ranging from moral qualities like "Magnanimous" and "Ruthless" to more expressive "Melancholic" or "Hedonistic." Note that it's possible to have two conflicting characteristics, though the game does present you with situations that force you towards one or another. It's a quietly brilliant idea: my best alternative to simple moral binaries was to complicate them with a second axis (selfishness versus altruism? religious versus atheistic?), but this does away with oppositional choices in favor of a free flowing personality quiz, blending morality and role-playing most deliciously.
On a somewhat similar vein, the game takes a remarkably agnostic view of the game world's epistemology. Who are you? Where are you from? What has happened in your past? Most RPGs, if they let you choose at all, force these choices on you at the very beginning of the game. EB lets these facts emerge gradually, with a substantial level of input from the player. I wonder if the approach could be taken further? What if the player could affect the truth of the game universe? Do this, and the thief has a heart of gold. Choose this, and he was a bad egg all along. Why not?
Both of these present a far richer variety of combinations and situations than traditional RPG approaches allow. Who expected this kind of invention from a Twitter game?
