Tssha

What's the difference? ;) The key to understanding the narrator's treatment of Roger is realizing that, for all intents and purposes, Roger and the player are the same entity.
 
In the early games, there basically was no "Roger", at least not as we know him now. He had no dialogue and no real personality beyond what characterization the story events (such as napping in the closet) and the narrator put on him. Although he started getting a little more characterization in SQ3 (mostly due to the increasing snarkiness of the writing around that time), it wasn't until SQ4 that Roger got any actual dialogue and personality. Up until that point, "Roger" was little more than an AFGNCAAP - an avatar for the player, with no real character of his own.
 
It's a holdover from the days of interactive fiction, where virtually all games spoke directly to the player as if they were the one personally interacting with the game world. It wasn't until adventure game protagonists started graphically appearing on-screen that designers realized they had to start defining certain basic attributes (gender, appearance, etc.) for the sake of designing character sprites. Over time, the trend continued, until adventure protagonists became their own entities.
 
Thing is, the second person narration ("You can't get ye flask!"), using "you" to refer to the main character, kept being used. Superficially, this would seem to indicate that the narrator is talking to the main character somehow - which of course is where the backtalk-the-narrator humor in many games (SQ6, the later LSL games) comes from. But on a gameplay level, the narrator is still talking to *you* - the person at the keyboard - which carries certain implications. ;)
 
Basically, when the narrator is snarking about how Roger is stupid, clumsy, useless, etc., he's not talking about Roger - he's talking about Roger as controlled by you. Think of Roger as a puppet (or a mech suit, if you're more of an anime fan) with you in the driver seat - everything he does is ultimately your doing. If Roger does something brainless (such as blow himself up with an unstable tank shell), it's because you were being stupid. If Roger blunders off the edge of a cliff, it's because you weren't paying attention or didn't have the finger dexterity to guide him around it. Akril's fanfic isn't far off the mark - it's basically a cute way to personify what would otherwise be an abstract game concept, impossible to portray in normal fiction.
 
Gary is ripping on Roger, sure, but only because Roger has the misfortune to be stuck with a shmuck of a player leading him around. ;) Arguably, if we were able to percieve a version of Space Quest where Roger acted of his own accord - one where there is no player, and no narrator - then we'd see him in his "natural" state - that of a lazy, clutzy, somewhat cowardly, but ultimately well-meaning average joe who's more dopey than he is dumb.
 
Then again, without the player's intellect to give him those sudden bursts of McGuyver-esque ingenuity and puzzle-solving insight, he'd probably have been blown up way back on the Arcada... <_<