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How Do You Tell a Good Story In an MMOG?
By Cameron Sorden | February 8, 2008
Moorgard recently made a post about the role of writing in games, which was nice, because it gave me an opening to talk about an issue I’ve been meaning to discuss for quite some time. He asks an important question for game writing:
Are MMOs there yet? Not quite. As fun as WoW is to play, it’s not going to win any awards for its writing. But as the genre grows, I think it’s inevitable that game makers find a way to meld great stories and writing on top of the style of action MMO players enjoy. The trick, as is true with any kind of writing, is to give your audience the instant gratification they’re looking for while subtly guiding them into a deeper experience.
Everyone loves a good, epic story. Many of us grew up reading fantasy or science fiction novels with intensely memorably characters, sweeping multi-year (and multi-novel) plotlines, and weapons of immense age and power. Rand Al’Thor, Aragorn, Paul Atreides, Raistlin Majere, and Daenerys Stormborn are just some of the figures that inspire gamers and designers alike to want to recreate the sweeping stories of swords and sorcery that we loved reading in an online world. Some of the younger gamers probably feel similarly about Harry Potter or Eragon. The point is that reading stories like that make us want to go online and be the focal point of our own sweeping, intriguing stories.
It’s easy to criticize MMOG’s for not “being there” yet, but the fact of the matter is that it’s really hard to create an environment like that in a game– especially an online game. I’m not trying to criticize Moorgard at all, but I don’t think it’s nearly as easy as providing players with carrots while dragging them into a larger story. There are a number of major problems with providing players with a really good story in an online, multiplayer setting.
The first problem with it is something that will be immensely difficult for developers to overcome. For a story to be interesting, you need interesting characters– but you can’t force your players to be interesting characters. Players make characters that fit what they want. Not what you want as a developer. You have no way to anticipate whether your players are going to make a bow-wielding carbon copy of Legolas or an peg-legged female dwarf named Stumparella that loves gardening and baking the monsters she cooks into pies. Both characters won’t fit equally well into all possible storylines, and trying to force Stumparella into a heroic, all-powerful, world-savior role doesn’t work (just like forcing Legolasxx into a pie-baking contest seems odd). While those characters might be interesting to those players, they won’t necessarily be interesting in the story you have planned for your players.
Furthermore, players often are forced to take a passive role in the stories designers provide them, necessarily. Players can’t make overarching and grand plans of the sort that epic characters in books make because they’re not creating the story– the game design dictates your story, no matter how many choices the characters are given. Passive characters aren’t interesting. When you’re passive, things happen to you. When you’re active, you make things happen. This is one reason why tabletop roleplaying tends to trump the experience of online gaming in many cases. You have a flexible, changeable environment whose experience changes based on what the players want to do, not on what the Dungeon Master necessarily expects them to do.
Another problem with writing in MMOGs is that epic stories are also interesting because of the relationships that form among the characters. We’re all human– we care deeply about the human experiences of friendship, love, hate, and revenge, and we love hearing about them. The bonds of friendship that bind Sam and Frodo make the final scenes of the Mount Doom ascent that much more meaningful and poignant. It’s extremely difficult to give players that experience with NPCs in relation to a videogame character, because you can’t predict how players will react to the NPCs– everyone is different. The next best thing you can do is let them watch NPCs interacting like that, which is decidedly boring without the context of the internal character monologues which books provide.
Next, stories aren’t about failure, but games need to have a chance for players to fail in some way for it to be a game. Voldemort isn’t supposed to nuke Harry where he stands, but that’s exactly what can happen in games. What does that do to the story? How do you deal with the potential that the hero might fail and die? Doesn’t that break the story? Doesn’t it at least break the immersion and the wonder?
Finally, there’s the same problem that gets brought up every time this issue is discussed: Everyone wants to be the center of the story, but you can’t let everyone be the center of the story in an MMOG. Even assuming that you, as a developer, can surmount the challenges I’ve outlined above, how do you deal with the fact that everyone gets the same story? Does everyone interact with the same NPCs? Does all interaction have to be instanced? What happens when two characters that have treated an NPC in wildly different ways go into the same instance that the NPC inhabits? What if that NPC died in one player’s storyline and not in the other’s?
Even TES: Morrowind, which in my opinion has the best “epic” fantasy storyline of any videogame yet published, takes an extremely shallow stance when it comes to character interaction (which weakens the overall story from an emotional perspective). Bioware’s games tend to be a little better at the NPC interaction, but it still basically boils down to whether your friends like you, hate you, or don’t care. Complex interpersonal relationships of the kind that even a small group of real-world friends experiences is way too complicated to program effectively into a game with room for player-driven interaction.
In short, I’m not convinced that videogames can provide the kind of excellent writing and sweeping, memorable storylines that we get from books. At least not until we’ve progressed to the point where NPCs have become complex enough to engage in natural conversation with a player based on what the player wants to talk about (and we’re a long way from that). That problem is doubly hard for MMOGs, as I’ve explained.
We might just be stuck with the equivalent of dime-store pulp writing and shallow, cheap thrills in our MMOGs until that day comes.
Topics: Random |
February 8th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
You’re absolutely right that it ain’t gonna be easy. But I think it *can* be done.
This is one of the tricky things about being a developer who blogs: I’d like to go more in depth on how I think certain challenges can be addressed, but at the same time I don’t want to give away the secret sauce of how we plan to make it better.
February 8th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
In short, I’m not convinced that videogames can provide the kind of excellent writing and sweeping, memorable storylines that we get from books.
Sure they can. Single player video games. Or perhaps multi-player cooperative video games where you are playing pre-existing characters rather than your own.
But in a MMOG? Nope. When everyone is “a hero” no one can be “the Hero” in a setting like that. Perhaps someday, but it will truly take a revolution in MMOG design for it to occur.
Of course you’ll always get those who think they’re “making their own story” which always cracks me up. Sandbox or linear, they’re doing the same stuff everyone else is, and I’d hardly consider grinding mobs to be a compelling story just because they did it on their own rather than having Joe NPC tell them to.
February 8th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Excellent post. Many of us want epic, heroic stories within massively multiplayer games. It’s a big part of why I became a game designer, and until I became one, I didn’t realize just how hard it could be to achieve it.
Our secret sauce is…
Step 1) Story
Step 2)
Step 3) Profit
February 9th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
One reason why I feel story telling is neglected is because the technology can’t support interactive story telling for thousands of players on the same server. There are small things that could be done though. Better dialogue is a no brainer. Quests that really matter. Sometimes less is more. A quest isn’t going to feel special if you complete a hundred in a span of a few weeks.
But, there’s a lot of players that don’t give a shit about intricate lore and are focused on achieving more than learning about the world and the stories therein. Whenever I encounter a longer piece of lore in a random WoW group, most players skip it or complain that it was long, when in all reality it’s only 3-4 paragraphs. haha.
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