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More On Narrative and the Problems of Videogames
By Cameron Sorden | February 9, 2008
I was thinking about these writing issues more last night as I was watching Veronica Mars and Lost (while I cleared Underbog on my laptop), and I wanted to talk a little bit more about the difficulty of presenting story in an MMOG. Specifically, compare the structure of narrative in a television program or a book to the way that we tell stories in games. When you read a book or watch a movie, the story is the point. We like to sit down and see what’s happening to the characters we’ve come to know and love. If we don’t see Sawyer develop as a character, or if we don’t see Veronica and Logan explore their relationship, the story gets stale and we think it’s shallow. It’s all about watching the characters change and react as they encounter new situations, and the interactions they have with each other. Most importantly, notice that you aren’t important. It’s all about them. You’re an invisible observer, hovering and watching.
In a videogame, massively or otherwise, the story isn’t about NPCs. The story is about you, even if it involves your relationship to some NPCs. You essentially take the role of the protagonist that you’d normally be watching. That’s important though, because when you take on the role of the protagonist, you also pick up the reins of choice that you’d normally leave to the author or the director. Suddenly, you’re guiding the story. They could have the best, most interesting story in the world, but if you choose to grind boars for 50 levels then that becomes your character’s story.
Whenever we “bump into” story in an MMOG, what happens is that the designers are taking the reins back for a moment and forcing you to read/listen/watch some of what they want the story to be. The reason that many players skip that or find it irritating is because it’s jarring. For hours at a time, they’re in control of what they’re doing and they’re playing the game, but suddenly they’re expected to read a page of text or listen to a five minute speech from an NPC. Even when it’s interesting, it’s tedious. I did the Silithus quests the other night on WoW, and at the end of the chain the little obelisks start floating in the air and you get told a long story. After thirty seconds, I wandered off because it was just too long to stand there and read text in the air as an NPC jabbered at me without any interaction.
When a story is told in an MMORPG, it’s broken up into small chunks and scattered around the world. Players travel from spot to spot, killing stuff and looking around, and then occasionally they bump into a bit of text or speech that moves an overarching story forward. Problem is, that’s a horrible way to tell a story. Imagine if instead of an episode of Lost, every Wednesday we got a quick 30 second spot that was like “Jack saw a black thing that killed people and he didn’t know what it was. Come back next week!” and “Kate made out with Sawyer. Come back next week!” and “Jack found a clue about the black thing. Come back next week!” Nobody would remember what was going on from week to week, and I guarantee you that no one would be interested enough to watch it.
As another comparison, think about all of the bad games that have been based on good movies or television shows. There’s a reason for that. People tend to like TV with good writing and spurts of action, not lots of action and spurts of story– especially over the long haul. That’s why you remember movies like Fight Club and movies like Ultraviolet get panned and forgotten. Lets pretend that Fight Club was written like a videogame is played:
“Jack wakes up. Jack figures out jumping. Jack runs into some walls and tries to interact with some objects in his apartment but can’t. Jack finds Tyler Durden. Jack tries to interact with Tyler but can’t figure out how to talk. Jack gets frustrated. Jack figures out how to talk but by then is in no mood to listen to the little soliloquy that Tyler delivers with no interaction from him. He clicks through it and goes on to the next challenge.” Now, that’s assuming Jack is a newbie. Lets go back later when Jack has mastered the game. That would still look like this:
“Jack logs in and checks his quest log. He has to beat 5 people in the Downtown Fight Club. He goes there and spends 30 minutes skillfully doing so. After all that action, someone steps forward to give some more story, but Jack doesn’t care. He’s still amped from fighting and wants to do it some more. Even if he listens to it, he only vaguely remembers what’s going on in the story because the last bit came three days ago. He’s been logged and doing real life stuff.”
It’s really tough to tell a good story when you have to tell it in short spurts and when you can’t guarantee when a player might stop for the day, or what they might do. How can you have interesting characters when the players might not even remember the last interaction that was critical to the character development of a certain NPC? How can you expect characters to remember an obscure NPC that ended up being the murderer in a mystery case when they can hardly keep track of who the major NPCs are?
How can we expect players to pay attention to a story when the story isn’t even the point of playing, and if it is, it’s told in a weird disjointed series of interrupted segments? With a mute protagonist (or practically mute, since games aren’t complex enough to let you respond as you really want to), there’s almost zero development of the protagonist as well. After all, designers can’t develop your character for you– they have no idea what kind of character you have in mind. Some of the best and most interesting characters in literature have deep moral issues, detailed internal character development and growth, or witty and entertaining dialogue of the highest caliber. In an MMOG, your character stands there gawking at NPCs who spend minutes at time delivering a complicated history lesson to you, and then you walk away without saying a word and go kill 50 snakes. What a boring main character! And if the leading man/lady is a boring character, why on earth would you care about the supporting cast?
An interesting story requires interesting characters, and you can’t force players to be interesting or to do interesting things. You can’t even define “interesting” for them. As soon as you hand the reins of control over to them and let them control the flow of the story instead of having them watch the story, you’ve made the story boring by virtue of messing up the timing and robbing the character of his/her voice, no matter how interesting the overall story might be (and often, it’s contrived and not that interesting to begin with– good has to beat enormous evil, go level up, we get it).
Topics: game design, literature, mmorpg, movies |
February 9th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
I think the industry may be approaching the problem from the wrong direction.
Trying to tell stories to MMO players as if MMOs are a static medium like a book seems to be trying to artificially force a story onto the weakest points of MMO’s. This is extremely challenging, for all the reasons you noted above, maybe even doomed to failure.
Instead of trying to force storytelling into the MMO environment’s weakest points, we should be looking at what the strong points of MMO’s are and how they can be tied in to storytelling.
What can MMO’s do ahat other storytelling media cannot? Allow the players themselves to tell their stories, of course. As you yourself point out, the whole point of playing an MMO is to tell your OWN story, and to be your own hero in it. Meanwhile MMO designers, with all the best of intentions but with the narrow mindset of “I have story … I tell story to players” are simply working at cross-purposes to the players’ enjoyment when they try to force stories down their throats.
I enjoy a good story as much as anybody, and in game lore actually does interest me, but beyond doubt and hands-down the most intense and captivating storytelling experience I’ve ever had (and I believe ever will have) was in EQ1 many years ago, telling my OWN story. As I played, I kept a blog describing the daily events from my character’s perspective. As the years passed, that blog grew hugely detailed. After several years in the game I had not only a marvellously detailed history of my server’s community, my guild, and all the people I’d met, but I’d actually managed to create a remarkably coherent story arc from the time my humble orphan shadow knight awoke in Neriak with few skills but huge ambitions, to the time I retired from the game, having clawed my way up through the ranks to become the leader of my guild and a well-respected figure in Norrathian politics known throughout the server.
I will never, ever encounter a story that affects me as deeply as that written by an MMO designer, for the simple reason that it’s MY story. I wrote it, I lived it, and nobody can tell it but me. And along the way it was affected by real people, I made real friends, and we had a real impact on each other’s lives. Some of the most compelling stories I remember the most vividly from EQ1 are stories that other players wrote and told, or enacted in game, not what the game designers had NPC X say to NPC Y.
I think MMO’s should be looking into making tools to help players tell their own stories, instead of focusing on forcing pre-made stories about NPCs down players’ throats. Imagine web sites customized for each character that can automatically record key events in the characters’ lives. A semi-automatically generated blog for each character, complete with a facility to upload screenshots automatically as you play. The ability to edit the content of course, for those who want to write more. A voting system so that readers can nominate their favorite character blogs.
Imagine going and killing that dragon, and even as it falls down dead, you’re pressing the F9 key and uploading a screenshot of the killing blow directly to your character’s site, while the death is recorded in your daily accomplishments. Later, after camping, you log into the blog site and write a little narrative paragraph about the battle. Key events could automatically generate blog entries; ideally a wide selection of flags could be selected or deselected by the player to indicate what events they want to record and what they don’t. Something unexpected happen? No problem, a custom command such as “/blog Attended guild leader’s wedding” could quickly and easily add a custom line to the blog for posterity and to jog your memory if you wish to write more later.
This would also enable players to keep track of their friends’ in-game lives much more easily, or the adventures of the cutting-edge raiding guilds. Players excited to see the dragon killed would be eager to read the blogs of the raid force characters. Community managers could pick out interesting and well-written blogs to highlight each week, increasing excitement about the game, and also adding value to maintaining a good reputation as a player.
As MMO’s move forward, I feel we need to design content that will generate new and exciting content for the players, not static storylines that will all start, proceed, and end the same. We need to design stories and events that can affect different characters differently. MMO’s are not linear, and trying to force linear stories into them is never going to be a brilliant success no matter how good your writers are. Taking advantage of the nonlinearity of the medium and allowing the players to control and tell their own stories of the world, on the other hand … I believe this could and will revolutionize the game experience if it can be done successfully.
February 9th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Is there room in the market for a hybrid MMOG/GM moderated RPG? Essentially an MMORPG engine, with strong GM and voice tools that would let GMs prepare instanced scenarios, voice act, dynamically deploy NPCs, sculpt the world, all the stuff a GM in tabletop RPG can do with a few deft words of description, but needs to be seen and explorable in a 3D video game. Something like a real-time version of the Neverwinter aurora toolset, or the Ryzom Ring.
Wizards of the Coast are designing a replacement table-top to provide VOIP, rules, miniatures and mapping tools, but it seems intent on being a direct substitute for tabletop mechanics. Helpful, but still only part of the way there.
I dream of doing “proper” roleplaying in an MMO setting, with combat and conflict mediated by the game engine, but all the “fun” stuff - the actual characterisation, plots, drama - being the responsibility of me, my friends, and my GM.
Easier said than done, of course.
February 10th, 2008 at 10:13 am
I’m all in favor of providing tools for UGC (User Generated Content) as well, but when looking at the other side of that coin, isn’t that placing the player-author in the shoes of a dev? Anyone playing his content is playing the author’s story, not their own.
The same applies for tabletop gaming: the GM is the “dev” who is creating the setting (unless using a pre-made world) and creating the story. The players may help guide the story along the way, but eventually the GM will put the rails back on and guide the players to his major story events, and allow the players to enact the outcome.
@Domino: screw pressing F9 or typing obscure /blog commands. Every action is logged in these games, I’d rather see an API provided with an XML output of data on player actions where, sure, the devs themselves may have their tools such as Vanguard’s “blog” and screenshot features or MS’ Xbox Live gamer card, but anyone else can write their own tools and widgets to display certain data in any form, such as what 360Voice did with the Xbox Live API information.
February 10th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
[…] wasn’t hugely satisfying for me as a player. The reason I’ve italicized the last point, is as Cameron points out on his blog, that the player’s perspective is different to that of a viewer. In a typical film or book, the […]
February 11th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
@Talyn: take your point, but players have been putting their trust in their tabletop GMs for, well, a long time now, and the system seems to work enough to keep ‘em coming back for more.
Many tabletop game systems (Iron Empires?) - not not the most popular ones obviously, else I’d remember more titles - emphasise an intrinsically collaborative approach to story-making that could transfer well into a computer-mediated reality. Ultimately the degree of collegiate participation in a particular session of storytelling is up to the group of players, once viable tools are in their hands.
February 11th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
I just wrote an unfortunately long article in response to this on my site
There is a dramatic difference in emphasis between tabletop and video RPG’s though, and that’s the main point many writers fail to take into account. Even combat-heavy tabletop sessions will often take into account choices and decision based on role playing (even the anti-RP players often do it without realizing it) and because of the social setting and only interacting with other people, it is a much more dynamic situation, even when the GM puts the group back on rails and funnels them to the next event he spent hours creating.
Video game RPG’s take all aspects of role playing, decision making, and of character, out of the equation. They instead are nothing more than attribute development games. The actual content is static and nearly everyone gets to experience it, so there is no unique story to be told, we are simply funneled from event to event that the devs created for us. So, given that reality, I’m more in favor of having a toolset available for UGC and some means for players to download and play through those stories in addition to the official dev-created content.
February 11th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I read your article, Talyn. Nice write-up (I wish I didn’t have to login to leave comments– I’m lazy).
I’m having a problem with my DnD group right now where I’m trying to make it heavy RP but several of them are playing it a lot like an MMOG– kill, kill, kill, loot, loot, loot. I feel the pain.
February 11th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
[…] More On Narrative and the Problems of Videogames […]
February 11th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
There’s this cool new thing called ‘cookies’ that lets you always stay logged in. I hear it works great on them newfangled web site dealios.
Seriously… hahaha… I’m always logged in here.
But for new registrations I did have to cave and require captcha because I was being hit every day with spambots. It *should* only apply for new users not for existing legit users just wanting to comment? If it’s screwing that up, let me know.
February 11th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
In my D&D campaign, several of the players were pretty hardcore hack-n-slashers, but one of the most memorable sessions I continue to hear about lasted probably 5 or 6 hours that night and not a single sword was drawn, not a single die was rolled in combat. And they did it all themselves, I didn’t force it on them. In fact I had a pretty decent adventure with combat etc. written and ready to go but they were getting so into my story line at that point they took us into uncharted territory and heavy RP. Truly a great experience.
February 11th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
*Talyn gets banned for comment spam!* bwahahaha
Ok, I just disabled the ‘users must be registered and logged in’ option in Wordpress. Come back by, ya lazy git!
If I start getting spammed though… it’s ALL YOUR FAULT!
February 11th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I get spammed all the time. Turn akismet on.
February 11th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
[…] Cameron also has two solid pieces about stories in MMOs, and his posts further reinforce my point, that NPCs are not memorable and […]
February 11th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Akismet is on! It doesn’t stop the bots from registering though, and I think it allows registered users to spam (not sure)?