Cameron wrote two fantastic articles recently on the problems of telling a story in a MMORPG. I’m right there with him: as a reader, writer, and former pen-and-paper role player, I sigh with resignation at the nearly complete lack of stories in MMO’s.
Oh, sure, the story is there somewhere, but buried away in random quest dialogue at best, which the player may not get to read all in one sitting.
Take World of Warcraft, for example. There were enough Defias quests in Westfall that I more or less gradually got a basic idea of what that bandit gang were up to, culminating in traversing the depths of the Deadmines to defeat their leader, Edwin VanCleef, and saving Stormwind from his invasion. The problem was the even though I had enough available time to burn through the quests relatively quickly, the story was not told well. The quest dialogue was very dry and uninteresting, and for someone with my attention span, I’m just going to give up and click the ‘Accept’ button and going about my merry way murdering the AI in Westfall.
Next up: the Scarlet Monastery. It’s under the control of the Scarlet Crusade. Who the hell are these guys? The boring quest dialogue tells me their goal is to rid Azeroth of the undead. Great! So why are they attacking me? I never had any idea really who exactly these Scarlet Crusade guys were, why are they so insane and zealous, why is this Scarlet Monastery here, why should my character be motivated to enter this place to murder all its inhabitants? Only by reading other web sites which took the time to collect various bits of information and present them for reading in a sane manner did I later come to understand the story behind it, and that is unacceptable.
Cameron points out how viewers are intrigued by the plot points, and more importantly, character development in television shows, novels or movies, and we get caught up in those stories. The problem comparing those mediums to MMORPG’s is that they are passive storytelling where we, the voyeuristic viewers and readers, are merely along for the ride, having no impact on the direction of the story or the characters.
In an MMORPG, the hope is that we, the players, are guiding our characters along and become directly involved in story lines as opposed to simply watching them from a safe distance.
An oft-overlooked problem in MMO’s — actually, any video game RPG — is that there is a difference between a character, a fictional persona played by an actor or author or guided by a video game player, and character, a person’s moral qualities.
In media we gradually learn the inner workings of the key characters; we learn their character, and we watch as they learn from experiences and see how wisely, they can apply the wisdom gained from those experiences, and how true they hold to their own character, their own beliefs and motivations.
In an MMORPG, players are not presented with a medium for telling their own story or developing that character’s beliefs. By and large, our only “motivation” is to acquire wealth and raise our attributes, which we (perhaps mistakenly?) refer to as “character development.” A key difference between traditional RPG’s and video game RPG’s is that in the latter, the RPG acronym has come to mean only “attribute management” with nothing whatsoever to do with who that character is. The only “role” we get to play is one of the Trinity: tank, healer, or damage. The only real choice or impact we have is which of those we choose to play.
Richard Garriott hyped up Tabula Rasa’s “moral dilemmas” in some of its quest lines but again, we’re left with the fact that MMO’s are completely static environments. His example of ethic parables such as:
One of these early missions involves the delivery of pharmaceuticals to soldiers on the front lines. While the supply commander, a rather straight-laced and stand-up kind of individual, would rather these pharmaceuticals be distributed to the soldiers in a formal, organized system, there’s a man who stole a whole bunch and has been selling them to the soldiers for a nice profit. Your decision to either turn in the thief, or help him distribute the stolen goods, not only affects the mission outcome but determines how the NPC soldiers will interact with you from then on.
On the one hand, it’s great we are presented with a choice of two possible outcomes but in the end, it doesn’t have a lasting impact on the world or on our characters other than a slight change in faction with one side or the other, and either way we’re still limited to murdering our way through the mission.
In many ways, we’re more akin to Rambo where, regardless of our class or any personal predilections for how we may choose to “role play” (if at all) our characters, we gleefully murder every fluffy bunny, giant bat or slimy Murloc NPC in our path. There is no other choice, there are no ethical or moral consequences, there is no personal conflict or inner dialogue. There are myriad better examples but, compare that with Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones when Anakin loses control, succumbs to his anger and massacres an entire camp of Tusken Raiders, including women and children, in retaliation for his mother’s death. His angst, his inner conflict with the reality of what he has done versus his beliefs in the usually peaceful Jedi teachings gives him some dimension, some realism (despite the wooden acting — ouch! 
) and allows us to relate to him as a protagonist.
I often see the sandbox advocates proclaiming they want to tell their own story. Yet, how exactly is this even possible? There is finite content in our MMO’s and every player gets to participate in most of it. In the end, that content boils down to murdering AI (or perhaps other player characters) so does it matter if you just decide to murder AI on your own or if Joe NPC told you to? Either way — much like a Harlequin Romance or a soap opera — everyone has the same story, the only differences are the names and locations.
Taking that a step further, how many heroic tales are there where the hero says “I’m a born hero, I will travel the world and murder all evil beings and save you noobs!” Not many? Didn’t think so. No, more often the hero only becomes the hero because he is thrust into a situation not of his making. This is more like the type of story telling we have in some MMO’s like Guild Wars or Lord of the Rings Online where we are presented with a story then proceed to murder all the “bad guys” until the story’s completion. Guild Wars uses in-game cinematics starring all the character’s in the group, where LOTRO uses extensive dialogue scripting and environmental and graphical effects to propel the story and a sense of drama and urgency. Future games will surely push the envelope and have even more grandiose scenarios like this to play through, but that will likely be as far as we ever get. As Cameron noted, we can’t force players to be interesting, nor can we force them to play their characters in interesting or compelling ways. There is no “character development” in games, there is only “attribute development” as I mentioned earlier. There is no story of our own to be told. Seriously, try it. Tell your adventures to a non-gamer. “I went to this forest and murdered all the wildlife I could find and sold their body parts to a vendor for cash. Then I went into an open area with lots of farms. All the farmers’ cattle were aggro so I murdered them all too. I’m sure the farmers would be mad, but the cattle will respawn in five minutes anyway. I went to town and repaired my gear and this noob hunter challenged me to a duel so I murdered him too. Too bad I couldn’t loot all his gear. Ha! That would teach him a lesson. Noobs…” Tell that story and see the look on the listener’s face. Then wonder why Jack Thompson gets on his crazed, fanatical soapbox…
Ah, but wait! So often the story is in the telling. The previous example was extremely literal, only describing the limited base actions we have in games. Yet read a character journal written as fiction rather than from the player’s perspective, and it becomes a whole new ballgame.
First, I am very much an advocate of User Generated Content (UGC). Yes, ask any developer and they’ll say the majority of UGC is complete and utter garbage. Hell, Second Life is proof of that. But there’s also a large subset of players out there who are extremely creative and are willing to put the time and effort into presenting their creativity for the enjoyment of others. Writing RPG character journals or designing maps or full-blown mods for games are prime examples of that. Give the players a toolkit to design their own instanced content and some means of offering it to the players for download. Extremely popular content could even be polished up and made official later on. Let the players craft stories and adventures, and let the players decide what they like.
I’m also an advocate of providing more data of character’s actions. Yes, as one user noted in the Listener Mail of SUWT #19, some could use that data in very elitist ways to judge a player’s ability and whether to group with him or not, or whether to allow him into a guild or not, but my vision is more along the lines of having a “character API” where any number of tools or widgets could be built to display certain data. Specifically, I’d like to be able to set a personality profile for my characters and as I play, the API could automatically blog what I do. Look how 360Voice.com took the Xbox Live API and has your 360 blog about you, complete with a bit of smack-talk. If data were provided to blog my character’s action, in the context of the personality profile I selected, that would be a fun tool to play with and a fun way of sharing your adventures with others, and allow every player to tell his own story regardless of their level of creativity or writing skill. Just a thought…
Apologies if I was scatter-brained through this post, I’m not even certain I managed to convey what I intended. Still a bit groggy and fuzzy, this trip is exhausting…
Tags: MMO Gaming, MMORPG
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Oh, weird… the first time I showed up, it told me I needed to log in.
Nevermind! Nice post.
Every “next gen” developer should read this post. I’m hoping that 38 Studios–with R.L. Salvatore on it’s creative team–incorporates actually story into their game. But the Blizzards and Sigils and SOEs of this world have left me so punch drunk I won’t believe anything at this point until I see it.
Yup, pretty much. This is more of what I was looking for from Turbine’s DDO. They had instancing in place, they said they’d be able to do some more cool stuff specifically because of instancing) and it was D&D! But it was a huge let down.
I think I ranted about this awhile back. Result was some hybrid of EQ2′s actual NPC talking to you (I read enough at work), defining character responses much like NWN had (i.e. good, evil, asshole, flattery, slimeball type responses available, unlike in EQ2) while also having the conversation have a lasting effect or an actual point behind them.
Good stuff.