Storytelling

January 12, 2006 on 10:42 am | In General Gaming, Playstyles

A discussion over at F13, started by Raph's thoughts on innovation, has taken a turn towards a favored topic of mine: narrative in an MMORPG.

What I always find funny in these discussions is the two competing views of stories in an MMORPG.

1. They're terrible. Yea, for the most part, I agree. None are particularly engaging, and all are soon forgotten.
2. They're useless. Stories in MMORPGs are little more than flavor text on a Magic: The Gathering card. They are there to entertain the few who may read them, but otherwise have no bearing on the outcome of the game.

Coincidentally, I think both cause the other.

Problem of Relevance

Knowing the story is irrelevant to the experience, so therefore not worth learning to individuals most nterested in maximizing their game play. If the story mattered, if decision trees existed and their choices mattered, and if the results of your story made you different from someone else in ways simple stats do not, then people would start caring.

Consider the current market leading MMORPGs in the U.S. That'd be games like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Everquest 2, and Final Fantasy XI. All of these feature roughly analagous game systems: kill to get better at killing. There's some very different implementations within of course (the unique energy meters in WoW classes, the multi-classing in GW, the Renkai of FFXI, etc.), but the end goal is largely the same, with GW and WoW slapping on a repeat-play PvP system onto that end.

Where's the story the in these games? Mostly in quest text, and in some cases, interactive world objects. That's it. In fact, in the case of WoW, those interactive world objects simply tell snippets of the story already listed in its entirety on the History of Warcraft page at the main game site.

Is the storytelling any good in these games? In my view, it's very hit or miss. WoW and EQ2 has some really inspired story arcs, spanning dozens of quest steps and culminating in some very interesting resolutions. It also has some pretty bad ones, little more than flavor text to fill up an otherwise empty Quest Log.

Why is that? Why such inconsistent storytelling?

Problem of Resources

I've argued before it's because of resources. Basically, I can see it be hard to justify spending lots of money on quality story-writing when it seems as though most people are fine with what they've got. It's hard for businesses to justify fixing a problem they can't really quantify. As a result, we have lore in these games that's basically not needed. No knowledge of the history of a game is going to impact one's ability to kill creatures in it. Even the old EQ1 Faction system isn't emulated much anymore, with WoW treating it as little more than another ladder to climb for access to new recipes.

So stories are not that great because there's a perception that nobody wants them.

Idea

To battle limited and unjustifiable resource expenditure, I'd push player story telling. And the best part is, we already have it. It's just not packaged that way.

If you've ever helped a friend hunt a mob, or get resources for a crafted item, or guarded them while they do so, or delivered something for them, you've partaken of a player quest. People don't see it that way, but that's the real shame of it: The stories players tell is within their interactions.

Players have gotten conditioned to thinking that the only relevant content in a game is that which the game delivers. But isn't that anathema to things like emergent PvP, housing, harvesters, Raiding, and so on? All of these activities are linked to players performing actions with other players, for commerce reasons, for mutually beneficial advancement ones, whatever. Sure XP doesn't come from it, but money could, as well as cammaraderie, both which could enable players to be more efficient in their XPing. And they've irreversibly affected each other's lives.

To me, it's odd that "Player Events" are considered a separate undertaking in some titles. Everything's a player event. If people began to understand this, they'd stop waiting for their monthly fix of new content and start directing their own.

And the best part, these sorts of activities are intrinsically repeatable. It's hard to capitalize on this knowledge though because conventional wisdom says the best games in which to do so, the "sandbox" ones, just aren't as successful as those where games mete out objectives and rewards.

But that's ok. Eventually MMORPGs will split between games that are barely MMO (like GW) and those that continue innovating in ways that capitalize on thousands of people co-habitating a virtual world. With the price of content being what it is, I can't see many more games like WoW come out and be as successful. So some form of innovation will drive the future of success, giving us a chance that relevant narrative is a part of it.