[MUD-Dev2] Players are shallow [was: The Future of Quests]

[Damion Schubert]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 4:26 AM, cruise <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:

> Humans require something...bigger, be it religion, relationships,
> philosophy, whatever, and it's that scale of fulfillment I want to aim
> for.
>
> Too far? I don't see why it should be - books, films and music all manage
> it. We are getting better - Mass Effect, for example, comes close with
> some of the decisions you have to make - but we have a way to go yet.
> Unfortunately, the players demands (and buying habits) are often in
> opposition with achieving that goal.
>

All this is fine, if you want to pursue it - personally, I'd rather play a
game
that was fun or be in a social space with good people rather than be in
one that taught me god's grace or gave me insights into Neitzche.  But
if you want to go that way, well I guess BioShock was kinda okay.

The one thing that has really crystallized for me working at BioWare is
that games are a unique media genre.  I realize this seems stupidly
obvious in retrospect, but hear me out:  When television came out,
initially they tried to tell stories like the movies did. The makers of
the shows tried to use the same conventions, on lower budgets.  It
took adaptation of the unique problems of television to really figure
that medium out: how to merge story pacing with commercial breaks.
How to make shows serial, and keep people up to speed.  How to
break up the narrative arcs.  Even subtle things, like how to write
for a medium that may only have half of the viewer's attention,
since a whole lot of people started watching while cooking or eating.
This learning has continued to evolve over time, as viewing an
episode of Lost next to an episode of Bonanza will show.  I've heard
of seminars describing how Tivo affects television writing

One reason why BioWare games are successful is because they
recognize that storytelling techniques that work in other genres
don't work as well in video games.  An obvious example is that
video games have almost NO control over the story pacing, as
the pace of the game is determined by the player, who may in
fact save the game and walk away for a day or two.  But
in other ways, the genre is stronger, with more potential.  BioWare
games are written to embrace interactivity, in particular, in the
belief that the player's free will as a story agent is the part of
storytelling that is superior in games vs. television or movies.

MMOs are different yet again.  Yes, you can tell good stories, and
yes, you can have good quests, but one primary problem is that
your stories are competing against the interest and drama that
comes from being in a shared social space.  Nothing your NPC
is going to say is going to be as interesting as the fact that your
raid leader is cybering your guildmaster's girlfriend, and everyone
knows but him.  Creating an interesting context to make the
space sticky is great, but at the end of the day, an MMO's real
content is other people. If it's NOT -- well, then your MMO
probably shoulda been a single player game.  Woulda saved
a lot of money.

There is probably some sort of Dunbar number at work here -
It's not that humans are shallow, its just that they can only
track so many relationships in a social space, and once they
begin forming relationships with real humans, relationships
with artificial agents are going to naturally become deprioritized.
Especially when, say, reading an NPC's quest dialogue text
keeps your party members waiting.

So my hypothesis: MMOs are a unique art form and genre,
with a unique set of rules for helping its users find fulfillment.
The next obvious question is: what are those rules?  And are
NPCs really necessary and/or central to that?  WoW says
'yes'.  Games like Eve and Tale in the Desert say 'no' - they're
not about the quest, and much more about game mechanics
creating interesting social dynamics.  Overall, though, I think
we're still at the 'Bonanza' stage of this journey of self-exploration.

--d