[MUD-Dev2] RANT: The Future of Quests

[Damion Schubert]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Mike Sellers <mike at onlinealchemy.com>wrote:

> Mike Rozak wrote:
> > ...
> > And, to tell the truth, if you can generate enough emotional
> > attachment that the player cares about the old woman, you
> > don't need to use the "Saving the world from the evil
> > overlord" card at all. Saving the world is kind of like the
> > ultimate emotional cop-out for poor writing/design because,
> > by implication, saving the world saves everything in the
> > world.
>
> Ding!  We have a winner!  "Saving the world" is a huge crutch just as you
> say.  The key isn't to find more and better ways for players to save the
> village, kingdom, or world, but to find more and better ways for the
> individuals (PCs and NPCS) in the world to mean as much to them *as if*
> they
> were saving the world.


There's a serious gotcha here, though.  Is there anything
more ham-handed than 'this time... it's personal'?  Doesn't anyone else
roll their eyeballs when Robin and/or Aunt May have to get saved again?
Would you really like to play a Batman game where your full-time job is
rescuing Robin and Alfred?

> While procedural quests work as filler, you can't create a
> procedural quest with the impact of the old-lady quest
> because your procedural-quest-generating algorithms don't
> sufficiently understand emotions and human reality.

> Until they do.  Others have written about the NPCs themselves generating
> needs and tasks (aka "quests" -- I've really come to dislike that word in
> this context) that are meaningful to them and to the players.  Having a
> bona
> fide emotional connection between the player and the NPC(s) is part of
> this.


I've worked on autogeneration before, and I now work at a company that
champions hand-crafted content, and I can tell you, it is nearly impossible
to autogenerate content with the emotional depth and resonance that
hand-written content provides.  This shouldn't surprise: after all, we still
don't have algorithms that will write better movies or novels than real
humans do.  Yet, for some reason we expect this to be true, even though
interactive content is far more difficult and subtle to write, and writing
for a media platform where consumers are routinely interrupted (logging
off, being disconnected, handling another quest, exploring another
activity, or helping a friend).

A core problem to solve with the autogeneration is pattern recognition.
The best quests in MUDs and MMOs have either interesting stories,
interesting activities or interesting characters.  One example: a quest
in Fallout 3 sends you to pick up the Declaration of Independence,
which has a lot of emotional resonance with the player in this post-
apocalyptic world.  This is not something that a random generator
would have created, and if it did, players would likely have also seen
quests to rescue the Constitution, the Magna Carta, and the Consumer's
Bill of Rights, all generated with similar explanations and expositions,
and that repetition would have destroyed the illusion.  Once the players
recognize the algorithm, maintaining their emotional hold becomes
harder and harder.

> Procedurally-generated quests have the emotional depth of an
> obnoxious male teenager on a power trip.

> Could that be because most of them are written primarily by those who are
> emotionally still obnoxious male teenagers on power trips?


I thought they were written by a procedure. =)

--d