May Contain Nuts

This is largely in response to a comment left in my entry on MMO suckitude, which took issue with what I define as a game.

I consider there to be a number of different kinds of games, though as the commenter was astute enough to point out, there is also a difference between “games” and “play”. I have enough ways to engage in “play” on my own without having to do so through a medium such as There or Second Life. It could be just the circumstances of my upbringing, but my play has always largely been solitary, and not something I usually care to involve other people in. It’s something of a small miracle of willpower that I actually manifested one of my most treasured places in 3D form and put it up for the world to “judge the hell out of” (to borrow the phrase from Adult Swim). Since There and company seem to focus more on “play” than actually being “games,” (the definition of which I’ll get to in a minute) I don’t find them nearly as attractive to participate in.

For me, a game can consist of many things, but ultimately it’s the achievement of an objective through a set of organized rules. Some games are incredibly simple in this regard: Pac-Man, Mario, and company all have pretty simple objectives and fairly straightforward rules as to what you can and cannot do. Others, largely sports and the like, have a long list of rules with one real objective and several smaller ones attached to it (the primary objective being to win). Others build on this simple format but become something much more complex. It is here that I would place games that carry a real story with them, and it is these that I am most interested in using to pass my time. In these games, not only is there an objective, there is also a narrative. Again, the narrative can vary wildly in complexity from game to game, with most being pretty simple and straightforward, while some are far more nuanced and involved. Some actually build player experience and activity into the story to strengthen the existing narrative. I don’t think games are inherently about contest… at least, story-driven ones usually aren’t. Sure, you can make a contest out of it by pitting yourself against other players of the game (anybody remember the “who can beat Riven the fastest” competition some years back on the Riven Lyst?), but inherently, story-based games tend to shy away from making a contest out of things. There’s an objective, and obstacles to overcome, but there’s no score or timer, which I tend to associate with more competitive games.

I, like Rand, am interested in what can be done to use games as storytelling devices. This is a brand new medium that has rather untapped potential, in my opinion, for new types of more interactive and dynamic storytelling that will only get richer as our ability to simulate real systems and react to people’s input improves.

I’m still not entirely certain where people got hung up on Uru’s “roleplaying”. It’s a basic premise in any game that while you’re playing it, you’re in the game’s world, and all of the people, places, and events in the game are real. Why, then, is it assumed to be “roleplaying” when you do this in an online setting? If you’re playing a game in a world online, it’s ultimately no different than playing it offline, save for the extra crowds of people. You are, more than likely, still going to behave just as you would were you actually in said situation (unless you don’t normally do that in games anyway, in which you’re roleplaying all the time). There’s no “role” to assume. You’re playing yourself, so just be yourself, and suspend your disbelief that you’re talking to a CG avatar and treat the game like it’s your reality for the time being… it’s what you do all the time in other offline games. The only difference in an online game is that the game’s characters have the potential to have interactive conversations with you rather than one-sided monologues (or the dreaded conversation tree speeches… oy).

Anyway, I’m getting off on a tangent here. Before I wrap this up I wanted to address a final point; that of second-hand experiences in an online game (IOW, not being the driving force behind every event in the game). I’m sorry to say, but in an online game, such personalized storytelling is simply not practical, or even desirable. The entire point of putting a world online is to create a more varied experience for people. In fact, one of the points I touched on in my previous comments was that everyone crawling the same dungeon and getting the same loot and encountering the same monsters as everyone else is boring. It’s already been done, and will be done again, and there was nothing unique or special about me doing it, so why did I bother? What I did had no effect on anything whatsoever, because if it did, the thousands of other people before or after me would have had the same effect on the world, and that wouldn’t be very believable at all.

I don’t think *Quest games live up to the same sort of allure and unique experiences that pencil-and-paper D&D (or other RPG) campaigns provide, because within the framework of that adventure lies the possibility for thousands of different things to happen to differentiate your experience from someone else’s. Plus, when you’re playing D&D, it doesn’t matter how many other people have played the campaign before or after you, because you and your party have the world all to yourselves; you aren’t sharing it with 100,000 other people on the same adventure, and because of that, you can have a real impact on the dynamics of the world you’re playing in. My party had an entire trade empire going by the time we retired the actual campaign… that’s the sort of thing you can’t do in a current MMO because the systems aren’t in place for you to be able to affect the world like that.

Ideally, an online world would be affected by a player’s contributions. Sometimes not at all, sometimes only slightly, and sometimes dramatically. It all depends on what they did and when and where they did it, and who was watching. MMOs are inherently more like the real world than a single-player game because of the dynamic that thousands of other people adds to the storytelling abilities of the developer. Not everyone can be the person who talked to Phil Henderson when he showed up on Eder Kemo. Not everyone could be standing by Sharper when he tore the Kahlo Pub barrier down in Ae’Gura. Not everyone gets to be the person to make first contact with an alien race (oops, giving away details about my project, hehe). Not everyone can defend Creedemoore from the Orc invasion and participate in the Battle of Jungle Cove (now I’m just making things up). That’s just the nature of storytelling in a massively multiplayer environment. Not everyone can do everything, and sometimes the story happens in another place entirely than where you were, or while you were asleep, or on vacation. It’s a different kind of story, and obviously it won’t appeal to everyone, but it’s not something you can tailor to allow everybody to be the major player in every event. That’s what single-player games are for.

I’m also very interested in the idea of evolving online worlds with strong stories driving the development of content and characters. Again, I think Uru gave us a small taste of that (and for the record, I was also in the beta from January of 2003 right through the end of Prologue) with Phil, Yeesha, Sharper, the DRC, and the conflicts developing between them. Nothing much had come of their involvement because not enough time was given to develop the story… all we got were the first inklings. Player participation in the Marker Hunts in Prologue may not have had any immediately apparent effect, but it was moving the DRC towards finalizing calibration of the Great Zero, and who knows what would have changed in-game when that happened. I think that, properly paced, To D’ni, Path of the Shell, and whatever was to come after it would have been a very interesting story to participate in with other people (I know Ahnonay would have been far more interesting and taken far longer to figure out ;)). It’s something I want to at least dabble in with the project I’m developing in the back of my mind. In such instances, the game world starts off inherently smaller than the more traditional dungeon-crawling MMORPGs for two reasons. First, the world needs to be smaller or it feels far too stretched out, and people are too distant from one another to really get anything done quickly. As the game gets more popular, though, the content should begin to expand to match the population. Secondly, as the story evolves, new places will be discovered, new people will come into the story (and others may leave), and the game world will naturally expand to include those new locations. Eventually, the world ends up being just as large if not larger than the area available in more traditional MMOs, but the environments are much more rich and detailed because the story has driven their development over time, rather than just being content drops that never get changed again. There was always the potential for stuff like that in Uru, it just never made it far enough to show that off (though To D’ni gives some hints as to some of the stuff they may have been planning to release into existing content).

Ultimately, I don’t buy games for the “play,” I buy them for their story. It’s not that I have a narrow definition of what a “game” is, nor that I wish to discount the general popularity of such play-based programs, it’s just that I prefer my play to be more private, and I have different preferences when it comes to what I want from my digital entertainment. What I’m looking for in a game is something I can experience, and perhaps even participate in (if it’s online), rather than a more free-form playground where anything goes. I want someone to tell me a story when I play a game, and I want to be a part of it. Somebody keep making these games for me.

Yes, I do like making up random words. Nyah.

Anyway, Gadren has been posting a few thoughts on why most MMOs suck (or at least, why they’re so lacking in actual unique gameplay from one game to another). Among his current complaints are lack of impact on the world, monotonous gameplay, and lack of customization. I think all of these are valid issues, and I’d just like to delve into my own thoughts on the matter as a non-player of MMOs for these and other reasons.

Perhaps my biggest problem with MMOs is what Gadren terms “living ON the world, but not in it.” This is really a huge issue, and one which nobody seems compelled to address in the developer community. I can certainly understand why… giving players the reigns pretty much means all bets are off when it comes to trying to steer the game the way you originally planned, and months of development could be for naught if someone decided to rally the game’s denizens around an objective that’s totally against the projected path of the game world. However, I don’t think the solution is to simply prevent the player from having *any* impact on the world.

Some games have made strides in giving players more control. Shadowbane, as I recall, allows you to actually siege and destroy cities using player-rallied armies. Presumably you can also rebuild cities, or start one from scratch, otherwise the map would get really empty really fast, but since I’ve not investigated the game, I really can’t say. EVE: Online is another game that has been making great strides towards allowing a player to live in the world, not just on it, but they have one serious thing going against them: your avatar is your ship… you can’t get out and walk around the hundreds of thousands of space stations or land on any of the tens of thousands of planets and moons. There’s no real interaction between you and the (admittedly stunning) game world beyond what you can do with your ship. Now, what you can do with your ship and with other players is indeed quite fascinating in its complexity… you can mine, run cargo, join corporations which compete on a real in-game supply-and-demand-driven market, and shortly after I stopped playing for lack of time and money (and interest), they allowed players to begin owning their own space stations. I’ve not kept up with it, but the dudes at EVE have been busting their butts on this game and it looks to be paying off quite well. The only other issue I have with it, ironically, is its fairly realistic depiction of the sheer vastness of space (I’m usually a stickler for games that implement space in totally incorrect ways). And really, it’s not that I even mind that so much, it’s just that it takes SO DAMN LONG to get anywhere because of it… the transportation systems aren’t built to accommodate the immense size of the game world (which they should, especially if you want me to really believe people actually live in this universe). While this is fine for simulations and whatnot, for a game where you want to be doing things, spending 40 minutes warping from one system to another just so you can drop cargo, spend another 40 minutes in warp, and then do it AGAIN is a bit tedious.

Which brings me to repetitive gameplay. I think the biggest problem with MMO games is that they really don’t actually have much content when it comes to what you can actually DO. Again, I understand the reason for these limitations… player-based content is hard work to come up with and it takes a lot of time to do. However, I don’t think this should be a continuing practice in the future. Players need to have basic mechanisms put into place to not only play the game’s existing content, but also create their own gameplay. I’m not necessarily referring to creating your own models, animations, quests, and whatnot, but more to being able to use existing material for purposes aside from their intended use (I mean, come on… “Cone dancing?”) to create new and original things to do. Mini-games are one way to do this, but I think the intended marker quests in Uru Live were another good example. You could create simple puzzles in Ages you’d already finished by setting up a marker collect quest and distributing it to others. You could, of course, also play marker collect competitions in an Age with others, but I was always more enamored of the possibilities inherent in the Marker Quests. I’ve never enjoyed the monotonous and highly repetitive nature of progressing in most MMOs, which usually involve mining or some other completely mind-numbing task you have to complete several million times before you can actually do much of anything (like monster-killing). And even once you’ve done that, usually all you end up being able to do is kill newer and stronger monsters (or, perhaps even less exciting, mining newer and harder-to-refine minerals…). That hardly strikes me as fun. Quests are great, but we once again run into the problem of just doing the same things everyone else has already done. There’s nothing unique in your experience to really make it stand out against the sea of identical players in the world.

I really think uru Live was a step on the way to breaking out of the MMO mold as it exists right now. Even though the world was largely static (meaning you couldn’t own a shop in D’ni, there was no real dynamic to it), events were always happening, and players were not only able to, but encouraged to take part in the events going on. The thing that set Uru apart from the rest of the MMOs I’ve ever seen is that it had a very strong overarching story, but it also allowed players to participate in and even affect the story as it was being told. It was like being allowed to write yourself into the events of a Myst game, rather than just picking up the pieces later as we usually do. As Gadren also mentioned, the Great Tree Pub, Sharper, the DRC, Phil, and Yeesha were all really fascinating characters, but they weren’t just background figures turning the gears behind the world, they took part in the world itself. They collaborated with actual players to achieve their goals (freeing the Bahro, calibrating the Great Zero, kicking the DRC out of the Cavern, taking the Journey…), and in doing that, they differentiated the experience from player to player. There were sides to take, and battles of words to be fought. And not only that, but actions had consequences. The trouble with this sort of storytelling is that it requires a cast of characters with rehearsed and well-timed speeches and actions, as well as a good ability to improvise should the players deviate from what they’re “supposed” to do.

The closest I’ve ever seen to another MMO with a strong story is probably EVE (though admittedly, I’ve pretty much been ignoring WoW because I value having a life), but EVE’s story is a lot of gears in the background that may, at best, change the dynamic of how the game reacts to players (such as territorial boundaries shifting, or NPC pirate bands raiding different systems over time), and none of it actually takes the players’ actions into account. It’s basically like reading a newspaper… things have already happened, and nothing you did had any impact on them. In fact, most of what goes on in EVE is documented in a newspaper-like webpage. And even if player impact has a larger role in the future, odds are that it’s only the power-users who will be allowed this luxury, because the newbies are going to be out running training missions and mining ass-loads of ore in painfully-slow-moving ships. Uru was perhaps unique in that, as long as you were in the right place at the right time, you could be part of a world-changing event even if it was only your second day in the game. There’s always a bit of luck involved in that kind of storytelling, but that’s how the real world works, and I think that’s a lot more fair than giving all the perks to the power-users.

I think the issue of customization is one that is going to be the hardest to address by far because MMOs have come a long way from Ultima Online, where you could custom-design stuff on your own territory provided you had the cash, because the game’s engine had a lot of presets you could work from and combine to create what you wanted without having to put a lot of work or extra code into the system. With things being fully-realized realtime 3D now, that content barrier is going to be a lot harder to break down. As such, I’m not so much concerned with that one right now, though whatever customizations you can grant players are always appreciated. Uru’s avatars were pretty highly customizable as far as online avvies go, and I think being able to at least customize the colors on your own junk is almost required these days.

I have some thoughts on a possible MMO that’s been evolving from a game concept I originally came up with several years ago, which I think I may like to share just for my own edification and to see what others think, and which I’ll start posting probably tomorrow or early this coming week. For now, I’ll just say that it’s space-based (but not set exclusively in space like EVE is), and addresses a lot of the stuff I’ve brought up here… sometimes better than others. I realize this’ll probably never get published, but it’s fun trying to think up the mechanics of a new game nonetheless. Anyway, more on that later, ’cause this is already insanely long.