The Importance of (the Other Guy s) Storytelling

The Importance of (the Other Guy's) Storytelling

This is another one of those sections that would require its own 350-page book to really define, explain, and provide advice on how to do it correctly. That isn't possible here. What we can do is give you some general guidelines on what to avoid and a few examples to illustrate those points. Anything deeper is going to have to wait for another time and another book.

At the 2002 Game Developer's Conference, an audience member asked the panel on "Building the Next-Generation PW" how he, as a writer, could ensure the integrity of his story in a PW. The reply came from panel member Raph Koster, the creative director on Star Wars Galaxies and former lead designer of UO : "Get over yourselves; the rest of the world is coming. Okay? People value self-expression. Is 'story' going to go away? No. Is careful crafting going to go away? No. Are the professionals engaged in that going to go away? No. Well, except that IP ”the concept of intellectual property ”may, but that's a whole other side discussion. The thing is that people want to express themselves and they don't really care that 99% of everything is crap, because they are positive that the 1% they made isn't. Okay? And fundamentally, they get ecstatic as soon as five people see it, right?"

This illustrates just one of the habits picked up from the designers of standalone games : the need to tell a linear story. To put it another way, linear stories can be a good thing in a standalone game, but it is never a good idea in an online game, if that's all you have. There is also the issue of self-expression, which Raph nailed in his response and which many online designers ignore or forget.

Designers also have the mistaken impression that they have to tell a story and guide the ignorant and silly player through it step by step to a logical conclusion. Few players want a linear story, and even fewer of them want you, as the designer, to tell the entire story; what they want you to do is give them an environment within which to act: set the stage, provide the props, speak the first paragraph, and then sit back and watch while they provide the middle and end of the tale.

In other words, players are there to create their own legends and tell their own stories, both as individuals and as part of group ; they are there to interact with the world, not solely to have the world act upon them. It doesn't make a lot of sense to spend inordinate amounts of time and resources building tools to allow the designers to tell an ongoing but hermetic story after launch, when what many players want are the tools to create and tell their own stories.

Note that providing a background story, the history of events, politics, diplomacy , and so on in your world to date is an absolute must, if only to assist the player in suspending disbelief and deriving more entertainment value from your game. There is also nothing wrong with providing ongoing events and situations that the players can pick up on and run with. This involves some work and resources on your end, but can be hugely popular with the players, provided they are " winnable ." Don't fall into the trap of setting up a huge scenario with only one possible outcome, regardless of player actions, such as co-author Jessica Mulligan did with the Trinsic city siege in UO in 1999. The players don't like them and, more importantly, they find ways to block that one possible outcome, requiring you to use force majeure to settle the issue. ^[8] This leaves an incredibly bad taste in the mouths of the players.

^[8] In our own defense, my team and I were basically lied to by a programmer on the UO live team when we designed for separate outcome possibilities of the Trinsic siege ”that is, the players successfully defended the town or they didn't. If they were successful, certain conditions and events would not happen on that shard. However, we were told by the UO programmer that this wasn't possible, so we had to settle for the lesser design of a forced ending.

About one week after the conclusion of the event on all shards, at an online services team post-mortem of the event and in the midst of being roundly criticized for the way it was conducted , I noted what we had been told by the programmer, who was sitting right there. His somewhat embarrassed response was, "Oh, was that what you meant ?" It irks me no end that, to this day, the Trinsic scenario is used as the exemplar of bad online game story event design. ”Jessica Mulligan

Mostly, though, the players want to create their own fun and stories within your world, to the extent that your interface and player-usable tools such as guild and teaming mechanisms allow. For the most part, this involves situations that let them change the face or nature of the game world, such as a war with another team that allows them to control territory or banding together to rid the area of a particularly nasty creature that you have introduced and they have encountered .

However, the most compelling kind of content in your game is likely to be player-created stories and situations that don't spring from a plot you provide and which also change the game world in some fashion. An example of this might be two members of separate guilds getting "married" in the game, thus ending a faction war that had made the area dangerous for all players to move around in without getting killed ; or players banding together to hunt down and eliminate PKs from a game, as the KOP guild did on UO's Pacific shard ("shard" is UO 's term for a game world iteration); or even just a number of players or teams pooling their resources to buy a large castle they can place on the terrain and use as a base.

The takeaway from this section should be simple: No matter what tools you want for yourself to tell stories to the players, also provide tools to allow players to create and tell their own stories and provide their own amusement . You must be flexible and willing to change your game and story to take into account the actions of the players over time. "Interactive" should refer not only to the players acting within the context that the designers create, but also to the designers then reacting to the players' activities.

An excellent resource to learn more about this is Raph Koster's personal web site at www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/index.html. Read his articles under the sections titled "Essays" and "Snippets." They are well worth the time.