From an event at USC, a GameSpy report on the Interactive Age Conference includes some coverage of storytelling and player control in online games.
Personal Space: Who Controls the Story
Massively multiplayer RPG game designers discuss story creation and how they want to impact the player.
When creating a game, who should control the story? Should it be the game designer, or should players be given the freedom to create the story. This was the key question behind several talks at the second day of the Entertainment for the Interactive Age conference at the University of Southern California. As Geoffrey Zatkin, a Senior Game Designer for EverQuest, put it, the "more authorship you give the player, the less designers can narrate. You must determine where you want to set the bar."
Zatkin's talk revolved around the concept of self-authorship, where the participants create the story. For instance, in a chat room, the conversations people hold in the room determines its character and their enjoyment of that space. Permitting self-authorship in a game "shares some part of the creation process with the player and it's a collaboration between the designer and the player."
Although games like Deus Ex allow you "to decide how to get through the story, the design is limited by how much you are allowed to do." Games in which the player controls a party of characters makes creating stories easier because overcomes is that fact that it is "hard to have a relationship when there is no one to have a relationship with". However, Zatkin feels the "true test of self-authorship" is the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG).
EverQuest
In those games, the "player is not the center of the universe, merely a participant in it and everyone has to be a member of the universe with about equal priority." This is challenging, as you are "not designing the game around the actions or what you think will happen with one person," unlike a single-player game, which tends to have a main character. Thus, the purpose of the designer of a MMORPG is to create the framework--basically a "huge, chat room world"--although Zatkin believes that the type of "world is basically irrelevant."
"What keeps them there is interacting with other people when they can start roleplaying to make their own stories." Because they are creating the stories themselves, the players automatically become emotionally attached to their characters and the world they live in. Another key idea Zelkin mentioned is that the game's design should permit people to show off their stories or interact with them as "very few people create stories just for themselves, the majority want to share it or develop them."
Matthew Ford, Producer for Asheron's Call at Microsoft, continued this theme as he discussed "roleplaying as a form of self-authorship." He felt that acceptance of roleplaying as a form of expression has grown out of interactive and improvisational theatre, Dungeons & Dragons--a kind of improvisational theatre where you "think about your setting and work within it"--and game conventions and Renaissance fairs. He felt using "thee's and thou's" was unnecessary for roleplaying in the fantasy genre as long as player's stayed in character, limiting their knowledge to that which the character would have.
He estimated that only 5% of Asheron's Call's players were dedicated roleplayers, but felt that "a little goes a long way" as "being around a roleplayer, even if you are not one yourself, is kind of entertaining and you find yourself being drawn into it. You'll start responding in character and [this will] draw you out." Other players, however, were more interested in building their character's statistics or feeling contemptuous towards the roleplayers. Basically, "whatever works, as long as they are customers and it makes them happy."
One unique feature of Asheron's Call is the monthly world-shaping events that guide the overall story of the game. The current plot has centered on the shadow forces trying to escape and free the evil Bael'Zharon. These events are normally designed 6-8 weeks prior to when it happens and the interests of the fans, such as expressed on the message boards, play an important part in these designs. For instance, he indicated that the next major plot would revolve around the Virindi race.
He also noted that players really enjoyed the superficial changes that accompanied these events, like the sky color (blood red for one of the events), seasonal changes in leaf color, etc. because it affects all players and "they want something they can enjoy." To involve more people in the epic events, they purposely design them with a "pyramid-style organization so you feel you contribute even if not the hero." This inclusion in the large events facilitates the player's ability to develop their personal story and be part of the world.
Also speaking at the conference was the eloquent Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) on the topic of the space in which the story is told. The two ends of the spectrum are impositional space, where the game designer basically imposes their story, characters or desired behaviours on the player, and expressive space, where the designer provides the tools for the players to express themselves. In both cases, the developers still provide the setting through the artwork, however, who controls the stories are very different. Koster doesn't "think one is better than the other. I'm just glad I created the space," and doesn't "care who the hell wrote" the stories, be it the designer or player.
This contrasted with the view of Tim Schafer, the creator of adventure games like Grim Fandago, who "wants to sit back and experience it" finding that "sometimes picking a save game name is enough expression for me." Unlike the MMORPG model, he "tries to impose story and make it more interactive as opposed to starting with an interactive world and adding a story."
Asheron's Call
Ken Lobb of Nintendo then proclaimed boldly "we don't really care about storytelling." Instead, he explained that gameplay, not art, is what makes Nintendo fun and has been the basic design philosophy from the days of Donkey Kong to the forthcoming GameCube games. The steps their games normally take are prototyping the game controls, adding a set of "gimmicks" or challenges and balancing where they should be learned in the game, and then finally handing it off to the artists to create the world.
Warren Spector of ION Storm also entered this discussion feeling there was a third type of space, so-called possibility space. His goal with Deus Ex was to create a "dialogue between an author and an audience, where the audience could actually drive the creation." The "plot belonged to me, but between plot points players had 'complete' control of the minute-to-minute gameplay." Thus, he was "giving the player the opportunity to express him or herself in whatever way is meaningful to him and her, not in ways that are meaningful to me, the creator of the game."
During a discussion session, an audience member questioned Geoffrey Zatkin about the recent clamping down by Verant on the sale of EverQuest characters and items at sites like eBay. Zatkin responded that the company "doesn't like characters being sold because it ruins the player experience. And we're about selling the game experience." He indicated that the player character levels were designed so that the player continually learns how to master the new skills as they gain levels. Thus, he felt that someone buying a higher level character would be unprepared to play such a character and gave an example in which a kid that had received a 50th level promptly ended up at 37th level because of many deaths. He quickly became a pariah as people that were depending on him in this community-oriented game were getting hurt as well.
The other major reason was that all these sales were creating excessive customer service issues like item sale scams, and the inability of people that had purchased high-level characters to use them. He did concede that if they could find a secure way that would mitigate these customer service issues, they would possibly allow it. In contrast, although these sales are clearly "not supported, not legal, against the terms of service, and [they] could choose to enforce" them, Ford explained that Asheron's Call has so far had a "laissez faire" attitude towards this practice.
Posted by justin at October 21, 2002 06:00 PM