Written Well AND Delivered Well

As a colleague pointed out to me at a recent IGDA meeting, game dialog can be written well but not delivered well.  Even if the dialog is out-of-this-world, poor voice-acting, engine limitations, or mismatched animation can hamper the performance.  Many game developers do send the writer to the voiceover session, but how many think it’s important for the writer to interact with the programmers and artists?

Nowadays, game development is a collaborative process.  Large games need teams of specialized workers. As we discussed in our SXSW Interactive session, story design shouldn’t be separated from the other disciplines.  Story can go beyond ‘just the words.’  Instead, a dedicated narrative designer working with programmers, artists, and sound designers will know how to convey story in an interactive experience.  To do this well, a narrative designer should be considered part of a multidisciplinary team.

For more on this topic, please read the article on Gamasutra - “Towards More Meaningful Games: A Multidisciplinary Approach.”

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Bartle versus MMOs, but solutions are in sight

I cannot believe I missed this.  Our new ION buddy Scott Jennings, who’s working on an unannounced MMO, posted a link on his blog to an interview with Bartle.  It spawned a lengthy conversation in comments, with Bartle himself weighing in several times.  Here’s the crux of Bartle’s argument:

1. MMO designers don’t have the interest or ability to improve on the MMO genre in general
2. MMO designers don’t give any reason or meaning to the worlds they create

Commenters immediately went to town on Bartle, condemning him for only being a consultant among other issues.  In the interest of full disclosure, we are actually consulting on an MMO where Bartle is also a consultant.  That said, having both consulted and worked on a number of MMOs, I have to agree that if you’ve worked on more than one, you get an idea of what is innovative and what isn’t.  If you happen to work on more than one during the course of a year, you really get to see what’s going on currently in the world of MMOs.  As for Jennings and Bartle’s assertion that designers don’t have knowledge of game design history, here’s a quick refresher from a game story perspective.

On the second issue, I can’t claim to know what is going on in the minds of all MMO designers, and neither does Bartle.  However, assuming Bartle is correct, starting with a unique vision, then setting up your world and gameplay to convey it is a step in the right direction.  It’s not enough to say “sci fi world” or “fantasy world,” because this type of world could fit into any game of the genre (not for nothing, but we presented a panel on Writing for Fantasy Worlds).  The worlds of Warhammer, Age of Conan, and World of Warcraft all take place in fantasy worlds, but fantasy worlds — and fantasy games — shouldn’t be interchangable.

Hop on over to broken toys and throw your comment into the mix, or drop your comment down below and tell me if you think Bartle’s dim view of MMO innovation is right or wrong, especially when it comes to MMO game story.   

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Create your own time to penis quest!

My friend Paul was driving some conservative out-of-town visitors around Los Angeles one sunny afternoon.  Paul was explaining that the city was actually quite normal, despite what the news media suggests.  Just then, a giant inflatable penis bounced across the road.  Turns out, that is quite normal. 

The Spore creature creation tools have caused quite a humorous conversation on other blogs and the women developer list because of TTP.  TTP or TTC describes how long it takes user generated content (UGC) to yield a penis, hence ”time to penis.”  At ION, we talked about how UGC can connect the player to the game story as well as the player’s story.  If we handed quest creation tools to players in MMOs, what do you think would be the TTP?  Let’s find out!

Create an in-game MMO quest that clearly invokes what TTP is all about.  Let’s assume that the designers have coded restrictions on profanity and the use of certain terms, like penis.  Even with this restriction, you can still write some blue content.  A line from an old MUD stated proudly: “(playername) strokes his long black rod.”   Come up with a short quest or quest premise, and post it in the comments if you’re bold or e-mail me if you’re shy at anne (at) writerscabal.com.  I’ll come up with one myself by next week and we will see whose TTP is faster!

Need inspiration?  You can set your quest in any MMO, but if you want to narrow it down quickly, set it in WoW.  Extra points if you can tie your UGC into the game story that already exists.  Have fun! 

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Whither D&D? Episodic gaming and MMOs

This Saturday I volunteered to teach foster kids about video game design. One of my students came out with something that surprised me. He liked “series games” — those that come out with sequel after sequel. I like ‘em too, but that’s because I consider them episodes, which conveniently ties in with my last post on D&D 4th edition. Last week I wrote about how D&D approaches player types and tone. Today I’ll take another look at how D&D’s 4th edition can come in handy with game design beyond the stand-alone game.

The DM Guide illustrates different types of games:

Campaign Games
According to the guide, campaign games mean what you do matters next time — allegedly. However, if the DM burns out, the story never finishes. I’d have to disagree with point one — sometimes in a campaign game, what you do in one session doesn’t always matter down the road. From a video game perspective, having one DM — or one writer — on a project can often lead to a weakness in one or more areas of the story, because there’s no one to bounce ideas off of. Therein lies one of the reasons for the Writers Cabal!

Episodic Games
The DM Guide indicates that episodic games don’t fit into a larger story, leading to a sense of purposelessness (fun word!). I have to disagree, and my TV roots will start to show. Episodic stories can take place in a campaign world and/or with the same characters. In these cases, the stories will be satisfying, because each adventure will (hopefully) lead to a satisfying conclusion, and they can all eventually lead into a larger campaign. Stephen King, for example, wrote many disconnected stories. Now — decades later — he realizes he can tie them all together with a big good vs. evil storyline. Furthermore, if your campaign story ends up having a lame or fizzled ending, you will at least be able to say, “Oh, and this one time, I did this!” The best stories are made up of a bunch of smaller ones.

Ongoing/One-shot Games
Ongoing games can either be episodic or campaign oriented. Ongoing games with the same group of people can encourage cooperation, while one-shot games encourage exposure to different types of player types. These concerns tie in more directly with multiplayer games, so…

D&D 4th edition demonstrates influence from certain MMOs. One commenter on the Gamasutra article noted that the “Healing surges” mechanic of 4th edition seemed similar to the rate of recovery popular in MMOs. In general, 4th edition definitely wants to take advantage of the online space as much as possible, even making it easier to run D&D games online. Do you think this trend will be good or bad for D&D?  Personally, if I’m going to play a game online, I might as well do so with my gaming group in an MMO. That said, maybe I could run a D&D game online that I wouldn’t want to do in person. Who’d be interested in that?

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D&D — the only place for moral ambiguity?

I was asked earlier this week on which games have influenced me as a writer and designer, so I thought I’d draw attention to the granddaddy of it all, Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition.  In fact, maybe D&D can still influence the game industry for the better.  How do you approach the tone and feel of your game?  What can you do above and beyond creating fun gameplay?  The DM Guide asks the DM to take into account the DM or game style, usually somewhere between two perceived extremes.  Here are a few of them and what they could mean for video games.

Gritty or Cinematic
In this sense, gritty refers to realism and consequences, while cinematic implies an action movie.  Even with these explanations, the two terms represent a false dichotomy.  “Realism” is pretty darn boring — you think reality television is entertaining because it’s real?  No, it’s entertaining because they take artistic license and take pains to heighten the drama.  Conversely, a gritty gunshot wound is actually pretty boring if it takes you 5 hours to painstakingly operate on it.  The best gritty parts are inherently cinematic.  Maybe the intended dichotomy here was serious vs. entertaining, but Sande would fight you to the death if you said serious games could not or should not put entertainment or fun at the top of their to do list. 

Silly or Serious
Lighthearted or Intense
I’m glad they brought up these dichotomies and noted you’d probably end up somewhere along the scale.  I’ve seen a lot of video games that are just unenduringly serious.  Comic relief will help wonders, no matter how important saving the world is.

General or Thematic
This dichotomy interested me especially.  What exactly is a general game?  One that meanders with no reason?  Have you seen any examples of “general” video games?  When creating a game with a story, whether emergent story or narrative, consider your theme, because you will probably end up with one or several whether you realize it or not.  While what is theme could be a topic of an entire post, I’m always amused by point number 10 on this blog.  Best theme of a game I’ve worked on?  The Witcher: ”There is no good or evil, just decisions and consequences.”

Morally ambiguous or heroic
Speaking of good and evil…  Personally, I love morally ambiguous choices.  I love having choices at all in video games.  But by the same token, many people have insisted they like playing heroic characters, who often have a clear right and wrong.  Check out the responses to my post on unlikely heroes for some opinions on the hero.  Can you feel heroic if you made the right choice but you didn’t save the world, or saved the world, but made a horrible choice?  Is there room for more moral ambiguity in computer games?

So now you’ve got an idea of player types, themes or approaches to your games.  What can D&D tell you about telling the game story?  I’m not done yet — see you next week!

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What D&D teaches about game design

A reader asked a question this week: which games have influenced us as game writers?  As luck would have it, one of my major influences just came out with a new edition this week: Dungeons & Dragons.  Just opening up the Dungeon Master’s Handbook gives you a quick overview of infos you need in game design — whether pen and paper or MMOs.

Right at the beginning, the author encourages you, the DM, to identify the types of player motivations, many of which map to Bartle’s 4 types and beyond for MUDs and MMOs.

Actor — The person who likes to roleplay.  I’d say that’s a cross between the explorer and socializer archetype from MMOs.  Agree, disagree? 

Explorer — Just like the explorer archetype

Instigator — Likes to make things happen.  Woosh, have I been that on occasion.  I’d say this type of player most likely aligns with the architect archetype.  Instigator overlaps with killer, unfortunately.  Also socializer, if this person is a natural leader. 

Power Gamer — Achiever

Slayer — Killer or Achiever

Storyteller — The player who likes to find out what happens.  We like to think the people who care about story in games are a subset of the explorer archetype. 

Thinker — These players like to solve puzzles and strategize.  You could argue it’s a subset of the achiever type, but I believe the thinker is happy just to solve puzzles and is not doing it for phat loot.  I would say these types are most likely explorers, who want a full understanding of the game system.  It’s a bit of a stretch, though.  Strategizer — that must be an archetype, if it doesn’t exist already.

Watcher — This person is along for the ride.  Pure socializer

What’s missing?  I noticed the killer archetype seems somewhat under-represented.  My friend quite kindly points out that the catass gamer, who just burns through content as quickly as possible, is not represented either.   These types are like achievers on crack.  I’m not sure these types can exist in regular D&D.

Once you have all these player types in mind, though, you will need to avoid the 4 misuses of Bartle’s Four.  What other wisdom is buried in D&D?  Stay tuned…

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More story in the design: what you missed at ION 08

A few weeks ago we spoke at the ION Game Conference on Story vs. Story: Redefining Narrative and Player Engagement in MMOs. As shocking as it may seem, we actually weren’t the only ones talking about story and MMOs. Think story in MMOs is only for writers? Here’s what you may have missed.

BlackStar Designer Reinhart On Design Doc Alternatives
Reinhart uses a few tricks of the writing trade to make your game concepts more palatable to those who don’t like to read massive design docs. Check out the comments on this article.

Microsoft’s Hanna On The Fight For Shadowrun Audience
What I didn’t see in this article is how the entire game story was thrown out right around E3, so they had to rebuild it from scratch and in a hurry. Turns out you really do need to get buy-in from your fanbase on game story early and often. Who knew? Oh, we did

Joe Ludwig on Pirates of the Burning Sea
Highlighted some of the interesting bits about Pirates of the Burning Sea — including an emphasis on storytelling for single players. How cunning! We almost forgive them for sharing our time slot at the conference.

A five year forecast for MMOs
Five years in the future you will find Scott Jennings and Damion Schubert. Who knew? Presentation covered business models and trends, but one take-home can be applied to storytelling: embrace your genre and learn to love the niche. Powerpoint!

I predict there will be increasing efforts to incorporate quality story into MMOs, because we’ve already seen that trend on published and up-coming MMOs. What do you predict for the future of MMOs and storytelling?

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Game story vs. player story… And the winner is?

Last Thursday at the ION Game Conference, we gathered for the ultimate showdown… internal game story vs. emergent player story. The results may not be what you think. Sam Lewis, Lead Designer at Cartoon Network; Katie Postma, Community Manager at FireSky (STARGATE WORLDS), and Sande Chen of Writers Cabal debated the topic, with yours truly doing her level best to moderate. In attendance we had a number of game designers interested in expanding their ability to combine game story and player engagement. Here’s how it all went down.

Story vs. Story: Redefining Narrative and Player Engagement in MMOs

Internal game story or narrative in MMOs provides context and meaning for player actions, while the emergent story and social fun engages players and tends to make MMOs sticky. That said, many at ION talked about using a diversity of methods to engage players and keep them around. Can game story be far behind? We talked about internal game narrative, emergent story, and ways to combine them both.

Sam Lewis pointed out that the worst kinds of game stories get in the way of achievement. Few enjoy hearing about a character’s life story when they want to kill the big bad. It’s important when writing and designing to keep in mind all player types, and not force anyone down one particular path. For example, story-lovers tend to be explorers — you wouldn’t necessarily want to make your game all about exploring, story or otherwise. Of course, this ties back in with designing with diversity in mind.

Sande pointed out that you can make the game story important. If hearing a character’s back story isn’t important, it probably shouldn’t be there to begin with. However, you can create systems to make story important, like lore badges in-game, or through forum status out of game.

Katie added how even though STARGATE WORLDS would draw a lot of fans of the Stargate world and story, 60% of its players would not be familiar with this world. The designers would be attempting to tell story other ways, like through the names of debuffs, for example.

Overall, the design ideas for making the internal narrative more important and more relevant to players include:

• Lore badges
• Link story through gifts between players
• Use of instances: The changes players can effect in instances as opposed to the persistent world make them ripe for story
• Animations in the persistent world, though these would be reset for each player
• See progression of story on website, perhaps through earning cash like on Club Penguin
• Catch the disease bug. Have a story-related effect spread throughout the game

The stories people play
Katie recounted what players talk about when playing MMOs. Hard-core raiders will share how they got their exalted reputation. A roleplayer in her casual guild would give a play-by-play of what he was doing fully in character.

Sam pointed out emote systems worked well in creating player story. He brought up the cantina crawl in STAR WARS GALAXIES, where players could go from cantina to cantina and would put on performances in each one. The biggest problem Sam had with MMOs from both a story and gameplay perspective involved the low stakes — if player makes a mistake, well, it’s no big deal. However, in EVERQUEST, the corpse run became one of the most talked-about features, because if the players didn’t get to their corpses in time, they lost everything.

Where game story and player story meet
Sam Lewis worked on STAR WARS GALAXIES, which, while brilliant in many ways, had some flaws. On the one hand, it didn’t capture the game story/world of Star Wars well enough for most players. On the other hand, because initially it was so hard to become a Jedi, it encouraged players to form entire guilds around helping characters become Jedis.

Katie pointed out that in WoW, most of her knowledge of lore came from another player. How, then, can we use the social systems that make MMOs great to tell the internal story, and vice versa? Check out these ideas that came up:

• Before launch, put some story clues onto the website and community boards that will get everyone commenting and speculating
• Allow user-generated content, such as tools to create missions in game
• Use systems like the cantina bands and tie them into the story
• Make it possible for players to be the first to discover something story/game-related, then give them public reward and recognition
• Let players show their story through motion capture and share it with others

At the end, each person offered one tip developers can implement right now to combine player story and game story on their MMOs.

• Let the worlds you build tell the story and create curiosity, rather than rely on dialog to convey it
• Bring in writers early to integrate them into the design and story-building process
• Make User-generated content available at launch and make sure your guild tools are robust at launch

Overall, this panel was chock full of good content — and I didn’t even get into the great question and answer period. I quickly discovered taking notes and moderating at the same time was a bit of a challenge, so if you were there, let me know if I missed anything key. What other ideas do you have for telling great game story, helping players tell their own stories, or helping players tell game story?

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