Story as Reward

“We don’t play MMOs for a story!”

This is something I’ve heard more than once, but it never quite rings true.  After all, stories are the engine behind all RPGs — can you imagine a Dungeons & Dragons without a story?  Fallout?  Chrono Trigger?  Final Fantasy?   Without a story, these games are simply elaborate combat simulators — something I feel a segment of the MMO playerbase has accepted as standard in their games.  After all, who reads the quest text?  Just go collect your ten foozles, kill your ten rats, and chase numbers, baby!

Except that even in MMOs, story is not dead — it’s just in remission.  Quest text boxes are one of the worst inventions of the modern MMO, because they’ve trained us to dismiss any story as irrelevant, because the quests are quick, the background story easily skippable, and there are approximately a hundred thousand of them in each game we play.  If I had a nickel for every time I heard a gamer promise that with THIS character, he or she was going to read ALL the quest text and really experience the lore of the game, then I could retire and make my own MMO.

But although the quest text box may have caused great harm to MMO storytelling, we’re starting to see a revival of desire and design that’s bringing us back to one of the true roots of RPGs.  Guild Wars 2, Cataclysm, The Secret World, The Old Republic, even Final Fantasy XIV — these games are placing a higher emphasis on storytelling than we’ve seen lately, and a lot of it’s taking place outside of the dreaded quest text box.  I, for one, am nothing short of delighted to see an effort made in this area.  I don’t want to be playing mere combat simulators; I want context, a hero’s journey, plot twists and real connections with the game world.

I took a class on teaching principles a few years back, and we spent a lot of time learning how storytelling is an invaluable tool for communicating, keeping an audience’s interests and teaching an important point.  Storytelling is one of the most universal of human activities — throughout all time, we have told and listened to stories, and while the medium has grown to include TV and books and computers, we’re still doing the same thing they did around campfires in antiquity.  Story captivates, it involves, it stimulates the imagination.  MMOs are notorious for dimming the imaginative part of the brain when you’re engaging in huge long grinds, so I think it’s worthwhile to fight back against this trend.

The way I look at it is that in most games I’ve ever played, story is part of the intangible reward of the game.  The better you are at a game, the more time you put in, the more story you’re fed as a result.  Just like loot, XP and titles, story is an important reward, all the more so because you’ve put in effort to access it.  Let’s look at two ways devs use story as a reward:

1. Structured Story

In this scheme, the devs are the storytellers and we are the audience — an audience who actively participates in the story, but still.  By accomplishing tasks in the game and achieving certain milestones, we are treated to new chapters of our saga and the tale of the world and people around us.

If you ever played an adventure game — you know, the “collect items, combine them in silly ways to solve puzzles” games — then you know how important story is as a reward.  I mean, story IS the reward in those games.  It’s certainly not the fun of trying to solve puzzles or pixel-hunting for hidden items.  You tackle the obstacles of tricky conversations and puzzles in order to advance the story and see where it’s going.  Story becomes a powerful motivator as a result, which is why those games placed such a great emphasis on an interesting and memorable yarn.

2. Tools Given to Make a Story

Alternatively, devs can reward players with tools to make their own stories.  Now, I’m probably not going to get Minecraft no matter how many of my friends and fellow bloggers love on this game, mostly because I don’t have time for a potential addiction, and because while I see potential, I’m not really feeling tempted.  Still, the Minecraft mania serves to illustrate just how much players love — and have missed — the ability to mold the world around them, to use tools to make their own story, and to be given freedom (within a grander structure) to forge their own path.

Likewise, MMOs can contain tools that players use to make their own stories.  We see this a lot in LOTRO, because there are a lot of places, items and player abilities (such as emotes and the music system) that allow roleplayers and even solitary adventurers from customizing their game experience and tell a new story that wasn’t created by a dev team somewhere else.

If you’ve ever seen kids play, most of the time what they’re really doing is telling a story with their toys.  Two cars racing for the prize; a dollhouse where a family lives and interacts; opposing armies of action figures at war with the fate of the world in the balance.  As much as kids love being told stories, they want the tools to make them as well — and I don’t think this desire goes away for adults.

Anyway, stories are important, even if there’s a movement to diminish or abolish them.  Some things are worth fighting for, and stories in MMOs are definitely one of those things.

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• Posted in: General