Editorial: What Do they Know, They’re Just the Writer!

By Jeffrey Philipp | July 6, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials | Tags: Editorials, Game Design, Writing

Hey everyone, I’m new here. I hope you didn’t have anything important to do for the next ten minutes or so, cause I’m going to go out on a bit of a rant.

For those who need to be somewhere shortly and want to know if they can safely ignore this, I’m going to try and work through why it seems that MMO developers these days don’t really put much thought into the writing that goes into their games.

Now to be clear, I’m not talking specifically about the words that pop up on screen as a quest description or something, as sometimes those can be downright inspired, but rather the overarching motivation for our characters to do anything at all.

First things first: I was thinking I’d go over some of the reasons why I feel that this is important, and the first reason is not likely to surprise anyone. The first reason is almost purely practical, in that without some sort of narrative in this current state of MMO gaming, players simply won’t know what to do, and this problem is only getting worse as worlds continue to get larger and games more complex.

Simply put, the narrative of the game as separate from the individual quest texts is what allows your players to get a glimpse of what it is they are supposed to do next.

I’m sure we’ve all had that moment when playing certain games, where we turn in a quest and find suddenly that we don’t have any more in our quest log, and then we have to stand there dumbfounded for a few minutes trying to figure out what exactly the best course of action is, before you decide to go back to some area you’ve cleared and find out there was a whole other bunch of quests that opened up when you leveled last.

I’m likely going to be coming back to the whole “Living for the next quest” mentality at some point, but for now let’s move on.

My second thought on why this is important is that when there is such production value and quality behind most games these days, then I find out that there isn’t much behind the plot I personally find it to be kind of jarring. Essentially I’m saying that it breaks the immersion of the game at the meta level when you actually take a step back from the keyboard and think about what you spend your time doing.

I found that this wasn’t so bad when it happened with EverQuest, because there was just so much new to experience and do, the whole situation of the game being online was something to explore and was more or less the raison d’etre that filled in for the characters motivations.

The sad thing is that I find these days, things have not improved overly much. Granted with their new expansion World of Warcraft is doing a much better job of this, but in the first two packs I found myself running around killing things because people with magical exclamation marks told me to do so, and it all really seemed like it was for it’s own sake until the whole Lich King expansion. And that’s simply the exception to the rule.

EverQuest 2, City of Heroes, Warhammer Online. All these games have you running around doing a huge number of tasks for various quest givers, but it really is all for it’s own sake and you don’t feel like you’re really playing a character in a world, but rather are checking things off on a list in order to get to the next shiny object.

And the final reason, and it is the last one I promise, is that I feel that games can and should be treated artfully; even though Paul Barnett will disagree with me, I consider that games should require the same level of creative brilliance than any other form of media, this one simpy happens to be interactive.

Now before anyone gets too up in arms about that, I’m not saying that video games should be on display next to Rembrandts (though there are a few that I think would be fitting), but rather that there are certain aspects of creating games that carry very similar aspects to other forms of art and I think that we as gamers should not be willing to accept less from a game than we would from a film or book simply because it carries the title of “game”.

Now that I’ve gotten the pretentious “GAMEZ R AERT” diatribe out of my system I thought we might spend some time considering what can be done, or perhaps is already being done about getting players more involved with the game. Clearly the obvious solution is to get more people writing, but if there are any software people out there they’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that sounds a lot like the “Mythical Man Month.”

This to me, sounds like one of those situations where just throwing more money or people at the problem is not really all that likely to solve it, rather I think that this is the sort of situation that requires one to consider this differently than it has been up to this point. Unfortunately what that means is that there might be some great difficulties making the needed changes to existing games, not for lack of trying, but for the fact that it requires the current game flow to change, which is already quite entrenched and highly unlikely to move much no matter what sort of weight you throw at it.

To put my personal proposal into words it would sound something like this. What I believe needs to happen, is for a writer to be one of the first people to come onto a development team and receive more than simple lip service when he makes suggestions.

Also this writer needs to write, that’s what they need to be good at and what they should be doing constantly. Something to note is that they should not only be writing the text that appears on the screen but they should also take a very active role in deciding what should be considered as far as content goes.

I honestly think that something that seems like it happens far too often is some designers will have great mechanic and art ideas and then they bring the largely finished encounter to someone and say, “Justify this please”, and that leaves things feeling a little disjointed to me.

I honestly think that this simple concept could probably have some fairly far reaching effects as the games feel more like a consistent world while still retaining differentiation in zones rather than the way we have it today where you can see yourself crossing a line and everything changes to another persons vision entirely. Essentially if you want the long and short of it, I think that writers for games have been neglected for far too long and that’s a shame, because I think everything would improve by such a large margin if they were just taken a little more seriously during the design phase.

So that is what I think might be useful in improving the state of writing in MMOs, but if you want to hear my opinion on how you could take it one farther then I’ll tell you. All right, you asked for it though. I personally would love to see a game come out where the writers would come in and check to see what actions the players have been taking and actively write to what the players are causing to happen in the world.

I know this is sitting in more of the realm of pipe dream at the moment, but I can’t imagine how epic it would feel to know that your actions could actually truly have an effect on the direction that the story takes. Anyway, like I said, a guy can dream, can’t he?

I sure hope that at least someone made it through all that, and if you did thanks for reading, and you’re one of my new best friends. I also just want to say that I’m glad to be joining such a fine team, and hope that I can continue to rant about design decisions to you for a long time to come.

Until next time!