The Story of Story

Symbols of atmosphere react with “adjacent” symbols, but in a non-linear fashion. Linearity can be enforced (for example, by making characters “run a gauntlet”), but this is itself an expression of atmosphere. Non-linearity is good for making statements, but bad for advancing arguments. Is there some other way that symbolism can be introduced such that it can be structured in a linear (and therefore more contributory) fashion?

Narrative

The way that both film and computer games handle this is through narrative. Film is the more structured: The scenes in a screenplay link causally to tell a story (generally in a classic, three-act form). Syd Field’s famous analysis ¹ of script form puts act I at pages 1–30, act II at pages 30–90, and act III at pages 90–120. Around pages 10–15 will be an inciting incident that knocks the initially stable situation out of balance; around pages 25–27 will be a big event that gives the protagonist a goal; around page 60 will be a pinch point where the protagonist becomes fully committed; around pages 85–90 will be a crisis point where all seems lost; the resulting showdown lasts until about page 115, then the story wraps up with a realization section where the audience can see how events have grown the

protagonist as a person. The position of the later events can slip a little, but many professional screenplay readers really will look at pages 25–27 and reject a script if it doesn’t have a big event there.

Virtual worlds don’t—can’t—have this degree of narrative control, because players don’t follow scripts. However, some causality can be introduced, and it can be done in such a way as to stimulate emotional or other involvement in players. It is important to realize that virtual worlds do not have, nor ever can they have, narrative in the conventional sense. They’re places. Players can act out narratives of their own within them, but the virtual worlds can’t impose a three-act structure or anything like it. Nevertheless, they can do some things. Here’s their full narrative spectrum:

• Non-fiction. Changes are introduced without any explanation. One day a new area, spell, class, or weapon is available that wasn’t available yesterday. There’s no explanation, it just happens. This may be in response to player suggestions or complaints, or it may have been planned from the beginning but omitted so that the virtual world could meet its launch date—whatever. The change is made with no supporting context, therefore any meaning that players read into it can only be intrinsic to it. “Oh, there’s a new class of bards. They must want to give role-players more choice.”

• Backstory arcs. These are narrative tricks intended to explain a virtual world’s prehistory, and are the mainstay of regular computer games. The better worlds use them to add richness and depth, explaining why things are as they are; the worse ones retro-fit a backstory to make illogical gameplay features seem logical. If a virtual world’s initial configuration is constructed to echo events of a fictional past, this can be a great aid to immersion. When it’s to erect some façade to justify why

characters don’t die, or why magic-users can’t wield swords, or why artifacts exist that no one can make, that’s less satisfactory. The backstory should come first, not second. Unfortunately, so many virtual worlds now use the retro-fit approach that players are growing accustomed to it. This means that backstory is often merely a designer’s commentary on their creation, rather than an inherent part of it.

• Idea arcs. With these, events occur that give players things to do, but they are not related to any central theme. Individual mini-dramas may be played out by the eruption of a volcano, an invasion by teeming hordes of monsters, a failure of the grain harvest, or whatever, but the events that trigger them are not part of any central narrative. Designers can make statements through these—for example, about the transience of all things or about their own ambivalent feelings concerning their powers—but these would be inserted as part of the wider work, rather than as threads in a narrative.

• Story arcs. These consist of interlinked series of events. The volcano erupts because the dwarfs dug too deep in their search for gold. The disaster awakens the ancient, half-remembered demi-god who once ruled all, but who was defeated in a cataclysmic battle and sealed beneath the sacred mountain. Through the causality of the events, the designer is making a point about the consequences of unmitigated greed. Unfortunately, the players have no say whatsoever in it: The drama unfolds whether they like it or not; they must react to the change in circumstances that the unfolding events dictate, but they can’t affect even the timing of what follows: A monthly patch is a monthly patch.

• Responsive arcs. Here, the designer changes the narrative in response to players’ reactions, much as a table-top referee might. For large-scale virtual worlds with multiple shards, this is very expensive as individual

shards can have divergent narratives ². Nevertheless, it is the strongest narrative form available to virtual world designers: It allows them to enter into a dialog with the body of players, and if the trust is there, it allows for expression on both sides ³.

• 360 degree arcs. There is a narrative path, but it’s circular. Players are involved in a perpetual struggle, sometimes making gains and sometimes making losses, but never able to achieve final victory or defeat. They’re locked into a story that never changes. Whatever the designer may be trying to say with this technique, the players will eventually conclude that the struggle is meaningless. If that’s how newbies see it too, the virtual world could end up in trouble.

• Player arcs. The virtual world is richly featured enough that players themselves are empowered to create personal narratives through their own ongoing actions. Designers get to give them the tools and the space in which to do this, but they don’t affect the narrative itself directly. Thus, although they can make statements by what they give the players to work with, they can’t tie these into a story; that’s for the players to do.

From this we can see that it is possible for virtual world designers to construct a narrative, but there are a number of barriers. Players don’t like being treated like ants whose nest is being stirred up for the amusement of some kid with a long stick. If a volcano is set to erupt every once in a while pseudo-randomly, that’s one thing; if it’s set to erupt because the live team say so, that’s another thing altogether. The same event

begs different interpretations based on the perceived intent of its creator. It’s not enough for the designer to say that the event is what matters and it’s for players to construct their own meaning from it. Players (through their characters) are directly affected by the event, and their understanding of it is heavily moderated by the notion of deliberateness.

Say I walked into an art gallery containing a paint gun installation. I know the paint gun will shoot at random intervals, and I can construct some statement about the nature of risk from that. If I walk in front of it and get hit, well, that’s going to make me ponder on it some more. If, however, I walk in front of it and the artist presses a button that makes it shoot me, the conditions from which I construct my meaning are different. Yes, I get hit by the paint gun in both cases, and yes, the artist set up the paint gun the same way both times. However, being hit at random is not the same as being hit deliberately.

So it is with virtual worlds. Imposed storylines mean reduced freedom. Through narrative, designers can explore important issues; however, by forcing players to participate in those narratives the issues change.

Story elements can be added in reaction to what players do. For example, if a bunch of characters mine deep into a mountain they could encounter a colony of dwarfs or dark elves or crystalloids. It’s hard to predict in advance when (if ever) players would dig deep into a particular mountain, and harder to list all the other possible things they may do that could reasonably lead to new content; for these reasons, it’s therefore not usually worth hard-coding bespoke content into a virtual world. However, it may be worth building a pool of content that can be released when appropriate to advance players’ stories. These also can be used by the live team to spice up a waning incarnation of a virtual world, for example—when some überguild is enforcing a dreary

status quo.

The main difficulty with this form of interactive content provision is that many players resent the fact that there’s someone pulling the strings and will level accusations of favoritism or victimization. “Hey, I dug a hole in this mountain over here, how come you didn’t give me any dwarfs?” Players like to think that the world is fair; interference by the live team in response to the reactions of individual players is unfair. Basically, they trust the code to be impartial but they don’t trust the live team to be so (except in very refined worlds). The new content inevitably becomes symbolic of the management’s disregard for players, regardless of whether it has some other, greater interpretation.

I’ve discussed narrative thus far on the global scale. Where narrative most often occurs is on the local scale, primarily through quests. In these, players as individuals are targeted by the narrative, rather than players as an amorphous group. Thus, although the designer is talking to fewer people with each narrative, what is said can be more finely tuned to those people. The different degrees at which independent narrative episodes can be sustained are:

• Puzzles. These are fixed in their location and solution; a standard maze is the classic example. Puzzles provide a search-space framework for branching narratives. Their inflexible nature means they can cover predetermined narratives in greater depth, but at the expense of becoming uninteresting very rapidly. Once solved, they’re solved.

• Static quests. These have standard locations and goals, but allow some open-endedness in their solution. They’re generally mindless and repetitive because they’re targeted at newbies rather than at more experienced players. Because newbies undertake them, though, designers will use the opportunity to promote shared cultural contexts. Although

the narrative possibilities may therefore be reduced to making general statements about the nature of the virtual world, they nevertheless lay the groundwork for more sophisticated forms of expression that players may encounter later.

• Dynamic quests. These change every time in locations or goals or both. They serve gameplay purposes only, and rarely matter beyond their existence. Although the means by which they are generated may be symbolic, the quests themselves can’t be so as they have no direct human input in their construction.

• Chained quests. These are a series of interlinked quests, each one leading to a new, usually greater one. They may be plotted manually by a designer or dynamically by an AI, or in combination. There is greater scope for narrative here with the potential to make an impact on individuals; even AI-generated chained quests can conform to a predefined concept, such as whether it matters more to rescue a friend or save a village of strangers. Chained quests can be used as part of an overall story arc, or to introduce new spells, resources, or whatever that would otherwise appear without reason.

• Player quests. The virtual world is so broad and deep that players can find things to give each other to do. This is the emergent gameplay approach, which is good for the players (those with the desire to participate) but allows for no narrative content on the part of the designers other than in the form.

Narrative is seen as an important artistic feature that is often lacking in computer games; by extension, virtual worlds are also often criticized for their lack of story (except those who have it, which are criticized for the quality of the story). Implicit in this is the elitist notion that players aren’t all that good at storytelling, therefore anything that emerges from their actions is not going to be compelling; better to find the people who are

best at storytelling and have them write the stories for everyone.

I don’t dispute that some people are better at storytelling than others. The question is, what is storytelling’s place in virtual world design? Are people participating to be part of someone else’s story, or to be a part of their own? In the major part of this book, I have argued strongly in favor of the latter. Virtual world designers may use narrative as a way of joining related concepts into a coherent whole, but these can only ever be steps along the way of a player’s personal narrative, which is what they make of themselves. Virtual worlds that impose narrative—even narrative written by a famous author—are overlooking what virtual worlds are about.

Why Story Arcs Don’t Work

Most narrative art forms are passive, in that the audience doesn’t participate directly in their creation. An author may be creating a novel to speak to a particular group of people, but can only estimate how they will respond, and thus how the novel should be changed as a result of this imagined response. In virtual worlds, the audience can in theory participate to the point of collaboration. Are they part of the work? Are they part of the production? Are they neither, or can they be both ¹?

In most virtual worlds, the dialogue between designer and player is indirect. Players can influence production from the beta test onward, but as individuals only in very minor ways. Some virtual worlds do go as far as to give the player body control over the actual programming, but most don’t. The fact that LambdaMOO famously introduced this has created a false impression among researchers that the practice is widespread.

It is not. Commercial virtual worlds in particular would consider this degree of player involvement in production insane. Players may be part of production within the context of the virtual world, but not of the virtual world itself.

It is the question of whether players are part of the work that is more contentious. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t regard the objectification of players as by definition a bad thing; after all, I don’t expect road construction engineers to look on me as anything other than a driving statistic, so if a designer looks on me as a bandwidth statistic at some point, fair enough. The objection comes when this is done inappropriately; in particular, players do not like being thought of as components of someone else’s art installation. If a virtual world is advertised as being such, they can hardly complain, of course (any more than can an actor in a play); indeed, it may be that over time players gain a maturity and understanding that allows them to appreciate the skill of the storyteller more fully. They would then become more akin to an improvisational theater group rather than players of virtual worlds, though. Sure, there’s a place for this kind of art, but it’s not a place that appeals to the reasons players play.

Designers who want virtual worlds to have storylines usually cite from the following reasons:

• It keeps people playing, because they want to find out what happens next.

• The virtual world seems richer, more immersive, and more vibrant.

• New content can be introduced that would be fiction-breaking otherwise—for example, a new race of lizard people.

• Pre-planned, higher-level content can be released in a controlled manner.

• It provides cover for nerfs and bug-fixes.

• It lets players know they haven’t been forgotten.

• It demonstrates the design team’s creative credentials.

• It helps market the virtual world.

• There is increased opportunity for tie-in books and other merchandise, arising from having more intellectual properties.

• It’s de rigeur.

These look reasonable enough, but there are some serious flaws:

• Either the player is impotent or the arc is derailable.

• You can follow the story without playing. I know a former Asheron’s Call player who got wrapped up in the story but not the world; she now follows it from web sites.

• People don’t like coming in on a narrative after it has started.

• Players like to create stuff of their own more than they like to see what other people have created—whatever its artistic merits.

• Explorers don’t mind new content being added, but dislike having to check over changed old content. They much prefer to be told explicitly what changes have been made, rather than having to deduce them from some piece of story.

• Player actions are limited by future storyline considerations. You can’t build here because there’ll be a castle on this spot four months from now.

• The more story that designers add to a virtual world, the less world there is, because the world is constrained by the story ².

• What happens when the story arc ends? Everyone quits and plays some other game? Or does the arc never end?

• Players’ destinies are not under their control, nor can they ever be. A hero’s journey in such circumstances is nonsensical.

Even without these objections, there are practical difficulties concerned with writing a narrative for virtual worlds. Stories in most cultures of the world traditionally follow the classical three-act structure of beginning, middle, and end. As noted previously, if you try this for a virtual world it means there’s an end. This is fine if the story is one of many stories that make up a player’s experience, but it’s not good if the virtual world is itself the story. The three-act structure is replaced by a recursive structure instead:

• A single, beatable individual is identified as the enemy. It’s not the police state that’s trying to crush you, it’s one particular member of the secret police.

• You identify the enemy, collect the plot tokens, and defeat them. But they were just a pawn, controlled by the real enemy!

• Variant: They aren’t really dead! They come back bigger and stronger!

• Recurse.

This is the conspiracy theory approach: When in doubt, widen the conspiracy. Eventually, the whole world ends up as a conspiracy and then you have nowhere to go. It’s a narrative trap.

Oh well, you can cross that bridge when you come to it.

Designer-level narrative has a place in virtual worlds, as a method of delivering content, information, and/or meaning. It is very good for presenting and identifying symbols. It is hopeless for presenting and identifying choice. Sparks, yes; arcs, no.

The fact is, any virtual world that places designer-driven story above players’ personal stories is a prison. This is why story arcs don’t work.

The Koster-Vogel Cube

At the 2001 Game Developers Conference, Raph Koster and Rich Vogel introduced ¹ their well-received storytelling cube as a model for describing the various ways by which players can experience virtual world event sequences as narratives. The following year, they explored it in more detail ². Their model classifies the elements that make up narratives along three binary dimensions:

• Control. Is the story told by the designer, or does it arise from player interactions?

• Context. Does the story arise more from real-world events or from the virtual world itself?

• Impact. Are the story’s effects short-lived or lasting?

These dimensions give eight possible combinations:

• Designer/in context/static. All content exists at the beginning, and players uncover it. Example: Majestic.

• Designer/in context/dynamic. Designer-created content is delivered episodically, possibly making major changes. Example: Asheron’s Call.

• Designer/out of context/static. This recognizes real-world events as part of its fiction—for example, Christmas holidays. Example: Ultima Online.

• Designer/out of context/dynamic. Designers attempt to weave any new features they add into a consistent narrative. Example: Achaea.

• Players/in context/static. Players role-play in the designers’ world. Example: EverQuest.

• Players/in context/dynamic. Players role-play in the designers’ world, and through their actions can change that world in major ways. The designers adjust the context to take account of the events. Example: Castle Marrach.

• Players/out of context/static. Things the players do for their own reasons, irrespective of what the context says they should do. They tell each other stories that make myth of their adventures; they go on themed jungle crawls. This is the default player activity.

• Players/out of context/dynamic. Players act outside of any designer-driven plot, but through their own actions can cause important and permanent changes to the virtual world. Example: Lineage.

The idea behind the Koster-Vogel cube is that it helps virtual world designers conceptualize what kind of virtual world they want; it lays bare the narrative choices that are open to designers. The cube has certainly proven effective in this regard, but I have a few misgivings about it.

My main complaint is that the dimensions seem to change their meanings. Players can role-play in Asheron’s Call as much as they can in EverQuest, so why is EQ classified as having player-driven narrative when AC isn’t? The main difference between the two in storytelling terms is that AC gives (the designers’) stories more impact than does EQ’s static “vision,” so what’s the justification for having differences in two dimensions instead of just one? Similarly, Ultima Online’s players role-play more than

EQ’s and arguably have a stronger ability to determine their own destinies, so why is UO designer/out of context/ static and not player/out of context/static? Perhaps EQ should be in the designer/in context/static sub-cube instead (or perhaps it should be acknowledged that virtual worlds can be in more than one sub-cube at the same time).

The context axis is especially tricky: I’d have thought the way Achaea strives to weave real-world events (such as the appointment of a new administrator) into its fiction would make it a more in-context world than one like EQ that presents the events with no in-context explanation at all. But if the “out of context” flag means “giving in-context meaning to real-world events,” how does that agree with the default player activity sub-cube? There, players are not making any reference to real-world events, just to the in-context events that occur through their own determination of their story. Personally, I think the context axis is weaker than the other two; it’s a distraction, and the model makes better sense if reduced to two dimensions (impact and control).

To illustrate my point, where would MUD1 fit in this scheme? Well it had real-world events programmed in, so that means it’s out-of-context (even though most of the time those events were dormant). It was reset-based, so any story impact was static. Control of narrative events was in the hands of the players, operating in the space of events made possible by the design. This suggests that MUD1 should be placed in the default player activity cube. This may well be correct: MUD1 had no backstory. What difference would it have made if it had one, though? Bear in mind that if I hadn’t added the real-world holiday stuff to MUD1, it would appear in the same sub-cube as EQ (which does have a backstory of sorts—more than MUD1 does, anyway).

Back in Chapter 1, “Introduction to Virtual Worlds,” I discussed persistence versus change as a way to categorize virtual worlds.

The Koster-Vogel cube’s impact dimension is roughly the same as persistence, and its control dimension is roughly the same as change (or player impact ³). There is a difference between in-context building and out-of-context building, but it’s not orthogonal to the other two dimensions; in particular, the groups of players able to build in-context in a world may differ from those that can build out-of-context in the same world.

The Koster-Vogel cube looks at virtual worlds as a medium for storytelling, and as such succeeds. It is, however, neutral concerning the likely success or otherwise of a virtual world that follows any particular classification. Designers using the cube should bear this in mind; in particular, virtual worlds with overarching designed-in storylines (as opposed to opt-in, opt-out mini-narratives) face a long struggle.

The Place of Narrative

Virtual worlds are places, not stories. You can have a story about New York, or a story set in New York, and New York can have a history, but New York is not itself a story unless you stretch the definition of “story” so far that it loses all meaning ¹. The same applies to virtual worlds: Trying to impose a story on the inhabitants of a virtual world is as sensible as trying to impose a story on the inhabitants of New York. You can impose events, but not stories; people make their own stories.

The designers of virtual worlds write the history, either explicitly (as a piece of prose) or implicitly (in the design). This gives the initial context, at which point the designers cede narrative control to the players whether they want to or not. Through play, the players write their own stories, but only to the extent they do in real life; there’s nothing intrinsic to virtual worlds that makes player actions any more “storytelling” than real-life actions. You do things, things happen, you recount these happenings to other people: story.

Virtual world designers can’t add story, they only can add content. Content provides experiences that can be made by those who come through or observe them into story. If the content itself is story, players’ own stories become worthless incidentals.

Narrative is linear. Virtual worlds are not linear. You can’t control the order in which players do things without railroading them, removing significant freedoms. There is only one path into the past, and thence comes story; there are infinite paths into the future. Virtual world designers build a bagatelle board and release the ball, but have no way of knowing where it is going to land. If they did, where would the fun be?

Episodic release of content is guaranteed its place in narrative theory, but the real reason for its existence is purely practical: Developers want to stop players from getting bored. Dressing it up as story is merely a handy conceit. Any developers who believe otherwise are deceiving themselves (and their players).

Some content needs to be added for other reasons: Virtual worlds continually need fine-tuning; real-world occurrences can have an impact on the virtual world that requires an in-context explanation. In these cases, content can be slipped in such that it disrupts the world’s fiction less, but it does still disrupt it. It

adds another peg to the bagatelle board, and no amount of hand waving or appealing to artistic imperatives can disguise the fact.