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.