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.
The other extreme is to narrow the meaning of “story” so much that most of what players would describe to one another as a story wouldn’t count. In Hamlet on the Holodeck, for example, Janet H. Murray looks at narratives in virtual worlds as fitting within traditional forms of narrative. This assumes that interactivity is entirely “in character” and players have goals determined by the world rather than by themselves. The result is a much tighter judgment of what constitutes narrative in virtual worlds. ↩︎