At the recent GDC Austin, Tracy Seamster of ZeniMax Online and Steve Danuser of 38 Studios openly discussed storytelling in classic MMOs. They brought up some good points and I can’t help but question just how good quests are as a vehicle for story? It would seem Seamster and Danuser would agree if we’re talking classic story.

No one wants to read in MMOs. As much as writers want to think their quest prose is for the ages, reading is not a popular activity in online gaming. The genre is a bad fit for classic storytelling.

Simply put – people don’t want to read. They skim web pages, they don’t read manuals, they certainly aren’t going to read game text. But it’s the same in movies, and there the viewer is looking for the story. We don’t gather around camp fires anymore and we don’t want someone tell or explain the story, we want to see the story unfold. Movie makers learned this long ago.

Story is action

For screenwriters story is action. As Christy Marx points out in the comment thread, it’s visual storytelling. When players complain about having to read too much text, it’s more than likely that text is nothing more than exposition. Exposition is an evil world in the land of movie making. It stops a story in it’s tracks and should be avoided at all costs. The screenwriting guru Robert Mckee advices turning exposition into ammunition.

Skill in exposition means making it invisible. As the story progresses, the audience absorbs all it needs to know effortlessly, even unconsciously … In other words,dramatise exposition

Story moves the most between scenes

Screenwriters also know that story moves the most between scenes. In one scene the protagonist is alone on an island. The next they’re being picked up by a passing ship. Obviously they created a raft to save themselves. That’s movement.

The story will move within a scene but it will move the most between scenes.

MMOs and quests don’t lend themselves to either

These are maxims in the world of screenwriting however I think they would be difficult to follow in traditional MMOs and questing systems.

To rely on action to tell the story might interfere with game play. For one, the player has traditionally been in total control of the camera. You can dramatize a fight between two characters but outside of putting it in a cut scene or taking control of the camera you’re never guaranteed that the player would see it.

Most MMOs also involve an open world which is also persistent or running off one central clock. You may duck out for a day or two but your character didn’t and is still resting in the general area you left them. This doesn’t exactly lend itself to the creation of scenes where leaps in time are the norm. You can make a cut scene but with a persistent world you can only advance or get out of  sync with the rest of the world by only a few minutes.

Players are looking for the game not the story

The player of course didn’t buy the game for the story they bought it for the game, the story is a nice to have. That nice to have most commonly comes in the form of a story world. As Tracy Seamster and Steve Danuser point out, MMOs seem more suited to story worlds where the player creates their own story using the rich source material provided. If you want real time story that is more along the lines of movies or books we probably need to look at different models.