Sandbox vs. Storytelling

So I was browsing through my newsfeed and came across this snippet where Reynir Hardarson talked about the sandbox MMO vs. the linear story. It seems to me that classic RPG storytelling and sandboxing are competing propositions. To get the player to engage with a story you've made you have to put them where the story is (or put the story where they are). This is inherently limiting. I don't think anyone felt a particular sense of urgency playing Skyrim, despite the apocalyptic storyline. Letting you Take Your Time is par for the course in anything that tries to give you a living world. Of course, in MMO's it's far worse since the player can't be portrayed as the sole hero without serious immersion problems. In an MMO, it really seems like the best storytelling option is to allow the setting to tell what stories it has, rather than try and give the players stories about themselves. This is likely a more frustrating venture than linear questing - you have to have content everywhere, but it all has to be content that gives the player agency, rather than the usual "fetch me a paperclip." Plus you have no way of determining whether or not a player will ever see a particular bit of cleverness. Then there's the issue of the emergent stories that come out of sandboxes. To really emphasize them, you need some way of recording and posting them somewhere that people will notice, and not just those involved. From my experience this is basically the same setup as freeform roleplay, which means that instead of taking stories as your foundational basis, you should take roleplay communities as your foundational basis for constructing stories in a sandbox MMO. On one hand, that means that player-generated content becomes a major part of the game, which is always good. On the other, it means that you aren't in control of the quality and content of your content. That might be frightening to some people, but having seen the stories that come out of sandbox games, I am optimistic.

Give us agency!

Seriously.

Okay, I still sort-of play WoW, and if you're around that area of the internet at all you're aware of the massive and persistent issue of "Horde favoritism." Given Blizzard's track record it's pretty obvious where they stand on that issue, so I want to touch upon what I find to be the biggest problem - the Alliance has no agency.

This is a serious problem in any storytelling format. If an entity exists only to be shaped by outside forces, and never acts in a meaningful manner, it's not a very interesting entity. To switch franchises, Yahtzee complains about this in the Silent Hill games, where the character is constrained to doing what the plot tells him to do because the plot says so.

But that shouldn't be confused with player freedom. It's the capacity of the entity to make choices in a narrative sense, so even a plot that's on rail can make you feel like you have agency. Also, you can if you're really clever make the lack of agency a plot point ("Would you kindly," anyone?), but that's riskier.

A project!

So Nick and I have put our heads together for a sort of projecty thing while we're not coding. Right now it's mostly setting and sketches, but we'll see what comes out of it.

We have a few characters too, but they'll probably evolve beyond recognition before anything occurs.

We're pretty excited, but we'll see if we have the time &etc to really do as much as we want with it.

Anachronisms

Anachronisms can really destroy the immersion of your story.

Most of the time when people talk about something being anachronistic, they're taking the context of the real world. But really, it's about context. If something makes sense within the context of your setting, it can hardly be anachronistic even if it doesn't match real-world expectations. Of course, this leads to the idea that settings themselves can't be anachronistic, which I don't think is quite true.

I was reading a scifi series a little while ago where the major alien species operated under feudalism. Feudalism, in a starfaring species. This is, I think, a setting anachronism. There's no reason for them to be feudal; they're rubber-mask humans. There's no excuses offered for something that should be impossible on the socioeconomic scale of a starfaring race of the same basic psyche as humans. The basic assumption of the setting had this completely out-of-place element, and it really destroyed the immersion I had.

In a different book, a fantasy with an expy of Edo Japan, the author kept using the word 'busted.' He had a busted lip, she had a busted eardrum. Some of it was verbal, some of it was narrative. In a setting where nobles (which these people are) are very formal, that sort of idiomatic English is horribly out of place. Again, it destroyed immersion.

In contrast, an in-universe anachronism is usually fascinating...and usually plot-centric. I'd love to write about a misplaced piece of high technology, or the remains of a Mayan railroad. It's just when they creep into the framing that they start destroying the integrity of your story.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

So Kingdoms of Amalur is the next big thing, and I have to say for good reason. They managed to snag R.A. Salvatore for creative director and Todd McFarlane for art director, and the whole thing looks and reads great. They managed an interesting twist on "you're the chosen one" by (spoilers) making you the result of a resurrection experiment that happens to work on you, and gets destroyed before they can figure out why yours worked.

The most interesting bit of worldbuilding is the Fae and the Ballads that rule their actions - they follow the Ballads, stories, over and over because death and so forth aren't a big deal to them. They get reincarnated/healed/etc with no issues so they don't care. And mortals are bound by fate, so in a very real sense there's nobody other than the player that has free will, even in the context of the universe. It's kind of a clever metacommentary.

The actual gameplay is quite streamlined, and the skills support hybridization in an interesting way by explicitly boosting the playstyle of a hybrid in the choices you make, as opposed to the usual underpowered dilution or overpowered synergy that happens in other games.

Overall I'm really impressed with how well put together it is. I hear it's a prelude to an MMO. I'd totally play an MMO based on this IP if they made it play as well as KOA:Reckoning.

Epoc and interfaces

So Penny Arcade has a post up about Epoc. Mind control of games (or really any interface in general) is by far the best possible option. Right now the best interface is generally mouse and keyboard - between the two we can manipulate things in multidimensional spaces and input complex commands (and most importantly, communicate clearly and quickly). Unfortunately, even as cool as Epoc is, it's not nearly precise enough to be a full interface.

Coming in from the other end is siftables, which are augmented reality, emphasis on reality rather than augmented. These are also a great interface, but I think they're pretty limited. It seems to me siftables would work best for things that are already physically manipulated - flashcards or board games. The paint and music siftables, while interesting, did nothing that a well-done UI for any paint or music program could do. And in fact, the program could do it better. They're also begging to get lost.

I was talking with Nick about interfaces, specifically about how the keyboard and mouse are so awesome and it's hard to device another type. But there has been, to some extent, success in the mobile market without using a keyboard and mouse. Touchscreen interfaces, specifically multitouch gesture-based displays, have begun having functionality that is similar (and in some cases better) than mouse control. The lessons learned from the mobile devices translate into tablets. While keyboard and mouse are still certainly amazing, perhaps the tyranny of the ancient interface device is ending.

Morality, gaming

There's an article on massively talking about moral relativism in gaming. While the article linked ends up upholding the game-enforced moral view, it makes me think of how so many games in general have "good" and "bad" as basically an informed morality. When moral choice systems are put in, they're basically reduced to, as yahtzee put it, sainthood or baby eating.

Part of this may be due to the difficulty of writing about two sides that have opposed but understandable views, and part of it may be due to the classical fantasy idea that people prefer a clear-cut good and bad. But even so, you run into Fridge Logic way too often. For example, the Malygos storyline in WoW. Humans screwed up magic horribly so he's going to take it away from us. Annnd that's is job. Yes. He is supposed to be the arbiter of magic. But he's being portrayed as evil, I disagree. Other than the Aldor and Scryer storylines (which were...somewhat lacking), you don't tend to see in games the ability to make rational choices of what factions you want to side with.

You also don't tend to see any way to side with factions other than fighting the opposed faction. I think that there should be more opposing factions with reasons for existence other than simply to oppose each other.