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.