More Than Numbers
On both my desktops at home and work there is currently an atmospheric piece of concept art from upcoming MMORPG World of Warcraft. In it, a hazy afternoon sun glows massive and orange over the precipice of an ancient, snow capped mountain range. In the foreground broken, weather-beaten cliffs and deeply creviced rocky spires rise up from the shore of a gently shifting ocean. Tucked into the corner of the scene, a small anonymous party of fur-robed adventurers trudge wearily along a narrow path skirting the edge of the cliffs, and disappear into the shadows of a craggy ridge rising sheer above them. The entire scene is swept over with a sense of beauty, mountainous weight, and otherwordly longing that borrows as much from Tolkien’s Middle Earth and the poignant northerness of Norse mythology, as it does from the brutal wilderness expanse of Conan’s Cimmeria. It is haunting, moody, and moving.
Whoever drew the scene understands fantasy RPGs very well. Looking at it during the past week, I have been reminded of what pulled me to fantasy RPGing in the first place. Role playing entered into stories in worlds larger, richer, nobler, and more magical than my own. Partly it affirmed the best and clearest things about being alive, and amplified them in a ruggedly romantic setting infinitely removed from mundane reality. To role play was not merely to watch and be passively led. It was to taste success and failure on a grander scale. It was the chance to go beyond imaginings, and to live out that which good art strove always to touch: something greater, higher, broader than ourselves.
The Blizzard painting is “high concept” artwork. It is meant to inspire in the viewer an ideal of what Blizzard want their game to be. And by succeeding it has emphasized where their game, and all indevelopment MMORPGS along with it, unfortunately are likely to fail.
Current MMORPGs are not like the evocative Blizzard landscape, or Tolkien’s vast turbulent cosmos, or Cimmeria’s crushing northerness. There is little of the awful beauty, subtlety, or vigourous romance of any of RPG’s formative influences. Games have reduced the drama of entire worlds and ages to one mean, narrow dynamic:
Kill and loot.
Judging from the build I saw at E3 this year, and the information released so far, there is little hope WoW is going to be any different. We will create characters based on the usual races and classes, kill endless enemies, follow endless repetitive quests, gain items, money, and experience, all in order to do it over again at a higher level. Current MMORPGs aren’t role playing games proper, they are elaborate and carefully balanced RPG systems, with all the technical framework, lights, whistles, and bells. But they are only the systems, just as AD&D is a system. Role playing systems were originally created to facilitate adventures and drama, not as an end in themselves. Now they are all we seem to have. There is little depth, not much magic, and not a lot of poetry. All there is, ultimately, is killing.
There was a defining moment in Everquest when I came up hard against the shallow reality of MMORPG design. In my lower levels I spent a good deal of time hunting gnolls at the tall curved spires surrounding the entrance to their cave domain in the open wilderness of Southern Karana. SK, as it is known, is home to wandering lions, bears, bizarre birdman monstrosities humourously dubbed “chickens” by players, snakes, some giants, and of course, gnolls. Late one evening after an extended period of play I looked up to see a stunning white Pegasus flying languidly across the landscape a few hundred metres from me. In contrast to the dirty, scowling little gnolls I had been fighting for hours, and the ugly unlikely chickens, it was beautiful. Such was its majesty, my Bard would have immediately laid down his life to protect it. He may have been inspired to eulogize it in song and verse. At the very least he would have run up to it and offered his hand in friendship. He certainly would not have stood mutely by and watched as an unruly horde attacked and killed it. Yet that is what he had to do.
Artists and 3D modellers had spent hours of their time and talent creating a vision designed to inspire awe. Once affected by the artistry, the only way for players to interact with it was to hit it until it died and take anything left on it’s corpse - kill and loot. The contradiction both frustrated and angered me, because in one moment the game had awoken an aspiration to something more, and in the very next had shown it to be a cheap trick. The veil of fantasy had been pulled away to reveal nothing deeper than attack charts, and loot tables. I felt a genuine tinge of regret as I watched the beast fall. If I could have, I would have waged war on the those who had felled it. But the Pegasus was not even an approximation of the mythical creature. It was merely an animated model; just a bunch of numbers. It’s appearance promised enchantment and adventure. The game delivered the roll of a die and random loot. Someone had ripped the covers off The Lord of the Rings, Conan the Cimmerian, and Ride of the Valkyrie, pasted them on my screen, and thrown away the substance that inspired them. All I was left with was cover art.
It’s not that MMORPGs aren’t fun. For those that enjoy them they really are. But they are no more role playing games than Quake 3 is combat simulation. They are increasingly fodder for powergamers intent only upon being the most powerful - whatever that means. They are Counter-Strike with swords and spells. And it doesn’t mean current games haven’t tried to add more depth. I think they have, and are genuinely trying to. But in the end all they’ve managed to do is add more systems. MMORPGs are combat tables crying out for context and adventure; bodies without hearts.
Many game designers would argue that MMORPGs should be virtual environments where the players increasingly write their own stories, and create their own narrative out of the content. There is a lot of discussion at the moment around designing systems which allow players to control their own content within games. The idea is that the more players can genuinely change and create the online worlds, the more immersive they will be. That’s all good, but I can’t help but think that still isn’t anything more than another technical system to fit into the growing cluster of systems; another bunch of numbers to jostle and play with, and compete over.
MMORGPs are a very new genre, and the challenges of designing content that must be accessible to thousands of players at a time, some of whom find intense pleasure in spoiling that content for others, are many and difficult. The big problems are still being worked out. Current design philosophy frowns upon forcing too much direction upon players. But the thing is, the magic of role playing arose not just from the interaction of a group, but from the interaction of a group within a bigger story. The more expansive the story that guided the shared journey, the better the experience. This was not just a static background setting. The world was not just changeable by the players, it was changing on it’s own around them, and moving in it’s own direction. Often that meant the players had to change with it, or were changed by it. They were swept up in the bigger story happening around them, and into something truly epic.
If MMORPGs are ever to regain some of the art and depth of their roots, they will have to grow beyond the collection of beautifully rendered but ultimately empty systems they now are, and fill that potential with more than just complexity and numbers. For the games to find their heart again, they are going to have go back to the story craft they left behind, and find a new way to include the players in the telling.
Perhaps designers should go back to their concept art and watch quietly for a while. Those adventureres are journeying somewhere.
posted by monty · at 6:49 pm · filed under Editorials
Great piece, with some very good points. I read your "Beating the Nasties" piece as well and am struck by the fact that you did exactly what you warn developers are placing too much emphasis on, you created your own story and context out of bare game mechanics.
Saying that though, I do agree with you. But I think part of the problem is that many gamers are simply too lazy to create and maintain a story for themselves.
Think of the last time you played almost any single player RPG. You created a character and imagined (maybe only briefly and casually, maybe in quite a bit of detail) a background and motivation for that character.
Then your character comes up against a problem, you think "OK, based on my characters imagined motivations he/she/it would do it this way…"
But very soon after, you start to second guess the developers. "I know (based on my imagining of my characters motivations) my character would do it another way, but the easy way to beat this quest/get that cool item/move on the the next chapter is to do something else entirely…" Often what you end up doing is the easiest way to beat the game, not what stays true to what would create, or maintain, a story based on a consistant character motivation.
Gamers sometimes end up taking the easy way out.
Maybe the stories people are creating are just like the one you wrote about. They are no so much relevent to the character IN the game, but to the person PLAYING the game. I suppose it all depends on how you like to play, we would get all metaphysical here… when you play, are you the person PLAYING the game, or the person IN the game.
Each perspective constructs its narratives in very different ways.