A version of this article appeared in the April 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine.

In my previous two columns, I discussed how designers can craft and integrate stories into their game.  Narrative can take many forms in games, ranging in practice from the backstory paragraph that serves as context for many games, to the branching, integrated stories found in story-based games like Dragon Age.  There is one additional kind of storytelling to be found in and around games: the stories the players themselves choose to tell.

Much like developer-created narratives, the player’s stories can take a dizzying number of forms.  They might be designed to borrow, mesh and interweave with the game’s narrative – or they may choose to ignore it in favor of the player’s own narrative.  Further, the stories could be entirely mechanical – about game rules rather than game fiction – or even purely social, in the case of multiplayer gaming.

While these stories vary in many respects, they all have one thing in common – they are the player’s own.  They star the imagination and events of himself and his friends.  When the designer’s narratives have to compete with these stories for attention and brainspace, he faces an uphill battle.  Rather than fear or fight these narratives, the designer should look for how to integrate and leverage them.

Playing Within the Lines

One way that player can contribute his own narratives is when the game has rules designed to allow him to do so, contributing to the narrative inside the confines of the game rule.  The classic example of this is, of course, tabletop roleplaying games such as D&D, which has been often described by enthusiasts as communal storytelling. The options of the players are limited primarily by their own imagination, often desperately being reined in by a dungeon master trying to get them back on track and into the front door of the dungeon he spent all night designing

It should come as no surprise that tabletop gaming experiences vary wildly from group to group, and the quality of the storytelling within is based on how the imaginations of the party members interact.  I hear a lot about pen and paper groups forming and dissolving in my circle of friends.  I can usually pick out the ones that will meet more than once – the participants feel obligated to post updates to their Facebook feed.  The stories that are arising are compelling enough for them to want to share.

Roleplaying in MMOs

Given that massively multiplayer games have their roots in RPG design and offer virtual worlds for players to live their virtual lives, roleplaying servers and guilds exist in almost every MUD and massively multiplayer game, to mixed success.  A sizable minority wants to roleplay in MMOs, but some surprising obstacles emerge.

Shortly after the launch of Ultima Online, players started to form roleplaying guilds fully comprised of Elves.  The problem was that, according to the lore of UO at the time, there were no elves in the Ultima universe[i], and so the mere existence of these guilds was upsetting to the roleplaying purists.  Fundamentally, you had an imagination clash.

In a tabletop game, you have a gamemaster in order to arbitrate these clashes.  In many text MUDs, MUSHes and MOOs with a roleplaying focus, the people running these freeware games help to manage the shared illusion.  However, this issue is harder to manage with paying customers, and doesn’t scale in once you get to truly large MMO populations.

The second odd problem is that the definition of roleplaying varies from player to player, and even more frustratingly, the devotion to fulltime roleplaying tends to degrade over time.  Players play these games a lot, and it is very hard for them to maintain a barrier between their real self and their avatar, especially if they really connect with friends and guildmates online and want or need to relate real-life feelings, problems or triumphs.  As such, the quality of roleplaying on an RP shard tends to erode, day by day, as players exercise their need to connect with friends, and their persona more and more becomes a mix of their virtual identity and their real one.

In the current state of things, the designer should help players who want to roleplay find each other, and more importantly, find those with compatible shared fantasies.  Help the players who want to roleplay as elves find each other, and let guildmasters take the responsibility for maintaining consistency at least internally. However, finding better ways to foster and encourage better roleplay is an area of opportunity for the enterprising MMO designer.

Sims: The Ultimate Storyteller’s Game

True roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons are considered to be the geekiest of geek hobbies, and yet to find a computer game that truly captures the spirit and imagination of roleplaying, you instead need to go to the most casual friendly game on the best seller’s list:  The Sims.

Dismissed by many hardcore gamers as a toilet cleaning sim, this virtual dollhouse is indeed a hotbed of player stories, and the design has been crafted that way – the rules are kept light, and the players are granted relatively easy access to whatever items, architectural elements and character appearances they might want access to.  Later sequels also gives them easy access to tools to take screenshots and movies, add captions, and upload them to the community – and so players did, uploading thousands of diaries and stories up to the net.  Like all player created content, a few are excellent, some are good and most are very, very bad, and there’s a design challenge in being sure browsers find the good stuff.  But all of them represent a true level of player investment into not just the Sims, but the culture and community that surrounds it.

But if you browse through the stories, it will quickly be clear that they are not purely from the player’s imagination.  In many cases, it is clear that these stories are writing about events that occurred to their Sims over the course of gameplay: “Mary started to flirt with the firefighter, and to her surprise, the firefighter started to flirt back.”  This is not a story straight from the mind of the player – it is closer to being a diary of the player’s experimentations within the game, and how the Sim chooses to respond.  And it is wildly successful, largely because the Sim is so broad and open-ended that the player can continually be surprised by the results of his actions.

The Storytelling in Mechanics

You don’t need designer narrative at all to get players to share stories about the games they are playing – you just need interesting game mechanics.  Indeed, one only has to look online to find reports about Chess, Scrabble and Magic the Gathering tournaments that have rapt readership.  The storytelling is all mechanics: she left her queen exposed.  He dropped the Q on the double letter score, but left access to the triple-word.  The magic player was going to die in one turn, but topdecked (i.e. drew) the one card that could save him.

We had piles of lore in Shadowbane, all of which we were very proud of, but the stories we put on our website that were the most gripping were the guild reports of city sieges from ‘in the trenches’.  They gave a real sense of what it was like to take part in the front, with full blow-by-blow accounts of bravado, logistics, war, desperation, treachery, triumph and defeat.  Little or no mention was made of the real backstory – it was all ancillary to the real action.

Mechanics Going Viral

The nice thing about the Shadowbane war reports was they had an immense ability to go viral – while the exact mechanics of a Shadowbane city siege were somewhat obtuse and hard to grasp, the general basics were not too far removed from real life – build catapults, amass some armies, and have at it – which allowed them to inflame the imagination.  Stories are easier to tell, and easier to have resonance, when non-players can easily grasp the gist of it.

If the mechanics are not immediately evocative, then you depend on the listener knowing the rules for him to have any appreciation for the story.  If you tried to tell me about your epic Go match, I’d be utterly baffled.  I don’t know the mechanics, and thus probably lack any appreciation for the subtleties of your position to understand what the big deal was about.  This tends to be true of many games, especially board games, where the rules are abstract or the competition relatively indirect..

Two such games are Kingsburg and Agricola.  These are fantastic, top-rated board games, but describing a closely fought match is very difficult to do due to the nature of the rules and backdrop.  By comparison, Pandemic leaves the players with great stories of being trapped in Asia when a viral outbreak wipes out the Eastern Seaboard and loses the game with one turn to go.  Here, the narrative backdrop the game uses isn’t wasted – it creates a player narrative interweaved with the game’s backdrop, making it tangible, easy to grasp and evocative to non-players.

Figuring out how to let players communicate to non-players can be a big win.  Blizzard went to great length to compress the size of their Starcraft 2 replays, each of which essentially tells a story for fans of the eSport.  These replays can also give the player more context and details to their story – the replay at the end of the original Civilization, for example, shows what was happening to the other players beneath the fog of war, which helped flesh out the details of the player’s triumphs and travails.

Drama is Competing Content

In any multiplayer setting, but especially in MMOs, there is one potential source of narratives that are incredibly powerful, that the designer has very limited control over.  Put simply, this is the narratives that arise when other players group and interact with each other.  Sometimes these interactions are positive – becoming smitten, for example – but often they’re negative.  One obvious manifestation of this that many have encountered: guild drama.

Put simply, if your guild’s best healer is cybering the guildmaster’s girlfriend and gets caught – well, at that point, any narrative that the game tries to provide is fighting an uphill battle to get any kind of attention.

One part of the magic of multiplay is that other players are, in fact, content.  The designer should encourage interactions between players, especially positive ones, but he should also be mindful that a player’s attention is limited, and in a multiplayer environment, he is prone to distraction at unexpected times from unexpected directions.  An amount of designer narrative that is wholly appropriate and well-paced in a single-player game might prove to be overwhelming when combined with the additional stimuli in a multiplayer environment.

Embracing Player Stories

Designer narratives are important to a game, and certainly in some games this is truer than others.  In story-driven games, especially, these narratives are important and vital parts of the game, and a designer’s first instinct is to keep the player on the rails, and to be sure the player experiences his story, in the right way.

But emergent stories can be as powerful, or even more so, than the handcrafted stories designers create.  Even though they frequently lack the quality or polish that is wrapped around the designer’s narratives, the personal investment that the player has in these stories is difficult to compete with.  Especially in multiplayer environments, the designer is well-advised to ensure that these player-driven narratives have room to breathe.

But designer narratives and player stories can, and should, coexist.  A story that is completely rigid and on rails misses out on all of the magic that comes with the interactive entertainment medium.  On the other hand, depending entirely on players for your story is effectively hoping all of your players serendipitously stumble upon greatness on their own.  The designer narrative should be the backbone of the experience, but he should also recognize that player storytelling within or about his game can take it to a whole new level.

[i] They were included in a later expansion, probably to address this very issue.