It comes down to story. The Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) has scope. It has good intentions. It even has fun. But it doesn’t have story....
Let’s set aside for the moment that it doesn’t have this story. It may not be possible to tell a convincing narrative in the context of a massively multiplyer game (MMO) at all. The problem, it seems to me, is in the “massively multiplayer” part. Don’t get me wrong, I like MMOs. Hell, I even like LotRO, more-or-less. But I never for a second feel like I’m being told a convincing story. Maybe I’ve been playing computer games for too long. I see the seams. I know, for instance, my character will never do anything which will prevent someone else from doing the exact same thing. I can save the hobbit from being poked by the goblins, but next time I log in, he’s right back in the cave, still almost getting poked.
It’s disappointing and it breaks the story. What Turbine and other MMO makers expect me to do is ignore the hobbit. After all, I’ve completed that quest. The hobbit in the cave is a reminder of the good times when I was level 5 and I could only go into the first floor of the cave and didn’t know about the other hobbit, deeper in the cave, surrounded by level 12 goblins, with pokier sticks and much more drama. But I can’t ignore the little guy. Look at him. He’s all small and keeps getting caught by the same goblins. Maybe he loves them?
LotRO has the additional problem of having The Lord of the Rings in its title. People have read and loved (or hated, or felt blah about) this story for over fifty years now. There have been comics and cartoons and even some movies made. We’ve read or watched those too. Leonard Nimoy sang a song about Bilbo. SNL has done parody sketches. It’s in the culture. There are action figures and lunchboxes. Oh, also: TURBINE, WE KNOW HOW THIS STORY ENDS! It’s not that I don’t think Middle Earth is a worthy setting for a game, but setting the game concurrent with The Lord of the Rings? Really? How is a writer, of any talent, going to make a reader/player feel like they will have any sort of measurable impact on the story when we have SNL spoiling the plot and Mr. Spock singing about the bravest hobbit of them all?
So what did they do? Well, thankfully they didn’t do what hack licensees do and put us in a secondary fellowship with Baragorn the Man-Who-Would-Not-Be-King, Mandalf the Slightly Charcoal, and Shimli, Gimli’s Cousin’s Wife. What they did do was only slightly better. Slightly better, not because it was a bad idea, but it turns out to be bad in practice. Here’s the gist of the setting of LotRO: The world is more or less cheery. But wait, what’s this darkness about? You hear whispers of a nameless fear. There’s a fellowship out there doing something important. It’s sort of vague, but you should help them.
What happens in practice is, while you are listening to the whispers of a nameless fear, a level 60 Rune Keeper is talking in the local channel about how he bagged the Witch King last night in an 80-man raid and then wore the iron crown like a bracelet. Thanks, man, but I’ve got this hobbit to save from pokey sticks.
So how do you do it? How do you tell a convincing narrative in an interactive, multiplayer environment? There are lots of very smart folks thinking about the issues behind interactive storytelling. One blog I like is Grand Text Auto. I first found it when reading up on old-style interactive fiction, à la Infocom and Adventure International. If you’re interested in more in-depth, academic discussion of issues surrounding interactive storytelling, I encourage you to check it out. But for my question, I’ll save you the trouble: no one really knows how to do it. Or, if they do, they aren’t telling.
So what makes a good story for you? Do you think an MMO can ever tell one? Should we just lower our expectations and play the damn game?
