At GDC this year NCSoft announced that they were adding a mission building tool to their MMO to allow players to create their own missions. They intended it to be a way for players to tell new stories. Instead it turned out to be a way to cheat the XP system.

One wonders what Richard Garriott (former executive producer on CoH) makes of this, considering the stance he took in “Alice and Dorothy Play Together”.

(But yes, I too shall be buying/reading this.)

Malcolm, I’ve certainly talked with people about approaches similar to one of PernMUSH’s. Different MMOs have done different experiments with performances by live teams in the roles of NPCs. I think the Matrix game (which I didn’t play) was rumored to be particularly ambitious in this regard. Other games tend to use performance teams for things like setting up cross-faction battles (e.g., SWG folks talked about some of their approaches to this). On the other hand, doing something portentous and seeing how players respond sounds like something more commonly done by today’s ARG puppetmasters than MMO live teams.

As for an overall story, the only MMO I’ve heard of that actually has a story arc (coming to an end) is A Tale in the Desert (in its iterations). But, of course, Sheldon was talking about a genre that doesn’t arc and come to an end, but rather keeps evolving through daily story content. I can’t think of a project that comes close, though my knowledge is not encyclopedic.

Of course, as a writer who also has strong algorithmic interests, my question is always how we should balance the workload of such a system, and where the sweet spot is for audience experience. Sure, with a big team of writers an MMO could have daily content. But maybe a smaller team of writers and some smart generative computation could give hourly content, or more personalized content, etc. Maybe now is the time to finally put that Universe story generation model (proposed in the soap opera domain) to use in a full scale media project?

What struck me as most interesting, however, was his comment about writing for MMOs. Most game developers seem to baulk at the idea of having continuous plot development throughout the life of an MMO, saying that it is just infeasible to make that much content. Sheldon’s pointed to daily soap operas as an existence proof that continuous content creation is indeed possible.

I’ve not indulged in the MMO world myself, so I have to ask: have there been any MMOs which have seriously attempted to have regular ongoing story updates (rather than seasonal ‘expansion packs’)?

I remember hearing a talk from one of the wizards of PernMUSH many years ago about how they managed this kind of thing. They had some interesting methods. One was the ability for a wizard to “posess” any NPC and control them directly. They used this from time to time on important quest characters to add a bit of variation from the run-of-the-mill.

The other thing they liked to do was create significant and portentious events in the world without completely planning what they meant. Anything from giving a single player a rose from an anonymous admirer to having cracks appear in the World Gem. They would then spy on the ensuing discussions and see if the players came up with any good ideas for what it meant. The best ideas would then be incorporated into later events.

Whether you could do this in a meaningful way in a game the scale of an MMO is a difficult question, but one that I’d love to investigate.