The Persistent Illusionist

Games and Stories - in which, in a roundabout way, I try to tell you wat I'm talkin' 'bout.

2010-05-01T07:25:00.000-07:00

While I talk and the flies buzz
a seagull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon,
a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness,
a man sneezes in Germany,
a horse dies in Tattany,
and twins are born in France.

What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity
of these events with one another,
and with a million others as disjointed,
form a rational bond between them,
and write them into anything
that resembles for us a world?

Great art is most commonly defined as that which casts some light on the human condition. This poem, Fulcrum / Writing a World, by David Morley, is one of the current crop of Poems on the Underground and a perfect illustration of the conundrum facing the storyteller. In a chaotic world, full of overwhelming irrelevance, we seek meaning. The storyteller takes on the fearful task of linking disparate facts, events, places, people, in ways that resonate for us, that help us to make sense of it all. We cannot take in every detail, and we tire quickly of information without pattern, without story.

So there are two fundamental aspects to a great story: that it has a resonant theme, and that there be 'rational bonds' between the various elements of the story. Narrative theorists define 'story' as the series of consequential events that unfold through the telling (not a far cry from what's usually understood by 'plot'), leaving us with the word 'narrative' to encompass all the specifics of how the story is told: characterisation, point of view, setting and so forth.1 All these narrative elements should support both the theme (the passionate heart of the story) and the plot (the thrilling twists and turns of the tale), allowing us to be immersed, entertained and enlightened.

It's a tall order, even for a novel. It's not easy with a film. For games, it's a whole new order of challenge.

As I've said before (insert link), questions such are 'Are Games Art?' and 'Why aren't there any great game stories?' are being asked left right and centre, and rightly so given how many of us play games these days. I'm throwing my hat into the ring specifically to try to address the peculiar challenges facing one kind of game: the MMORPG.

There are several theories floating around as to why stories in games as a whole are un-brilliant. Of course there are also plenty of dissenting voices citing this or that game as an example of fantastic storytelling, and already there is a sensible middle section pointing out that we are probably looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing. Taking it from first principles though, what might stop a game from telling a great story?

Firstly, that whole business about casting light on the human condition; having a resonant theme. There's nothing, absolutely nothing, intrinsic to games that's stopping games writers from tackling the big questions. The bugbear of course is that to provide fresh insight, the theme has to be handled in an original way. You can tell the story of two tragic young lovers striving to find happiness despite lethal opposition from friends and family a thousand times over, and we do, we do, but fail to add something new and what you get is a tired cliché. Add to that the undeniable fact that many games, especially the ones non-gamers tend to consider representative of the medium, are based on the most generic of genre fiction, and clichés abound. But they don't have to. From Grim Fandango to Portal to Bioshock 2, there are plenty of examples of inventive story-creation in games.

They may or may not move us to tears, which is one oft-mentioned test of emotional impact. It is certainly arguable that although games may on occasion reduce us to tears, they are most likely to do so when they are at their most linear, when the player has the least freedom and the storyteller2 has the most control, i.e. when they can utilise the techniques available to novelists and film-makers. Yes, I mean cut-scenes, but not just cut-scenes; in any linear story the storyteller can manage, if not outright control, things like a players feelings towards the characters in the story, and thus can predict with a reasonable degree of certainty that when the main character's stupid-but-faithful companion of the past several hours is brutally killed in an act of pointless heroism, the player's going to feel a bit sad about it.

This is an appropriately massive problem for MMORPGs. No cut-scenes. No faithful sidekicks, unless these are other players, in which case the game designers can hardly engineer a heroic death for them, and if they did they'd have to allow them to be resurrected thirty seconds later, that being the way things work these days. In an MMORPG, rarely are things allowed to change. Thousands of players must each be offered the same play experience, both at their own convenience (you don't want to upset the casual players) and in real-time (these are persistent worlds, after all).

I believe very strongly that it doesn't have to be that way, but it involves a major shift – a shift that may already be happening – in the way we approach the emotional content of multiplayer games, and above all a shift in who it is that's taking responsibility for the player's emotional journey. It's nothing new; in fact it takes us right back to the genesis of the MMORPG. It's a dirty word in many gamer circles these days, but the 'R' in MMORPG has a lot to teach us about games and stories.

Opening the Box

2010-03-19T05:03:00.000-07:00

As I said in my introduction to my interview with David J. Williams (game writer and novelist), I've become fascinated by storytelling through the medium of computer games. Unsurprisingly, being an MMO junkie, I want above all to look at the state of storytelling in MMOs, which present tremendous obstacles for writers, but also really exciting possibilities.

There are a lot of assumptions to examine along the way. What are we talking about when we talk about stories, and games, and narrative, and play? What are designers trying to achieve, and what are gamers looking for, and are they the same thing? It's a rich field in every sense, what with the games industry having been widely reported in 2009 as having overtaken Hollywood as the biggest sector of the entertainment market.

The recent feature on The Culture Show I linked to last week thrust forth the assertion that games are an art form about to blossom into maturity. Computer-mediated narrative has allegedly been on the cusp of this maturation for at least thirteen years: one of the major arguments made by Janet H. Murray in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck, a seminal book on the subject published in 1997, is that computers are simply awaiting their 'digital Homer'; a bard who, having been immersed in the possibilities of digital storytelling, can fully exploit the medium to tell compelling tales to the eager masses. However, there are still plenty of voices proclaiming that the games we have played to date are in a state of arrested development, with thin, cliché-driven storylines written and consumed by people more interested in boobs 'n' bombs than in casting light on the human condition.

I'll be arguing that point, starting from first principles. I'll be looking at the history of computer games, and attempting, in a very basic way, to connect actual games development with the theoretical literature on narrative, play and the interaction between the two. I want to try to make sense of the criticisms of game stories, both from the point of view of those clamouring for stories with more depth, and those dismissing the idea of games as art as inappropriate, wide of the point. Eventually I hope to come up with a useful assessment of progress to date, and an analysis of the specific hows and whys of satisfying story-like experiences in games, and, finally, how (and if!) all this can be brought to bear to make MMOs more emotionally engaging for players.

Along the way there'll be much talk of magic circles, make-believe and emergent narrative. I'll be including more thoughts from folks in the industry, and gamers of various stripes.

I have plenty of opinions about what's got to happen to make games better, but I'm expecting to have at least half of those turned on their little pointy heads as I solve the puzzles of this unfolding adventure.

It's Officially Time

2010-03-15T04:16:00.000-07:00

The latest edition of The Culture Show (BBC2) contains an eight-minute report by Jacques Peretti on the status of video games as art. It's only available until Thursday, but if you catch this post in the next 4 days and are interested in seeing it, click here. The piece starts at #11.10.

The Story of Homeworld: Interview with David J. Williams

2010-03-10T04:08:00.000-08:00

With Apocalypso firmly on hold, I've had time to do some reading. For the past several months the focal point of my interest in games design has been converging with my interest in narrative, which is a boring way of saying Stories! Gameplay! WTF?

WTF, because stories and gameplay do not always seem to get along happily when tied up in the same canvas sack. There's no shortage of commentators pushing the opinion that games are unsuitable as a medium for storytelling, that games will never be 'art' nor contain anything of literary value, etc., etc. Some folks are fine with that, some are pissed off about it, and some of us just think it's a load of crap. Games can tell stories, and well.

So to kick off a series of articles about games and story, I contacted a man I thought might agree with me: David J. Williams, author of the Autumn Rain trilogy, and story creator for the first Homeworld game. I started off by asking him how he first came to be involved with Relic, and Homeworld.

DW: I went to elementary school with Rob Cunningham, who ended up being one of the founding members of Relic. We fell out of touch for a long while, but hooked up again after he moved out to Vancouver.

PI: What was the process of creating / writing the game like?

DW: The Vancouver scene in the 1990s was a pretty magical one: there were a lot of start-ups being revved up on a lot of different launch-pads, and a real sense of possibility. Relic was breaking new ground with its rendering engine/tech, and Rob was drawing off-the-charts spaceships way more gone than anyone had seen up to that point in video games. But they were searching for a narrative concept to tie it all together. I was out on the west coast taking a break from my corporate slave job at the time and pitched Rob the story of a people who discovered their previous legacy as galactic rulers and set off on an epic quest to return to their homeworld. I also brought my obsession with history to the project: a lot of the language of the game -- Kushan, Kadesh, etc. -- comes from that.

PI: You came up with the story concept for Homeworld before you'd ever written a novel: now that you've written 3 novels, how would you compare the two?

DW: I guess the most basic difference is that with novels you're a one-man band, whereas video games are done by committee. That worked for Homeworld because of a special alignment of people and circumstances; it was less successful for the game's sequel, which was torn by competing visions, and never really figured out exactly what it wanted to be. But I can safely say that I'd never have tackled novels if it hadn't been for my experience with Homeworld. Unlike a lot of writers, I hadn't spent my whole life writing, but HW put me back in touch with a love of science-fiction and story that I hadn't really engaged with since childhood. Three years later, in the midst of a premature mid-life crisis, I turned my attention from space opera to near-future space warfare: what will it *really* look like when we have weapons in space across the next century? What would happen if simultaneously the Internet splintered along geopolitical lines? That became the genesis for the Autumn Rain trilogy, and I thought of basically nothing else for the next decade.

PI: Would you say you were thinking like a storyteller when you were working on Homeworld? How were the storytelling elements meshed with the gameplay to create the overall play experience?

DW: Honestly, I wasn't really thinking like a storyteller. I was a total amateur and had no idea what I was doing beyond the fact that it was a damn sight more interesting than dealing with spreadsheets and corporate best practices. As for the meshing of the storytelling with the gameplay, I can't take credit there: that goes to folks like Adam Bullied, who served as game designer.

PI: Homeworld is often cited as one of the best game stories ever - what do you think of games as a medium for telling stories (v. films, books etc) Do you think games can hold their own as a narrative art form?

DW: I think games are where movies were in the 1920s -- just starting to scratch the surface of their possibilities as narrative. Ultimately, they'll be recognized as one of the great forms of cultural endeavor.

PI: What are are obstacles - again perhaps drawing on your novelist's props - to telling a really compelling story via a game?

DW: I always thought of novel-writing as creating a really big, complex machine . . and games are even more so, since there are even more moving parts---literally--and you've got to figure out how all the potential paths intersect. It's like combining several novels with several movies within a choose-your-own-adventure framework.

PI: What do you think made Homeworld, in particular, a successful story?

DW: Homeworld was a successful story because it was a simple story, imbued with huge archetypal drama. And the actual game experience was nothing short of an aesthetic masterpiece: the art of Cunningham and Aaron Kambetz and the music of Paul Ruskay combining to make you feel like you were out there among the suns.

PI: Finally, are there any other games you've played (I know you're too busy for games but I have to ask) that you think do it right?

DW: Bioshock is the standout. They do a better job at creating atmosphere than anything since HW.

And with that I thanked David and let him get back to playing with his nuclear powered train set.

Over the coming weeks I intend (real life permitting) to look at the relationship between gameplay and storytelling and consider the emergence of games as a valid art form. You can find out more about David and the Autumn Rain trilogy at autumnrain2110.com.

Goshdarnit, Fallen Earth!

2009-05-17T07:38:00.000-07:00

It's slow going at Apocalypso towers at the moment. The artist says he has drawings, the gameplay guy says he has skill trees, me, I've been learning Blender for no good reason, and reading about C++ without actually trying to code in it. Love theory, hate practice.

And I've been doing something I can't talk about for reasons I can't tell you. An NDA is an NDA. So let's talk instead about how Fallen Earth has cut the rug from under us.

Our scenario: it is 2161 and civilisation on Earth has collapsed following a deadly pandemic and a nuclear war. A hundred years on, small tribes and factions are fighting for survival in a harsh environment &c &c.

Fallen Earth's scenario: it is 2156 and civilisation on Earth has collapsed following a deadly pandemic and a nuclear war. A hundred years on, small tribes and factions... yeah, you get the picture.

We knew we were leaning a little too heavily on Fallout , that given the demand for a Fallout MMO and current social concerns we probably wouldn't be the only ones in an apocalyptic frame of mind, and that our story wasn't shatteringly original. I'm glad this happened at the drawing board stage, but it's still a little... irksome.

I've been turning over ways to differentiate our world further from Fallen Earth. We have a different setting (ours is in Britain), and different gameplay (no levelling, less FPS-y combat), and some rogue elements such as the Spires that are, I hope, not much like anything else. But it's not enough. /sigh

What's the Story?

2009-04-15T02:11:00.000-07:00

At this year's GDC, Jeff Kaplan of Blizzard talked about quest design, outlining nine problems with quests in WoW. Lum picked it up at Broken Toys (which is where I saw it first, though it's all over everywhere now), and now Timothy Burke has posted an interesting response at Terra Nova, which has prompted me to post my own thoughts on the subject.

Kaplan's problems with quest design are much the same as ours, which is to say, the same as most everyone who thinks about these things (but not, apparently WoW players). To summarise his nine points, I'm cribbing from the write-up at ShackNews:

1. The Christmas Tree Effect: quest hubs, where every quest-giving NPC has a shiny light over his or her head, and you can 'vacuum up' a lot of quests in one go. Players don't bother to read the quest text, they forget which NPC gave which quest and what order to do the quests in. Apparently, WoW players love this.

My experience of this is that it's the way WAR was implemented and the way the quest system in DAoC has evolved. It's horrible. It's overwhelming, distracting and immersion killing. The lights-above-heads work as attractors, but the goal becomes 'turn all the bloody lights off' rather than 'experience fun quest content'.

2. Too Long, Didn't Read: Quest texts are too wordy, and players don't read them.

True, but why? Well, firstly, and I'm not the first to suggest this, quest text is not universally well written. So you start off reading them, wanting to learn more about this new world you find yourself in... and after a wee while, you start thinking ho hum, I know as much about the lore as I actually care to, and listening to yet another NPC jabber on about his lost dog/sister/sword is way less interesting to me than getting the money and xp points I've been promised for this quest. Just tell me: How many foozles and where are they? Quests simply aren't entertaining enough. And it may be too late to make them entertaining, at least as long as they're presented in this same format. The playerbase has given up on them already and I doubt designers will be given another chance.

Secondly, and I haven't seen anyone talk about this anywhere, there's a procedural problem with quest text in an MMO. This is massively compounded by Christmas Tree quest hubs, but it's a problem in any game where a) the prevailing culture is one of acheivement rather than exploration, and b) players are grouped.

When I'm questing, I have three modes of play. One is solo, questing-for-fun. Under these circumstances, I'm questing because I've got nothing else to do, and I've got my Explorer hat on. I might read quest dialogue, if I think it's going to be interesting, and I'm not offered too much of it at once. Another is solo, questing-for-advancement. I've identified that a particular quest allows faster progress than farming and is repeatable, so I go farm the quest. (An example would be Dousing the Flames in DAoC / Albion.) I've got my Acheiver hat on, and I'm doing the same quest multiple times, so the last thing I want is to have to click through pages of dialogue, and the whole experience is mind-numbingly dull. Finally, there's questing-for-loot. Often, the good loot comes from the good quests; developers have put a lot of effort into these ones, knowing that the reward is an uber item lots of people will want. But they're usually tough quests that you need a group for. And the more of you there are, the less you feel able to take the time to read quest dialogue. The purpose of the group is always to bash through these things as quickly and efficiently as possible, because that's the prevailing culture. Sadly for the Explorer in me, I know of no game where this isn't the case.

So it seems to me that storytelling needs to be decoupled from rewards, so that the Acheivers can get their fix without being forced to wade through a lot of irrelevant narrative, and the Explorers can consume narrative content at their own pace, without being driven through the content at breakneck speed by (external or internal) reward-seekers. This could be done by only offering small rewards for story-heavy quests, or by putting all the texty stuff in books that the player can read later, if they want. Oh and make the damn things entertaining, please.

3. Medium Envy: Quest writers would rather be writing books or screenplays. "We need to stop writing a fucking book in our game, because nobody wants to read it."

This is the main point Burke addresses. I'd like to quote all of it, but this is turning into a long post already. I'll assume you're not a text-hata - Go and read it!

Essentially, it seems to me that Burke is saying you can't effectively crowbar controlled, linear narrative into a static multiplayer world, and we need a new paradigm. This is exactly the problem we're trying to address with Apocalypso. One of the commentators points out that EVE is an evolving world in which players generate their own narratives, though this player-history is not 'easy to see or well documented'. There's a sweet spot here, that has to involve presenting both designer-created and player-generated histories as an integrated and accessible part of the game, and I think I have some ideas on how to do that, but I'll save those for the design documents!

4. Mystery: Apparently quests that make you think are a bad thing. "We wanted the action... to come from the gameplay, not in figuring out 'What am I supposed to do?"

OK OK. Experience may show that within the WoW context, people hate the mystery quest. But see point #2 on quest text. You have to understand what's motivating the player at the point when you present them with this content. If someone just wants to get the Shiny Hat of Pwnage because they've heard it's the best Shiny Hat in the game, do they want to have to figure out which levers in the Hall of Confusion open the gate to the Dungeon of Muddle and then find their way through the Maze of the Lost? No. They'll look that stuff up online and curse your name the whole way through. Figure out which players like solving puzzles. Offer them puzzles to solve, at appropriate stages. Don't try and make the min/maxers do it too.

5. Poorly Paced Quest Chains: Don't give your players long quests spanning lots of levels that will suddenly get too hard. It pisses them off.

6. Gimmick Quests: I think what Kaplan's saying here is don't write something in that isn't really part of this game, because you wish you were working on GTA.

7. Bad Flow: Don't group your quests up so the player has lots of kill quests and then lots of collection quests etc. Seems like common sense.

8. Collection Quest Mistakes: Um, pitch the difficulty appropriately for the reward and don't ask people to collect more stuff than they can carry. (I'm paraphrasing massively here but there didn't seem to be more to it.)

9. Why Am I Collecting this Shit?: I.e., what does the Mayor of Questville want 18 gnoll paws for. And why doesn't every gnoll drop 2 paws?

Kaplan should have put this under point 8, and it's obvious, apart from the last question. Why doesn't every gnoll drop 2 gnoll paws? In a thread I was reading on Raph Koster's site recently, a reader suggested that in their ideal MMO, every wolf would drop all the things a wolf should have about their person, i.e. wolf teeth, wolf hide, wolf eyeballs, and not money, torn jerkins or toyboxes. You can extend this, and say that every bandit should drop what that bandit is wearing. It reminded me of how bizarre I found the DAoC loot system when I first started playing it. Horses with money, bandits with nothing but a muffin, when I could clearly see armor and a shield, not to mention the sword he'd been hitting me with just before I killed him.

I don't know how much extra load it would be for the servers, but wouldn't it be nice if loot all worked like it does in Morrowind , where the NPCs have exactly what you expect them to, and you can loot all of it?

Notes from design meeting 26/03/09

2009-03-29T09:52:00.001-07:00

Paul Barnett Talks

2009-03-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

Gamasutra have an article up on Paul Barnett of Mythic's recent presentation at the GDC. Despite being one of the faces behind Warhammer, he seems very excited about the 'new Golden Age' of simple, fast-to-market indie games made possible by iPhones and the like. Makes me wonder if we're chewing the leg of a dead horse, trying to make an indie game that has all the trappings of an old-style hardware hungry, labour intensive MMORPG. But I'm not bored of immersion, of virtual worlds that feel like places you can live in. It's something games just haven't ever quite delivered for me yet, and I don't care if I chew until I hit bone - I'm doing this thing.

Wikiwiki - Documenting Game Design

2009-03-27T04:28:00.000-07:00

I decided that the only way we were going to progress with the MMO project was to start inputting all our research, discussions, decisions and design documentation into a Wiki. I tried a few out and settled on Netcipia. It has the same problems as PBWiki - the WYSIWYG isn't, and the overall feel is cluttered and not customisable enough. But it's free, and it'll do for the time being. There are tools available for working on MMO design (e.g. Video Game Design Pro 2006 (http://www.thecorpament.com) ), but I'm not ready to invest in a commercial package at the moment.

I made a list of articles I wanted to write for the blog, but feeding the Wiki has taken up an immense amount of time. And that's the thing with a collaborative project; you have to write everything down. Topics on the Wiki cover our initial vision for the game, background reading on sandboxes, multiplayer game design, player psychology, combat systems, skills trees, and elements of world building, such as geography, climate, flora, fauna, transport, technology and politics. We also needed to think about marketing and finance, and there's a huge section on development tools, as we're working our way through, evaluating the available options.

It's a more than daunting task. We've been talking about it for six months, and the work is only just beginning.

Catching up with Myself

2009-01-15T10:05:00.001-08:00

Just a quick note to say that I was overtaken by events in the summer of 2007, which are actually very pertinent to the subject I was talking about at the time, but halted me in my blogging tracks.

In short: my life turned upside down and I've spent the last eighteen months or so learning how to walk on the ceiling.

I'm intending to pick this blog back up again, to the extent I can without internet access at home, and talk about some of the wider social psychology aspects of gaming, but more specifically to diarise work on design of an MMO: Working title 'Apocalypso', it's a game set in a shattered future, where competition for resources and ideologies pits groups and individuals against one another in a struggle for survival.

I've been working on it with a couple of buddies for three months already so there's a hell of a lot of ground to cover to catch up, but I'll put my best foot forward (the right as it happens, as the left ankle is wrecked) and try to document the whole process.

Who am I?

2007-06-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

OK, so in my last post I started talking about how forming social bonds within a game starts to make the virtual world real. By virtual world I mean not only the game world, in my case the rolling hills and aquatic badgers of Hibernia, but the websites, forums and social networks that accrete around a game. I want to talk next about prydwen.net, the forum that supported hib/pryd players (Hibernians on the Prydwen server in DAoC), but before I do that I'm going to allow myself to digress a little and take up the theme of identity. It isn't really a digression, because in order to be a member of a social network, one does have to have an identity. People need to know who you are.

Identity online can be a tricksy concept, however. In a roleplaying game, potentially even more so, as people adopt personae in order to play out scenarios in-character. DAoC is an MMORPG, the RPG is in there and roleplaying is an element of the game. It's not exactly rife on the Prydwen server however, and has never been a large part of my own playstyle. So, the dominant culture on Prydwen (now clustered with the Excalibur server under the collective moniker 'Dyvet') has always, I think, been one in which players present themselves as 'themselves', unless a roleplaying event has been arranged.

Why is 'themselves' in quotation marks? Well, when you meet someone online, you very rarely have a lot of information about who they are, unless you know them in 'real life' already. Take me for example. My first character in DAoC was a hero character called Ambera. I didn't roleplay her, except occasionally in my head. When I talked to people I talked as 'me'. They may have felt that they were getting to know the real person behind the avatar. However, I was cautious about sharing anything that didn't relate directly to the game. I enjoyed the anonymity. I liked that people didn't know I was really a 30-something English woman with dyed hair. I didn't pretend to be anyone else, but I liked the way in which the game system - avatars, text-based conversation - prevented people from judging one another in the usual ways. People still judged each other of course, but in game terms. If you had skill and treated other players with respect, it didn't matter what you looked or sounded like, what age or class you were (I'm talking social class here, not character class, which matters a whole lot), or where you were from.

So, anyone talking to me experienced only those aspects of myself I chose to share. And, although I never pretended to be someone I wasn't, sometimes... well, sometimes I was someone else. At least Ambera was. My partner also played that character during our first months in the game, and was never very forward about letting people know he wasn't me. It always made me deeply uncomfortable, and became unbearable once I started to make friends with Talien and others. I was acutely aware that if they didn't see some sort of consistent 'me' behind the avatar, we wouldn't be able to form a connection. Once my partner opened his own account and started playing, that tension went away, and the pair of us, playing together, became quite recognisable and made many friends.

I had to trade the benefits of anonymity for being able to make lasting social connections. People like to know who they're talking to.

Of course, there are degrees of anonymity. You don't have to share everything with everyone. There are many people, even in my guild, who know me simply as 'Ambera' (or Ascarii, the name of my warden character). They have little interest in how old I am, where I live or what I do when I'm not playing DAoC. They know the history of my characters, they know that I'm a mid-flight warden, not top-flight but not too shabby, they know what weapon I use, but they don't know, or care to know, who I am in 'real life'. And that's fine, but those people will not remain my friends once the game servers are shut down. Friends are the ones who ask you how work's going, have you had the operation yet, how's your mum? And those are the people who keep you coming back to the game.

Raph Koster says it better

2007-06-03T04:18:00.000-07:00

I first realised that Dark Age of Camelot was not going to be something I could simply walk away from when my friend Talien quit the game. It wasn't until he quit that I realised I really valued his friendship, that I had, in fact, considered him a 'real' friend.

I'd been through the process of making 'virtual' friends before. I played a text-based strategy game called Utopia, way back in the last century, and, as a member of a group of very silly roleplayers called the Danish Brotherhood (nothing to do with Danes, everything to do with pastry), made several friends whose houses I visited, and whom I corresponded with for years after we all stopped playing Utopia. The difference between those relationships and my friendship with Talien was that my Utopian friends were only very loosely tied to the game. Our relationships existed chiefly on forums and via email; our shared world was one we'd created rather than the one the designers of Utopia had created for us. (More on that at some point). Talien and I on the other hand interacted mainly within DAoC, though we had spent a weekend together IRL, at a mini-meet in Brighton. We had not established habits of communication outside the game that would carry us through his ceasing to play. So we lost touch, and I grieved. I became confused about my other friends in the game. How 'real' were those relationships? Who would I miss, if they quit? Would anyone miss me if I did? And if we did miss one another - was that only within the context of the game, or had we taken root in one another's lives in a way that would transcend the virtual world and affect our 'real' lives?

In this essay, written way back in 1998, Raph Koster explains how, when a member of the UO community died in a car crash, the grief the other members felt changed their perception of the game:

In the end, the social bonds of the people in a virtual environment make it more than just a game. They make it Real. Sometimes it takes a moment of grief to make people realize it, and sometimes people just come to an awareness over time, but the fundamental fact remains: when we make a friend, hurt someone's feelings, suffer a loss, or accomplish something in an online world, it's real. It's not "just a game."

So we can take as established the fact that for those of us involved, online relationships are as real as any other relationships, and online 'communities' have social bonds that make virtual worlds real. Does that mean that those communities behave in the same ways as communities formed through other media? I don't think they (we) do; the issues of identity and ownership that Sharkith has been looking at over at The Empty Pixel feed into this discussion, as do the strengths and weaknesses of the virtual world in and around which the 'community' has aggregated, the methods of communication the playerbase uses to talk to one another, and the methods of communication the company uses to talk to the playerbase.

For me, the social bonds between myself and other players did not become clear until we had started to share more than just the virtual world - exchanging details of the other areas of our lives and establishing other, reliable, methods of communication that allowed me to beleive that our friendships were stable and would persist outside the game should any of us leave. I read somewhere (yeah yeah, I'll try and find the reference) that players who participate in forums subscribe to MMOs for one average 50% longer than those who don't. I think social ties are the likely reason. This would give weight to the argument that forums and all other arenas attached to but outside of the game itself need to be considered as part of the world; they are the foundation of the 'community' and are dismissed at the peril of the game-runners.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

2007-05-29T07:26:00.000-07:00

So said Einstein.

To be honest, I'm not terribly interested in whether our default reality is real or illusion, at least not for the purposes of this blog. I am interested in the shared realities deliberately created for us, purposeful illusions that hope to be persistent, known as MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games).

I'm a keen player of games, and for the past 4+ years I've been playing Dark Age of Camelot. My time there has come to an end, possibly temporarily, possibly permanent. As I explained over at Zora's Corner, this has been an upsetting process, and I am grieving for the loss of a major part of my life.

People often say things like 'It's just a game' and talk about games and 'real life' as being completely seperate things. But a game can become part of one's life, and if reality is what we can agree exists, as has also been claimed by philosophers, an MMORPG is lent its reality by the people playing it. If a couple of thousand people are sharing a virtual world, spending hours every week acting in it, forming and breaking relationships in it, it is real, if only in the sense that it has a real and sometimes profound effect on the lives of those playing it.