I think there’s a lot of people thinking in much the same way. Detection is critical, and it’s what I’ve been working on.

The short version is that I simply create “loaded hooks” – game choices which reflect the preferences of the player. As the player makes a choice, you can determine what characteristics he or she has (or is roleplaying) and use those to determine future content. I use the same technique for the “ludic” parts of the game as well as the “narrative” ones.

If you’re interested in morew detail on the steps I’ve taken on the matter, you can find a very rough four-part intro here: Parts one and two are basic introductory stuff, mostly. Parts three and four are still a bit introductory, but at least they have specifics. I haven’t gotten any further in tutorials, although many of my posts are on the same subject.

The game I’m making utilizing these tenets can be found here, although it’s got an unflattering front post up.

We obviously have some different ideas about narratives in MMO’s, and some similarities. Where I think we start to agree is:

…you can’t assign traits to players as they enter the game. Rather, you have to detect traits they are expressing.

Here’s something I wrote about WoW a while ago:

“There is an adage about writing that goes like this: “show don’t tell”. And it’s something that any decent writer needs to learn. I would say that MUD’s/MMO’s are in the process of learning how to show instead of tell. WoW tells with reckless abandon. It tells me that I’m a hero, it tells me that I just saved the day, etc. And all I really care about is the new quest item I got because eventually I realize that this is all that really matters in the context of the virtual world. I.e. what matters is what actually happens gamewise, not storywise, because being told that I’m a great hero for the 15th time through some concocted NPC plot loses its charm awfully quick.”

I think it’s necessary to emphasize this showing more. And that means far more than giving badges or labeling someone “rigidly conservative” or “rakishly handsome”. Character choices and their story need to transcend racial selection or dialogue selection and overt “telling” manners for pasting real-world meaning into the virtual world and need to become deeper game mechanics that allow players to express meaningful traits that make for a place in a virtual, open-ended story.

A good example is Fish Banks, an educational game that tells the story of the tragedy of the commons. In the game you and several other teams own fishing companies and try to make money fishing. The game models a realistic fish ecology and of course, eventually, fish populations start to retreat. Despite the fact that players can completely control how much they fish, the outcome is almost always that fish populations are decimated. No one comes into the game picking the “greedy corporation” class. No one earns an “ecologist” badge. And yet a very powerful story is told (shown?). Not through verbiage but entirely through game mechanics. That you are fishing and that it is fish populations which are dying out is merely a detail, and the lesson of the game applies equally to many other contexts.

Star Wars Galaxies was the best example of this ‘personal and community evolution’.

Start as a character with 250 credits. Make your way up to a reputable crafter, an Imperial / Rebel Commander, a base destroyer, a member of a music band that makes contracts to perform in player cities, a mayor of a player city.

Especially the evolution of a Jedi was amazingly ‘an epic story’ in Star Wars Galaxies. After mastering a certain number of professions and unlocking your Jedi, you were forced to live alone and away from your friends in exile to level your Jedi. While doing this, you were forced to play political games with enemy guilds, bribes, threats, Bounty Hunters..After a certain time of disapperance, returning to the world usually as a mighty warrior. Then, climbing the ladder of Prestige; Force Ranking System; to be the most reputable Jedi despite its hard work and broken mods.

But the player base attracted to this kind of ‘personal evolution’ is unfortunately old and not the target consumer of the market. But they are not very small in numbers. I know a good number of players who paid ingame credits to good story-writer players to write bios for them.

In games like wow, you reach capped level, solo intances, get your tier 1 sets, do harder instances, get your epics, slow down, wait for the next instance and next epics, rinse, repeat. There’s no time for character background stories or evolution.

Actually, this concept can be considered with the ‘Do levels suck?’ question. There is a certain development time and fund. Should these be wasted on levelling quests and environment creating an enjoyable lvl 1-lvl max journey or should levelling phase be kept as short as possible (meaning skill-based system instead of levelling) and these resources be channelled to character evolution quests and end-game quests as much as possible? Assuming managing both is a myth of course.

As for being evil / good; players never see it like that. For an Imperial player, The Empire in Star Wars is not evil. The Empire is ‘trying to restore order and peace to the Galaxy for the cost of Rebel sacrifices’. And Rebels are terrorists causing chaos. Vice verca for a Rebel player.

I think certainly to a degree that MMO characters have the potential to aid in self-exploration, but they do not do so purposefully as they are now. With systems like Allignment in DnD games, or the Light Side/Dark Side dynamic of KOTOR, I don’t feel it’s a representation of who we are necessarily, but perhaps an exploration of possibilities, and a shift in circumstance. With so much invested in our real world identities, most people wouldn’t dare gamble that away by “seeing what happens if…” but they allow us to take that leap, be it playing an evil character in an RPG, being ruthless and cunning in FPSs or action games, or taking completely opposite political viewpoints from our own in strategy and politics games.

With the possibility of MMO characters being (more) accurate representations of ourselves as well, you fall into a number of pitfalls. First of all is the idea of peer-pressure or conforming to perceived norms and standards. People become (largely) what they feel or think they should become, or need to become to get by. We see this all the time in political and cultural identity: during election campaigns, people are less likely to show their true feelings in polls if they feel they will be judged poorly for their beliefs or decision. The same applies to cultural and/or racial relations, most Americans would say they are not racists, but how do we know for certain whether racism has actually gone down in the US, or if people just cover it up publicly because they have learned to associate those views with “bad” or “wrong”, or at least “innapropriate”. Who is to say that players in a (albeit anonymous) game wouldn’t follow these same trends, of being worried of being treated differently by the perceived norm, if and when they do something that may be “innapropriate”, be it stealing in game, or killing, or what have you.

The other pitfall I can see encountered is the idea of playing “the best character”. Every MMO so far has fallen into role-specific race/class combos and/or superior skill sets outnumbering “weaker skills”. I can remember when I played the original Asheron’s Call, I loved my Spear-wielding warrior to death, I had a back-story, I role-played, I loved it. No one else loved it though, I was seen as inferior because I wasn’t a l33t UA. People laughed at me and my flaming spear because I chose a character I enjoyed over what was the best for leveling.

I understand that in the perfect MMO, there would be no superior class, but what about the problem of people being pidgeon-holed? In the original EQ everyone had a class, and every class had a role to play, and if you didn’t do that and get phat exp you got kicked from whatever group you were in. I understand that the classes in EQ were built to work together and the roles were there for a reason, but would a more accurate representation of the human behind the polygons work in this way? Would there possibly be room for characters to meaningfully work together if someone plays say, a cleric who doesn’t want to heal but instead engages in hand-to-hand combat out of a strict moral code against weaponry? What if the game is built as EQ was with assigned roles based on class, and there are classes that no one gets plays as because classes are assigned based on personality of the player, and few people fit the profile for those classes? If these classes were important then people would simply rig the system and start playing as whatever classes were needed. The only way I can see this class system working is maybe with a number of classes, one of which is assigned to the player based on personality, and it’s up to the player to specialize from there, allowing a loose role to be assigned by the system, and specifics to be decided by the player him or herself.

I want to say it would work much cleaner in a skill based system, but I’m having trouble visualizing it without additional problems. The main problem I see is flexibility, it’s something that a lot of MMOs have not yet offered the player, most end up with the “choose class, here’s your job” type creation system. While this syetm would open up new doors in terms of flexibility on the part of the player, we must also be weary of falling into the same trap of people simply being assigned roles that they have to stick with for 50, 60, 100 levels (again, if it would be a class-level based system, which I really don’t like anyway).