MMORPGs or Massively multiplayer online role-playing games if the anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, is fast replacing heroine as an addiction. For a genre for which very large number of players interact with each other, subscription revenues alone have crossed $1.5 billion in 2008, and a single game like World of Warcraft has over 12 million subscribers. The effect that it has had on the concept of video gaming is a different matter altogether. The impact of user-created worlds like EVE Online is creating a dilemma for game designers and players alike. What happens to the good old story that leads us through a finely woven narrative and consequently satisfying us with somewhat of a closure, rewarding the player for his/her emotional investment in the medium? Is storytelling slowly giving way to the combined actions and its repercussions of the million of online gamers?
MMORPGs are turning traditional game design on its head and making the players decide the pace and type of character development the way they want. The game is ever more so alive even when the player is offline, thanks to the persistent nature of its world.
Does this meteoric rise mean that game auteurs are fading away? The answer is far from yes. In fact the role of the narrative will always be primary in games despite the seismic shift in the way games are being experienced today. Virtual crime (protection racketeering, theft, and ransom) is part of life in a game like EVE Online, and even if one were to chronicle the life and times of players in its game world, it would only seem like a drab reality show rather than an operatic space saga like Mass Effect which relies on an overarching storyline.
The narrative has always been central to any media, be it literature, film and quite recently gaming. The presence of the game designer’s voice as well as style has made cinematic sequences captivating and interwoven into gameplay (Hideo Kojima for the Metal Gear series, Valve for The Orange Box). Games like Braid, Bioshock, Half-Life 2, Modern Warfare etc have a defining story arc which makes the gamer traverse it with relative freedom of approach.
However, there are many who’d like nothing else but to live in the virtual world and make their own legacy. The narrative is for them to create. Revant, an economics student from Exeter, UK, recently confessed to me that while playing MMORPGs, the thrill of being someone else and having a ‘second life’ is what drew him to log long hours in World of Warcraft
I also spoke to Arun Ravi, who’s played around the world as a professional gamer for whom online play is a complete social experience that he enjoys with friends, a few of which he meets only online. Arun’s take on the whole single player v/s MMO issue is that he feels any great narrative-led game should also be able to extend itself online in order to continue the same game-play, albeit in a social environment, “Like playing on facebook!”
The world of gaming is evolving into a very unique phenomenon and I am reminded of a line from an author, Thomas Pynchon, who in his novel, The Crying of Lot 49 highlights the protagonist’s clash of the real world with an imaginary one, by making her write the words, “Shall I project a world?” in her diary. Perhaps, sometimes that is what we wish to experience: a world created by us.
