GamesIndustry.biz interviews BioWare general manager Ray Muzyka and creative officer Greg Zeschuk.
Q: Do you think a good, meaningful story is possible in an ever-changing world that all users can change [i.e., an MMO]?
Ray Muzyka: I think a great story is possible, because if you think about it, the narrative is actually possible in multiple directions. There’s a social narrative between players, there’s the external narrative outside of the game with social networking. And then there’s the internal narrative of the choices you make, and then there’s the internal narrative of the story arch being created and kind of evolving over time, both on the player’s user-generated content and the way they make choices and their impact on the world, but also the developers actually create a story arch that has some kind of purpose or overarching goal to it. So you can look at it almost like an onion with multiple layers of narrative, and that’s one of the reasons why I think interactive fiction is so exciting, because it has those multiple layers that aren’t really possible or as achievable in a more passive, linear medium. They can have good stories as well, but I think there are different kinds of narratives that are deeply exciting, in some ways more exciting, in non-linear fiction.
Read the whole thing. For my money, Muzyka’s answers about the challenge of, but need to, make an emotional connection through game content is putting his eye right where the ball is.
Fucking A. The many components can interact in lots of ways to imply additional stories, and to enable players to infer others. Plus, you never know — that dude you just saw level up in WoW? That might be the good news that turns his week around or wins him a bet or caps the time he got to spend playing after finishing his science project. For him, that fictional event is part of a real-world story.
There are stories all around, and they don’t necessarily create interference. It’s just that we can’t read them all simultaneously, so we’ve got to look away from the developer’s tale to view the tale of, say, the fall of a bank in EVE. But looking away from a story doesn’t undermine it. I can read two books at once, just not at once. You know?
Unsurprisingly, Ray is a PnP player – as are most of the folks at BioWare. His final answer in the interview basically reads as his musing on what we have struggled with for so long in RPGs: how much of an RPG story should be sandbox versus directed?
I was very amused by the phrase, “feel like they have freedom”. I do believe I’ve used that once or twice in sections on GM advice.