Ragnar Tornquist, working on Anarchy Online, has updated his personal website with an editoral for his edgewise section. It's a personal rant about working on evolving storylines, and this is how it starts:
In the previous posting, I mentioned briefly how intriguing, how different, how liberating it is to work with the evolving story of an online game. Aside from the fact that the feedback is instant and constant, and the process organic, part of the reason why I like it is also that it's brand new territory; it's not something any of us have done before. In fact, it's something very few have even attempted to do. There aren't a heck of a lot of ground rules, aside from the rules that apply to all fictional forms.
One rule unique to online games that I've learned first-hand in the few months that we've been doing this is that an evolving real-time online world story -- basically a sort of "history in the making", something that can be looked back on six months down the line and appear logical and coherent -- can often be experienced as too slow-moving, at least when compared with the sort of stories that people are used to experiencing. It's natural that some players would want everything to move quicker, to be more exciting and action-packed, something more akin to watching a movie, or playing a single-player console title. But the story in an online game (not counting past history; more on that another day) can't move at an unrealistic pace. You can't dissolve from one scene to the next, indicating the passage of days, weeks, or months. You can't put up a title-card reading "Five years later", or "Meanwhile, in Devon". You can't have characters age, you can't expect the players to be online twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, right when you want them to, and you can't change things around so much that you risk alienating all those people who prefer the world the way it is right now. |
Ragnar Tornquist goes Edgewise
