Like a lot of World of Warcraft players, I found reports about WoW designer Jeff Kaplan's GDC critique of quest architecture in the game to be intriguing.
For one, I thought the talk was further evidence of how Blizzard's success with WoW has a lot to do with their internal corporate culture. It's clear that Kaplan's criticisms were the result of sustained attention to WoW's weaknesses and strengths by its live management team coupled with a healthy degree of honesty and confidence. Most other virtual world management teams to date have come off as much more defensive and blustering, at least in their public presentation to players, trying to bluff their way past problems and mistakes until the magnitude of such problems becomes such that the developer has no choice but to address them publically.
Like a lot of other people, I found myself quibbling with Kaplan's views of what does and does not work in World of Warcraft, sometimes because I have my own treasured beliefs about what could work if only it were implemented more effectively. Sometimes that's because I'm unrealistically wishing that WoW was something other than what it is. What Kaplan calls a "mystery quest", for example, strikes me as potentially very workable, but only in a game that's more of a dynamic environment, more of a sandbox. In WoW's extremely controlled, hand-holding design, it's perfectly true that a mystery quest just comes off as designer sadism. There's a reason why you still hear new players asking plaintively, "Where is Mankrik's wife?"
I guess I'm most struck at Kaplan's argument that World of Warcraft's quest designers have suffered from "medium envy", that they have rarely succeeded in designing quests which are native to the distinctive character and affordances of virtual worlds and digital games.
Kaplan comments that "we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game". I think he's right enough about the main thrust of his insight here. The very few quests in World of Warcraft or any similarly designed virtual world which arise and progress seamlessly from within the action of gameplay tend to be among the most popular (presuming they otherwise function well in technical terms).
The "Wrathgate" quest in the current WoW expansion seems to be one of the most popular in the game's history, largely for its use of a dramatic cut scene that features an interesting plot twist and the subsequent quest which incorporates the player directly into events of major consequence within the gameworld. It's not even a very strong example of what might be possible in terms of storytelling within the virtual world form compared to many other digital games, given the relatively mechanical and even awkward stitching together of gameplay and cinematics.
World of Warcraft's current expansion also features a number of examples of "phased content" (Wrathgate is one such) where the world changes as a player progresses along a quest chain. Phasing is another case where the content of questing is integrated into the action of gameplay. The game mechanics sometimes push against that integration in some odd ways. Players who have not yet progressed along a phasing quest chain stop being visible to players who have when they are both in the same location. The final dramatic resolution of a phasing quest chain tends to settle a zone or quest hub into a permanent state of stasis: creatures and antagonists that ought to be absent as a result of the narrative remain as features of the landscape.
I can think of isolated cases of seamless storytelling within the mechanic of quests in other similar virtual worlds. In City of Heroes/City of Villains, for example, a player pursuing a quest was sometimes ambushed by appropriate antagonists while en route to the next destination, sometimes creating havoc in areas where the typical player-character was much less powerful than the questing player. Quests in a number of games sometimes turn on storytelling events or twists that unfold within the action of the quest itself rather than as a written narrative delivered once the player returns to the quest hub.
To ride my own design hobbyhorse, however, I can't help but feel that Kaplan's ambition to get Blizzard designers to stop "writing a fucking book" clashes uncomfortably with his prescriptions to more tightly control or direct the action of players as they move through a series of quests. The static pacing of storytelling in WoW and its many imitators is rooted in the basic structure of quests themselves and in game-mechanical contrivances like the quest hub. When I think of solo digital games that have storytelling styles that seem "native" to the form, what they all share in common is dissolving the delivery of narrative into the game mechanics, making the action of gameplay itself the natural, invisible modality of storytelling. Think of Planescape: Torment making death and resurrection a part of its narrative, or the way that Half-Life 2 and many similar shooters make the next objective a part of the environment itself. If Blizzard designers dump books on players in little 511-character doses, that's not just medium envy, it's a consequence of the quest-hub surrounded by many mini-treadmills, of an environment with no spontaneity in it. If I see a creature in a WoW zone, I know sooner or later that I will be tasked to collect its gizzards or claws. One of the basic attributes of narrative, in any medium, is surprise. For stories to arise from within the action of gameplay (rather than as books or movies or theater), the gameplay has to be thought out with narrative in mind.
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