Storyboard: Let the gate be

Over the past two weeks, I've been essentially playing politics. That's a bit glib, sure, but if you have a better term for arguing two sides of the same issue over the course of two separate essays, I'd love to hear it. Of course, turning around and arguing the other side of my own points is something that I've been doing for years now; it's really not surprising.

For those of you just catching up, we've been discussing player-generated story in games -- whether it deserves to be the only form of story and whether or not it's any good at that goal. Today, I'm going to try to wrap up this discussion forever, or at least for the purposes of this little mini-discussion. That requires a bit of re-framing, since I think that like a lot of other issues, this one isn't nearly as monochromatic as we like to pretend it is. There are virtues to both sides, and the real danger lies not in preferring one but demonizing the other.

I can't, in good conscience, claim that player-generated stories are somehow inherently worthless. It might be anecdotal evidence, but I myself have experienced at least as many stories that emotionally moved me as ones that struck me as weak or lackluster. There are characters that I still talk about with friends even though they died in-game years ago, characters that I consider interesting enough that I still keep them in my head and look for another opportunity to use them. There's a reason why I kicked off my early access to Star Wars: The Old Republic by creating eight separate characters, and it wasn't just to reserve a few names.

But claiming that you should rely only on player-generated story is tantamount to claiming that you should only be allowed to have a hamburger if you killed the cow yourself. Actually, scratch that -- it's tantamount to claiming that you shouldn't get that hamburger unless you raised the cow and then killed it. Especially when you consider that some cows don't make particularly good hamburgers.

There's also a lot of cow left over after you kill it for one hamburger, but I think I've stretched this metaphor to its breaking point.

Getting invested in a roleplaying group is, in many ways, an almost unreal confluence of just the right conditions. It's true in real life, and it's true in an MMO. You find a group of people whose approach to everything is close enough to yours that you feel comfortable and different enough that you feel surprised. You create stories spanning huge stretches of time and several different characters, ones that wind up occupying huge chunks of your mental landscape. It's great. It's unique. It's special.

It's also as reliant upon chance as any random drop. If you're lucky, the group stays together past one game. If you're unlucky, it doesn't, and schedules change or tastes change or all sorts of other things change around. Trying to pin everything on a group assembling like that is like dating by sitting on a park bench and waiting for your one true love to waltz along at just the right moment.

By the same token, forcing you to not roleplay is obviously not on my list of acceptable choices. No games arguably go this far, but some free-to-play offerings are just a hop and a skip away -- several Nexon games force you to play as one of a handful of specific characters, for instance. It's not that you can't tell an engaging story that way, it's that giving players the freedom to play a wide-open game and then restricting that freedom is really stifling.

So what's the right answer? There isn't one, or at least not a simple and straightforward one. The right path is the middle path, with a game that has story in spades but also has plenty of opportunity for players to provide their own roleplaying as well. Perhaps tellingly, the games I can think of that have historically placed the greatest emphasis on story are all well-designed to allow for roleplaying, and only one of them (Final Fantasy XI) didn't develop a large and thriving RP community (due to the way that servers worked at launch).

The only way to be wrong is to claim that one method or the other is the only right way to do things. That's just as bad as designer restrictions, implying that somehow your game experience is more or less valid because you rely more on one side of the story equation than the other. It diminishes what you can get out of the game notably for no real benefits. Story in the game and creating stories as players are not opposing forces; they're two tracks that can intersect or remain separate as the situation merits.

There is no "right way" to do things. If you prefer a more open environment without a defined storyline, play there. If you prefer having a storyline, play that. Claiming that roleplaying can't provide enough of a storyline or that in-game stories are inherently worthless is the only way to really miss the point.

Yes, there's a longer essay to be written on that topic, but that's covering more than just roleplaying. Later.

So did I really just spend three weeks of columns to arrive back at the same point as I started? Yes and no. There are arguments in favor of both sides, and it's important to be aware of both. Sometimes, understanding both sides looks a lot like walking in a circle.

Before I get overly pretentious, however, I'm going to call it a week and make the usual rallying cry for feedback in the comments below or via mail to eliot@massively.com. Next week, I'm going to take a big break from the past few serious discussions and talk about comedy in roleplaying, both intentional and otherwise.

Every Friday, Eliot Lefebvre fills a column up with excellent advice on investing money, writing award-winning novels, and being elected to public office. Then he removes all of that, and you're left with Storyboard, which focuses on roleplaying in MMOs. It won't help you get elected, but it will help you pretend you did.