General: Portnoy's Current Complaint

SBFord · October 2010

In his latest Free Zone column, MMORPG.com's Richard Aihoshi discusses the quality of writing in MMOs. Comparing MMO lore and the NPCs to their literary counterparts, Richard wonders whether or not we'll ever see pre-eminent living game writers of the caliber of some of today's finest authors. See what Richard thinks and then add your thoughts on our forums.

According to various experts who rank such things, Philip Roth is the pre-eminent living American novelist. Still writing at age 77, he came into the public eye with his first published work, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), which won him one of the country's four most notable literary honors, the National Book Award. He subsequently received a second for Sabbath's Theater (1995) plus National Book Critics Circle Awards for Counterlife (1986) and Patrimony (1991), PEN/Faulkner Awards for Operation Shylock (1993), The Human Stain (2000) and Everyman (2007), and a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). Perhaps a bit ironically, he may be most widely known for none of these, but rather the 1969 work referenced in the headline of this column.

Read more Portnoy's Current Complaint.

snoocky · October 2010

Lol, I thought they where talking about Mike Portnoy (ex-Dream Theater ) !

Bullwraith · October 2010

I find it difficult to imagine that quest writing will get much better (and quest text is where most of the story is told in-game). Consider that when WoW launched, the quest text in the window "slowly" became visible from top to bottom and many players were upset that they had to sit there and read the stuff. Horror of horrors.

The option for Instant Quest text was added in a later patch, but not soon enough for many... addons were written to solve the "problem" until Blizzard put in the option.

Many, many people play the games to get from point A to point B as soon as possible and couldn't give a hoot about the "in-between". Sadly.

Ashlar · October 2010

Annwyn · October 2010

Name the F2P

Described as an action-oriented tactical combat game, the mystery title this time is not yet available in North America, although a publication agreement has been announced. It's the MMOG adaptation of a multi-million selling hack and slash franchise loosely derived from the classic Chinese literary work Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, the game originates in Japan where it launched in 2006.

Eeeerrrr, Dynasty Warrior Online?

Shiymmas · October 2010

Originally posted by Bullwraith
I find it difficult to imagine that quest writing will get much better (and quest text is where most of the story is told in-game). Consider that when WoW launched, the quest text in the window "slowly" became visible from top to bottom and many players were upset that they had to sit there and read the stuff. Horror of horrors.

The option for Instant Quest text was added in a later patch, but not soon enough for many... addons were written to solve the "problem" until Blizzard put in the option.

Many, many people play the games to get from point A to point B as soon as possible and couldn't give a hoot about the "in-between". Sadly.

So funny that you mention WoW at launch not having the instant quest text. I loved it as a feature, and I read every quest I ever did back then. I definitely remember the complaints about it, though, and in my very first guild no less.

It is a shame, though, that even for those of us who read the quests, that less and less time is spent to deliver a quality story. As the article points out; they cater more and more to the lowest common denominator, as they do in most aspects of gaming anymore.

Also, reading comprehension is most definitely in decline, but I'm not so sure I'd agree with Mr. Roth when he states that "novels won't die [...] but he does foresee a future where no one will read them". Printed novels, maybe, but novels on the whole? I highly doubt it. Sure the audience may seem smaller due to less book sales, but that's only relative to the past 50-75 years, I'd assume. On the contrary, reading may very well be higher across the board (reading comprehension aside), but it's more the medium that has changed from print, to digital. With that comes the ability to reach a far broader crowd than ever before, and given the amount of time spent behind a digital screen of some variety (PC, phone, notebook, tablet PC, digital book readers, etc.) certainly means more people spend time reading written words than ever before, regardless of how well they're understood or how poorly they're written. After all, what are we doing on this website? Reading!

SBFord · October 2010

Originally posted by MadnessRealm

Name the F2P

Described as an action-oriented tactical combat game, the mystery title this time is not yet available in North America, although a publication agreement has been announced. It's the MMOG adaptation of a multi-million selling hack and slash franchise loosely derived from the classic Chinese literary work Romance of the Three Kingdoms. However, the game originates in Japan where it launched in 2006.

Eeeerrrr, Dynasty Warrior Online?

Click on the red word "Answer" and it will open up the full answer.

erictlewis · October 2010

Interesting to see that a well know author thinks that most mmo's are not written well, and most of it is copy and paste.

Yamota · October 2010

Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 2 has excellent story and character development. Unfourtunately they are not MMORPGs which is another sign that the genre is degenerating into mediocricy.

kalinis · October 2010

Ill admit i love to read. Anything from john grisham to anne mccaffrey talent and dragon riders of pern series. Ive read or own mos tstar wars novels. So i read non stop im also 37. My nephew and neice hate to read. I wish my brother andmes love of reading had been passed on to his kids.

That said i dont really play games to read. Bioware and sw tor may change that. They are gonna be a story driven mmo. so perhaps the story in an mmo will come to fruition for a change. Maybe bioware will do it well enough people wanna read there qust text. Then again i bet mos tpeople will do what they can to just skip most of it and just make whatever choice they have to make.

hinkhouse · October 2010

The writing in WAR was/is excellent, the quest text, the personalities of the NPCs, the tome of knowlege. I don't know if it compares to Roth nor can I say that it left me "thirstsing for more" but I enjoyed it and could have enjoyed it even more if I ever felt I was playing a PVE game.

MareWinds · October 2010

I'll tip the hat to LotRO on this one, as well as another MMO currently in closed beta (and, therefore, the NDA forbids me to say more). Fact is, I've never read Philip Roth nor, unless requested to do so by a college class, would I be interested... non-genre fiction has never appealed to me. However, both games compare quite well to professional fantasy fiction.

My one complaint for these and all MMOs is that NPC development always suffers; what rare exceptions I've found amount to a smattering of NPCs over the course of hundreds of hours of encounters with your usual, two-dimensional variety.

Morgaren · October 2010

Originally posted by hinkhouse
The writing in WAR was/is excellent, the quest text, the personalities of the NPCs, the tome of knowlege. I don't know if it compares to Roth nor can I say that it left me "thirstsing for more" but I enjoyed it and could have enjoyed it even more if I ever felt I was playing a PVE game.

I have to agree that they did an excellent job with the setting and feel of the story. too bad they tanked on the unimportant stuff like game mechanics and class balance, those minor tings that add up lol.

but I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Sovrath · October 2010

Originally posted by kalinis
Ill admit i love to read. Anything from john grisham to anne mccaffrey talent and dragon riders of pern series. Ive read or own mos tstar wars novels. So i read non stop im also 37. My nephew and neice hate to read. I wish my brother andmes love of reading had been passed on to his kids.

That said i dont really play games to read. Bioware and sw tor may change that. They are gonna be a story driven mmo. so perhaps the story in an mmo will come to fruition for a change. Maybe bioware will do it well enough people wanna read there qust text. Then again i bet mos tpeople will do what they can to just skip most of it and just make whatever choice they have to make.

But the thing is, do you read D.H. Lawrence or Jack London or Sylvia Plath or Edgar Allen Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorn or Wallace Stevens or heck, even Billy Shakespeare?

The problem is that many people are reading grisham and mccaffrey (I've actually only skimmed Grisham but I've read a few Mccaffrey stories) and while while books on that level can be good or even great as far as what they do, they often don't rise to great heights as far as "amazing writing quality".

And before you think I'm picking on you, I'll pick one me. I used to read all those Authors on top of the main stream sci-fi/Fantasy fair. Then I stopped reading with the exception of biographies and history. And to be honest, I haven't read a full book in a few years.

I definitely see the point of the article. People, even well read people, start to get hectic lives and there is an immediacy in movies and TV. Now we start talking about "great" writing, writing that works on other levels and I really wonder how many people truly dive into the likes of Faulkner or Joyce or Nabakov (one of my favorite russian writers).

And even if mmo's are an interactive medium I really don't see a lot of good writing let alone great writing.

Even on a macro level we dont' find a lot of "great" writing. Let's not even talk about quest text. let's say we do away with quest text. What about putting together the story and history of the world.

Lord of the Rings is the only one I can think of that has the advantage of a fully blown and thought out mythology and history.

And I sometimes see players say "we want to make our own stories". That's all fine and good but more often than not those stories are hardly stories and come off as anecdotes at best.

So if one wants great story from players one might have to be a little revisionist and cut out some of the nonesense that players seem to create when dealign with each other. At least enough so that a coherent and interesting narrative might be discovered.

edit: I'll throw in Athol Fugard as a great writer as well. ; )

LadyAlibi · October 2010

The writing in a game doesn't have to mean reading. Video games are primarily a visual medium, so you could think of the writing more in terms of screen writing, rather than novel writing. The writing is no less important, but it is a different animal. Unfortunately, I would have to agree that game writing is often similar to the worst of screen writing.

There's nothing worse than lore or quest text written by someone who really wanted to be a novelist, except possibly machine translated text written by someone who really wanted to be a novelist. It's wordy, sometimes overly flowery, and it does nothing to add to the experience. I'd rather have the story told by the environment itself and by the actions of the "people" (NPCs) in that environment. I want to experience the lore and my part in the story, not read it. Game writers, like all writers in visual media, need to show, not tell.

In Everquest, Fippy Darkpaw, the gnoll who shouted and charged the gates of Qeynos in futile rage, was a memorable character, even though he only had one line, and was killed by players or NPC guards on every charge. He showed us a little story with his one line and his actions. It's not a lot to read, but it was good writing.

Stormwatch · October 2010

I don't agree with the whole "noboy reads anymore" notion. Why is that? Is there some kind of evidence? Quite the contrary it seems, when we include reading on the internet (it's still strongly text based).

There as another anecdote: Not a long time ago, in an ancient place called europe, there was a book series called Harry Potter that made young audiences wait some hours for the bookstore to open. I am quite sure, that didn't happen before in this magnitude. The problem is when people never-ever read a book (they liked), it's hard to bring the idea across that reading a novel can be a wonderful experience. So Potter solved that for a generation. And how many went back to read Lord of the Rings?

We also have to take into account that games are games. The argument goes beyond "the story is what people tell each other after they played, rather than the story written by a writer".

The games industry is quite obsessed with writing better stuff than the novelists, direct better movies than hollywood and so forth. But it also realizes more and more that games are really their own kind of thing: when you drop in too much, too intense, too "book/radio/movie" elements, it may actually weaken the gaming experience. Warren Spector had a quite inspiring talk about the topic at GDC2010 in cologne where he emphasized again how each new media heavily borrowed from prio media until it develops it's own language. On the writers summit at the GDC Online (Austin) just few days ago, it was again more the idea that writers "write stories and narration", which wasn't doing the narration part justice (because the narration emerges out of game play patterns and they aren't written in the same sense as writing books).

It comes down to: A game should have interesting, well made, parts: 3d models, textures, sound, music … and text. This is all more or less "data". The narration lies within design, I believe and it emerges out of the game design, not out of the writers quill.

When I play a game, I want to play the game. Not read text or listen to dialogues. It would be nice to have well-written lines. Sure, more of that! But my expectation still is: "I want to play a fun game today".

maplestone · October 2010

"The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan

Ngeldu5t · October 2010

Originally posted by snoocky

Lol, I thought they where talking about Mike Portnoy (ex-Dream Theater ) !

I had the same thought...lol

darasen · October 2010

The biggest issue with the WoW quest text is that it appeared so amazingly slow. That said some quest text is ok otherwise who really cares why bob wants 5 dead rats? Of course equally bad is the amazingly chatty Litch King. I thought his goal was to talk the party to death.

Writing wise I like the CoH writing as it fits the genre fairly well. .

FreeBooteR · October 2010

I think more game companies are realizing that better writing is required and some have novelists on the payroll. Having said that, MMO's make for lousy book reading, and even worse movies because those mediums are too linear and restrictive. MMO players are not content to being passive observers. Theme parks are great the first time around, but they can become repetitive very fast and lose people's interest. If you are having to have a lot of text in an MMO you are doing a lousy job of communicating to your player base. MMO's need more audio and visual clues to help guide players through the game, otherwise you are boring a large part of your player base. Text should be used sparingly.

Athcear · October 2010

I thought of Mike Portnoy, too...

So, what does any of this have to do with Free to Play? Most of the games with good writing are the AAA P2P titles, like EQ, LotRO, DDO, and WoW. Dynasty Warriors's writing has nothing to do with its pricing model. Koei has already made 20+ games off of this story (which is over a thousand years old) so they had better be good at telling it.

Most F2P games have awful writing, and a lot of them just copy/paste the generic DnD fantasy setting. Allods Online had decent writing, but that was based on previous games.

So... what's the point of this article about besides an old writer complaining about changing technology?

Terranah · October 2010

I've read hundreds of books over the years. When I want to read a book, I read a book. I don't play a video game.

I think the same goes for cut scenes. I like a nice cut scene here and there, but if I want to watch a movie, I'll watch a movie.

tweets · October 2010

I'd have to agree with MareWinds about Lotro on this one... If you've ever played the Volume 1 quests to the end (very possible now) and actually read it, the story is a complex, tragic, beautiful one. They even take time out for you to attend and help in a funeral for several Dunedan Rangers who died in the fight against a dark, malevolent evil!

I don't want to spoil the story, but it's really well written and can actually absorb you into it without much effort from the player, than reading the screens of text as they are presented to you.

I've never completed volume 2 or 3 yet... but that doesn't mean I won't! What I know of those stories so far is still very good!

Yuui · October 2010

Originally posted by Yamota

Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 2 has excellent story and character development. Unfourtunately they are not MMORPGs which is another sign that the genre is degenerating into mediocricy.

Correction: Mass Effect 1 had an excelent story and character development. Mass Effect II is A LOT more simplistic in character archetypes. In MEI, each character was...diverse, with those multiple little traits that make them morally ambigous(. That made those "should i let them do that and that" decisions a whole lot more complex.

You know what? People complained about that. Thus comes Mass Effect II and from the start you know that "silent killer" wants to atone stuff, "perfect girl" has self-esteem issues and "milf alien warrior" has some EEEEVIIIIIIIL Enemy.

Now I agree with Dragon Age: Origins. All characters were consistent and deep (except Morrigan who was all over the place from naive little teen, to all knowing manipulator). It was truly awesome and the whole lore felt alive (just like in Mass Effect. Damn the moment you see the citadel station...). The hwole racial origins feature added A LOT of depth (and I wish mmorpg games had that kind of depth, the way you could decide not only what your character will become, but also on what he WAS and what he BECAME)

Sadly Dragon Age II seems to follow MEII route(racial origins feature removed, character intentions recognizable from their looks and description)

I think its not just problem with mmos. GAMERS overall nowadays stop to care about story and want to just "shoot the stuff". I mean, I see people COMPLAIN that game does NOT LEAD them or SAY WHERE TO GO EXACTLy.. what the?

Gamers and games are devolving. and even if there still are some story-driven awesome games, mindless shooters light on story become increasingly popular, sadly.

amotholen · October 2010

+1 for thought of Mike Portnoy, rofl.

Also Aeria has sweet games and good community; but they are very greedy company. After 3 years, i m sure i never play their games again.

Also i dont know about Dynasty Warriors, but most of Aeria games has bad writing...like most mmo's

eyeswideopen · October 2010

Originally posted by erictlewis
Interesting to see that a well know author thinks that most mmo's are not written well, and most of it is copy and paste.

Unless you're trying to erroneously imply Aihoshi is a well known author, I fail to see where you came up with that impression from this "article".

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