Keeping track of virtual world history
by Alexander Sliwinski 
{ Dec 2nd 2006 at 1:30PM }
MMOG players are well aware of the virtual lands they play in because there is typically a rich history established, but after that there is no record of how the players influence the world once the "game" started. Gamers are naturally, due to programming, always at the mercy of plot lines created by developers; however, even when a major plot line is fulfilled, there is no history that it ever happened. Narratively it's like the government being in control of the press and you only hear what they want you to hear. A TerraNova writer poses the possibility of a student asking to write a history of events in Ultima Online, he says, "The textual sources are going to be extremely difficult to recover in a thorough way because there are both too many and too few; a lot of the rest will only be knowable through oral historical work, or through questioning people through email."Players in World of Warcraft over the last year dealt with opening the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj and a new Scourge Invasion, but players have no place in-game to find out what happened during these times. There is no newspaper, no town crier , nobody who publicly tracked in-game what guilds and players helped the war effort. For new players or those wanting to look back there is no history in the World of Warcraft after players entered and the game started. It would be nice to see embedded journalists in the game like there is in Second Life, tracking the history of various servers with access to Blizzard's statistical information. These journalists would be able to report and help create a history to online worlds. Of course, it wouldn't be a free press because the company would manage what data could be released, but at least there would be narrative of what players have accomplished.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Twilight Spectre @ Dec 2nd 2006 1:41PM
That's an awesome idea.. I would love to see that. :O
ME @ Dec 2nd 2006 2:04PM
"there is no record of how the players influence the world"
Because they haven't. Not really. Sorry to break it to you.
Mark @ Dec 2nd 2006 2:10PM
AION!
NCSoft's new game, AION, promises server-specific storylines! The players change the history of the server, and each server's history is completely different than the next!
Bohemian Problem Drinker @ Dec 2nd 2006 2:19PM
Woah, talk about taking a game waaaaaaaaaaay to seriously.
Phil @ Dec 2nd 2006 2:35PM
Well I sort of agree.
When I used to play WoW, there was an event that occured once that was very narrative in context but was entirely created by the players, and in way for the sake of creating a sense of story. The player's actions just happened to be in line with what you would an expect to happen in a world like WoW's:
I was dealing goods in Ogrimmar, buy and selling at the auction house, when suddenly a few members of the horde started shouting "Call to arms! Undercity is under attack!". Most kept going about their business, but soon enough a large group formed at the zeppelin tower, ready to go to Undercity to attack the Alliance before they could get away.
Once we arrived, there was piles of corpses all over, mostly Alliance's, and we waited in the halls of UC for any of them to resurrect. "In the sewers!" some would shout, or "North East of the zeppelin!". Sadly, it seemed the action was mostly over.
So we devised a plan, we would meet up in Ashenvale and lunch a suprise attack on an Alliance outpost. Our meeting point was in the shadows of the forest, just behind the outpost on the other side of the small river.
We had to make our way to our meeting point without using the main roads in order to make sure no members of the Alliance would realize something was afoot. Eventually we were around 30 members of the horde, all at the meeting point, waiting for the call to lunch the attack.
We took a picture, and the command was given. First we swam through the river, sneakily, unseen by the unsuspecting members of the Alliance. Once on land, we killed all members of the Alliance we could see, and did so for around 15 minutes, then retreating in victory!
It was nice, but sadly it was probably one of the only times I REALLY had fun playing WoW. Non-scripted events like these are cool but totally unsupported by the game , maybe one day some MMO will figure a way to make such actions part of the game without screwing the game's balance.
Picklesworth @ Dec 2nd 2006 3:08PM
Also, I bet that non-scripted event had no impact on other players whatsoever.
The game would actually have to be non-linear to do that; a feat which is far more difficult to achieve than some developers would have you assume.
Cool though it is, I'll bet that neither of those attacks would have had any impact on either group beyond killing your opponents for a little while. As soon as players get used to the invincible infrastructure, it's not at all immersive.
Long story short, hardly any of these MMOs are properly persistent.
HaloBreaker @ Dec 2nd 2006 3:10PM
Wow I hate to drown all those peoples wishes, but nobody cares!! That's why. Only a few people actually role play in these games. Most people that do role play make their own shard that all their friends can connect to.
Go find another game that has a rich RP community. Because in WoW and the like the only thing people care about is Phat l00t Pwning newbs, and instances with 1337 gear!1!!
Nobody is going to sit and read/talk about the world they live in, because to most players that's valuable grind/quest time down the hole. And when you have to pay to play you're going to make it worth while.
Crrash @ Dec 6th 2006 1:06PM
you cannot forget Myst online: uru live!
the content is done in a way where the players influence what happen, and the most active players also get known and remembered.
We have one "guild" that archived the entire history (mostly logs) of major events in the cavern.
there is also a group that makes radio news.
the problem is to have a good balance between one time events and ongoing quests. people usually get very annoyed when they miss one of those onetime events and companys therefore try to avoid those.
another problem is that every server would have to have a different "history book"
Mark @ Dec 2nd 2006 3:28PM
HaloBreaker,
I think you completely missed the point of this article. It wasn't about RP in the slightest, and you using it to bash RPers is low.
Picklesworth @ Dec 2nd 2006 5:45PM
Crrash:
Yep, Myst Online is sounding really interesting. I intend to play around with it when it is out, assuming it's as unique as I have been told.
Heck, even if it's not as good as I think I'll buy it because I want RealRiven! (And I would hate to see Cyan cease to exist -- it sounds like they're pretty close to edge at the moment).
I must say, though... the whole situation with Myst Online really confuses me, since it seems (thanks to all the other Uru stuff) as though it's been out forever or something.
Are they working on a new incarnation of the thing or do they just have a ginormous beta testing community?
Chris @ Dec 2nd 2006 9:08PM
I don't know about other games, but City of Heroes has this in the form of the Paragon Times, an in-universe style newspaper featured on the CoH website. And I'm sure most MMOs have forums where game-universe history is chronicled in extensive detail.
Jecrell @ Dec 2nd 2006 9:50PM
@ 11
... you missed the point of the article.
Coralin @ Dec 2nd 2006 10:02PM
Uru came out long, long ago, you're right- what happened was Cyan was unable to get support for the online portion, and ended up releasing what they had in a single-player version; somewhat later on, there was enough demand that they put out a system for smaller, player-run shards to start opening up, but nothing officially-official, just semi-official. Now that Gametap has decided to pick it up, they're redoing it as the MMO it was meant to be.
Shiro @ Dec 5th 2006 3:18PM
That's why I always planned on putting a newspaper out for my MMO if I'm ever fortunate enough to make one. Then you could possibly get some player-written entries eventually as well. Sounded good to me, but then, I dunno if I'll ever get the chance.