First Post!

I thought it best to create a new blog centered on game design, rather than flooding up my writing blog with that kind of thing - while game writing IS writing, game design encompasses far more than just the writing of fiction. I wrote one post in my writing journal before creating this blog, and so I've replicated it here in this "FIRST POST!!!!11!."

Writing for games, I find, is quite a bit more complex than traditional writing. When I write for fun, it's usually a very loose experience; There's a lot of just writing down whatever the characters in my head are doing, thinking, etc. It's a much more fluid process.

When I'm writing for games, UO events in particular, there's a lot more consideration to how players would react to any given situation. It also has to be easily chopped into a combination of short story bursts (events) and ongoing background stuff (quests). Most, if not all, stories should have some sort of tie to the main theme or overall lore of the game. While you can always write a quick little quests where it's just kinda-sorta interesting, it's always a lot more fascinating and "epic" feeling when it feels like it's really a part of something larger. I try to tie the UO stories I write into the lore: virtues and anti-virtues, what may or may not have happened since the shattering of the gem of immortality (it's interesting to think of the entire Ultima storyline as "stuff that might or might not have happened in this timeline/shard").

Basically you have to think a lot more about how to work the players into the story, and it's that immersion which can make or break a plot. In the case of an MMO, it's more difficult to tie players directly into a story, as you can't be certain that they will be at the next event. Mid-event quests would seem to be the right answer to this - things that players can perform that are directly related to the ongoing fiction, and that directly affect the outcome of the story.

It's this interactivity that adds another factor to the game writing for a persistent world; You can only loosely define the story as it develops, if you're to give players the freedom to REALLY affect the outcome.

Of course, you can always just make everything static and predefined, but it takes away from the interactivity and therefore the overall immersion, and the players feel more like observers / pawns than heroes whose actions will determine the fate of the world.

I may write more on this in the future, possibly in a more professional format...