Narratives in MMOs

OK so we've already had these threads which I'm gonna go ahead and throw out right here in reverse

Rogueism
Ebert Video Game Commentary Hullabaloo
The novelification of games
Linear vs. Non-Linear
best plot twists in video games
"good stories" in games

And then today I was reading the dreaded PA and Tycho says this:
http://penny-arcade.com/2008/12/17/

Games of this kind get codified very quickly, transforming your best attempts at story width into golden, optimal paths. We don't know what it actually means to make story central to an online game you can play with friends, who are themselves in various states of completion. We don't know because they haven't actually said.

I immediately thought about the roguelike quandary, in which you have a game that has a generative narrative, like a music algorithm, where most results are meh but once in a while something happens which is genuinely amazing - but it only happens to you, the individual player, within an individual instance, and trying to express this story to others amounts to relating a fishing adventure, e.g. no you don't understand I had THIS MUCH treasure when I drowned in that trap - and why can't MMO instances work this way?

Then I thought about how nethack has some of the properties of the old MUSH/MUDs - people built their own madness into the environment as well as playing and exploring, and eventually in some of them the function of starting from a random room had the same qualities of a randomly generated dungeon because the whole mess was so huge and haphazard and complex. Why can't a modern MMO have this? Instances defined by friend lists or by similarly-leveled/-equipped characters logging on within a time frame, and each instance itself built out of thousands of players' input on top of a generative algorithm? Isn't this kind of what LittleBigPlanet and Second Life go for, to an extent, without the dungeon crawling, level grinding and treasure collecting (and is that all they're missing)?

The idea of a cooperative roguelike experience really appeals to me, and I doubt any MMO game will really suit me until such a idea can be implemented well - it takes away the fish story problem of unshared experience, it provides for narratives that aren't vendor specific, and allows (possibly) for you to put your own ideas to work, instead of being essentially subservient to the developers' prefab path.

A few things have happened in MMORPGs to date that resemble what I'm talking about - the political and economic wackiness that overturns the pecking order of EVE online every year or so, and historic cock-ups like Leeroy Jenkins - but this is all just proof-of-concept right now.

Nethack the MMORPG, what do you all think? Who's going to get there first?

Left 4 Dead manages some of these things: co-op shared story, generative instancing.

Cheez N Bread manages some of these things: co-op instance generating, story shares.

I always assumed this stuff happened in MMORPGs already, and that I just didn't have the patience to get past the slow and tedious tutorials & start befriending people to go off on quests and so on with. From what you're saying, I was probably right not to persist! Isn't the problem with this ("your own ideas to work, instead of being essentially subservient to the developers' prefab path") that you can't have a fully-realised world of user-generated content if everybody wants to be the hero? How do you incentivise "third bodyguard on the left", or "part-time binman and shoe repairer"?

I thnk multiplayer nethack would be fun though.

Or thinking about it, "a race to the prize" game.

All players start out alone, and as they move through the dungeon, they start to meet and eventually all converge on a central point. The winner is the last one alive in that central room. Every time players meet, they have a crucial decision: do I fight this guy to try to eliminate him, or do I team up with him to strengthen my hand against the puzzles and other player encounters ahead? I think there'd be some really interesting game mechanics involved as well as some great stories of trust and betrayal.

man, remember deathtrap dungeon? that book was awesome

never read deathtrap dungeoun, but just read the wiki - that's the concept, yes! but fully multiplayer and obviously in computer RPG rather than book format- so every encounter to be with another human player, and it plays out a bit like an RPG poker tournament... the crux of the game would be in how well you felt you could(temporarily) trust the people around him & how to get a competitive edge without playing your hand too early and losing the benefits of that temporary trust.

(apparently a shit videogame was based on Deathtrap : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathtrap_Dungeon_(game)

and things like... say you come across some cool items that will boost your stats. do you share them with the people you're running with, or hoard them for yourself - which would make you stronger and better prepared for when you make the break, but wouldn't help the team and also make them more likely to turn against you?

re. nethack mmorpg - a couple to try (I haven't yet)

http://www.tomenet.net/main.php?tome_current=1
http://crossfire.real-time.com/start/index.html

haha those look ...interesting.

I wonder if any actual MMORPGers will ever post to this thread.

Clearly, they're too busy playing WoW!

there's some kind of online text adventure MUD think emily short was talking about a while ago that might be germane .. ? i can't really remember much about it, i'm afraid

i have nothing to add here really except that tombot is right and something like this needs to be made : /