Quests 148
Aeonite writes "Quests have always been a part of fantasy gaming; from the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons to World of Warcraft's myriad quest lines, quests have given players purpose beyond button-pressing and mindless grinding. Jeff Howard's Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narrative is an exploration of such quests in both literary and gaming contexts, comparing and contrasting their appearances in each medium and striving to bring the two worlds closer together by imbuing game quests with more meaning." Read below for the rest of Michael's review
In his preface, Howard first attempts to define quests, both in his own terms and with respect to the likes of Campbell and Frye. In short, a narrative quest is a "journey to attain a meaningful goal," such as one might find in The Odyssey, The Faerie Queene, or The Quest for the Holy Grail. Such quests are romantic, archetypal, and laden with meaning and purpose. On the contrary, a game quest is in Howard's words "an activity in which players must overcome challenges to reach a goal." The disparity in the language used here is clear, especially when Howard goes on to clarify game quests as being "about action that is meaningful to a player on the level of ideas..." Narrative quests are about meaningful goals; game quests are about meaningful action. Howard quotes Auden as saying that "the search for a lost button is not a quest," but is this not exactly the sort of quest we find in MMOs like WOW? Time-filling quests to give the player some sort of activity, to provide "meaningful play" in the absence of meaningful goals.
| Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives | |
| author | Jeff Howard |
| pages | 248 |
| publisher | A.K. Peters Ltd |
| rating | 8 |
| reviewer | Michael Fiegel |
| ISBN | 978-1-56881-347-9 |
| summary | A comparison of quests in both literature and gaming |
This inherent problem with quests in games is further touched upon in the introduction to the book, which explains that its own goal is to prove quests out as a bridge between games and narratives. "[I]nteractivity is a prerequisite of enactment but is not sufficient to produce it...," says Howard. "[E]nactment requires active, goal-directed effort, often in the form of balancing long-term and short-term goals." Campbell, Frye, Auden and Propp are all consulted and cited here, exploring their own takes on quests in terms of their place in the heroic monomyth, medieval romance, subjective personal experience, and a "sequence of defined transformations," respectively. However, the most enlightening point comes after an exploration of the history of quest games (from D&D through WOW) where, quoting Tronstad, the author explains that "the paradox of questing is that as soon as meaning is reached, the quest stops functioning as quest." The profusion of more-or-less meaningless quests in MMORPGs "causes the 'main quest' to disappear" according to Howard, who cites the "bleak scenario" of WOW as not being conducive to meaningful gameplay.
Given that challenge, the main portion of the book serves as a sort of lesson plan towards the creation of better, more meaningful quests in modern games. In Chapter 1, "Introduction to Quest Design," Howard asserts that designing meaningful action is key, and ample examples of symbolism and spiritual analogy tied to the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are offered. The following chapters each cover a different element of quest design, more or less aligned along the same breakdowns as one might find in a MUD codebase: w(or)ld, mob(ile), obj(ect) and the like. Each one is broken up into two sections: theory, and practice, the former covering Howard's thoughts on the topic, and the latter delving into practical examples of how to create that quest element using the Neverwinter Nights Aurora Toolset.
Chapter 2 covers the "Spaces of the Quest," providing a sort of primer on level design and world design, from dungeons and labyrinths to dreamlike allegorical spaces. Chapter 3 then focuses on "Characters," both NPC and PC alike, including a discussion of encounters, dialog trees, archetypes and some minor venom spat Fable-wards due to the presence in that game of characters literally named Mentor and Hero; perhaps worth mentioning in Fable's defense is that both Hero (of Hero and Leander fame) and Mentor (Odysseus' sagacious friend) are both legitimate names derived from Greek myth. But I digress.
Chapter 4 explores "Objects," specifically those quest items that players seek out and gather on their quests. "[T]he drive to acquire objects in Everquest challenges literary understandings of games because players do not seek to interpret these objects," Wesp is quoted as saying here. The assumption seems to be that quests should strive to contain objects laden with meaning and symbolism, whether they be "rods of eight parts" that one must piece together or symbolic tattoos such as those found in Planescape: Torment. Certainly, many MMOs could learn a few lessons from this chapter, being as so many have players running around collecting feces, offal and skins. Indeed, the quests that send them off to do such things are explored in Chapter 5, "Challenges." Here Howard covers fetch/collect quests, kill quests, escort quests and the like, providing a somewhat awkward apology for kill quest proliferation by trying to compare kill grinding in games like WOW with the intense violence practiced by Odysseus. Of course, Odysseus was never sent on a quest to kill 12 Cyclopes to collect their eyes for a healing potion; once again, the difference between meaningful action and meaningful goals rears its ugly head. Indeed, Howard provides a somewhat telling example of an attempt to rectify this disparity in his scripting example, wherein he has King Arthur bestowing Gawain several keys to use on various chests so Gawain can open them in sequence to find objects hidden inside each which will help him on his quest. Surely there are examples of this sort of rote quest sequencing to be found in folklore and mythology; Russian mythology in particular is full of things done in threes. Yet one cannot help but feel that it makes the whole thing somewhat less epic in the retelling when a knight of the Round Table is reduced to playing puzzle games.
Chapter 6 of the book closes out the lesson plan with "Quests and Pedagogy," an example of how Howard used The Crying of Lot 49 with his own students to explore the nature of quests in a video game setting. This rather short chapter is followed by a Conclusion, summarizing what's come before, and then several lengthy Appendices: a guide to the Aurora Toolset; an excerpt from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and an excerpt from The Faerie Queene. An excellent Works Cited page (nearly as long as Chapter 6) and an adequate index close out the book. In total, the book weighs in at 248 pages, although 46 pages of that is introduction (15 more if you count Chapter 1) and over 80 pages is composed of conclusion, appendices and endmatter. Thus, about half of the book is either introduction or conclusion, frontmatter or endmatter, and this makes the book feel somewhat imbalanced, taking a long time to introduce and then back up the topic while spending not enough time (in my opinion) actually working through it. Howard's writing style is excellent and the subject matter worthy; I wish he had spent more time in his book's Act 2; perhaps he would have been able to extend his ideas even further than he does, striving not only to infuse quests with meaningful activity but with meaningful goals as well. Too much of game quest design is derived from the Latin origin of the word quest (which Howard tells us comes from questare, which means " to seek,") and not enough on the purpose of the quest, which is to have a heroic journey with a "Happily Ever After" at the end. Yet MMOs almost by definition require that many millions of players walk the exact same heroic path; would the epic tale of King Arthur be so epic if his round table had 10 million chairs, with ten million knights forever searching for their own copy of the Grail?
"Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest," says King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "If he will give us food and shelter for the night, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail."
"Well, I'll ask him, but I don't think he will be very keen," replies a French soldier. "Uh, he's already got one, you see."
Therein lies the problem: he's already got one, and so does everyone else. Because everyone has done the quest, and furthermore everyone wants to keep grinding for the +2 grail, which will no doubt be available in the next expansion, or perhaps in the Player's Handbook IV, or as an exclusive Dragon Magazine feature, available to subscribers of D&D Insider. Many (if not most) fantasy games can never have meaningful, magical quests where you get the vorpal sword and slay the Jabberwock and save the world, because their Sisyphean stories can never truly end; the Horde will always be at war with the Alliance, and the ring will never, ever make it to that volcano, and there will always be another supplement or sequel, another dungeon to raid, another hamlet of Hommlet to rescue. One telling Neverwinter Nights module is called Infinite Dungeons; the solitary hero has turned into the solitaire hero, ever grinding away. Sure, Odysseus had his wandering Odyssey as he searched for home, and Galahad took years to quest for the Holy Grail, but in each case they eventually found what they were looking for. Unfortunately, right now much of the game industry seems to generally be following the example of King Pellinore, endlessly pursuing his Questing Beast.
What Howard attempts to do with Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives is truly worthwhile, and I look forward to the dialog his book will inspire. He would have us re-examine the game quest in terms of the narrative quest, and apply those lessons to gaming. The book is well worth a read, both as a lesson plan for making the activity of questing more meaningful, as well as a first step towards giving games that rely heavily on quests — especially MMOS — more meaningful goals. If the game industry can pull that off, it will be an impressive feat, worthy of Sir Galahad himself. If not... well, there's always another 12 wolf pelts to collect.
You can purchase Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Are Quests in MMOGs doable? (Score:5, Interesting)
I contend that MMOs wont get to this level of questing again until we go back to unique items. Eg the holy grail gaining a faction special privileges like +2 to all skills and only one can be in a realm/server at a time. Then the players can quest over it and battle and gain things that way. As the grail goes from faction to faction they can either guard it themselves or they can use resources to put it in an adequately difficult location. Have enough items like this and you get quests defined by players rather than the grind of doing it over and over again. As a guild gets more and more of the unique items it would get more powerful as a whole. You would get small uprisings with people trying to take over the guild and people moving around rouge style stealing items. It would be fantastic game play. Princesses giving special trade privileges, Relics gaining stats, deities granting favor.
ahh but I am back daydreaming again. People love gear grinding too much. Thus the reason I quit Wow.
This book though seems to point in the right direction though. I love questing, rather than the goal being button finding or getting to lvl 70, an emotional satisfaction is attached to completing a lengthy storyline. In WoW there is absolutely no attachment to any NPC in that game unless you went through Warcraft 1,2,and 3. But it is good to see that there is enough interest in the Quest problem to generate a book about it.
* Quest (Score:3, Interesting)
So what does he have to say about King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, et al?
Can you change the world in MMO's? (Score:4, Interesting)
In MMO's you can't change the world in the sense that if you do a quest, say slay Hogger, and it prevents another person from doing the same quest, then the world would need sort of an infinite number of quests. It would be difficult to program. Otherwise it's first come, first kill, first to get the gear, first to advance and prevent others from advancing.
The best resource for MMO's is the playerbase. Anyone who can harness that creative energy to create content, beta test new content, grade potential new content and vote to put it into the game world will open a new frontier.
If you put in puzzle quests, someone will post the answer on a spoiler site, and many players will just read the site since they are just interested in advancing.
How many people actually read the quest text in WoW in detail? Versus how many just skip to the "go here, do this" part? I bet it is at least 10 to one.
So your design options are limited. Use a renewable resource.
In single player games, some of the same difficulties exist, but at least your actions can change the world in more meaningful ways: you kill Hogger, he stays dead. Maybe a new farm crops up at his old stomping grounds. Maybe new people come in and have new quests.
But in an MMO, what if I have the Hogger quest, and now he's gone?
To be honest, I would not try to overcome that problem. I would try to work on the most pressing MMO problem, repetitive content. Maybe we have to accept the logical inconsistencies of the shared world (we kill Hogger, yet he is still there, we clear out all the Blackborrow Gnolls but they magically reappear).
But maybe we could have deep instanced content? Then the problem arises, what if I need a group? What if they are not all at the same place I am?
In conclusion, I think the MMO and single player experiences are so different it would be difficult to say something meaningful to both at once.
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the "dumb" nature of MMO quests are partly what fuels their addictiveness. It's not that they're dumb per se, but that they're very tiny and quick. So the customer is always finishing up a quest and ready for another, with no down time. Everytime you log in, there is something new to do, and you accomplish something before logging off again. Compare to single player computer RPG games. There a quest may take days or weeks to finish. Players have long term goals, and some evenings they may do a lot of activities but nothing is ever checked off on their to-do list.
In a single player game, there may be a quest to rescue someone from kidnappers. Along the way the player may have to figure out where to go, get some clues, earn money to afford to travel, bypass the blockade of a city, defeat the kidnappers, etc. With side quests along the way to build up your survivability. But the games leave it up to the players to figure out what to do.
But if an MMO had anything near this complex it would break it up into micro-quests. Such as "go see Bob", "kill boars until you find the one that stole Bob's map", "kill orcs until you find the second half of the map", "return to Bob", "go across the street to the cartographer to repair the map", "go see Bob again", "follow the map to the next town", etc.
I haven't seen any MMO quests that last multiple levels or that give the players long term goals that they have to figure themselves. The players create their own long term goals of "try to find more quest givers" or "get more levels". Very addictive, but not very deep and there's not a lot of thinking involved. I get annoyed in some games when some new player arrives and quickly asks "is there a way to get an arrow that point to the quest objectives?"
Oblig. Planescape reference (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Are Quests in MMOGs doable? (Score:3, Interesting)
While MMOs are not all that new (Ultima online anyone?), the quest part seems to be getting dumber and dumber as the world moves on to better graphics and larger quantities of gear. Grinding seems to be all you do in later games. I was originally a big Baldur's Gate fan, loved the quest line, side quests and customization there.
I contend that they are getting smarter, but I think your definition of smarter and mine are not the same. Grinding is very very hard to eliminate, because to eliminate grinding, you have to provide quests making leveling easy enough that the laziest, stupidest person can do it without grinding. MMORPGs have to cater to literally hundreds of different kinds of interests, to get the most people, while balancing everyone's needs and giving them choices. Every MMORPG will become grind because you reach a point of diminishing returns on your personal enjoyment. If you reach that point, you should move on.
I don't play WOW but I've seen plenty of huge boss character that are too powerful for just one character. You have to create teams, come up with tactics, and then execute. On a personal level, doing this a couple times is very fulfilling to actually be able to pull it off. And there are two sides to this. If you have to kill the boss 20 times to get one item to drop, that's annoying, not fun. On the same token if you can run into any situation like Leeroy Jenkins and not have any consequences, that's not as much fun either. Again, all about balance. How well balanced WOW is compared to other MMORPGs is where I find the intelligence. They have more people playing that than any other MMORPG so they are doing something right.
I contend that MMOs wont get to this level of questing again until we go back to unique items. Eg the holy grail gaining a faction special privileges like +2 to all skills and only one can be in a realm/server at a time. Then the players can quest over it and battle and gain things that way. As the grail goes from faction to faction they can either guard it themselves or they can use resources to put it in an adequately difficult location. Have enough items like this and you get quests defined by players rather than the grind of doing it over and over again. As a guild gets more and more of the unique items it would get more powerful as a whole. You would get small uprisings with people trying to take over the guild and people moving around rouge style stealing items. It would be fantastic game play. Princesses giving special trade privileges, Relics gaining stats, deities granting favor.
The problem with this is that you would immediately institute everything that was bad about Evercrack (there were good things, this was simply one thing that isn't). EQ had tons of rare items that were hard to get, but so hard that it was discouraging to go after, and also certain people would camp at repop sites until the beast came back and they'd kill it, hope the item dropped, then sell the item/character on ebay to some sap who thinks it's okay to pay $500 for a virtual piece of property. That type of thing really discourages middle and low end gamers. And to sustain any MMORPG you have to have some kind of volume. Perhaps someone can create such a world and make money off it. I encourage it and wish you the best. Blizzard makes good games that appear to the most number of people possible. There will be people not satisfied on the high end, and I can't blame you if you are one of those people, you just aren't always the target audience.
As for "guild uprisings" most MMORPGs are trying to deal with the fact that a majority of people do NOT want to fight each other. Some people think that in order for such games to be enjoyable, everyone should be fighting each other. That is entirely untrue. Many of us don't want to have to deal with griefers, and find cooperation more fun than competition.
If the items were completely unique, you create a situation where one person would complete the quest and everyone else would no
And now for something completely different (Score:1, Interesting)
I've spent the last few years trying to apply the things I loved most about gaming to my real life and it's been a very fun game. I regularly come up with quests and try to see them through. Many are puzzles in their own right and a few have taken me around the world questing. My next quest takes me to Africa, which should be a fun level. Has anyone else had a similar world view/experience?