Footprints

Mmorpgs are so big, aren't they? Not the worlds, all that travel, vast distances across plains, over oceans, all those hours on horseback, in hot air balloons. Not the trail of footprints in the snow, the desert sand, glazing into the shimmering distance. 

Not those. The other footprints. The ones on your hard drive.

I have most, if by no means all, of my mmorpgs stashed on my third internal drive, the E: Drive. They're in a folder cannily called "MMOs". It's a 2TB mechanical drive and that one folder takes up almost half of it: 982GB of data, which breaks down as follows:

Auteria - 643Mb

Black Desert Online - 39.3GB

Blade & Soul - 58.8GB

City of Heroes - 4.45GB

Crowns of Power - 1.65GB

Dino Storm - 194MB

Dragon Nest 2019 - 18.2GB

Dragon Nest EU - 434MB

Dragon Nest Oracle - 224MB

Dragon Nest Origins - 9.74GB

EverQuest - 15.5GB

Fallen Earth - 6.67GB

Fortnite - 34.2GB

Genshin Impact - 25.0GB

Glyph (for ArcheAge) - 27.0GB

Guild Wars - 3.86GB

GW2 - 50.0GB

Icarus Online - 44.4GB

Kingsisle Entertainment (for Wizard 101 and Pirate 101) - 9,44GB

NCSoft (for Aion) - 28.2GB

Neverwinter - 26.3GB

Portalarium (for Shroud of the Avatar) - 8.14GB

Vanguard - 38.8GB

Secret World Legends - 50.5GB

Square Enix (for FFXIV and FFXIV:ARR, separately) - 47.1GB

Star Citizen -  51.0GB

Star Trek Online - 13.7GB

Star Wars - The Old Republic - 40.9GB

Test EverQuest - 15.8GB

The Hammers End - 1.05GB

The Lord of the Rings Online - 30.6GB

Villagers and Heroes - 4.72GB

Warhammer Redux - 20GB

Wildstar - 12.6GB

World of Warcraft - 101GB

Saving the biggest for last, there. Also, it doesn't add up to what I said, if anyone was nuts enough to check, because inevitably I have let things get in there that I shouldn't have. I didn't list those.

 

Other things that might ought to be there... aren't. Anything I originally installed via Steam is going to be in one of my three Steam directories, for a start. I have no idea what's in which. That's why I have Steam in the first place, to take care of the boring details. I just made three to spread the load.

Some notable exceptions you'll have spotted, no doubt, include EverQuest II, currently sitting on the C: Drive for no particularly good reason and weighing in at 42.6GB. Elder Scrolls Online, on my D: Drive, that's another 71.9GB. 

DCUO is in its default folder, the path being an abstruse C:/Users/Public/Daybreak Game Company/Installed Games, where it is in fact the only game installed. Never let mmorpgs put themselves where they want to go is my advice. Not if you ever want to find them again.

There's another installation of WoW on the D: Drive, too. Must be an old one. It's half the size at 52.GB. Oh, wait, I bet one has Classic in and the other doesn't. I don't suppose I need two versions of Retail. I should probably do something about that. But I probably won't.

The thing is, when I clean house, uninstall the mmorpgs I haven't played for years, delete the ones that have gone out of business and will never be playable again, next thing I know there's some free offer or comeback deal or someone's made an emulator that requires an original installation and off I go again. It's easier to buy new storage, frankly.

I was prompted to make this tedious list for several reasons:

1. I promised myself I was going to do more List posts. There should be more List posts. Everyone should do list posts. List posts are great! I have a plan to do more that I'm mulling over but I thought doing this one would help me get back in practice.
2. I'm patching Riders of Icarus as I type. I have a good cable connection and the download is flying along but I've still had time to write all this and there's about twenty minutes to go. I am, naturally, patching up because I heard there was free stuff for returnees. Given the sheer amount of free stuff RoI gives away as standard I felt I had to see what extra bribes they'd come up with this time.
   
3. It's too hot to write a post where I have to think much. Yes, I know other people have it this hot and hotter for months at a stretch but you have air conditioning and houses that are designed for temperatures in the 30s. We don't.
4. I think there was another reason but I forget what it was. See reason #3.

Oh yes, I remember the last reason. Tomorrow, all being well, I should get an invite to the New World closed beta. I've had a pre-order since last December. I'm working tomorrow but I have the following two days free so I ought to be able to give it a run, see how much has changed. I suspect it's going to be everything.

But first I'll have to download the thing. I did at least remember to uninstall last year's alpha, on the grounds that it might screw something up if I didn't. I wonder how big the finished thing is going to be. Bloody huge, I bet. 

I might have to delete that spare copy of World of Warcraft after all.

The First Day In August

It's that time of year again. The time when every second post in your RSS feed (if that's still a thing people use) looks almost exactly the same. Yes, it's the run-up to Blaugust!

We all do it, don't we? Write up a post saying exactly what everyone else is saying, with all the same links and all the same logos. It wouldn't be Blaugust without the run-up.

I confess I didn't think we were going to have a Blaugust this year. I mean, it's only a couple of weeks until August and in recent years the whole thing has tended to kick off a week or so before the calendar flips. I thought we'd already missed our window. 

Mostly, though, Belghast, the amazing motive force and organizing principle behind the annual event has, by has own account, been having such a hard time of things lately I figured the very last thing he'd need would be more responsibility. 

But you know what they say. If you want something done, ask a busy man. Actually, I believe the saying is "ask a busy woman". Probably going to need some work, that saying, if it's going to survive much longer.

True, though. It's those that can that do. There, I made that one up myself! Feel free to pass it on. It doesn't make any sense but when has that ever stopped a meme? (We're calling sayings and catchphrases memes now, right? Or is that over, now?)

Three enormous cheers for Bel for stepping up, yet again, to get this blogging ball rolling. It wouldn't be summer without Blaugust.

Belghast has everything you could possibly want to know about what Blaugust is, why we do it, how it works and why you should join in, all explained with a clarity and brevity I couldn't hope to match in this post here.

I've signed up and so can you. Here's the link. 

And here's the link to the Blaugust Discord. I'm signed up to that, too, although the more I use Discord the more uncomfortable I get so I probably won't be on much.

I imagine I'm down as a Mentor again which is fine by me. Feel free to ask me any questions about blogging you think I might be able to answer. A small field, I know. I'll almost certainly be handing out advice right and left, whether anyone asks for it or not. Why break the habit of a lifetime?

The thing about Blaugust is this: it works. I'm not sure how many totally new names we'll see this year. I suspect the glory days of the Newbie Blogger Initiative (another great event now subsumed within Blaugust itself) are long gone. I can't see me having to add forty or so new blogs to my blog roll this go round, which is probably just as well, since I never take any of the old ones off. 

Here in this corner of the blogosphere, it's not so much fresh blood we need as a transfusion from those of us still plugging away into the writing arms of those who've dropped behind. My god, that was a labored metaphor. Here's my first piece of blogging advice for the year: don't start a metaphor if you don't know how to finish it.

What I'm saying is, there are a lot of silent blogs in my blog roll that I consider to be dormant, not dead. At least I hope they are. That's why I don't cull the list to a manageable level. You never know when one of them will spark and sputter and spring back to life.

Blaugust is a set of jumper cables for bloggers whose batteries have gone flat. (Look, didn't I just talk to you about metaphors?) A lot of people who used to post and don't any more still read. When they see all these Yay! Blaugust! posts and everyone getting all excited it starts their juices flowing again. At least I imagine that's what happens. I never stop blogging so I'm guessing how it might feel...

Two bloggers, whose words of wit and wisdom I would very much like to see pop up in my Feedly or on my blog roll at least on a semi-regular basis, have already expressed a wish, even an intent, to dust off the keyboard and make a comeback. I would urge any other lapsed bloggers reading this to give some consideration to joining them. I'm pretty sure Bel has some fatted calves laid in for just such an eventuality. 

And if there's anyone reading this who still hasn't given the whole blogging malarkey a try yet - what are you waiting for? If we can all do it, surely you can. There'll never be a better time than now!

I think that just about covers it. Meet back here on the first of August and we'll see how it goes.

It'll be great! It always is!

How To Do Now: An Overview Of Guild Wars 2's Marionette

She's back! For one week only, Scarlet Briar and her amazing Marionette. Performances every two hours, only at The Eye of The North. Get in line now!

Yes, the promised return of Guild Wars 2's best ever structured event began on Tuesday after the update. The public event runs for just one week, ending when next week's patch lands but there's also a private version that should be available indefinitely.

Here's how it works:

Both versions are accessed via the Scrying Pool in current content hub, Eye of the North. You used to have to own the Path of Fire expansion to go there (or have legacy rights from the pre-launch events a decade ago, I guess) but that requirement has been dropped. Now you just need to be Level 80. If you've never been there before, no worries; there's a one-time portal scroll in the mail that will take you there and open the waypoint for you permanently.

The 50-person private Squad instance is always available. If you want to start one, use the Scrying Pool. More likely, if you want to join one, use the LFG function and search under Tyria - Squads. Right now there are lots of people doing it but as folks get the rewards and the achievements they want it will calm down. Based on other, similar content, though, there will most likely be Commanders and guilds looking to form up fairly regularly, especially at weekends. GW2 is very good at keeping older content in play.

When you've found your squad, join up and follow instructions. Do not zone into the instance via the Scrying Pool yourself. Wait for the pop-up invitation and accept that. Then just listen, pay attention and do what everyone else does is my advice.

If you're there for the Public version, check the Event Timer for the next one, arrive around the top of the hour, go to the Scrying pool, click on the Public button when it appears and zone in. Then you can either run around like a lone wolf and tick everyone off or you can join a lane, follow a tag and behave like a socially responsible person. Your call.

The mechanics are virtually unchanged from seven years ago but if you can remember much of the detail you have a better memory than I do. Of course, that may well be the case. Almost anyone does.

Luckily, there are some excellent guides available. This is the best I've seen. I would strongly advising reading through it before embarassing yourself. I didn't but I think I got away with it. No, I definitely got away with it. I didn't do anything dumb. Still, I would have been a good deal more comfortable if I'd known what I was doing, so the point stands.

I was lucky my first run in that the Commander had a squad message up that detailed the basic mechanics for each boss. Plus I got the easy one first time, even though I was in Lane Two, because the people in Lane One couldn't even manage to kill theirs, even though it was the easiest boss. It passed to us and we killed it for them! Go us!

The next two lanes also killed theirs but after that it was fail time for everyone, and we wiped. Second time around we did even worse and then I had to go to bed. It was a great introduction all the same.

This evening I did the public version which is in some ways easier (you can have more people - the limit is 75 rather than 50, I believe) and in some ways harder (you can't vet who comes and you get quite a few lollygaggers and layabouts). We did brilliantly.

The first four lanes cut the chains. I was in Lane Two and my platform was last to get our kill, mostly because the guy I was with took a while to learn we needed to kite the boss over the mines. He got the hang of it after I yelled at him, though.

Lane five failed, which wasn't a shock because the fifth boss is the hardest. Lane One, on their reprise, took him down. Not a single lane let too many mobs through and we finished with the aethercannon still only 25% charged from that single failure. Even back in the day that would have been counted a very solid run. 

Although the exact details of what to do are quite complex, the basics are simple:

Get organized. If no-one else is stepping up then maybe think about doing it yourself.

Have 10-15 people per lane, depending on whether you have 50 or 75 in total.

When your lane is up, kill all the mobs as fast as possible to get the portal open.

Run in fast. It's really embarassing to get locked outside and watch your team fail because you were late.

Kill the boss on your platform using the correct tactics as outlined in the guide linked above or as explained by your Commander, assuming they know what they're doing.

If the idiot on your platform is doing it wrong do yell at them but also tell them how to do it properly!

All the times it's not your turn, concentrate on holding the line. Use all the available tools (barricades, golems, repair hammers) plus all your snares, roots, stuns, knockbacks and so on to make absolutely certain none of the giant twisted clockworks get to the portal. If even a few make it your lane will fail and the aethercannon will charge up some more. You do not want that gun to fire. It will kill everyone. Literally everyone.

If a lane calls out for help (usually when their turn comes around again after a fail and they realize half of their people already left) do not go charging over to help until you are asked! It's really embarassing when the whole thing fails because everyone in one lane went to help another lane and left one poor guy trying to stop a hundred twisted clockworks on his own.

If you win, jump up and down and cheer like crazy. Or just grab your loot and leave. You do you.

 

I cheered. Then I grabbed my loot. Most of it was the usual nonsense but there's two gold for the first time you do it that day (Maybe. Or maybe it's just the first time ever. Honestly, I didn't check. I'm not doing it for the money.) 

There's a fairly nice set of weapon skins to collect if you're into that sort of thing. Mostly, though, it's about the fun. Marionette is a really well-designed event and I'll tell you why: it's because it keeps everyone engaged from start to finish and makes everyone feel invested in everyone else's success. It's a true mmorpg experience that could not be replicated in a single-player game.

All five lanes have to be held. All five bosses have to die. All five chains have to be severed. Every success is everyone's success. Every failure is everyone's failure. It's a true team effort.

I loved it. I'm just writing this up in the time between the last public run and the next. The private squad version is good but the public one is the real thing. 

I just wish it was staying for longer than a week.

You'll Be My Mirror

In the spirit of shorter posts, here's one that probably ought to be a tweet, if only I was on Twitter. Which, technically, I am, not that I ever log in.

I was amused yesterday to see the following announcement on Pitchfork:

Kurt Vile, Michael Stipe, Iggy Pop, St. Vincent, and More Cover Velvet Underground & Nico for Tribute Album

Sounds kind of familiar...

I suspect the upcoming version is going to be a tad more commercial than mine would have been. Here's the line-up:

01 Michael Stipe: “Sunday Morning”
02 Matt Berninger: “I’m Waiting for the Man”
03 Sharon Van Etten with Angel Olsen: “Femme Fatale”
04 Andrew Bird / Lucius: “Venus in Furs”
05 Kurt Vile & The Violators: “Run Run Run”
06 St. Vincent / Thomas Bartlett: “All Tomorrow’s Parties”
07 Thurston Moore: “Heroin” [ft. Bobby Gillespie]
08 King Princess: “There She Goes Again”
09 Courtney Barnett: “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
10 Fontaines D.C.: “The Black Angel’s Song of Death” (Sic)
11 Iggy Pop / Matt Sweeney: “European Son”

Positively an all-star affair compared to what I went with:

01 Petite Meller: “Sunday Morning”
02 Dan Lyons: “I’m Waiting for the Man”
03 Sasha Belyava: “Femme Fatale”
04 Ängie: “Venus in Furs”
05 Emily Loizeau: “Run Run Run”
06 A.B.B.A feat. Elfin Bow: “All Tomorrow’s Parties”
07 Opal feat. Hope Sandoval: “Heroin”
08 Hatsune Miku: “There She Goes Again”
09 Emma Elisabeth: “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
10 You Can't Win, Charlie Brown.: “The Black Angel’s Death Song”
11 Matt Berninger: “European Son”

Matt Berninger is the only one to make both lists. And he picked what are, in my opinion, and for very different reasons, the two hardest tracks to cover. Good on you, Matt!

I look forward to hearing the results. Those are some very talented people. 

So far all we have to judge by is Kurt Vile's take on "Run Run Run". He's been a big favorite of Mrs Bhagpuss since she saw him do a televised Glastonbury set a couple of years back. I like him too, although not as much as she does. He sets a high bar for the rest of them, I'd say.

The full version clocks in at a mesmeric seven minutes. I recommend listening to it in full. There's no video for long version, though, so we're going to have to have to settle for the four-minute radio edit instead.

Now I need to think of another album I can wreck. Not that I want to give anyone ideas.

The Choices We Make

I'm playing Blade & Soul again. I didn't go back for the free Level 60 boost. That was mere serendipity. It happened much more randomly than that.

I was looking for screenshots to illustrate one of my recent non-game-specific posts and I chanced on a folder of shots from B&S. I opened it to see if anything in there might work. I'd forgotten just how good-looking a game Blade & Soul can be.

I'd also forgotten just how much I like my character there. I only have one, a Lyn Summoner, because of course it's a Lyn Summoner. I'm nothing if not predictable. 

The races in B&S are not particularly inspiring. There are only four. A big human, the Gon, a regular
human, the Jin, a race that probably kind of stands in as the elf race, the Yun, who can only be female, and the Lyn. The Lyn is the only obviously non-human race and also the smallest. Two boxes ticked already. They also have huge, fox-like tails and ears, so you can see where this is going.

Classes come with a lot more variety. There are thirteen, although some of them (all of them?) break down into specialist sub-classes at higher levels. They come handily graded for difficulty, both on the website and at character creation. It's a five star grading system and Summoner, the pet class, is rated 2* for Easy. 

The pet you get is a cat. There are five cat personalities to choose from, something that happens in game as part of an introductory quest. You can dress your cat in various costumes and change their appearance by visiting a Groomer. 

Seriously, was there ever a chance I'd play anything else?

And I did play her, too. I didn't just futz around in character creation and do the tutorial then walk away. When I logged back in a few days ago, after a five gigabyte patch and some searching through notes for login details (it had been a while) I found I'd left off last time at Level 34. As of this writing I'm Level 37.

Blade & Soul occupies an odd position in the current hierarchy of mmorpgs I hear about. It hardly gets a mention anywhere. What's more, it never did get much attention even when it was new. If anyone else in this part of the blogosphere plays it or has played I couldn't tell you who that might be. 

It's strange. B&S is a bona fide AAA game from a well-known publisher, NCSoft. The same publisher, in fact, as Guild Wars 2 and Aion, both of which get far more press here. Also, it was already a familiar franchise from a Japanese TV show even before the mmorpg arrived.

It's not what you think!

The game has been around for five years now. It gets regular content updates and by most accounts has been commercially successful. A mobile version of the same game, called Blade & Soul Revolution, was released in 2020 and a Blade & Soul 2 is in development with a launch date possibly as soon as this year.

It's fully voiced and translated in good, clear English and it also benefits from a hybrid combat system, meaning it can be played comfortably in either action or classic tab target and hot key mode, making it available to the widest of audiences. There seems no obvious reason it shouldn't be as well-known or as widely reported as, say, Black Desert Online, ArcheAge or it's own stable-mate, Aion, but it just isn't.

I like it, anyway. I keep dipping back into it and I always have a good time when I do. In typically inconsistent fashion, given my recent pontification on the inadvisablity of grafting linear storylines onto open-world mmorpgs, almost all of my time there has been spent slavishly following the main questline. I'm on chapter forty-something now.

It's quite hard to follow a story when you leave gaps of many months between visits but it's the usual tale of possession, displacement, fate and destiny. I kind of know who some of the main characters are, or at least they come back to me when I play ecah time. They all have Anglicized Korean names that don't easily stick in my memory but they also have very distinctive visual signifiers that do, so I can just about keep my scorecard marked.

Charlie's Angels - the re-re-reboot.

 

That's a polite way of saying the game is highly sexualized, by the way, or at least the female characters are. It would be tough not to remember some of these women. I'd have a lot more difficulty with the look of the thing if it wasn't so outrageously, ludicrously, cartoonishly over the top. It's like Russ Meyer made an mmo.

I guess you could also make a case for the powerfulness of the women involved. I mean, I don't think I'd want to stand behind it but it's possible, at least. There are a lot of female leads and they are all badass. They definitely don't need any males to come along and save them, although they quite often turn up and save each other. Or the opposite.

I thought the character I'd been chasing for thirty levels, an arrogant pretty boy, was the main villain until my character and her three female allies roundly thrashed him last night. Then his boss turned up to gave him a highly negative performance review. She's a very scary woman. 

She also casually murdered the other greasy, odious, devious, cheating male who'd been making life difficult for my Summoner for many levels, something I chose to interpret as some kind of broad gesture of solidarity. She's probably just a sociopath but I like to try and see the good in everyone.

Well, my character does. Thankfully, she's positively demure, at least by comparison to everyone else. And she looks great. The attention to detail is fabulous. She's one of my favorite characters in any game as far as looks go although I wouldn't say she's developed much of a personality as yet.

She does get dialog but it's very easy not to notice. The player character isn't one of those silent protagonists some people love and others complain about. There's just no voice acting for the PC and their text dialog appears off to the right, whereas all the rest of the conversation takes place center-screen and in voiceover. Sometimes I don't even notice she's spoken at all.

Of course, the real reason she hasn't made her character known to me is precisely because I've been nailed to the storyline from day one. She won't become a character in her own right without agency and that's something a pre-written storyline never offers, particularly when it doesn't include what we like to call "meaningful choices".

And yet I am sufficiently attached and invested not to want to use that Level 60 boost on her. She's made it to the high 30s on her own and I'm confident she can go all the way. Might take a while but she'll get there. 

Which leaves the question of who I should use it on. As a free player I have three character slots and two of them are still empty. I read through all the classes and races last night but I'm still not sure which way to jump. 

I'm currently favoring the Gunslinger, a ranged class rated Easy. Blade & Soul is almost certainly never going to be a game I play fervently, frequently and seriously. It's going to be one of the extensive roster of mmorpgs I keep coming back to, chipping away at, drifting away from. It makes no sense to play anything that's going to require more than the minimum effort if I'm going to have to keep re-learning everything every time I return.

I know you have a thing for wool but try to keep in check just this once.

 

That's how it's going to be, and yet I also know Blade & Soul is a game I could be playing more. It has the potential to be a focus game. Quite a few mmorpgs do. 

Why we end up playing one rather than another is a question I'd like to have answered but I suspect the motivations, if revealed, might not be all that flattering to my ego. I have a feeling that, collectively, we end up playing mostly the games we see and hear about other people playing. We are, after all, social animals, much though many of us like to deny it.

Add Blade & Soul to the big summer of mmorpgs, then. A free Level 60 and an upcoming major graphical revamp definitely count as a significant promotional move. I can't help wishing these companies would co-ordinate their schedules a bit more sensitively. It might be to their benefit as well as ours.

Much as I'd like to press on and take my Summoner all the way to sixty this summer, I imagine in a week or so there'll be virtual dust on my B&S desktop icon. The New World beta begins next week and Bless Unleashed arrives not too long after. This is Blade & Soul's moment but it won't last.

I guess I'd better get on with it, then. Choose who to use that Level 60 boost on before it goes back into the cupboard for next time. Whenever that might be.

And So The Story Goes

Following on from yesterday's post, where I took a thousand words to explain how I wished I could keep to the point once in a while, today I thought I might try a five-finger excercise on that very theme. There's a topic going around, kicked off by Aywren but generally following in the slipstream of Final Fantasy XIV's growing success, concerning the necessity or even advisablity of hanging mmorpg gameplay on the hook of a strong, linear narrative.

Naithan sums up the situation perfectly in the title of his post on the problem (if problem is what it is): "FFXIV May as Well Not Be an MMO". Couldn't have put it better.

Of course, FFXIV isn't just an mmorpg, it's an instalment in a long-running series of JRPGs. It's a hybrid.

And it's not the first. A decade ago (what, has it been that long already?) all the attention was on an upcoming mmorpg set in the Star Wars universe, Star Wars: the Old Republic. Produced by BioWare, a developer famous for story-driven, single-player and co-op RPGs, what we were being promised was a collation of two forms: the massively-multiple theme park mmo experience of World of Warcraft underpinned by the nuanced storytelling associated with games like Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect.

Much was made of the "Fourth Pillar", the term BioWare liked to use for Story. Anyone remember what the other three pillars were? I didn't. I had to go look it up and it wasn't easy to find.

"Traditionally, massively multiplayer online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars - combat, exploration and character progression", said "BioWare boss Ray Muzyka" in an interview with Eurogamer back in 2008. (Yes, it really was that long ago). His contention seemed to be that until then mmorpgs hadn't bothered telling stories, but that was okay because now BioWare were around to make things right. 

I suspect that plenty of writers who'd been making a living putting words in the mouths of NPCs for the previous ten years might have looked at that interview a little askance. I'm pretty sure Blizzard and SOE thought they'd been telling stories set in their imagined worlds and I'm damn sure Turbine did in the one they'd leased from the Tolkein estate. That was kind of the point, wasn't it?

BioWare were widely seen to be riding in to battle against an enemy that didn't exist but time has proved them right about one thing: story has become that fourth pillar, at least in the minds of some players and developers. 

In the early years of the genre, narrative and story were gameplay elements but they weren't the focus of the experience. I played the EverQuest titles for years without ever having more than a vague idea what the overarching story was. But I always knew there was one.

Because those games attempted to replicate the experience of being in and of a world not as the "one, true hero", just someone who saw things happening around them and joined in as best they could, story was everywhere. Not just the personal stories of the players themselves, as touted by the advocates of the sandbox, but crafted stories, written by writers and given to NPC actors to tell.

The quests told stories, the incidental, ambient dialog told stories, the books and the statues and the ruins told stories. The worlds told stories and they were as real as stories ever are, which is as real as real gets. And you never heard them all.  

You heard fragments, sections, pieces. You heard rumors and legends and myths. You puzzled and figured and discussed and out of all of that came stories with frayed edges and loose ends, tales to tell over camps and at guild meets, stories to argue and maybe even duel over.

Then along came the serious writers, the adults in the room, ready to tidy up the toys and put them neatly back in their boxes. A story has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. It has to have a hero and a moral. It has to follow the rules.

Why did it happen? I have a theory. The games, the genre itself, began with explorers. Explorers are the ones who go out and make the maps. Explorers, though, don't stay behind to hammer in the signposts or manage the map concession in the town square.

There's always been a tension, a competition, between the four archetypes, the Explorer, the Socialiser, the Killer and the Achiever. The people who tell you where to go are the achievers and the importance of story in mmorpgs grows alongside their ascendency. Almost by definition, the one archetype that has to come out on top is the Achiever.

And so it was. Achievers gained their ascendency, in the games and in the studios, years ago. Almost all the mmorpgs we play now are box-tickers, first and last. Everything must be codified, accounted for and scored, including exploration, socialising and killing. All those boxes have to be ticked.

And that's just what the current incarnation of Story in mmorpgs does. It ticks boxes. The new, big, important stories are unified and linear. They may contain many digressions and sub-plots but like those in a novel they all serve the central narrative. You start at page one and you read to the end. Every page turned, evey cut scene watched, is a box ticked. 

Stories, of course, are infinitely more than box-ticking excercises. In a good story, the characters become friends, their actions, memories. Stories become us. We're made of stories.

There's nothing wrong with a good story, of course there's not. There's everything right with one. I love a good story. I'm not saying I want the stories in morpgs to be not good. That would be crazy. I'm not saying I don't want mmorpgs to have stories in them. That would be crazier still.

But there's a place for these particular kinds of finished, complete, linear stories. From everything I've seen so far I'm not convinced that mmorpgs can, let alone should, be that place. 

Mmorpgs are places where stories happen, of course they are. That's the whole point of an mmorpg: it's a place where anything can happen. It's a world, or it can be. Stories belong in mmorpgs as they belong everywhere. But stories can't be mmorpgs. Mmorpgs can't be stories.

To bind the mmorpg form to the yoke of narrative is to set hard restraints on its limitless capacity to change. A linear narrative is a corridor passing countless doors that will never be opened, a train on a track that arrows straight to the horizon. It's a wasted opportunity.

We already have so many ways to tell those kinds of stories. Mmorpgs offer a chance to tell the old stories in new ways, maybe even to tell new stories in ways that have never been seen before. For a while that seemed like it might happen but the signs and portents aren't good. Mmorpgs are being assimilated in the old narrative tradition, when they should be in the vanguard of something new, something non-linear, fragmented, chaotic, alive. 

It maybe already be too late. The damage may already have been done. Story sells, or so it seems. And, of course, it's the winners who get tell the stories.

Their stories, not ours.

Too Many Words

So that was a long gap between posts. I suspect things are going to get oddly sporadic, random even, now I'm back at work. Having dropped a day to go to three days a week and also requested, if possible, the three days don't come all at once, I now have a pattern that's sufficiently scattered I can't readily hold it in mind. 

I can't say being back at work is a joy but it does at least provide a little outside perspective after six months sat at home in front of a screen. And a keyboard.

One of the many recurring tasks the job involves is writing those little cards you see that sit on the shelves to draw attention to certain titles. The latest guidance suggests they should never be more than twenty-five words long. After I saw that I went around and did a word count of a few of mine (and other peoples'). Almost all of them were longer than that. The only reason they weren't a lot longer was you couldn't fit any more words on the cards.

I'm going to try to stick to the advised word-count on any new ones I write in the hope I might develop some transferrable skills. If I could train myself to be concise I might be able to knock out a blog post in under an hour, which would mean I could reasonably expect to get something up whether I'd worked that day or not.

Shorter, snappier posting has been a goal of mine for years. It's not like I don't know how. It's more like I've forgotten. Looking back at the early days, pretty much every post comes in under five hundred words, some at half that. Re-reading them now, they don't seem to lose much for being so very, very much shorter. 

The posts get progressively longer and longer over the years until these days I don't consider I've scratched the surface of anything in much under two and a half thousand words. I discard entire ideas for posts nowadays (and not infrequently either) because as I frame them in my mind I can feel them running to five thousand words or more. 

I wanted to do one in reply to Aywren's post on the importance of story in mmorpgs but just the thought of doing justice to the subject made me feel tired. I couldn't see how I could get it done in less than a couple of days of solid work. 

The reason I did a music post on Friday, due to an unfortunate piece of scheduling the one day in five I wasn't working, was that music posts are relaxing and fun to do. They take even longer to put together than regular posts but well over half of it is watching videos and listening to songs so it hardly counts. 

And the way I write music posts feels different. They're almost always just a lot of opinions, emotions and supposedly smart remarks, all wrapped up in a frame where I try to sound more hip and happening than I am, a persona I've cultivated for the best part of fifty years now and with which I'm very comfortable. It comes easily.

 

Writing long meditations on the warp and weft of mmorpgs, by comparison, feels uncannily similar to being back at college. There's a lot of reading and research, the structure has to be considered and there's a deadline to get everything done and handed in which always seems to be bearing down on me. Eventually I get it finished. Then I sit back and wait for comments. The only thing missing is a grade.

The only comment I got on the first essay I ever handed at college was succinct and to the point: "Too long". That was it, the only thing my supervisor had to say. He certainly took his own advice. 

We had some words about it. Things got quite heated. I changed supervisors for one who seemed not to mind. My essays, if anything, got longer. I wonder, now, if the first guy might not have had a point.

This, as I'm sure everyone still reading will have noticed, is yet another post about posting. There's something of a convention in the blogosphere, or this part of it, anyway, to apologize for blogging about blogging as though it's self-indulgent or tedious. It might be either or both but not necessarily. As a blogger, I lap this stuff up. It's shop talk and shop talk is only boring to people who don't work in the shop. We all work in the blog shop.

It's July now and if anyone's mentioned Blaugust 2021 I haven't seen it. Belghast is very evidently not in any position to take on the extra work and responsibilty and if he even thinks about doing it someone had better call an intervention pretty darn quick. If anyone else was planning on stepping in I guess we'd have heard about it by now. I am, for for sure, not voulunteering!

These past few years Blaugust has offered the best chance to chat about how blogging works. We usually have that week at the start where everyone comes out with their tips and hints and the week at the end where we all recap how it went and in the middle there's a lot of topic-work that frequently includes showing your workings. It's like a convention, where everyone gets to sit around and tell each other things they all already know, and yet somehow hearing other people say them helps make sense of it all.

If we're not doing that this year then I guess there are just going to be more posts like this, where we mither on about how we're doing, what's working and what isn't. Or I will, anyway. I mean, you can't just write about games all the time, right? Sometimes you just have to write about how you write about games.

That's about nine hundred words. It's not the five hundred I'm hoping to get down to but it's a start. I'm going to stop now because I can already feel a bunch more words trying to push their way to the front and I'm damned if I'm going to let them get the better of me. Again.

Now I just have to think of what to call this thing and which pictures I could use to break it up a little. That's the hard part.