I was talking with some students today about massively multiplayer on-line role playing games (MMORPG’s) such as Ultima Online and Worlds of Warcraft. One of the students was complaining about a particular characteristic of most MMORPGs: Unlike single player games, the sheer number of participants in an MMORPG does not allow the average player to be a heroic figure.
Even leveling players up, as the Star Wars games did, doesn’t solve the problem. In a world filled with Jedi Knights, it’s not all that special to be a Jedi Knight.
I argued that the answer might be to go the other way — rather than think big, think small. In real life, we are all heroes in our own story, and for the most part our respective heroic journeys through life do not ruin it for each other.
This quality of shared human experience has found its way into other art forms. For example, great novelists are able to weave together perhaps dozens of characters, each of whom is the center of his or her own unique dramatic arc. The key is not to make the individual characters very large, but rather to make the world large enough to accommodate all of those simultaneous dramatic journeys.
I think Will Wright’s original version of THE SIMS got it right. You may have been merely a suburban home-owner, but in your own way you were on a quest, which felt quite important to you as a player. Eric Zimmerman did something similar with Diner Dash. Your character may just have been a harried waitress, but as that waitress you were very much the center of your corner of the universe.
If THE SIMS had kept with this strategy when it went multi-player (rather than morphing, rather unfortunately, into a chat-space), it could have been a prime example of a game consisting of multiple intersecting heroic narratives. You would have been aware of other players as home-owners down the block, or perhaps as co-workers or parents of your children’s friends, but each of you would have been able to experience this shared world as the center of your own personal narrative.
Maybe there is a MMORPG out there that does this well already. If so, please let me know. After all (in the immortal words of Dr. Horrible): Everyone’s a hero, in their own way.