MMO Gaming

A post that I can’t seem to find over on Kill Ten Rats from a bit ago (might have been a few weeks, may have been just a few days, but I sure as heck can’t find it) brought out a point about games and writing. Namely games don’t seem to have anyone doing it. Or, to go along with what I remember from the article more, TV/Movies have a much higher quality of writing than games do. Is that true?

I was thinking about it, and at first I agreed completely, but then I started looking at it again and I couldn’t decide.

Let’s take two ideas that are fairly similar, one MMO and one show (rhyming not intentional, but awesome nonetheless.) City of Heroes/Villains and Heroes, the NBC show. The show does have good writing, I’m not going to argue that (though that whole “Save the Cheerleader, save the world” line was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard…ever) but is it really better than City of Heroes? I don’t think so. Of course, I also don’t think you can accurately compare the two. City of Heroes doesn’t necessarily have a great “active storyline”, except for what is revealed through quests, but it does have an extensive back story and mythos surrounding it. It’s a very deep and vibrant world, er…city.

Heroes, on the other hand, has a great “active story” and character development, but the “world” they are basing it on is the one we live in every day, so they didn’t have much work to do when “creating” it.

Comparing the two seems a bit silly. City of Heroes, and MMOs in general, are all about world-building. TV/Movies (for the most part) are not. They are about character development and plot advancement. I guess it’s arguable which is “better” but I think they both have their place.

Of course, I would love to see deeper plot and character development in an MMO, and I’d love to hear some ideas on how it could be done, but I wouldn’t call the writing in games “bad” per se, it’s just not the kind of writing you would see in a work of fiction normally.

All that being said, game developers do need to spend more time, and money, on writers and writing. They need to find ways to incorporate this into the games if it wants to continue to be a viable medium.

UPDATE: Thanks to Ethic who gave the link to the post I was looking for in the comments. For those that aren’t going to look at the comments (shame on you) here’s the link to the post.

writers, writing, heroes, city of heroes, city of villains, nbc, mmorpg, mmo games