Brian Green is a veteran game developer, writer, and the co-founder of Near Death Studios, a company which owns and operates Meridian 59, one of the earliest graphical MMOGs. Ten Ton Hammer's Cameron Sorden snagged some time with him at this year's IMGDC to talk to him about storytelling in games and innovation from the indie crowd.

Ten Ton Hammer: Why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about what you’re working on. What’s cooking?

Brian: Most of my work recently has been consulting work. I’ve been consulting with a bunch of different companies lately. It’s kind of the time for it. There’re a lot of people that want to make online games right now. Games like World of Warcraft and even Second Life, with all of its media attention, have helped with that. A lot of those people are realizing that these games are bigger than they thought, and they want someone experienced working with them.

Another thing I’m working on is a personal project, but not anything I can talk about much, yet. One of the reasons I’m here at the indie conference is that it gives me some inspiration for that. I think a lot of the smaller games can teach us important things which larger games can’t. I’ve been talking for a long time about certain ideas like storytelling in games. The problem when we start talking about the larger games is that people say stuff like, “I want to do storytelling in this game.” [The response to that is] “No, no… We’re gonna clone World of Warcraft. Keep your head down. This is not your 50 million dollars to spend, so we’re gonna do something that we consider safe.”

Ten Ton Hammer: There’s been a lot of discussion about storytelling in games lately. How important do you think that a good story is in games?

Brian: I think you don’t need story. Now, to say that you don’t need story doesn’t mean we can’t tell stories in games. It’s kind of like a painting. If I were a painter, I could paint a pleasant still life, like a vase of flowers, or I could paint something that really tells a story or has an emotional impact. Games are the same thing. I think games can tell stories, but they don’t have to. Look at Tetris, for example.

Ten Ton Hammer: What about MMOs in particular, or RPGs, which have traditionally had stories as a very central part of the experience?

Brian: I think that the story is important there. The problem we’ve had so far is that the story is very static in these games. There’s not a whole lot of player interaction. This is a really hard problem—this isn’t something where people are ignoring and obviously simple solution. We view stories the same way we view non-interactive media. We compare games to movies way too much. The primary difference is that games are interactive and movies aren’t. Movies tell you a story, you go along with it, and there’s not a whole lot you can do to interact with it. Games are interesting because of their interactivity. Things aren’t determined. The choices I make can affect what happens in the game. The problem is that we’re still trying to tell linear stories, even in really good cases.

One example I really like [in World of Warcraft] is the story in the early Alliance quest lines in Westfall. Van Cleef is trying to take over and dealing with the forces of Stormwind. The problem is that I really have no input. I’m going along with this, and I’m doing things, but the culmination quest is that I go into the Deadmines, kill Van Cleef, and bring his head back. There’s no option for me to go support Van Cleef, or do something totally different. I either do the quest and get my reward or I ignore it. I kind of want the reward, so I guess I have to go kill Van Cleef. I think that’s one of the problems we have today.

The two types of stories we have in online games are either extensive background story, which 90% of people aren’t going to read, or we have very linear stories in the game. What I would like to see is someone putting that interactivity into our stories. Of course, there are a lot of things to keep in mind. It’s not an easy problem to solve.

Ten Ton Hammer: Although you said we shouldn’t compare games to movies, having interesting characters and watching the development of their relationships play a huge role in popular traditional media. How can we try to capture that in online games?

Brian: One of the problems you have in TV or movies is that a writer can control exactly what the characters are like. When we talk about games, you can’t control the characters to such a high degree. Players are going to do what they want to. If you want to focus on interpersonal relationships, you want to look at how players interact with each other. That’s really hard to do with coding. One of the things you could do is start to have players define their relationships with one another. You could do this in a role-playing scenario. If I create a character and you create a character, and we decide we want to be best friends from childhood, maybe we can check a flag to do that. Then, certain storylines would trigger on “best friends from childhood” or certain quests could open up to you because now you can do them with your best friend. You can do other relationships too: brother, sister, husband, wife, lovers-- whatever you want to do, by coding this stuff. The problem there is that people might game the system. Will I just have a “best friend from childhood” to get extra quests?

Ten Ton Hammer: Let’s switch gears for a second. It seems like things in the MMOG seem to be moving towards browser and flash-based games, especially in the last year or so. Do you think that that’s really going to take off and be the next big thing?

Brian: I think that flash technology is going to be more important. With the project I’m working on, I’m really looking at using flash. Why? It’s a lot easier than taking C++ and writing a whole 3D client from scratch. Flash games are also easy to load up in a browser and easy to run for players. So, I think that that’s going to help us define games more. Of course, there are trade-offs. For some people, a flash-based game isn’t going to be as immersive as a fully-realized 3D world.

Ten Ton Hammer: You mentioned that you wanted to use your personal project to try some things which a larger project might not be able to explore. What do you have in mind?

Brian: There’s a lot of “conventional wisdom” that may not be accurate. Take permadeath. Can we make a game with permadeath? That might be interesting. Doing the smaller scale indie thing is much better for this because you can test out these things without putting your 30-50 million dollar budget at risk. Players aren’t universal. Every player is different. Maybe there is an audience for permadeath. We really don’t know. Everyone thinks that permadeath will chase off people, even though in the past we have had games that use it. Nobody has tried it or made a game with permadeath in recent memory.

There are a lot of other gameplay options to play with. Everyone has a main character and alt characters, right? What if you made those characters more interconnected instead of being separate? What if you had generations of characters? One idea I’d like to play around with is when you have an expansion, having the timeline of the world advance, maybe even a long period of time. Some characters would die off and others are born. In World of Warcraft, the expansion came but Van Cleef is still sitting in his dungeon. If you could advance the time period and change things, you could do stuff like having areas conquered or revamped. You don’t need to throw away your old work—you can change things. But if you have a large budget, you’re a lot less likely to try stuff like this. You want to take the safest path possible.

Ten Ton Hammer: Well, thank goodness for the indies. Thanks so much for talking with us, Brian!

You can read more of Brian’s design theory and writing at his personal blog, Psychochild’s Blog.