Lessons MMO Writers Can Learn From Game Of Thrones

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Game of Thrones is a hell of a TV show. It's a great one
for binge-watching - start with the first episode of Season 1 and keep
watching for the entire weekend. There's currently about 30 straight
hours' worth, which should be enough for even the most dedicated couch
potato.

While there are a couple of single-player video games already set in
Westeros, I believe the setting lends itself perfectly to MMOs. There's
magic and dragons and swords and war and hundreds of colorful characters -
basically, all the ingredients for a great MMO storyline. But I also
believe that the masterful writing of Game of Thrones (and, by logical
extension, the series of books upon which the TV show is based) have a
number of lessons that can be valuable to the writers of any  other
MMO on the market.

I should point out that I'm specifically talking about the television
series on HBO, not George RR Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" series of
novels, the slimmest of which is over 700 pages long. I haven't read the
books - I know, I know, I'm a dirty philistine and feel an appropriate
amount of shame. Basically, I have too many games to play and too much
writing of my own to do to sit quietly and read thousands of pages' worth
of novels, even the truly exceptional ones. But I can watch Game of
Thrones on a second monitor while grinding out dailies or cycling through
alts to check the mail. So let's move past my obvious deficiencies of
intellectualism and culture and focus on the TV show, and the lessons MMO
writers can learn from it.

1. The High Fantasy Audience Can Handle Mature Content

There is a weird discrepancy in the content of most MMOs. On the one
hand, characters roam around committing horrendous acts of violence
against humans and other sentient beings. Slaughter quests are fairly
commonplace, and heroic characters can carve their way through literally
hundreds of enemies in a single dungeon just to get to one chest full of
precious loot. Even if a game has a setting to turn off blood - or, in
some cases, even if all the kills are more or less bloodless anyway -
there's still a ton of brutal, savage physical violence.

Lessons from Game of Thrones - SWTOR skimpy top

But, in most fantasy-themed MMOs, there are a number of seemingly
arbitrary taboos that accompany the sword-slinging and murder-by-magic.
For example, nobody ever drops the F-bomb. Not even the surly dwarves and
foul-mouthed orcs, who usually only cuss in their own secret languages.
And women will wear the most outlandishly-revealing metal lingerie, no
matter how impractical these "armor kits" might actually be for combat
purposes... but apparently they are still too demure to bare a nipple.

Age of Conan
is an exception to the "no-nips" rule, and there are a few rated-M MMOs
like Fallen
Earth
that play fast and loose with the blue
language. But there are no triple-A Western MMOs that feature mature
content on the level of Game of Thrones.

Lessons from Game of Thrones - Danerys

Obviously, there is a concern that youngsters play high-fantasy MMOs, and
surely it's not right to expose young children to prostitute-sex scenes and rough
language. I'm in no way advocating these things. But neither do I think it
is necessarily a great thing for them to be exposed to characters running
around slaughtering human beings with swords.

On the other hand, it's not moneyless little kids that are buying and
supporting the games. It's adults with credit cards - often as not, the
same adults who watch the Game of Thrones on TV. The popularity of the
show proves that there is a clear audience for "adult" high fantasy. It
may be controversial, sure, but there is obviously a market for it. And an
ESRB rating.

2. "Good vs Evil" Is Not The
Only Story Template

Black and white morality, the Campbellian monomythic struggle between
good and evil, has been around for a very, very long time. The first known
example of English literature - Beowulf - follows the Hero's Journey and
details the battle between good and evil. It's a classic motif. All the
greats do it.

Lessons from Game of Thrones - Good vs. Evil, represented by the Sith

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But it's kinda been done to death at this point. We already have so many
monomyth stories kicking around that it's difficult for writers to come up
with a new way to tell such a timeless story without being compared to all
the others. The Good vs Evil war story of something like Star
Wars: the Old Republic
gets compared to Lord of
the Rings, which gets compared to Beowulf, which gets compared to stories
of Perseus or Hercules, which comes from some forgotten Sumerian epic, and
so on into pre-history.

Game of Thrones tells a very different morality tale. The main focus of
the story is not about good-versus-evil - not since Ned Stark, anyway.
Everything after his execution has been varying shades of grey fighting it
out amongst one another. Some shades are darker than others, sure, but
there are no clear-cut "good guys" anymore. The pure and noble get cut
down hard because they play by the rules, and the other guys do not. Most
characters have varying degrees of both sympathy and antipathy. It's
badasses against other badasses. While there are some characters who are
quite clear-cut...

Lessons from Game of Thrones - King Joffrey

... there are a great many more characters who are less absolutely
defined.

This is growing more common among MMO stories now, as more and more
writers embrace a grittier grey morality. For example, none of the three
factions in the Elder
Scrolls Online
is more noble or just than the
others. They each have their good points and their bad points. While so
many other titles follow the familiar "Rebels versus the Empire" model,
ESO's faction war is more like "Rebels vs. the Other Rebels vs. the Other
Other Rebels, Plus Empire vs. Everyone."

3. Main Characters Can Be Seriously Flawed

This sort of falls under the same umbrella as the "black and white
morality" thing. While there are surely exceptions to the rule, in general
there is a tendency for main story-characters in MMOs to be truly
superlative individuals. If they are good, they are also often pure and
just and generally all-around amazing. If they are evil, they are
irredeemably wicked and foul, megalomaniacal psychopaths of the very
darkest sort. Either way, they are paragon champions - the ultimate
representative of whatever team they play for.

Lessons from Game of Thrones - DCUO's Superman

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Game of Thrones features flawed, imperfect characters in nearly every
role. Its heroic characters are tempered by physical deficiencies, serious
defects in personality or decidedly-unheroic origins. Few of its
villainous characters are so utterly foul that they are completely beyond
redemption or without some degree of relatability. There are obvious
exceptions, of course, but there are way more characters that are far less
perfectly-aligned and full-on than Joffrey Baratheon. 

Tyrion Lannister is probably the best example of a deeply-flawed main
character. He is physically disadvantaged by dwarfism, most of his family
hates him and he spends a great deal of time drinking and bedding
prostitutes. He is abused and mocked by many, and he has to work very hard
to be taken seriously. He is also a shrewd tactician, usually well-spoken
and witty, and shows an un-Lannister-like kindness towards his fellow
cripples, bastards and broken things. However, he can also be wickedly
rude and ill-tempered, often relies on his family's money to solve
problems, and can be blinded by love. He is a complex and terribly
interesting character - generally sympathetic, but there are times when he
is utterly despicable.

Lessons from Game of Thrones - Tyrion Lannister

Few characters in Game of Thrones are paragons of anything, but they keep
the story moving along at a very engaging pace. They're the kind of
characters that keep the watcher guessing. And not just because they must
cope with their own glaring flaws, but because they could get killed off
at any moment.

4. It's Totally Okay To Kill Major Characters

I'll try to keep this bit as spoiler-free as possible, but, well... the
section header is something of a dead giveaway. I'll try to just stick
with the one spoiler everyone seems to know about anyway, and only make
oblique references to the other awesome, shocking events that happen
later, without going into detail.

When I started watching the first season, almost the whole way through I
was thinking, "Okay, this is the story of how Ned Stark fights against the
evil Lannisters." Until the second-last episode, when things took that
dark turn and they killed off the guy I had always assumed was the series'
main protagonist.

Lessons from Game of Thrones - Ned Stark

Having never read the books, I couldn't imagine how they could carry on
the series after killing off the main guy - really, one of only three or
so big-name actors in the entire cast that I recognized from anything else
at the time. I didn't think you could do that. But carry on they did, and
by God the show just kept getting better and better.

The shock of Ned Stark's execution was nothing compared to the Red
Wedding episode. Again, having never read the books, I was unprepared for
that. And it is the only time a television show has ever caused me to
utter, "What the f***!?" out loud.

Lessons from Game of Thrones - Walder Frey during the "Red Wedding"

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Without giving too much away, never, ever have Walder Frey make a toast
at your wedding.

Other characters undergo such dramatic changes that they may as well be
dead. Theon Greyjoy, for example, essentially died and transformed into an
entirely new character, Reek. Jaime Lannister started out as a
blackhearted and nigh-indestructible villain, but has since become much
more sympathetic and humanized. Bran Stark underwent a dramatic character
makeover within the first two episodes, and continues to evolve as the
story goes on.

This almost never happens in MMOs. The main story characters are there
from start to finish, essentially unchanging (though they may undergo some
kind of soul-searching character growth). Some of them are killed at the
climax of the main story, sure. But that's usually 50+ levels in, at the
conclusion of a very long main story arc, or as a crucial turning-point
during the second act. By contrast, Game of Thrones seems to kill off or
dramatically change a character every handful of levels.

It is perhaps unfair to call this an MMO-specific problem. A lot of
writers in many genres follow tried-and-true "hero's journey" character
arcs with a consistent cast of characters all along the way. But the
problem is more pronounced in MMOs, where gameplay often extends far
beyond these closed arcs - what happens after a year or so, when all the
regular players have played all the way through the main story arc? How do
you keep the game interesting after everyone in it has already saved the
world many times over?

Lessons from Game of Thrones - Thrall

Thrall has been going strong since the 1990s - what would happen to
Azeroth if he died? Wouldn't that be a more interesting story to pursue
than yet another expansion where the mighty "green Jesus" survives yet
another demon-and-necromancer Armageddon and his legend continues to grow?
We've been there and done that for over 10 years now, all the way back to
single-player Warcraft III days.

Ned Stark was killed off after just one season, and it changed all of
Westeros. The event of the famous hero's death is when things got really
interesting. 

Main non-player characters in MMOs should serve as world-shapers, and
ideally they become characters that the players grow to love. But maybe
they shouldn't be so precious as to be immortalized - the death of a
beloved hero can be traumatic, but it can also spur other great events,
and open the way for new stories to evolve. This kind of evolution is
great for MMOs, where worlds need to constantly evolve or risk becoming
stale and tired and having the playerbase drift away out of boredom.

Obviously, you can't have a Red Wedding every 10 levels. That would just
be cruel. But you can certainly have the odd hand-amputation or spinal
injury or unexpected beheading. Keep the players guessing, keep the
players playing. 

Note that, up there near the beginning, I say that these lessons can be
learned by writers of "any other MMO on the market."
Bigpoint.com, the studio that brought us Battlestar
Galactica Online
and a number of other browser-based games,
is developing a free-to-play browser-based MMO called Game
of Thrones: Seven Kingdoms
. It will focus primarily on PvP, game was
announced at GDC 2012 and is expected to be released sometime this year. It's
a bit difficult to imagine that this game will have much focus on
storywriting (and, according to one
early previewer
, they're probably going to scale back on the "Rated
M for Mature" stuff), but it will be interesting to see where they go with
it. And even more interesting to see if the writers at any of the major
development studios take notice.


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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