Wolfbytes

Morrigan, aka The Bitchy One. Dragon Age excels at characters that you love, or love to hate, or occasionally both.

So I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Origins. Obsessing over it, you might say – I’m still nowhere near finishing it, though I’m playing at a pace that saw me finish The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion in about two weeks. Partly that’s because the game is just plain huge. But it’s also because I keep getting sidetracked into just chatting with my fellow adventurers, rather than killing Darkspawn. While at it, I realised something. I’m doing that, lavishing time on the NPC’s, because several times now those AI-controlled character simulations have conned me into thinking of them as real people.

In fact, I’ve been having an easier time treating them as ‘real’ than I generally do with the characters roleplayed by actual, (virtually) present human beings in the MMO’s I mostly play.

Let me underscore that. For the past few years, most of my CRPG’ing has been MMO roleplay in World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online or City of Heroes. In settings where each character you meet is the avatar of another human being, you’d think I’d be having the “I’m playing with real people” experience in buckets and spades. Not so. In patently out-of-character interactions like PUGs and raids, it’s easy to remember other players are people. In roleplay, though, the uncanny valley looms huge and unbridgeable. It’s rare to ever, even for a moment, forget that I’m dealing with amateur representations of made up people, controlled by unpracticed storytellers just trying to muddle along – or worse, not even storytelling at all but just “roleplaying” and “immersing” (which seems to be code for “having teen romances with everything that has a pulse” or “arguing over trivial crap because conflict is interesting”).

Basically, the vast majority of roleplayers fail to produce a credible imitation of humanity. Real live MMO-playing humans actually fail an intuitive Turing test – but somehow in Dragon Age’s, precoded and simulated NPC’s don’t. To me, that’s cool (also rather depressing, as MMO roleplay goes, but definitely more cool). Why do AI-controlled constructs convince me of their authenticity as ‘real’ people, why do roleplay characters directly controlled by bonafide human beings fail?

My instinct is that it has to be down to the art of storytelling. Dragon Age is a carefully tailored, story-driven single player experience, where the characters fit seamlessly into the narrative and serve to build up the experience as a whole – the characters and the world feed each other, producing an illusion of realness. MMO’s on the other hand are basically a graphical interface disguising the fact that everything under it is really a loot-lottery fuelled Skinner box. Dragon Age i’s a professionally orchestrated feat of storytelling, carefully designed to engage me emotionally, not just on a hand/eye-coordination level. MMO designers, even the fabled Blizzard, don’t make that effort. They don’t make money by delivering an emotional experience: what they capitalise on is delivering ever larger Skinner box cycles to keep their players shelling out that 12€ a month to complete their latest set bonus.

That leaves narrative content in MMO’s largely down to what amateur roleplayers can produce – and that just can’t compete. First, because amateur roleplayers simply don’t have the control over their story’s environment that BioWare does, and so have vastly less tools to deliver a compelling experience. There simply is no allpowerful author capable of orchestrating the show.  But they also poison the well voluntarily, because storytelling is a skill and an art, and the vast majority of MMO roleplaying groups gratuitously cripple it. They simply forbid any demand for quality, and ban any form of educational feedback that isn’t positive and encouraging. They offer no incentive to provide good story, and make it outright difficult for rookie storytellers to learn.

People who have never roleplayed online wonder how Stephanie Meyer’s horrifficly bad Twilight came about. Those who do MMO-roleplay, have a depressingly good idea. When the rule is that players must suspend disbelief and give the benefit of doubt to storytellers less skilled, wish fulfillment and self-therapy tend to bubble to the surface. Not all “natural leaders who just need a chance to shine” are played by RL insecure people, not all people starved for RL romance will play their idealised form of the opposite sex for daydream closure – but enough do for it to be a cliche. And that’s fine, it really is, as therapy. As storytelling? There’s the rub. A good storyteller’s goal is to entertain and move their audience - your average wish-fulfillment roleplayer’s goal is to entertain and move themselves. The audience comes as an afterthought,  if it gets a thought at all.

This, I think, is why especially immersively played roleplay characters do worse than scripted AI simulations at mimicing humanity. They engage the player’s emotions, rather than the audience’s – and because they fail to provoke human response, they fail to appear human at all.

Storytellers are liars and manipulators, but it’s the art of manipulating the audience, not oneself. Until roleplayers learn that, I suspect they’ll forever fail the Turing test.