Which is more important to you?
o That there is a story
o That the story is suitable for MMO

Which is more important to you?
o That there is a story
o That the story is suitable for MMO

I believe almost any story can be suitable for an MMO. I also believe an MMO with no story is too boring to play. So, I guess of your two options, it is more important to me that there is a story.

This idea is more gameplay than story, but eh, it belongs in this thread because it fits with the game concept.

Possibility - owning one or more of a type of monster unlocks a minigame. Subtypes of the monster may give gifferent conditions within the minigame or change the prizes available. Playing the minigame 'harvests' a crafting resource appropriate to the monster type. For example, if a cow was owned, playing the cow-associated minigame could earn a reward of milk. Perhaps each monster's game could only be played once a day - this would encourage players to have a lot of monsters, and also help prevent players from getting bored playing the same game over and over again. A daily play opportunity that was not used would be saved for later, such that a player who could only play once a week would be able to play the minigame 7 times, the same as a player who could play every day.

If in the original story the player plays the Santa Claus, then the story changes when
it is adapted for MMO where each player plays a gift-maker, but none is Santa Claus.

Concepts related to cleansing land:

o Religion, temple, pilgrimate, sacred place, tomb
o Homeland, ancestry, respect, nature, beauty
o Expansion, demand, profit, profession, resources
o Maintainence, chore, punishment, practice, trial
o Host, guests, visitors, tourists, event, festival
o Obsession, art, ambition, occult, conspiracy
o ...


Game Story: Wasteland Prince
- A story for 1 to 5 players

Hoping that the Princess would never find her true love, the Evil Witch had banished the Prince to the Ethernal Wasteland
with a curse that the Prince would not return "until the water there runs clean." At the Wasteland, the Prince met some Sick,
Ugly, Stinky, and Disgusting folks. Just as the Prince was convinced that he would never be able to escape the Wasteland,
the group stumped upon an ancient artifacts buried there that the disgusting folks call the Monster Eggs. After some trials,
the Prince figured that each Monster Egg had a different function, and by using them in combination, he could turn bugs,
rodents, and other small animals or plants into monsters that just might eat away the trash--That is, if he could find a way
to make the monsters eat the trash instead of eating them.

P1: Prince
P2: The Sick
P3: The Ugly
P4: The Stinky
P5: The Disgusting

Main Gameplay:
o Capture / grow / hatch / mutate / breed / combine / train monsters
o Avoid getting killed my monsters
o Observe monsters' abilities and behaviors
o Decide how to make better monsters
o Avoid getting monsters poisoned by wrong diet.

If in the original story the player plays the Santa Claus, then the story changes when
it is adapted for MMO where each player plays a gift-maker, but none is Santa Claus.

Not necessarily true. In an MMO typically all or most players will carry out a quest yet the game story may treat the player as the only one carrying out the quest. There's no reason a game can't tell each player that they and they alone are Santa and the only one capable of making and delivering the necessary gifts. In general people want to be praised for being unique and special, so they prefer a game story that treats them as such.

Concepts related to cleansing land:
o Homeland, ancestry, respect, nature, beauty
o Expansion, demand, profit, profession, resources
o Maintenance, practice, trial
o Host, guests, visitors, tourists, event, festival
o Art, ambition, conspiracy[/quote]
Removed a few I didn't like, and adding to this list:
o Social duty, honorable task, useful employment, education
o Growth, healing, evolution, birth, apotheosis, destiny
o Archeological discovery and repair, exploration of new alien world
o Ecology, balance, increasing complexity and diversity, emergent benefits, improving nature by taming it

I'll attempt a game story too, although this won't be the final one I go with.

The player is a teenager of a race of beings which are nature spirits. They are mortal, biological creatures, but as a race they have a magical connection to nature. They have to learn how to use these magical abilities, and what they do with these abilities is up to them, and often a moral gray area. Culturally, the race believes that the good thing to do is to increase life. Young adults first learn to increase things in simple ways, such as just increasing the numbers which are there. They learn how to harvest life to gain the raw materials to create more life. Then they learn how to convert uninhabitable environments into habitable ones so life can spread. Then they learn how to modify life to provide new raw materials, which in turn allow new types of life to be built. As they become mature they learn to increase life in more complex and subtle ways, such as by increasing the diversity and complexity of an existing ecosystem. A high and somewhat dangerous goal is the possibility of creating intelligent life. Mature nature spirits also gain mature social roles, taking responsibility for helping shape the future of their own race. They can act as culture heroes, people who donate to charity, teachers, mayors, artists, mad scientists, or supervillains. An individual who achieves total mastery of nature power becomes basically a god.

The two enemies of life are order and chaos (perhaps more accurately called stasis and entropy). These two forces are natural parts of the universe, but they cause problems by decreasing life. The first tasks given to young nature spirits are maintenance activities of reversing problems that have been caused by entropy. This goes along with an exploration dynamic, because entropy is primarily a problem in places which haven't been visited by the nature spirit race in a long time. Physical manifestations of entropy are things like ruins of old architecture, chemical imbalances in soil, sedimentation (mud turning into rocks), desertification, and the local dying-out of desired types of animals; also included are disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, insanity, unhealthy mutation, plague, etc.

Argh out of time... >.< Oh well, there's no real plot there but it captures some of the worldbuilding I'm interested in.

Re:
Variations on the way interactive story exists in an MMO

In an MMO typically all or most players will carry out a quest yet the game story may treat the player as the only one carrying out the quest. There's no reason a game can't tell each player that they and they alone are Santa and the only one capable of making and delivering the necessary gifts. In general people want to be praised for being unique and special, so they prefer a game story that treats them as such.

What you have just answered was, in my judgement, the most basic question about the vision. I agree that in general people want to be praised for being unique, but even with that there are two ways:

1. Lie to them.
2. Create an environment where they can truely be unique, special, important.

In my opinion an MMO that ops for Type 1 feels cheap and breaks immersion. I don't enjoy the situation when I have to play dumb to play a game.

The story you mentioned so far in the last post would belong to Type 2. You see that whether a player feels unique could largely depend on what you let the players do, not who you say the player is. If your story goes on where the players are simply fellow teenagers, then the structure is Type 2. It becomes Type 1 if you start saying to each player that they are the appointed, the one, the only, etc.... and detach the story from the reality of the game.

----
I think we came across a rather interesting philosophical mismatch of what a story is. In your perspective, when a quest giver tells you that you are the only hero, then turn around and tell a fellow player that he is the only hero, you consider only the information transaction between you and the quest giver part of the story, and disregard the transaction between the quest giver and the third party that resides in the same world. To you it doesn't change the story, but to me it changes it, because when it was a single player game, the presented information would match the facts, now they don't, which makes the story a nonsense. Since the quest givers are agents in the game world, they also change from reasonable characters to robotic quest servers. The story and the world that was originally flawless become broken. The story isn't just about what text and dialogs are displayed to the player, it is also about whether that information matches the reality.

It is an interesting difference of opinion, I agree. I don't want other people in my story, I like a game that gives each person their own story while politely excluding them from interfering with others' experience of their own copies of the story. For example, when an NPC talks it is only visible to the player they are talking to. Also, I'm willing to go to the extreme of having the world look different to different players, depending on whether they have finished specific quests yet.

I don't believe in destiny, so to me being "the special one" consists solely of having NPCs recognize the player as the one who solves all problems, has earned a level of fame, might in the future become the most powerful person ever, might be the youngest person ever to achieve godhood, has the most impressive collection of monsters, etc.

Generally I think game stories are inherently broken because game worlds by necessity have limited interactivity, and it's often possible to think of a perfectly reasonable way to use items in a game which simply isn't possible because the designers didn't anticipate it or it was too low of a priority to implement. Sometimes the most desirable things to do within a game, such as repeatedly running a dungeon and killing the same boss, are inherently illogical. The concept of death is only one example of an important part of reality which is fundamentally incompatible with RPGs; the games must redefine playable characters as essentially immortal due to some nonsense involving save points or respawning. So, basically I think stories always require some nonsense as glue to hold them together or oil to make the parts work smoothly. Not just games, but all fiction - an easy example is the standard convention that fictional characters do not need to eat, pee, or sleep unless it's useful to the plot.