Quests

Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives

Jeff Howard

• Publisher: A K Peters/CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000576450
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Combining theory and practice, this updated new edition provides a complete overview of how to create deep and meaningful quests for games. It uses the Unity game engine in conjunction with Fungus and other free plugins to provide an accessible entry into quest design.

The book begins with an introduction to the theory and history of quests in games, before covering four theoretical components of quests: their spaces, objects, actors, and challenges. Each chapter also includes a practical section, with accompanying exercises and suggestions for the use of specific technologies for four crucial aspects of quest design:

• level design

• quest item creation

• NPC and dialogue construction

• scripting

This book will be of great interest to all game designers looking to create new, innovative quests in their games. It will also appeal to new media researchers, as well as humanities scholars in the fields of mythology and depth-psychology that want to bring computer-assisted instruction into their classroom in an innovative way.

The companion website includes lecture and workshop slides, and can be accessed at: www.designingquests.com

part one Introduction

chapter one Definitions, Theories, and Histories of Quests

DOI: 10.1201/9781003138266-2

Quests as a Bridge between Games and Narratives

As Jesper Juul explains in Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, some scholars of video games have written about the concept of the quest as one attempt to resolve a long and bitter conflict between “narratologists” and “ludologists.” In game studies, narratologists once argued that games can be analyzed as narratives, whereas ludologists (from the Latin ludare: “to play”) insisted that games should be studied for the features that are distinctively related to play, such as rules and simulation. While the definitions of both narrative and game were highly contested by both camps, these theorists tended to define a narrative as a sequence of causally and dramatically connected events that a reader follows in time. In contrast, a game is a set of rules for interactive play. Juul writes:

As an attempt at bridge-building between the open structure of games and the closed structure of stories, the concept of quests has been proposed by Ragnhild Tronstad (2001), Espen Aarseth (2004), and Susan Tosca (2003). Quests in games can actually provide an interesting type of bridge between game rules and game fiction in that the games can contain predefined sequences of events that the player then has to actualize or effect.

(17)

Juul concisely defines the difference between a quest and a narrative by focusing on the issue of performative activity, which requires the player of a game to cause events to occur through effort rather than passively observing as these events unfold.

Rather than dispensing with the events of narrative altogether, as some radical ludologists once proposed, Juul suggests that a game can be interactive and contain a strong story if the player must enact its events. This quality of quests can be more accurately referred to as “enactment” rather than “interactivity.” Interactivity means that a player can change aspects of a simulated world, which responds to her actions. Interactivity can result in what Henry Jenkins calls “emergent narratives,” such as the conversations that a character has with another character in The Sims (128–29). Interactivity is a prerequisite of enactment but is not sufficient to produce it, because enactment refers not just to random changes created by the player in a simulated world but rather to the overcoming of specific challenges that results in particular events. Enactment requires active, goal-directed effort, often in the form of balancing long-term and short-term goals.

In “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse,” Aarseth defines a quest in a way that highlights enactment as well as the movement through space and the identification of a player with a virtual identity, or “avatar.” He writes that “a player-avatar must move through a landscape in order to fulfill a goal while mastering a series of challenges. This phenomenon is called a quest” (368). Aarseth is one of the leading proponents of ludology and is famous for having vehemently opposed the use of “narratology” to analyze games as stories. Believing that massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as EverQuest cannot be understood as stories, yet faced with the popularity of some action-adventure games that do seem to have a strong story, Aarseth opts for the intermediary activity of the quest.

Literary Definitions of Quests

In contrast to many but not all ludologists, I argue that a search for meaning is not analogous but rather intrinsic to the design of quests because of the literary history of quest narratives and their associations with religion and mythology. As Tosca acknowledges, “The idea of [the] quest as a search with a transcendent meaning (as in ‘quest for the Holy Grail’) is part of the everyday use of the word and no doubt has some influence in the way players and designers look at them” (4.1). The word quest etymologically comes from the Latin word questare, meaning “to seek.” This definition suggests a goal-oriented search for something of value. The Oxford English Dictionary corroborates this explanation in one of its definitions of quest: a “search or pursuit, made in order to find or obtain something.” A related definition of quest gestures back toward its origins in “mediæval romance,” in which a quest is “an expedition or adventure undertaken by a knight to procure some thing or achieve some exploit.”

As these definitions suggest, quests in games were influenced by a long tradition of quest narratives, ranging from Homer’s The Odyssey to the medieval romances of the Holy Grail, formalized in Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” and Northrop Frye’s anatomy of the “quest romance.” Susana Tosca observes the relevance of the genres of epic and romance as well as that of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey to the “background” of quest games, though she brackets the question of how closely the literary and gaming traditions can be related, arguing primarily that such theories are “not pointless” to the study of games. However, she views Campbell’s pattern as either “too general” to be analytically useful or as incidental to the main thread of her inquiry. Yet I would argue that these patterns must have explanatory usefulness specifically relevant to games because they are part of the historical origins of games and game designers themselves acknowledge their influence. Tosca’s claim is insightful but deserves further development, since a more detailed and forceful statement of the relationship between the literary tradition of quests and their operation as a gaming activity would allow the quest concept to fulfill its bridge-building function more effectively.

Moving Past the Ludology and Narratology Debate

Quests take their place in an increasing consensus that games and narratives can work productively together, allowing us to move beyond the debate between ludologists and narratologists. Theorists and designers alike agree that there can be transformations back and forth between games and narratives as well as many intermediate forms in between the two categories. The idea of adapting material from narrative to game and back again is rapidly becoming well-accepted in the academic study of new media and literature, as can be seen in the transition from the anthology First Person to its sequel Second Person. Moving past the contentious ludology versus narratology debate that characterized the first volume and the first wave of game studies, many of the essays in the second volume discuss ways that designers have based games upon stories (including The Name of the Rose, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, and many other franchises). The title of James Wallis’s essay “Making Games That Make Stories” sums up just how closely intertwined these two forms are currently understood to be. There are many strategies for adaptation represented in Second Person, in which computer games become collectible card games and novels become board games.

Perhaps especially intriguing is the editors’ decision to single out two writers of narratives on the various types of games and adaptation in the book: Tolkien (for his “quest structure”) and H. P. Lovecraft (for his Cthulhu mythos). The fictional worlds of Tolkien and Lovecraft can accommodate both quest games and quest narratives, offering examples of transformations in both directions. We do not have to speculate on whether quest narratives can be transformed into quest games strictly as a pedagogical exercise, because this transformation has been successfully achieved many times in both directions.

For example, the fictional universe of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu mythos” has generated many narratives written by other authors as well as many games. Authors and designers have transformed several of the tales (some of them, like “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath,” themselves quest narratives) into games. Lovecraft’s fiction forms the basis for the rules of the tabletop role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, which gives rise to many possible quests, including scenarios/modules and computer games like Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Similarly, the quest narratives of fantasy writers J. R. R. Tolkien and Fritz Leiber influenced the rules and worlds of Dungeons and Dragons; later, Margaret Weiss and Tracey Hickman adapted several play sessions of Dungeons and Dragons into the Dragonlance trilogy. This trilogy in turn became a rulebook, which was part of the inspiration for the Dragonlance Adventures modding group to create mods in the Dragonlance universe using the Aurora Toolset.

Quests, Games, and Interpretation

As the debate between the ludologists and the narratologists dies down, many game theorists and game designers increasingly focus on meaning and interpretation as central to game design and narrative. Salen and Zimmerman call for “meaningful play” as the overarching and central goal of successful game design. In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost incisively challenges Aarseth’s long-standing claim that readers and game players engage in two distinct cognitive activities, or “functions.” Aarseth argues in Cybertext that the dominant function of non-cybertextual literature is interpretative, in which readers determine implied meanings of a book or imagine its events and characters differently. Aarseth suggests that the dominant function of cybertexts, including games, is configurative. Users reconfigure the elements of a simulation, as when they make strategic decisions about the deployment of resources within a set of rules (64).

In contrast to Aarseth, Bogost suggests that literary texts and video games (as well as a variety of other art forms, including film) are both comprised of discrete “units” that can be configured by users (ix). As Bogost argues, “any medium—poetic, literary, cinematic, and computational—can be read as a configurative system, an arrangement of discrete, interlocking units of expressive meaning. I call these general instances of procedural expression unit operations” (ix). Bogost asserts that these “unit operations” can be studied and interpreted critically in terms of the ideas about society that they express, consciously or unconsciously, and that an awareness of these operations can in turn encourage more expressive game design. Bogost tends to focus on modern and contemporary texts, in part because he is interested in ways that games can comment on contemporary political ideology rather than in ancient mythology or the Western canon of quest narratives. Nevertheless, he eloquently argues that “we must also make room for interpretative strategies that remain faithful to the configurative properties of games” (108). His point remains that games and literature can meet at the issue of interpretation.

In contrast to Bogost’s discrete “units,” the quest is a feature of gameplay and narrative that is both “progressive” and “systematic,” two qualities that he denies to units (3). The configuration of a reader in a quest narrative and a quest game is defined by being “goal-oriented.” This emphasis on goals often includes sequences of objectives in which there is some choice, such as the order of certain optional quests or whether to undertake a side quest. The portions of the game engine and interface that keep track of quests are often called the game’s quest system. This system frequently consists of a main quest as well as many side quests, yet the variety of localized actions that players can perform while completing quests might still be regarded as unit operations.

The History and Theory of Quest Narratives

The argument about the intersection of interpretative and configurative meaning in games and narrative is not just a theoretical one. Indeed, understanding the theory of quest games and quest narratives is closely intertwined with issues of design and history. By studying the history of both quest narratives and quest games, designers can benefit from paradigmatic examples of quests—especially well-constructed, innovative quests that can inspire their own designs. This inspiration is more than emotional encouragement that such achievements are possible. Examples of excellent games and narratives in this genre provide designers with a set of strategies for building meaningful quests. There are four classic theorists whose work can help designers to understand the history of quest narratives.

• Joseph Campbell
• Northrop Frye
• W. H. Auden
• Vladimir Propp

This list is not chronological. Campbell is the most familiar and widely used of these theorists and so will be discussed first, but he is not the first theorist to discuss quests. Frye offers an independently derived theoretical framework for quests that is part of his larger Anatomy of Criticism. Auden is a poet who is in part responding to Campbell by way of Tolkien. By beginning with Tolkien and ending with Propp, the reader will be able to see offshoots of Campbellian thought and alternative branches to it, as well as an earlier sub-strata of Proppian thought that is particularly compatible with computational approaches to quests, such as those found in procedural generation.

Campbell, the Hero’s Journey, and Quests

The designers who work with the quest note its resemblance to the “Hero’s Journey” as described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and popularized by Christopher Vogler in The Writer’s Journey. Many game designers embrace the hero’s journey as a potential structure for games because it is effective in creating a compelling storyline that will motivate ongoing play. Authors of books on game design who are also practicing game designers have praised Campbell’s structure in detail as a model for constructing games. These authors include Glassner in Interactive Storytelling, Rollings and Adams in Game Design, Novak in Game Development Essentials, and Dunaway in “Using the Hero’s Journey in Games” (Glassner 59–66, Novak 116–17, Rollings and Adams 93–111). For Campbell, this journey constitutes a protagonist’s quest to overcome various obstacles and enemies with the help of mentors in order to gain a ...