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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.

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.

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.

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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...

... 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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?

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.

