1 Introduction
The
idea of looking more deeply into quests springs from several connected
interests. First of all, it continues my previous work on how literary
tools might be useful for the study of certain kinds of games, as well as being very related to a long-term
pursuit of mine, namely pen&paper roleplaying games, where the
problem of how to create interesting adventures/quests/missions
for the players has been crucial to the development of the genre
and a central worry for gamemasters worldwide.
However,
the direct inspiration behind this paper is the course “Computer
Games: Designing an Online Computer Game”, taught by Jesper Juul and me last semester at
the IT University of Copenhagen. In this practically oriented course,
our students had to design and develop an online multiplayer game.
All groups except one chose to develop roleplaying games with quests
(individual or group quests) as a central part of the player’s experience.
The course sessions included a “game critique” part, where students
would present their analyses of existing games to the class. They
were very critical with existing games, mainly in the adventure
and roleplaying genres, noting that the quests in these games were
often too linear, boring, repetitive and unrelated to the character’s
“physical” and emotional development. Thus they set out to provide
players with a more satisfactory experience in their projects, chiefly
by creating better quests that would overcome some of the deficiencies
they had discovered as critics. This proved a daunting task, and
in the end the groups were openly discouraged by how difficult it
turned out to be, so that they had to resort to the well known
schemas of “take object A to place B and bring back object C to
get reward”, “town leader asks you to save town killing monster
X that lives in place Y for a reward Z”, and similar ones; the only
difficulties being that most tasks required collaboration amongst
different players in order to be completed. This is not the place
to analyze each of the students projects in detail, but all groups
agreed in that the quest format very often fails to meet the expectations
of players and probably also those of designers. However, they couldn’t
explain why this was so, and it was one of my motivations to try
to understand what quests are and how they function in games, so
as to work in a more efficient way next time that we are faced with
such a design problem in the classroom or elsewhere.
Several
theorists have explicitly dealt with the question of quests and
games, particularly Wibroe et.al., Tronstad
and Aarseth among others.
Their definitions of quest differ with each other and with mine,
as we will see in section 3, but it is necessary to examine them
in order to have an overview of the theoretical “life” of the concept.
It is a word with several senses, but let us for now adopt a simplistic
view based on the pen&paper roleplaying games where the initial
idea of quests originates:
From
the designer’s point of view, a quest is a set of parameters in
the game world (making use of the game’s rules and gameplay) that
specifies the nature and order of events that make up a challenge
for the player, including its resolution. From the player’s point
of view, a quest is a set of specific instructions for action, they
can be as vague as a general goal (overthrow the evil king) or extremely
precise (take this bucket to the well, fill it up and bring it back
to me); after the quest has been completed it can be narrated as
a story.
With
this definition I want to stress that the primary intention of this
paper is to define a concept and to deal with game design issues
from a literary perspective, and not to participate in what has
been called the fight between games and narrative.
2.
Games and narrative
Much
has been written about the topic of games and narrative, and it
is a discussion that I do not wish to go into, as I consider the
matter rather closed in that games are not narratives, although both cultural forms share certain similarities,
so that some theorists might have been tempted to take one for the
other. The literary tools are only useful to analyze the storytelling
elements in certain games, and I emphasize certain
because there are many games that have no storytelling elements
at all. The genre of each individual game is a crucial factor within
such a diverse cultural form, and I am here exclusively refering
to games that contain storytelling elements, usually adventure games
or roleplaying games (both single and multiplayer), although there
are many hybrids, and storytelling elements are present in other
kinds of games too. I will also avoid the use of the word narrative
from now on, as it reminds us too much on the possibility of
narrating events after they have happened, and this possibility
of telling or interpreting our interaction when playing
games is what has led people to confuse them with stories. I will
instead use storytelling, as it doesn’t necessarily imply
narrative in the static sense, but can also mean pre-disposition
of elements, as I will explain in connection to how game designers
use this concept.
As
introduced elsewhere (Tosca, 2000a), there are a number of elements
that are present both in stories and games, even if they work differently
in each of these media. For a story to occur, we usually need one
or more characters involved in a plot where some things
have consequences and lead to other things, that is, there is causality
too. This is a nearly journalistic and quite structural
definition of a story (what, who, how, why), even though
I am not mentioning the when or the where, that are
a part of what we can call the story world, another very
important component in the storytelling equation. Once a story has
happened (in real life for example, as all human experience including
history can be narrated, or in the author’s imagination if it is
a fiction), it can be narrated, but only afterwards, as we cannot really narrate while participating
in these stories and there is usually some temporal distance.
Of
course the definition of plot is not straightforward either, but
if we typically define plot as a narrative of events, we can view
quests as a way of structuring those events. This doesn’t mean that a plot is made up of
several quests or viceversa, the two terms do not contain each other,
but rather refer to different things: the action and the narration,
following Tronstad (s. note 6). Here I am interested in the action
(as the narration is out of the game), both as it is planned by
the designer, and experienced by the player.
In
computer games, quests incarnate causality at two levels: a semantic
one, where we understand how/why actions are connected (the character
has to do X because of Y, and then Z will happen); and a structural
one (the designer can plan for the events and objects involved in
the quest, and also for the order in which some or all events must
take place). In other words, it is absolutely necessary to distinguish
between the player and the designer’s perspective when considering
quests. For the player, they are a set of instructions for action,
as they give her a goal that needs to be solved. For the designer,
they provide a structure to plan for events and describe object
interaction within a comprehensible framework.
From
the player’s point of view, problems arise at the semantic (information,
choice) level when the instructions are not clear (the player doesn’t
know what to do), or when they are too specific (the player has
no choice whatsoever); and at the structural (interaction) level when the obstacles are not challenging enough
(too easy) or impossible to overcome (too hard). The designer has
to balance the semantic and the structural function of quests in
the game, so as to facilitate a combination of objects (as available
in the gameworld) and actions (as derived from the game rules) that
generates interesting gameplay.
This is easier said than done, as our students had the chance of
finding out. Setting up a world with objects, characters and a backstory
is one thing; combining all these elements into quests that the
player finds engaging is a very different one. For a game designer,
creating quests is the primary way in which the different storytelling
elements come together. Generally speaking, designers have a very
different conception of storytelling and quests than academics.
3.
Perspectives
The
problem of quests has engaged the interest of game researchers,
game designers, and of course the pen&paper roleplaying community.
Each of these three points of view concentrates on different angles
of the problem, and they are all necessary for us to understand
how quests work in computer games.
3.1
Academic
M.
Wibroe, K.K. Nygaard and P.Bøgh Andersen have examined quests in
“Games and Stories”, where they analyse the game Diablo trying
to discover why it fails as a story. They are interested in events
that are tellable, according to Marie Laure Ryan’s definition
of the concept, that is, events where “there is a discrepancy between
the actual world and a possible world or internally between possible
worlds” (Wibroe et. al., 169). For them, a really sucessful story-game
would be one where the player’s actions had as many outcomes as
possible (not completely linear), and also where the game world
presented an illusion of complexity similar to that of the possible
worlds of stories (where each character struggles to realize her
own version of an ideal world). In this view, there is no good story
without conflict. In Diablo, the villains just wait around
for the hero to attack them, and the world feels quite static, even
though the player can choose the order in which she performs the
different quests.
While
I am not interested in Diablo or any other game becoming
a good story, their definition of quest is quite in line with the
one I proposed earlier: “The quests of Diablo constitute
its plot, since they are the way in which the underlying story is
revealed” (p. 170). The authors’s aim is to find “remedies” that
allow for games like Diablo to tell good stories, but most
of these remedies point in the direction of a tremendously powerful
AI that could manage totally independent characters and a world
that responded to their actions in real time. However, some of their
points are very valid and realistic for designers; for example,
that quests should be story-functional or that the most important
ones shouldn’t be introduced too late in the game (p. 178). They
also describe the two basic quest structures the game is made of,
in a very useful example of how to undertake quest analysis: the
simple exchange (“delivering something to someone and then
being rewarded”) and the breach of contract, basically a
complication of the previous one (“after the deed is done it turns
out that one has to fight for the reward”). The second one would
obviously be more interesting as it presents conflict and is thus
tellable.
The
tellable quality of quests is also central to Ragnhild Tronstad’s
conception of them (2001), although in her case tellable
is understood in the linguistic sense of something that can be told.
As explained in note 6, quests are for her performative, they are
acts, while stories (the telling of the quests) are constatives,
since the quest is already solved. This distinction is important,
but to my mind, her definition of quest solving is too tied to the
semantic level to be completely applicable to games. She writes,
“To do a quest is to search for the meaning of it” (p. 4), so that
when the meaning is found, the quest is finished and there isn’t
much of a point in trying to do it again. But quests in computer
games are very often devoid of any search for meaning (take this
letter to the merchant!), there is no meaning to be sought, nothing
to be known, but something to be done. Moreover, this
can be done again and again independently of the player knowing
all possible meanings in advance (for example in EverQuest
is it not uncommon to repeat some low level quests in order to get
more experience points, since the goal is not meaning but the reward).
Espen
Aarseth is also inspired by Tronstad in his “Beyond the Frontier:
Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse” (2002), that is actually
an attempt to find a new way to use narrative in order to discuss
games from a more intrinsic perspective (and solve the “war” between
games and narrative along the way). His article is very interesting
in that it examines several games from the point of view of how
quests work in them. His definition of quest is very broad: “The
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.” (p. 6), and from the conclusion, “we might benefit
from looking at some games (games with specific goals) as quest
games”(10). He also notes that this kind of games is not so easy
to define, but maybe if we look at his examples we can understand
it a bit better.
-
X-Beyond the
Frontier:
quests are not fixed, the player is free to choose them as she discovers
pieces of information (an area has a valuable resource that you
could go and take). Basically for entertainment inside a simulation
game.
-
Myth II: Soulblighter:
the quest is quite determined since you know the objective (take
the castle) and the means (use the dwarf); Aarseth decided to use
him in a different way than intented, so relative freedom in the
means.
-
Return to Castle
Wolfenstein.
Multiplayer game with two opposing teams with also opposed goals:
transmit the secret codes / avoid the transmision of the secret
codes. Quests would be made of all the objectives.
As
we can see, the three kinds of “quests” are very different, as Aarseth
seems to imply that all games that have a particular objective (beyond
the desire to win) would be quest games. But even “simple” games
with no visible plot/narrative content (like Chess or Tetris)
would have particular goals or objectives (take the enemy king,
don’t let the pieces accumulate), so that all games would be quest
games except for simulations? In the first example, the quest is
just a suggestion for action, in the second a quite structured sequence
integrated in the game story, and in the third example, the instructions for the
teams to act. In my approach, the first would be too loose to be
a quest, as we will see in section 4 of this paper, the second would
be more along the lines of my quest definition, and the third
is undoubtedly the most problematic of them all. Following Jesper
Juul (2002), I consider team-based first person shooter games as
games of emergence, where simple rules lead to complex gameplay
that cannot be pre-structured. Quests are a progression structure,
even if emergence and progression can be combined in certain games.
As Juul says: “Progression games have walkthroughs: list of actions
to perform to complete the game. Emergence games have strategy guides:
rules of thumb, general tricks.” (p. 328) Also for me, quests can
be part of walkthroughs, and they don’t involve complex strategy.
These
revealing theoretical perspectives are very useful to help us think
about the nature of quests and the role of quests in games. But
in order to learn how the concept works in design, we have to ask
the designers…
3.2.
Design
As
I mentioned before, designers don’t have a problem with considering
storytelling elements an important part of the design process, without
confusing games and stories: “Strictly speaking, computer games
do not need to tell stories. (…) but it seems that when employed
properly, stories can make games that much stronger” (Rouse, 215).
Richard Rouse proposes several solutions to achieve nonlinearity:
-
storytelling (branching)
-
multiple solutions
-
order (pick the order in which they perform challenges)
-
selection (not all challenges need to be performed)
(p. 126)
The
two last ones refer to quests. For Rouse a challenge/quest is
“good” storytelling because it integrates the storytelling
elements with the gameplay: instead of letting the player watch
a cutscene, she has the chance to participate in the action that
motivates the story.
Rollings
and Morris’s book on game design (2000) also has a section on storytelling,
and even though they don’t mention quests by name here, they have
a “toolbox of storytelling techniques” (p. 110-120), that are really
mostly recommendations for building better quests; as we can see
in the following examples:
-
Obstacles. Uninteresting quest start should be
avoided.“There is a vampire up at the castle. You have to kill it”,
is boring. If the hero needs to do some research in order to get
this information by herself, it is a more engaging story. (p. 111)
-
Personalization. Saving the world is a common goal,
but it is much better if it is small and personal, for example saving
your lost niece. (p. 112)
-
Plot points. It is also very exciting to “pivot
the story around in a new and suprising direction”. “Being told
you’re going with Gandalf on a quest to Mount Doom would be boring
if that’s exactly what happens.” (p. 116)
Finally,
they have a series of recommendations for the resolution of a story
(and here we could say “quest”) to be satisfactory. The resolution
should be “hard won, not obvious, satisfying (morally or aesthetically),
consistent, and achieve closure” (p. 118-119). This points to solving
the problems I identified earlier in quests at the semantic and
structural level.
The
last design perspective on quests that we will consider is that
of Bob Bates, who considers storytelling as a feature of roleplaying
games. Although I think that computer roleplaying games are about
character advancement and not storytelling (that would be the focus
of pen&paper roleplaying games), his observations are interesting
for us here:
“Storytelling
in RPGs is generally accomplished through a series of quests. As
the player carries out the missions, he explores the world and learns
more about its inhabitants and his place among them.
To
deal with the never-ending conflict between linearity and nonlinearity,
don´t give the player the quests one at a time. Instead, group the
missions in a series of small clusters so that, although he has
a choice of what he is working on at the current moment, he isn´t
overwhelmed with too many possibilities. At any given time, the
player should have several immediate goals, one or two midterm goals,
and one final goal.” (p. 54)
Bates
advocates for a three-act structure for creating plots in games,
following Aristotle: problem, complications and solution. This is
no doubt very simple, and it makes us aware that computer games
are not such a sophisticated medium as contemporary literature,
for example, where it is entirely possible to have a plot without
a solution, or even to try to do without a plot.
These
three designers’s perspectives have been extremely useful for our
students, who preferred to get practical tips such as these rather
than to enter discussions about narrativity. They have criticized
and refined their initial versions of quests according to this kind
of advice. They have for example planned for a non-linear combination
of quests (that is, the player can take them in different orders
or drop some), tried to involve the player’s personally (if he has
to investigate some evil, it is because his father has been killed,
not just for money), tried to include surprises, treasons and plot
turns, and also planned for quests that can only be solved in groups
of people with different skills to promote social exchanges within
the game world, etc.
As
we can see, the three design books take for granted that the reader
understands what a quest is, and they just set out to offer practical
examples of how to make them better. This is useful, but we need
to complement it with a discussion on the nature of quests, as will
be undertaken in part 4.
3.3.
Pen&paper roleplaying
The
function of this section is to stress the fact that the idea of
quest or mission as an organizing structure for meaning and action
comes from pen&paper roleplaying games. It has been incorporated
particularly to the computer game genres of adventure and roleplaying,
in single or multiplayer versions. Roleplaying games have a core book that describes how
to decide upon all possible player behaviour (physical, social,
mental, etc.), how to build a character, and what is the game world
like (usually game worlds are inspired by other kinds of fiction,
like literature or cinema). All this is quite a complex and comprehensive
set of rules that serves as the basis for all interaction, and that
usually cannot be changed by the players or game master (unless
all agree for example that one rule is stupid and they won’t use
it). If we consider the rulebook as the hard structure in
roleplaying games, we can see the typically called “adventure modules”
or supplements, as the soft structure. These are usually sold separately from the rulebook, and contain
a particular story or instructions for a quest in the game world.
These instructions typically describe places, objects and people
in detail, and the nature of the players’s quest. Depending on the
game, these quests will be more or less open; typically, early games
like the first Dungeons and Dragons, are much more linear
than later ones, like Vampire. The Masquerade. A linear adventure
book might for example describe an orc lair in all detail, showing
what the players will encounter step by step; the mission will be
described like this: your players are sitting in an inn and the
major asks them to save the town from evil orc raiders for a sum
of money. A less linear adventure book will contain the description
of a city and its most influential characters, will have a few notes
on important past events or relationships between characters and
their plans, and will suggest a few themes and conflicts that might
interest the players, but it is then up to them to run around and
find their own mission. For example, the book could suggest that
the prince acts in a suspicious way, and then the characters might
decide to investigate this, later uncovering a conspiracy, etc.
with a feeling of having created their own story (which is true
to a certain extent, since the gamemaster controls it all).
Some
players and gamemasters prefer more fixedly structured quests, others
prefer open ones, and the market caters for all. In my experience
as a game master, it is quite hard to keep a balance between a good
structure and players’s freedom, as it is easy for them to feel
like they have no choice in the first case, and like they have no
idea of what to do in the second. But there is a crucial difference
with computer games that applies to both cases, and that is, not
everything is predetermined. This might seem a banal observation,
but it is very important to consider that pen&paper roleplaying
games have a human gamemaster that constantly adjusts the adventure
to the players’s actions, acts as all the non-playing characters
showing their personalities with real-time dialogue, and can even
change the hard rules if something is not convenient for
the adventure. In computer games, we need to prepare the quest events
in a much more fixed way, place all objects, and even write the
dialogue for the non-players characters. The result is less lively
and immersive, as in pen&paper the series of quests can have
many more open spaces than in computer games. To my mind, the success
of pen&paper games is precisely in the common creation of a
story, that springs from the hard rules and soft adventure guidelines
but that depends on all participants being human and changing the
script constantly.
Paradoxically,
this is what cannot be reproduced by computer games, but we can
still learn something from pen&paper games in order to create
better quests, specially about the design of the soft rules or adventure
modules. This is a better inspiration for designing quests than
literature, as there are no possibilities for confusion of games
and narrative; in roleplaying games, everything is active storytelling.
4.
Quests
4.1.
Quest background
Even
though this paper doesn’t deal with the literary concept of quest,
or rather, epic quest, it is not pointless to also remember
that the epic quest had a great importance in ancient literature,
and particularly in medieval literature. The idea of quest as a
search with a trascendent meaning (as in “quest for the Holy Grial”)
is part of the everyday use of the
word and no doubt has some influence in the way players and designers
look at them. As Rollings and Morris advised game designers, it
is annoying that many games give players the quest of saving the
world. This has become so pervasive in our culture (also in mainstream
films), that the theme has been emptied of its meaning and become
something banal. The word quest evokes the dreaded great narratives,
and maybe that is why we should be careful when using it, although
it seems that, at least in the game design field, it has come to
stay.
We could ask if these ancient quests can inspire us for creating computer
games, and this is something that has been tried before, with games
about the Odyssey or the arthurian legends. However, this
is more a question of adaptation from one medium to another, and
as such is beyond the limits of this paper. In relation to quests
we could wonder if the game is a thematic adaptation of the story,
a reproduction of the story-world where other stories can take place,
or if it tries to follow the exact same sequence of events so that
the player has a “similar experience” to that of the characters
in the book or film. It would be interesting to wonder at which
levels does this adaptation work, and why, as the migration of certain
stories from one medium to another (it also happens in the opposite
direction of game to film) is far from having been thoroughly examined,
and it has nothing to do with the usual “book to movie” path.
Apart from literature, quests have been a matter of interest for researchers
of mythology and popular culture. Possibly the best known example
is Joseph Campbell’s, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948),
where he explains myths from diverse cultures under the assumption
that they are all versions of the same universal archetype. It also
contains a model for all human experience: the quest. The hero’s
journey or quest is a sort of explanation for human action and change
in three steps or parts: the call (in which the hero learns
about the quest and has to leave the known world behind), the journey
(which includes initiation, transformation, revelation, struggles,
the final big battle, etc.), and the return (where the hero
comes back home and brings something for his community). This could
be applied nearly directly to computer games quests (it is also
very similar to the aristotelian three act structure proposed by
Bates), and it can even be quite inspiring for designers. However,
Campbell’s quest is really a pattern that, like narrative, can be
used to make sense of any kind of human activity, even a human life,
without telling us anything specific about computer game quests.
4.2. Definition
I earlier defined quests as a way of structuring events in games, and explained
that they incarnate causality at two levels:
a semantic one (how/why actions are connected); and a structural
one (plan of actions, interaction of objects and events). The two
levels can be perceived by both the player and the designer, and
if the quests are well built, they will contribute to create some
kind of emotional engagement as part of the player’s experience,
as they can be the glue where world, rules and themes come
together in a meaningful way.
In order to know what computer games quests are, I would like to borrow
the terms I used earlier for describing roleplaying games, and to
draw a distinction between the hard and the soft rules
of a game. I propose that the hard rules are the rules making up
the game-world, namely, objects properties and behaviours and gameplay
dynamics, including the final goal of the game. The soft rules would
in this approach be the concrete objectives in smaller strings of
actions, in a way, how the hard rules are particularly implemented
in short sequences that the player can take individually. Examples
of hard rules would be the properties of water (you drown, your
weapons do not work) or the system that calculates damage in combat.
Examples of soft rules would be the requirement that the player
kicks a door three times before it can be opened, or that she finds
a letter in a drawer in order to go on to the next level. One could
also say that hard rules are general, and soft rules are particular.
Strategy plans (in Jesper Juul’s terms, emergent) have to
do with hard rules, whereas
problem solving activities have to do with soft rules (for Juul,
progression).
But not all soft rules are quests, since soft rules can also be puzzles
or action feats, that is, they can very well be devoid of any storytelling
content. A quest, as we said earlier, brings some or all the storytelling
elements (characters, plot, causality, world) together with the
interaction, so that we can define it as the array of soft rules
that describe what the player has to do in a particular storytelling
situation. Let us take a simple quest example: an exchange.
The soft rules defined by the designer determine that the player
has to take a certain object (a bucket), explore the world to find
another object (a well), combine them according to the hard rules
of the game world (fill it up with water), and take it back to the
non-player character (more exploration and object exchange). The
designer also scripts the conversation lines that will let the player
learn about the quest (by asking the non-player character if he
needs help, for example), and plans for an appropriate reward (experience
points, a good sword).
In the player’s experience, this quest takes the form of a set of instructions
that have to be completed. It is so simple that the level of uncertainty
is very low, maybe the only thing that presents a challenge is finding
the well in the game-world.
Quests can have several variables that we can use to distinguish between
different kinds, for example and not exclusively:
-
Linearity. They can be extremely fixed (like the missions
in Grand Theft Auto III: go here, beat this man up, steal
his car, bring it back), where you even have an arrow pointing at
your objective and a point in the map to drive there efficiently;
or more open (like the player’s task of getting rid of the replicants
in Blade Runner, that can be done in a number of different
ways, including making friends with some of them)… Linearity is
a requirement for quests in all cases.
-
Duration. In time (a big quest that is the whole game
and is made up of smaller quests), in number of actions needed to
be completed (the exchange quest can be completed in two, the breach
of contract quest adds more complications).
-
Single/Multiplayer. The multiplayer element introduces
uncertainty and strategy elements, since a designer can never be
sure of exactly how the group will solve it (for example grouping
in EverQuest to slay a dragon).
Whatever their variety or the name we give them (quests, missions, adventures,
exchanges, errands, tasks), quests are the chance for the game designer
to bring the storytelling elements into play. And if there should
be any general recommendation for designers, it would be that they
try to entwine structure and story as much as they can in their
quests.
The
necessary continuation of this work would no doubt be a thorough
examination of different kinds of quests in order to propose a typology
that could be used both for analysis and design. I would also like
to consider in more depth how the game genre affects the way that
quests work, for example if quests are essentially different in
adventure and roleplaying games, or if the genre distinction plays
no role when considering quests.
5. Conclusion
Even though the importance of the concept of quest has been recognized
for some time and several authors had dealt with it from different
perspectives as examined here, we lacked an overview of the different
understandings of the concept and how it can be defined in relation
to computer games. In this paper I propose such a definition, derived
from game design experience as well as from a discussion of the
main theoretical positions surrounding the concept of quest. Explicitly,
I wanted to challenge certain widespread ideas such as: quests equal
linearity, quests equal goals or objectives, or that they are only
a feature of single player games.
As stated, the quest concept is the primary
way for game designers to implement storytelling elements in games.
For academics, it raises some important questions about the relationship
between narrative and games, and for some it is even the source
of the frustration of storytelling expectatives when playing (Wibroe
et.al). One of the questions at the
beginning of this paper was why quests are boring or can feel as
meaningless for the player. Now we can answer this by examining
the level at which the quests in a particular game can fail (semantic
or structural), or by trying to evaluate if quests are integrating
the storytelling elements in a particular game: if they feel disconnected
from the plot, the game-world or our characters, chances are that
the bridging of the semantic and structural levels hasn’t suceeded,
and we have to reconsider the elements that made up our quests and
how they are presented to the player.
There
seems to be a fairly fixed and small number of typical quests that
many games repeat (the exchange, the breach of contract, the discovery
of the traitor, save the kingdom, etc.), and we might ask ourselves
if it is desirable to explore new lands and devise new version of
these quests or search for entirely different ones.
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