All the game world’s a stage: towards a model for asymmetric collaborative storytelling in persistent open world MMORPGs

Abstract: Despite being a highly profitable industry, very few MMORPGs have managed to find commercial success over the past decades. One commonly identified problem is their near-exclusive reliance on social interaction as a means of attracting and retaining a sustainable player base, and their failure to achieve the network effect required to establish that appeal. This research proposes a complementary approach that leverages emergent narrative in order to diminish the genre’s reliance on social interaction, specifically through the use of persistent player characters to believably populate the game world.