I Name Thee Maybe

Stop abusing quests in games.

Everybody knows what a quest is. Everybody knows what a quest is. The concept of the quest has been around since before there were books in which to write about them. Man wants thing. Man goes in search of thing. Man finds thing (sometimes and/or sort of). Man is changed. Life is different. There are of course a million variants on this, but in general you can tell a quest when you see one, especially in games, where it’s conveniently labelled “Quest” and often involves exclamation points and question marks in some physically improbable configuration.

But quests in games are a very different beast from quests outside of games. If you’ve played games that involve questing, then you have probably observed this; “Find the Golden Fleece (and probably die trying)” is a far cry from “Slay these three rats so I can pay you.” The underlying difference, I think, is steaks. Or Stakes. Something like that, anyway.

Games that admit to using the quest trope are proclaiming their descent from an illustrious line of heroes, the closest approximation of ultimate progenitor for whom is probably the original Dungeons and Dragons. Dungeons and Dragons didn’t, and to my knowledge still doesn’t, define quests, except in a fairly specific sense. In order to learn certain spells or achieve certain powers, for example, a Druid may have to locate and engage in ritual combat with another, higher-ranking Druid. This is a specific quest, and it has a name, and it only applies under certain circumstances. It is an individual quest, and it is defined only under its own title. There is, by contrast, no page in any Dungeons and Dragons book on which the phrase “A quest is…” precedes anything but vagueness, where it can even be found at all. But the concept of questing has a history so long and it is graven so deeply into our culture (especially for those of us who grew up steeped in fantasy lore and literature), that it gets used in an ad-hoc sort of way almost constantly by the people who run the games in question. And through this use, the meaning of the quest has shifted.

Once upon a time, many years ago, the quest was a power play. Either you wanted power (physical, political, metaphorical), and you quested to either A) get it or B) die in the process, or you already had power and you sent people away on quests to either A) get more power for you or B) die in the process instead of you. Taken at face value, high stakes and uncertain outcome made the quest an extremely useful tool under the right circumstances and for the right people. Taken at meta-value, the quest was a teaching tool, and by the success or failure of the questing person we, the audience of the telling of the quest, were expected to learn something.

Sometimes it was a moral lesson, like “Don’t give up hope even when you’re practically drowning in lava” (Lord of the Rings). Sometimes it was a philosophical lesson, like “AI is troubling and we should think really hard about whether we want to use it” (More movies than I can name, and also The Matrix). Sometimes it was a purely practical lesson, like “Think carefully and use the tools you have” (Hercules). And sometimes its use was deeply questionable, like “Don’t piss off Hera, she’s a bitch.” (Also Hercules). Ultimately, both the hero and we, the audience, were intended to come out of the quest bearing something that we did not have going in, whether that thing was knowledge, or power, or just the carcass of a lamb that was apparently made out of gold.

But in games the quest takes on a new meaning. The quest is a way to get the players to do the thing the Dungeon Master wants them to do, without the DM having to just come out and say “Look, I want you to go over here” or “Look, this is the part of the game I have planned out right now, so we’re going to do it or we can just all go home.” Great DMs and people who think they’re great DMs will read that and say things like “No, Dungeon Mastering is about freedom, the players make the choices and I build the world around them!” or “Yeah, I don’t plan, I just build the world and let things happen as they’re going to happen,” and that’s great in theory, but for every gaming group out there who has a truly great DM, there are a thousand others who hang out in Mom’s basement and have to discover how this works on the fly, and when you’re learning the rules as you go, few things are as useful as a good old-fashioned quest. It gives all parties an excuse to follow the MacGuffin even when it is, and let’s face it, most are, poorly thought-out. We have a quest, and that’s something to which we all know the rules.

But the quest also forms a kind of implied contact between the person building the game (be that a Dungeon Master or a game designer or a software engineer) and the player(s) playing it. The Player agrees to go where the Builder wants him or her to go (or to not complain about not being given a choice), and in return, the Builder promises not to confront the Player with conflicts, consequences, or challenges that are way out of the Player’s league (either above or below). The Player is guaranteed some measure of comfort and safety (depending on the Builder in question) and possibly some shiny loot at the end, and the Builder gets to run things in the order he or she wants to run them. Now, the use of this contract has enabled some pretty incredible things: look at WoW, or the Bioshock or Metro games, or, perhaps my closet favorite, Majesty. All completely, one hundred-percent, quest-based. So are all the Call of Duty games, though they’d be loathe to admit it.

The problem is, this contract lowers the stakes. The consequence of failing the quest isn’t death. It isn’t dismemberment. It isn’t the lives of people you love or care about. It’s the loss (or in some cases only temporary absence) of some gold. A nice sword. A health potion. Three magic fish. A few minutes of play time. By playing on both sides by the rules of this contract, we geld our games of power: “Find the Golden Fleece or die trying” becomes “Kill these three piddling rats so that I can pay you.” This is taken to one obvious logical extreme in the quest structure of WoW, which is so repetitive and uninteresting that people will spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars of real money to not play it. Or they used to, anyway. I haven’t been in touch with WoW in many years, and so I can’t speak the current state of its extralegal markets, but this trade has occurred in every single MMORPG I have ever played, bar none, and it does so in large part because of its reliance on quests.

Now, let me not be thought to say that quest failure should always be punished by permanent player-death. Perma-death is a risky business at the best of times, and when used as a punishment is almost universally a bad idea. One of the great powers of games is that they allow us to explore extreme or otherwise challenging scenarios with the stakes lowered, which gives us a pretty extraordinary opportunity: we can see and consider things that we would otherwise have to risk death in order to encounter. Make the stakes what they would be in real life, and you will almost certainly lose the vast majority of your player base, and your game, for all its against-the-grain ambition, will probably suck.

No. Increasing the severity of the consequences for quest failure is both too extreme and not extreme enough to start alleviating the steak problem. Stake. Shhhh. It’s too extreme for the reasons above. It’s not extreme enough because it ignores the other half of the problem: rats, and I mean this, boys and girls, rats are seriously not worth your time.

Do you cook? I don’t mean frozen pizza. I mean like, when was the last time you marinated a chicken breast in a sauce of your own devising, then, I dunno, cut it into half-centimeter cubes, flash-fried them in sesame oil, and served the stuff over a bed of rice and (grasping at straws here) arugula and endive? Maybe garnished with something orange? I don’t suggest you try exactly that, because having written it it sounds pretty iffy. But games and cooking have a lot in common.

Chances are you don’t eat the same thing over and over again every day. People just generally don’t do that. Oh, you might eat Ramen every day, or sushi, or pizza, or burgers, some other easy category of food. But when was the last time you ate the same thing every day for longer than like a week? How long before you get tired of sausage pizza? California rolls? Creamy Chicken was always my favorite flavor of shitty American packet ramen, but even when I could afford nothing else I still had the occasional flurry of additional spices, just to make things sane again. Old Bay was good. Once. So was curry powder. Once.

Variety, in food and games, is the spice of life, and if you think of RPGs as analogous to a category of food, say, protein, or maybe just beef, to make it a little more focused… If RPGs are beef then quests are spices. How many Fetch Quests (bring me these 10/4/72/pi things of indeterminate nature and I shall reward you!) have you completed in your game-playing career, if you have such a thing? Why do you think they’re all so easily lumped together under the title of “Fetch Quest”? Because, with a few exceptions, they are identical except for the numbers. The exceptions either stand out in your mind as obvious exceptions or they didn’t even come into your mind at the mention of “Fetch Quests.” Fetch Quests are like ground black pepper. A lot of people put black pepper on everything they eat out of no other impulse than sheer habit. It adds nothing to most food, and it often detracts from good food (which, if it needed pepper, would have added some during the cooking process to ensure proper flavor melding), but people sprinkle some on anyway without really thinking about it.

Designers who make RPGs have a tendency to do this with Fetch Quests. You need something to get the player into and back out of the Dark Forest in roughly the time it takes to reach level 2. It’s not important enough to warrant anything dramatic, but it’s got to be done or the player will die when she tries to go into the Shadow Cave at level 1, so we need something…something that takes time…something easy to build because we’re behind on our release schedule…and another Fetch Quest is born. Eventually, I suspect people on both sides of this equation get into habits of thought, such that an RPG without fetch quests seems rather like steak without pepper.

But a great stake doesn't need pepper. It doesn't need marinating, although the addition of subtle new flavors is undeniably fun. What steak needs is a little salt, some patience, a very hot pan (or grill), obsessive timing, and nothing else. Great steak just needs good meat, cooked right. And maybe a beer to drink.

What does that mean when it’s not out frolicking in metaphor-land?

It means quests, the spices in this little pantomime, ought to be used sparingly. Quests are big. Bold. They’re the kind of thing you finish and then write it in letters as tall as the sky, doused with jet fuel and burning like a signal meant to be seen from Pluto.

It means quests ought to be holistic, considered, intentional. Quests are long and complicated, full of the unexpected, the unbelievable, the unthinkable. They either take a lifetime or they feel like they take a lifetime, and it takes an awful lot of planning, a lot of random knowledge, and no few mistaken attempts before the result is worth living through.

It means quests ought to be emotional. Quests burn us. They torment us. They reshape the people we were into the people we become, and doing that to your players requires courage, intelligence, and above all unflinching, absolute honesty. Good writers create believable lies. The best writers reveal truths.

So abandon the simple, small-time quest: slay those rats, carry this bucket, bring these shrooms, sweep that floor. Rely on the nigh-impossible quest, stated simply: Slay the dragon (The only dragon. Also he’s the size of the world, he eats asteroids and breathes starlight). Find and destroy the Horcruxes (Hidden across the entire Earth by a mind whose genius you could never equal and over a period of time longer than you have been alive). Let go of that ring. We all need one good, well-designed quest. One that can push us to that point just beyond our previous known limits, so that we can bask in the fiery glow of hard-won glory. It makes us into the people we have always wanted to be, and what we have almost universally always wanted to be is someone who worked hard for something great. Give us that chance, and you give us a gift almost holy in its power to delight and transport. Give us a list of housekeeping chores, and you bore us, you waste our time, you break our trust, you alienate us.

Please, please, please, stop doing that.

PS: “But I want to provide sidequests!”

Then they had damned well better be unique. Not, like, “Last time I was slaying ten fire elementals but this time I’m slaying ten ice elementals.” Unique. Temporarily alter the function of time. Change the controls. Do whatever you have to in order to make the sidequest its own little game. This will be easier the more power you give to your scripting system. Consider using Lisp.

PPS: Note also my acknowledgement that there are exceptions to everything I’ve said. I welcome, for example, Fetch Quests used with intention and in full knowledge of everything that they are; the King thinks I’m not worth his time and wants me out of his hair for awhile? Fetch Quest away. But pay attention to, and be honest about, what your quest is really doing from the player’s perspective. And maybe if we come back earlier than the King had planned us to, let us walk in on some dirty dealings. Those are always fun.