So what’s it like writing for Massively Multiplayer Games? Definitely intense in research and writing. Tracy Seamster, once a quest designer for Sony Online Entertainment’s EverQuest II, has now moved on as a writer for The Agency, a merge between FPS and MMO with a modern setting. After years of medieval writing, she’s now transitioning to modern dialog and quest storylines as the game develops for PlayStation 3.

Q: Yours is a job that Game Masters envy! Can you tell us a bit about how you came to be a quest designer for EverQuest II and its first three expansions?

A: I was hired on at Sony Online Entertainment six months before EQII launched (November 2004), specifically to assist in building content for the game. Prior to that, I’d been working part-time for Simutronics as a Product Manager for one of their text-based titles. I was very lucky, in that EQII was hiring someone with a writing background and that is what one gets when working with text-based games. Also, one of my former supervisors at Simutronics was now with SOE, and I’m sure that helped in making sure my resume hit the correct people along the way.

While I’ve been pretty fortunate, I think some of my luck comes from building relationships along the way. The industry isn’t so big that you won’t run into the same folks over and over again in one’s career.

Q: What’s your daily work life like? What are the day-to-day tasks and the process as a writer for MMOs?

A: The daily life depends on what task I’m doing. I’m often googling cool new ways to kill people, the names of weaponry, or reading various news sites to find out what’s going on in the world.

For EQII, once the game was live, my day was divided between working on new quests and stories versus bug fixes for released items. Moorgard and I received all the typo reports each day and read through them to fix what we could. Some of these reports were hilarious; those are the ones I liked the best! I used to save the funniest ones in a text file, but I seem to have misplaced it since moving to Seattle. That’s too bad; they were great!

Right now, we’re building backgrounds for NPCs, operatives and other assorted things players will encounter in The Agency. Our lead writer, Matt Staroscik, builds the big picture and narrative sweep. I’m putting in little details.

Q: What tools do you find yourself using? Please don’t say Excel, although that’s what I’m expecting! Did you end up with a template for quest designing with all of your experience?

A: I use Microsoft Access (and Excel, heh!) for some of my writing now for The Agency. With EQII, we had proprietary tools. I first started out writing everything in TextPad or Word, then laboriously copying and pasting everything into the quest editing tools. Eventually, though, I wrote everything directly into the editor itself. In a way, that’s a shame as I wish I’d kept copies of some of the quests and dialogs I wrote so I could at least remember what I’ve already said. After a while, I wonder if I’m repeating myself…

Q: That’s right! I can imagine after that much time in one world, you’d have to run into the same content after awhile. How do you keep your characters and quests fresh and lively? Where do you find inspiration?

A: When I’m writing backstory, I read a lot of advice columnists like Dear Abby and Carolyn Hax. You learn a lot about human nature by seeing what sorts of predicaments folks present and truth is often much stranger than fiction! That stuff comes in handy when writing about people.

Mythology helps me a lot, too, especially lesser known myths. It puts my mind into another world entirely, where magic exists and what we may take for granted now once needed to be explained somehow. I wrote a lot of myths for EQII, such as creation lore from the perspective of the different races. The one I think is most “magical” explains that the kerra were formed by a union of wind and stone. With The Agency, explanations may not be so poetic but our characters still need to have a backstory. Backstory builds a world for the players to live in, whether they read it all or not.

Q: What other challenges and limitations do you have when writing in MMOs?

A: The main challenge for me is to be brief. Some of my early dialog trees in EQII go on and on. I cringe now to think of how many times players had to click a node to get offered a quest. That’s because I look at the story as the most important part, whereas a player may not care what the story is so much as it offers phat loot and good experience. Over time, I’ve learned to whittle down my text a bit… but it’s still challenging.

In general, with an MMO, we’re writing content that can shift and change once the game is live. There are updates and live events for players, in addition to long-range planning for the next expansion or event. It’s exciting, as you get to work under tight deadlines to create a variety of texts: journal, web lore, dialog, et cetera.

It’s also frustrating when you’re implementing something and it just plain doesn’t work! I don’t know how many times I would stare in frustration at something that wouldn’t compile, or update, or do anything useful when all it meant was that I had used the wrong phrasing in the script. I’m not a very programmy person at all and I used to trade writing for scripting assistance when working on EQII. If it weren’t for the assistance of LJ Sigmund, for example, most of my quests would actually require nothing more than going around talking to other NPCs. He very kindly wrote up a library of basic scripts that I could tweak slightly for various quests (probably to keep me from whining at him when my things broke).

Q: Now that you’ve moved on from quest writing for EQ, has it been renewing to step into The Agency? How does that differ in terms of what you’re writing and how you’re going about it?

A: One thing I really enjoy about The Agency is that it’s all new to me. I’ve written medieval fantasy for over ten years now, so a modern setting is really refreshing. It’s also challenging in that I now need to stow away all the knowledge I have about Norrath. As The Agency is more real world, there’s no need for Ye Olde Dialogue any longer. That’s a little of scary! I’ve never written anything modern before.

I’m not implementing anything (yet), either, so that changes things a bit. Instead of coming up with an NPC, planning the story arc, placing all the mobs and then writing all the text associated with it… I’m just writing text. Our level designers are doing the current implementation based on the broader context of our missions. I’m writing backgrounds, so most of what I’m doing at this point will be released in little tidbits rather than grandiose quest dialog trees.

It’s interesting to be on a game team this early in its process. EQII was near beta when I joined the team, so I always felt like a latecomer to the party. At this point with The Agency, we’re still making decisions about all sorts of cool background things. It’s like buying a house and getting to choose your paint colors! I can’t wait for players to experience the game for themselves.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 10:20 am and is filed under Design Interviews, PEOPLE, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.