Here on the story forum, we are, bluntly, lore nerds. We draw from a wide range of sources to pull together and relate a thousand different data points to construct a picture of what we understand to be true, or what we think will be true about the story. We craft theories, we discuss plotholes and dissatisfying moments. We represent our ‘teams’ racially or factionally, and we often do it with a central consideration in mind: “what is canon?” What are the facts of the narrative, and based on those facts, what can we glean?
This won’t come as a surprise to many of you, but I have problems with this model.
A discussion based purely on what is fact obscures what’s important in a story: how does it make the audience feel? This is not a history class, nor is it a public policy debate - it’s an entertainment medium that’s designed to get people to emotionally react to a narrative, and to find something memorable or enjoyable in it. Feelings are the point, and if your discussion ignores how people feel about the narrative on the basis that said feeling is out of step for what is technically canon, then you’ve missed the point, because feelings don’t always care about what’s factual. The way in which those facts are conveyed is more important than what those facts actually are.
It’s tempting from here to then say that discussion is pointless because feelings are subjective and everyone likes different things, and while that’s partially true, it ignores that human psychology is a science. We are more alike than we are different, and we as a species have produced a great deal of observable patterns that do a fairly decent job of predicting how we behave and how we emotionally react to things. It’s based for example on the psychological work of Scott Rigby, a prominent video game researcher, that I’m confident in saying that human beings play video games in order to achieve feelings of competence, relatedness, and autonomy. People have critiqued my saying so as a lecture, but it’s a nod to the science, and we don’t get to ignore that science.
Nor do we get to ignore the works of film, literature, and yes video game critics who have come before us, and have developed a whole encyclopedia of terms that we ourselves use based on repeated observation. Things like “show don’t tell”, “ludonarrative dissonance”, “Chekov’s gun”, “mary sue” are themselves things that we have based on years of studying, classifying, observing, and recognizing patterns in stories and how audiences commonly react to them that help us to explain, or to predict, the quality of a story. This is important for our purposes because it allows us to explain why a story doesn’t or didn’t work - and to see the end-goal when we are creating suggestions.
Two of those truisms are “know your audience” and “know your medium”. The latter I’ve discussed up and down these boards already, but the focus of today’s post is the former. What IS the audience, and why does that matter? The audience is the 2021 global video game market - inclusive of existing customers and potential customers - and yes, this is a very business-minded discussion because Activision-Blizzard is a profit-seeking company. The story is important because it drives the marketing and therefore is critical to attracting and retaining players, and if you disagree with that, then I would ask you to go look at the last fifteen years of AAA video game trailers. Story may not matter to everyone in the same way, but it DOES matter, even subconsciously - and it matters more with every passing year.
Story furthermore does not conflict with gameplay. It supports gameplay. It integrates with gameplay. It exists for the gameplay, and to prop up sales for the game - and if it can’t do that then it is failing. I say this because it is common for someone to say that writers shouldn’t care about how the audience feels, that the story isn’t for the audience, or that the audience doesn’t “get it”. If the audience doesn’t get it, it’s because the writer failed to communicate it, and so long as they are writing a story to support sales of a product, yes, they do have to care about how the audience receives it. They don’t own the story, the shareholders do, and if their handling of the story is acting against the shareholders’ interests, then they are failing to do their jobs.
I bring this up because we are going through some numbers on the Night Elf discord that I run. I need to get through a few other projects, but once I do, I intend to collate and present this data in a future post. There are important shifts taking place in WoW’s playerbase and in the total potential audience at the same time, and I feel that these need to be considered when we examine the concept of “knowing the audience”, and from there, what kind of a story WoW should tell. At points in it, some are going to wonder why a discussion on markets and demographics is in the story forum, and because that explanation is long I wanted to put it in this, separate, thread.
More to come - stay tuned.