Howard Jeff - Quests

Combining theory and practice, this updated new edition provides a complete overview of how to create deep and meaningful quests for games. It uses the Unity game engine in conjunction with Fungus and other free plugins to provide an accessible entry into quest design.

The book begins with an introduction to the theory and history of quests in games, before covering four theoretical components of quests: their spaces, objects, actors, and challenges. Each chapter also includes a practical section, with accompanying exercises and suggestions for the use of specific technologies for four crucial aspects of quest design:

• level design
• quest item creation
• NPC and dialogue construction
• scripting.

This book will be of great interest to all game designers looking to create new, innovative quests in their games. It will also appeal to new media researchers as well as humanities scholars in the fields of mythology and depth psychology who want to bring computer-assisted instruction into their classrooms in an innovative way.

The companion website includes lecture and workshop slides, and can be accessed at: www.designingquests.com.

Jeff Howard is Senior Lecturer in the Games Academy at Falmouth University in Cornwall, where he specializes in occult, metal, and Gothic themes and mechanics in games.

Second Edition

Jeff Howard

First edition published 2008

by CRC Press

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CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Howard, Jeff, 1978- author.

Title: Quests : design, theory, and history in games and narratives / Jeff Howard.

Description: Second edition. | Boca Raton : Taylor and Francis, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Combining theory and practice, this updated new edition provides a complete overview of how to create deep and meaningful quests for games. It uses the Unity game engine in conjunction with Fungus and other free plugins to provide an accessible entry into quest design--Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021052945 | ISBN 9780367686079 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367686048 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003138266 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Video gamesAuthorship. | Quests (Expeditions) | Quests (Expeditions) in literature.

Classification: LCC GV1469.34.A97 H69 2022 | DDC 794.8/3dc23/eng/20211221

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052945

ISBN: 978-0-367-68607-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-68604-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-13826-6 (ebk)

DOI: 10.1201/9781003138266

Typeset in Palatino

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

A lot has changed since the first edition of Quests.

The book was written between 2005 and 2007, and published in 2008. Vanilla World of Warcraft had just been released, and MMOs were taking the world by storm, popularizing the notion of games with thousands of quests. As I argued throughout the first edition, a lot of these quests were of dubious quality, repetitive, and lacking much meaning (kill 10 wolves and bring me back their pelts). The first edition of Quests was written as a countercultural response to that design practice. As a counterforce to these trends, I invoked the historical, literary origins of quests (medieval romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and the ludic origins of quests in early computer games (like Ultima IV). By comparing the symbolic framework of correspondences in Sir Gawain to the computational virtue system of Ultima IV, I advocated for a holistic approach to quest design through all aspects of game design, expressed in five elements of quests (overall meaning, spaces, objects, characters, and challenges) with five corresponding practical skills (systems and narrative design, level design, object creation, NPC profile construction, and scripting/programming). The core of this argument remains the same.

But, like I say, things have changed. Theyve changed in the following ways:

• Procedurally generated quests in games like Dwarf Fortress and Moon Hunters
• Rich, complex, morally ambiguous quest lines embedded in cryptic, symbolic worldbuilding in games like Dark Souls, The Witcher 3, and Dragon Age Inquisition
• The genre of the evolving game (massively online, co-op friendly but not quite an MMO) in the vein of Path of Exile and Warframe
• Storytelling tabletop RPGs and board games with rich, complex, and often generated or generative quests and quest systems, such as Kingdom Death: Monster

Technology, in the form of the tools that we use to design games and quests, has also changed. The first editions practical exercises were in the Aurora Toolset from Neverwinter Nights: an engine which, while well-designed and still supported by a niche of modders, has now become outdated. Even at the time of writing, this engine required the purchase of Neverwinter Nights, making it somewhat restrictive to users. In the meantime, user-friendly engines like Unity are freely downloadable and widely used in independent development, and free middleware plugins like Fungus integrate with Unity to aspects of quest design (such as branching dialogue and scripting) much more accessible.

Tonally, there is also a shift. As the protagonist of the Christopher Nolan movie Tenet intones: We live in a twilight world. The darkness of an ongoing (at the time of writing) global pandemic, the possible rise of fascism, and environmental destruction have unleashed a world that (to use a fictional genre term) is grimdark, along with a black tide of grim games whose quests are rich, resonant, and very dark indeed. Whereas the prototypical quester of the first edition was Sir Gawain, the quester of our current moment might be Guts from the grimdark anime