When Guild Wars 2 launched, there was a contingent of people who were very, very annoyed about Trahearne. There were a lot of players who felt like he was being manufactured as The Hero Of The World even as the player character actually did everything, and so he was seen as this invading force who should not have been allowed to acquire his undeserved prominence. Then, when the player character killed him in Heart of Thorns and became indisputably The Hero Of The Story, there were numerous people annoyed that the player character had gone from being just an adventurer to being the hero of the story regardless of what players might have envisioned.
My point here is not to make people who liked or disliked Trahearne into the villains of this story; I didn’t particularly like the character myself, but I felt like the twists did ultimately pay off pretty well. But I also feel that there is actually something interesting to talk about here because there is a constant pressure, a push and pull when on one hand people want to be the hero of the story but also not be forced into it.
Before we go into this, though, I think we need to define some literary concepts because there’s something important to understand: the hero of the story is not necessarily the protagonist of the story.
If you spent your life learning how to do useful things anyone cares about, like plumbing or math or whatever, you probably do not know a whole lot about this, and the fact of the matter is that most actual classes on the subject, even at a college level, kind of such at making the distinction. But it’s a pretty important distinction. Heck, some of them will elide the terms, but that’s not really right. So what’s the difference for our purposes?
The protagonist is the person the story revolves around. It is the protagonist’s thoughts, actions, and responses to events that form the core of the narrative and determine whether it is satisfying or not. By contrast, the hero is the person who is serving as the primary lynchpin of a major conflict taking place.
Case in point: At the time Star Wars Galaxies takes place, the hero of the story is Luke Skywalker. He (and to a lesser extent Han Solo and Princess Leia) are indisputably the heroes in the battle against the Empire. You, as a player, are not playing Luke Skywalker. Even if you are playing a Jedi, you are not playing the hero. But you are playing the protagonist because that’s a necessity of the narrative.
In every MMORPG, you are playing the protagonist because that’s just the basic definition of stories. Stories do not need to follow the hero. But they do need to follow the protagonist because if the story is following someone else, that someone else is the protagonist. This can even be done for dramatic effect; in the play Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, the eponymous characters are the protagonists, with the central joke being that they are not the heroes or even relevant in the events that are going to wind up killing them both.
Frequently, stories will follow protagonists who don’t seem like the hero of the story but later become the hero, like the archetypical callow farmboy who will ultimately become the greatest knight of all the land. (You know, Luke Skywalker.) But it’s also possible to just follow a protagonist while other bigger events occur around them. One of the big points of The Hobbit (which the films missed out on) is that Bilbo Baggins had an adventure, but he wasn’t the hero, just the guy who sorted out a difficult journey and then had no role in the large-scale battles that everyone remembers.
But herein lies the problem: It’s really hard to write a video game story with a protagonist who isn’t a hero because unlike most other mediums, a video game is an interactive medium.
Why did Final Fantasy XIV players hate Alphinaud during the game’s initial launch? There are lots of potential reasons, but a big part of it is that for the base game and the first four patches, Alphinaud was very much treated as the hero even as the player character was the actual one who did everything. Any bosses killed? You did that. Any monsters slain? You did that. Alphinaud told you to go do things, got written as the hero, and yet there was no part of him that felt authentically like the hero.
And yet because MMORPGs are games that we come into with the expectation of defining our own characters, it’s also easy to run into a problem that you become the hero of a story that you don’t want for your character. You don’t want to be the hero of this story. It’s hard to feel as if you’re the protagonist when you get to define the character but don’t actually get to determine the course of what takes place. Even when done well, there are stories you’re going to chafe against because that’s just not the direction you want things to go.
The thing is that there is not, in fact, an absolute answer to this. For every player who is upset that a story features your character taking more of a passive role as a mentor, there’s going to be another who much prefers that because you can fill in the blanks of what kind of mentor your character would want to be (whether or not the characters being mentored learn the lessons). There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, and just as in the piece on the pros and cons of player-run stories and scripted stories, the point here is not that one is superior.
One of the great elements of roleplaying is that it allows you to tell the story you want to tell. If you want your character’s story to only tangentially relate to the main story that’s unfolding, you can do that. (It’s how I tend to do things, for example.) But there are a lot of people playing the game who don’t necessarily want that. A lot of people do, in fact, want to be the hero of the story. There are people who have played Skyrim because they just like being the hero of that fantasy tale and would never even consider building a house and spending hours collecting every wheel of cheese in the game just for giggles.
Splitting the difference between protagonist and hero is always going to be an issue. In single-player games, you can sometimes split that difference more elegantly (Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, works around that because once you have an illithid tadpole in your brain, you kind of have to rejigger your priorities). In MMORPGs, it can be more difficult. You want players to feel important to the story in which they are the protagonists, but you also need to keep in mind that some people don’t want to be the heroes.
So ultimately, the takeaway should be that this is complicated, and maybe you should relax a little bit if a given story doesn’t quite land the balance where you’d like. Life is weird like that.
If you’re an old hand at roleplaying in MMOs, you can look to Eliot Lefebvre’s Storyboard as an irregular column addressing the common peaks and pitfalls possible in this specialized art of interaction. If you’ve never tried it before, you can look at it as a peek into how the other half lives. That’s something everyone can enjoy, just like roleplaying itself.
