Jess Lebow, a former Guild Wars story writer and the current lead quest designer at Carbine Studios, showed clips from games as an introduction to storytelling issues in MMOs. After opening it up to the sizable floor for discussion, audience members gave suggestions on how to tackle the issue.

For the first clip, Lebow talked about the quest delivery system in Grand Theft Auto 4 and contrasted it with the traditional MMO quest delivery system of clicking on a NPC and reading a block of text. With GTA4, the cell phone used in the quest delivery system enabled the player to be anywhere and also, fit the world better. Audience members offered suggestions such as delivery owls a la Harry Potter, communicators a la Star Trek, and the Seer Stones in The Lord of the Rings Online.

After showing a clip of his "favorite game of all time," Advance Wars 2, Lebow asked how MMO designers could get away from the block of text. When an audience member stated voiceovers, Lebow pointed out that a voice file still has the same issue as a block of text. The player may not want to sit around and listen to it. Another suggested having the text read while the player is doing something, a la Bioshock. Lebow agreed, stating that escort quests were perfect times to get some back story out of the way.

Another person suggested letting players be the quest givers and setting up a quest auction house. Warhammer's public quests were also discussed. In public quests, objectives are flashed to kill mobs within a time frame and Lebow commented that when the quest seems to be given through the UI players seem to be more willing to accept them.

Lebow opened the issue of instances vs. persistent worlds by showing a clip of Guild Wars. In response, one audience member brought up the epic struggle of World War II, and the sense that an aggregate outcome could be based on smaller individual outcomes. Others repeated feelings that they didn't feel so accomplished when they killed a boss, only to watch other people come along and kill the same boss after it respawned.

Although these ideas might have been better serviced by a more intimate setting, what was not lost to the large room and loud crowd provided a unique take on an interesting problem.