Writing For Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG)

Tie In Fiction and MMORPGs: Multi-Million Dollar Market
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 10 years, You have heard of the World of Warcraft (WoW), an insanely popular game developed by Blizzard Entertainment.  What you may not know is the extent to which WoW has prospered: in the first few days of launch it had over 140,000 players (http://www.independent.co.uk).  As of 2011, estimates range from 11.5 million to over 12 million users.

Note: These games are so popular there is actually a rehabilitation program to help people stop playing.  The World of Warcraft rehab program in Seattle, WA costs $28,000.

So these numbers are pretty amazing, but what does it mean to freelance writers?

It means there is an already abundant, targeted audience for your fiction, provided you've played enough of the game and know enough of the lore to write a compelling and accurate tale.  This is one of the greatest barriers to publishing in this niche which is known generally as tie-in fiction (writing that piggy backs on already established settings or worlds, including timelines, landscapes, and historic scenarios, characters, and events).  Here is a more accessible example of tie-in fiction which may help readers understand the basic principles of successfully breaking into tie-ins.

The most popular example of tie-in fiction would probably be the sci-fi and fantasy genres.  Specific worlds give a targeted readership base to dozens upon dozens of authors in the worlds of Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms series (if these examples are unfamiliar, think of the world Tolkien created for his series The Lord of the Rings.  He had a map with landmarks, forests, mountains, cities, peoples, and villians.  The lands of Dragonlance and ForgottenThe work  Writers do what they should naturally love doing best, reading, and become acquainted with the world of one of these platforms.  After researching maps and detailed descriptions of places and people online, reading quite a few of the novels set in these worlds should be enough to give a firm base of facts to follow in crafting an original story.  Querying before writing may be especially important in this rule-laden genre of writing: if an author proposes a story to an editor that completely defies aspects of the world's landscape, timeline, or critical events, the editor will either reject the idea outright, or if the mean gist of the story is solid, will work with the author by correcting facts, changing details, and rearranging elements of the story so they fit into the world that, as much as in the imagination as on paper, already exists to its readers and creators. 

These worlds, characters, events, and time-lines are considered the intellectual properties of the companies and persons who designed them, and editors who accept queries or manuscripts are paid secondly to pick out great stories, and firstly to protect the integrity of the intellectual product of their respective company.  These gatekeepers take their work with the same seriousness that a historian takes to the correct accounting of actual events.  Like writing a novel set in the written world of Krynn, the world of the Dragonlance sagas, the digital worlds of MMORPGs and other game titles might be even less forgiving when it comes to fiction that fits.  (More to come!  Time to "research" my MMO short story : P )