Showing posts with label storytelling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label storytelling. Show all posts

Saturday, October 23, 2021

A Secret Island Treasure to Inspire Storytelling

 https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20211020-the-rainbow-island-most-travellers-dont-know

With ochre-stained streams, crimson-hued beaches and enchanting salt caves, Iran's Hormuz Island is a geologist's Disneyland.

"You should get a taste of this soil," said Farzad Kay, my tour guide on southern Iran's Hormuz Island, as we stood at the foot of a ruby-red mountain that loomed majestically over the shoreline, engulfing the beach and waves in a crimson shadow. I approached his suggestion with some trepidation, as I was yet to understand this mysterious, mineral-laden landscape.

Set 8km off Iran's coast amid the murky blue waters of the Persian Gulf, Hormuz is a teardrop-shaped shimmering salt dome embedded with layers of shale, clay and iron-rich volcanic rocks that glow in dazzling shades of red, yellow and orange due to the more than 70 minerals found here. Nearly every inch of Hormuz Island's 42 awe-invoking sq km imparts a story of its formation.

According to Dr Kathryn Goodenough, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey who has previously worked in Iran, hundreds of millions of years ago, shallow seas formed thick layers of salt around the margins of the Persian Gulf. These layers gradually collided and interlayered with mineral-rich volcanic sediment in the area, causing the formation of the colourful landmass.

"Over the last 500 million years, the salt layers were buried deeply by younger layers of volcanic sediment. Since the salt is buoyant, over time, it has risen through cracks in the overlying rocks to reach the surface and form salt domes," said Dr Goodenough. She added that these thick layers of salt, many kilometres below the land, are actually present across much of the Persian Gulf area.

This geological makeup has resulted in ochre-stained streams, crimson-hued beaches and enchanting salt caves. In fact, Hormuz is often called the "rainbow island" because of the spectrum of chromatic hues that it exudes. It's also home to what's thought to be the only edible mountain in the world, which Kay was encouraging me to try.

Locals believe that the salt found at the Goddess of Salt mountain has the power to release any negative energy (Credit: Saeed Abdolizadeh/Alamy)

Locals believe that the salt found at the Goddess of Salt mountain has the power to release any negative energy (Credit: Saeed Abdolizadeh/Alamy)

The red soil on the mountain I was standing near, called gelack, is caused by haematite, an iron oxide thought to be derived from the island's volcanic rocks. Not only is it a valuable mineral for industrial purposes, it also plays an important role in local cuisine. Used as a spice, it lends an earthy flavour to curries and goes perfectly with the local bread called tomshi, which means "a handful of something".

"The red soil is used as a sauce," explained Maryam Peykani, Farzad's wife. "This sauce is called soorakh and is spread on flatbread as it is almost cooked. Apart from its culinary usages, the red soil is also used [in paintings by] local artists, dyeing, creation of ceramics and cosmetics."

Beyond the ruby-red mountain, there's plenty else to explore on Hormuz. In the island's west there's a spectacular salt mountain known as the Goddess of Salt. Extending more than a kilometre, its pale caves and sharp-edged walls are covered by shimmering salt crystals that look like the giant columns of a marble palace.

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Locals believe that the salt possesses the healing power to soak up and release any negative energy, and Kay advised me to take my shoes off so my feet touched the salt dome. "The rock salt is known to release immense positive energy," he told me. "After having spent [time] in this valley, you are bound to feel much more invigorated, which is why the valley is also called the Energy Valley."

Similarly, in the island’s south-west is Rainbow Valley, a stunning display of multi-hued soil and vividly coloured mountains in shades of red, purple, yellow, ochre and blue. As I walked, I noticed patches of bright colours forming geometric patterns that glittered and gleamed as the sun's rays hit them.

In the nearby Valley of the Statues, rocks were weathered into fantastical shapes by thousands of years of wind erosion; with a bit of imagination, I could see birds, dragons and other mythical creatures. It was like admiring Earth's very own art gallery.

The island glows in shades of red, yellow and orange due to the more than 70 minerals found here (Credit: Lukas Bischoff/Alamy)

The island glows in shades of red, yellow and orange due to the more than 70 minerals found here (Credit: Lukas Bischoff/Alamy)

Despite the island’s surreal, kaleidoscopic natural colours, most travellers don't know about it. According to the Ports and Maritime Organization of Iran, just 18,000 visitors came here in 2019.

"This natural phenomenon is not fully discovered by world travellers despite its significant tourist attractions, historically and naturally," said Ershad Shan, another local, as I sank my teeth into a spicy, fragrant curry of sardines, red onion, lemon and orange, prepared using soorakh. "If more attention is paid to the infrastructural development of Hormuz, this island can be changed to be an important attraction for tourists."

Locals have started to offer home-cooked meals for tourists and driving rickshaws and motorcycles to transport people around the island. "We feel responsible for doing our bit for Hormuz. It's so rare and is a part of our identity," Shan said. "We feel an urgent need to contribute towards getting the world to take notice of this eco-heritage."

As I devoured my curry, it struck me that while Hormuz is without doubt a geologist's Disneyland, it is the edible soil, which is literally runs through the veins of its inhabitants, that make it truly special.

Geological Marvels is a BBC Travel series that uncovers the fascinating stories behind natural phenomena and reveals their broader importance to our planet.

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Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Example 2 of writing for clients, rewrite of initial order: Perking Up Boring Romance (Action) Writing

Example 2 of writing for clients, rewrite of initial order:
Perking Up Boring Romance (Action) Writing
 

By Neale Sourna

Hey, are your stories of sizzling love fizzling out like tired champagne, that’s more flavored water than sparkling? Well, romance (falling in love) is an action; so, we’re going ruthlessly search our bland scenes and discover little tender moments to spark our readers’ senses, imagination, and fears, then add the little stuff that exploits our own and your readers’ emotions and expectations.

WRITE TO OUR SENSES

The easiest way to get deeper into your readers’ minds and hearts, and into your characters, is to take individual editing passes through your stories, concentrating one at a time, adding when your couple can SEE, HEAR, TOUCH, SMELL (let’s say “scent,” sounds less odious), and TASTE. It adds flavor and sparks interest right away.

Why?

Because all of us, or nearly all, have all or most of these senses and know what a fresh, crisp SWEET APPLE or a fresh, crisp TART APPLE TASTES like. The SCENT of HOT BREAD, FLORAL COLOGNE, MUSK on a warm body you love. Or WARM MUSK from a body that repels you.

Sensing adds instant tactility and reality; drawing us deeper into your world, so we’ll FEEL the HUG that relaxes us and the SHARP BITE of a whip from a sadist drawing BLOOD from our backs and making us BITE our TONGUES to TASTE.....

This technique is especially useful for those of us who think A LOT and our characters do too. They think, they thought, they realize…. Stop.

Get out of your head, and INTO THEIR BODIES AND EMOTIONS. Use ALL of your senses for your character people; it makes them more real to us. The first time I did this in a script it made everything pop and more rich. Of course, don’t use it in EVERY sentence, till we puke; but, it helps you add LIFE, so do it.

BUT, DON’T FORGET SENSE #6

Depending on your story genre and the type of characters, your couple or one of them may have a sense of “knowing” when the other is simply arriving or FEEL UNREASONABLY agitated enough that they must rush to find them because....

Or it may just be a FEELING of faith in which one or both KNOWS the other will rescue them, love them, or hasn’t truly left them.

Or that “jinx” thing, when two people say or do the same thing at the same time. I do this all the time with family members and close friends. We’re just on the same track, FEELING the same vibe, or recalling the same shared experience. It is weirdly fun and adds a layer of intimate bonding.

AND DON’T FORGET THE LACK OF OUR SENSES

“When I entered I couldn’t sense him, not even that gentle scent of his cologne, and not that gentle vibration that always signaled that he’s nearby.”

“Disconcertingly, although we were in the dance’s embrace, I felt, sensed, whatever, her body harden and edge away from me; the worse was holding her yet in my arms, but feeling I was abruptly alone.”

DISCOVERY & RESPONSE

Here’s a little more help. Your characters, your people experience their lives and love, suffer, die, and get reborn as vampires and zombies. Okay, vamps and z’s are only in some cases. But, you, dear storyteller, are our only Guide into this unique world and characters you have shaped, and how your people discover and rediscover themselves and react and respond to it will keep us reading, and sharing your books.

Think about an historical era character who is rescued by a gentleman and, perhaps, now owes the safety of her “virtue” and her life to him. And when he asks can he contact her family, she has no answer.

Hm. Why? I don’t fully know yet, it’s a new work in progress for me; but, for my new heroine, her hero’s question:

Makes her DISCOVER she’s UNCOMFORTABLE (feeling) giving him that information.
 

She also DISCOVERS she FEELS bad about withholding this from him since he’s been nice, respectful, and he’s attractive. Yum.
 

But, she’s not going to cave and give her private information, now (logic action, thoughts controlling her emotions); her reasons are a can of crawly worms she doesn’t want to get into yet, or maybe ever.
This woman will disclose much later, when the EMOTIONAL STAKES ARE HIGHER BETWEEN HEROINE AND HERO; but not now, which also helps my storytelling and yours—postponing, delaying the consummation and climax on this one subject.

That’s only half of telling an intimate story of two (or more) people interacting.

He’s in your written scene, too, and he’s been gracious, kind, etcetera, plus, he’s a man for whom the world usually bends to his will, and although he understands that she is afraid; still:

He’s wondering what the heck is up with a woman apparently alone and who has just survived multiple traumas. Why doesn’t she want her family...? 

Maybe she’s not so innocent?


As you, storyteller, think and FEEL what he feels and thinks, you and he are wondering if she’s decided he’s a bigger, juicier catch than the man from whom he rescued her...? 

FEEL it? Now doesn’t that spark and perk up all our SENSE involvement in the intimate, individual DISCOVERIES of your hero and heroine? When we can VISUALIZE and FEEL their distinct confusions and sensualities, in conflict with what they fear and want, it generates a RESPONSE in us, your readers.

_900 wds meets the length requested and made changes requested; but...
requested 2nd rewrite next post...

Monday, December 28, 2015

Sunless Sea, 80 Days and the rise of modular storytelling

The last few years have seen the rise of modular storytelling, which offers players something akin to a collection of short stories tied together with character or theme. They offer a wealth of self-contained vignettes for players to interact with, and new ones can be continually added, increasing the breadth and richness of the narrative.

Inkle's 80 Days is the most prominent example of this, casting players as Phileas Fogg’s personal valet, Passepartout, as the two make their way around a steampunk Victorian globe. Each city on the trip offers its own self-contained story, occasionally spilling out into other locations, but by and large limited by geography to something that you discover and leave behind as you circumnavigate.

Failbetter Games’ Sunless Sea adopts a similar approach, casting you as the captain of a vessel in the game’s ‘Unterzee’, ranging out of a mostly submerged London to discover the islands of its unlit ocean, each with its own history and events.


This story-telling approach fundamentally alters the structure of the development process, both before and after release. “The main reason to build the game this way was because we didn’t know how big it was going to be” Jon Ingold of Inkle tells me. “To be frank, we didn’t know if Meg [Jayanth, 80 Days’ writer] would give up halfway! We needed to make sure that, whatever happened, we could pull the game together and deliver it. But it also meant that we could be very flexible about adding diversions, side-content and additional routes.”

"This story-telling approach fundamentally alters the structure of the development process, both before and after release."
Alexis Kennedy, the Creative Director on Sunless Sea, has similarly positive things to say about how modular storytelling impacted scope-management. 

“It gave us a natural pattern for production. We developed the game through Early Access, we pushed out monthly-ish updates, and each update had 3-5 islands on it, until the whole sea was populated. That’s much easier for players to understand than story-line based announcements.”

What this also means is that players are less likely to see the ‘seams’, so to speak. Often in a standard linear narrative there are difficulties including everything that was initially planned, leading to scenes, plot points and sometimes whole characters being cut from the final game. 

With a modular approach, those ‘missing’ pieces are almost completely isolated from the other pieces of the story, leading to their absence being very hard to feel, as a player moves through the game.

Talking about the iteration process with both developers, it’s clear that modular storytelling helped immensely when it came to playtesting and iteration, too. For 80 Days, all Inkle had to do was get one trip around the world complete and they essentially had a working prototype. From there, it was just about adding cities that branched out from that already established route, and the game grew from there. A complete experience that just became broader and richer as content accumulated. 

Similarly, Sunless Seas islands ‘worked’ as soon as there was one of them thrusting out of its Unterzee. “We had much more informed ideas on how island stories should work by the end of the process than we did at the beginning,” Kennedy tells me “We didn’t have to commit to one form from day one.”

This was an important point, especially for Failbetter, but also for Inkle; both companies brought in freelancers to help write their games, and while Jayanth for 80 Days played a very central role, Sunless Sea had fully 30% of its islands written by freelancers. But when those freelancers don’t have to worry about maintaining absolute consistency with an already established story, they can produce much more interesting work.



“The Fallen London universe is big, sprawling and complex in the way that only worlds built by thoroughgoing nerds are complex.” Kennedy continues. “By isolating stories on different islands, we allowed our freelancers much more liberty to experiment, to add new odd lore, and above all to use a voice that was very different from our well-established house voice. The polyphony of different voices - I think – really added to the sense of exploring foreign spaces in Sunless Sea, and gave us a range and breadth of perspectives that would have been impossible if we’d had to squeeze everyone into the same approach.

"The benefits of the approach extend past release, too, as both games have proven. Taken today, 80 Days and Sunless Sea are far more expansive than they were when they originally launched. In the case of the former, each new platform (Android and PC), gave the team at Inkle a good excuse to add a big chunk of new locations and stories, each more outlandish and unique than the last.

“The post-release updates were an unexpected benefit, and not something we had planned for in earnest.” Ingold tells me. “But when we came to do it, it was just like continuing our development process from where we left off. It’s been particularly satisfying to weave extended new storylines into the existing framework, such as the jewel thief plot that, once activated, follows you around the world wherever you go.”

Similarly, Sunless Sea has been receiving regular new geography to its eponymous body of water, but despite the already well-established lore that they created with their browser based Fallen London, writing a new island didn’t require an absurd amount of research; instead they just had to reacquaint themselves with one element, and then the isolation of the sea did the rest.

None of this is to say that modular storytelling is a cure-all for games’ narrative woes. It’s difficult to argue that having isolated vignettes is more emotionally rewarding than wholly bespoke cinematic experiences, but that is also not to say that they can’t deliver a satisfying narrative arc. Both 80 Days and Sunless Sea have created their own ways of delivering that arc, and they’ve both managed it, with varying degrees of success.



“The level of drama [is] proportional to longitude.” Ingold tells me. “So the soup is too hot in Europe, the soup is on fire in India, and the soup is talking to you about your death in South America.” This, combined with the natural drama that comes out of dwindling resources and health states, means that on the average trip in 80 Days, you’re running out of money and time by the time you’ve crossed the Pacific. 

That the stories themselves then escalate in drama and stakes means that the final leg of your journey should feel like a third act, so to speak.

Sunless Sea is less rigorously structured, so it can’t rely on the same tricks. “One of the things we got right was the strength of the core loops.” Kennedy explains. 

“You leave port; you cross the darkness; you find the lights on the far side, which you’ve been anticipating during your time in the darkness. You do that again and again. And then, in aggregate, you complete a much larger loop, where you leave London for the unknown; explore a series of ports, and then return home. That outgoing-homecoming loop, with the relevant music and visuals to signal your departure and return, is the heart of the game.”

This structure also has a knock-on effect that I hadn’t considered until Kennedy pointed it out to me; player choice, when framed as a choice of where to go rather than explicitly what to do, becomes something that’s both very interesting and exceedingly manageable on the part of the developer. 

Instead of having to limit choices to the world of morality, and all the design headaches that that naturally leads to, you instead need only to provide a fork in the road, and the player will feel the weight of that choice bereft of the trappings of ethics that often present a choice that’s barely a choice at all.


“For the player to feel that the journey has meaning,” Kennedy says. “They have to be free to decide where they’re going; for them to be free to decide where they’re going, the ports have to be untethered and modular. Players long for the opportunity for self-expression. Anything that validates and extends that self-expression is welcomed, and plays to the medium’s strengths. 

"At Failbetter, we talk about ‘fires in the desert’ as a model for our variety of storytelling. Imagine a desert, seen from above. Paths lead between the villages in the desert. When travelers cross the desert, you can clearly see the route they take, where they stop off, and so on. But what if night has fallen? Then, all you can see are the little fires in the village. Occasionally, travelers emerge from the darkness and sit by the fires for a while, and then move on. But the routes they take between those fires belong to them alone.”

In other words, the player provides the context, and the game provides the stories. While the developer can provide certain elements that influence the order with which the stories are experienced, ultimately the final call is with the player. Especially in Sunless Sea, there’s no guaranteeing that a player will go to this island or this island first. In 80 Days, the only constant is Paris; everything else is up for grabs.

“Just as in a film the story is told through the edit, [here] the story is told through the darkened paths between the fires.” Kennedy finishes his conversation with me by saying. “In cinematic terms, it’s a montage; we provide the shots, the player does the arrangement. In comic terms, Scott McCloud calls it ‘the blood in the gutters’ – the creative space that exists for the audience to instantiate the potential between specific events. There’s not much space in a traditional told story for that."

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Game Writing equals Narrative Design

http://www.thefictionengine.com/articles-on-game-narrative.cfm/article/writingequalsdesign



"...there isn’t a line between the design and the writing, especially if you’re doing a narrative-driven game. A lot of what you might call the game design is actually writing in a sense – writing isn’t just words, it’s creating the characters and the world and the actions that might make sense in that world." - Sam Barlow

I grabbed that quote from the following article where Sam Barlow, Rhianna Pratchett and Ragnar Tornquist discuss the closure of Irrational and what it means to AAA storytelling.




 As to Sam Barlow's comment about Writing and Design in video games, I was initially in wholesale agreement with him.  In fact, it's kind of bizarre that we have to call ourselves Writers AND Narrative Designers.  What really is the difference? 
Were I to write I fantasy novel, I'd write 'design documents' about the world, it's people, their culture, politics and economics.  I'd describe the terrain and climate, the cityscapes and landscapes.  I'd produce character profiles.  I'd plan out the narrative in a series of story beats.  Then, and only then, would I get stuck into the writing of the actual words that the reader will consume.
Stephen King once likened writing a novel to digging out a dinosaur skeleton.  You chip and brush away, revealing the dinosaur bone by bone.  Only when you've finished do you know exactly what sort of dinosaur you have.  I tried that once, with my first novel.  Needless to say, it remains unpublished.  Sorry Steve.  Guess I'm not that kind of writer.
I can't just make shit up and expect it all to turn out fine and dandy.  I had to laugh when in Alan Wake Alice surprises Alan with a desk set up nicely with typewriter and a fresh ream of paper.  He freaks out. 


I'd freak out too.  What am I supposed to do with that?  Just sit down and churn out a masterpiece like an infinitely typing monkey?  

I have to plan, map out, structure, formulate the story first.

Moving on from that first disaster of a novel, that's how I do all of my writing now.  I plan out the world, character and story arcs first.  Then I write the scripts.  But guess what?  

That's exactly what most writers have been doing for centuries now.

So why, when it comes to the Video Games industry, do we feel the need to suddenly call ourselves 'Narrative Designers'?

Because it sounds more technical?

More credible?

More professional?

Because it's the only way that we can get across across how much more there is to our job than just writing dialogue and flavour text?

"Writing isn't just words..." says Sam Barlow.

On this Sam and I disagree.  Writing IS just words.  Whether they're going into a script or a development doc, those words are still how we tell our stories.

Tuesday, June 04, 2013

From Gamasutra: Narrative design that tells the player's story

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/193422/Narrative_design_that_tells_the_players_story.php

Narrative design that tells the player's story
 

June 3, 2013   |   By John Polson




Kent Hudson, an indie developer who previously worked on Deus Ex: Invisible War and BioShock 2, says games spend too much time talking at him, instead of involving him in the story. He aims to address this issue along with other design pitfalls in his upcoming game, The Novelist, which combines stealth gameplay with interactive narrative.

Hudson offered a first look at The Novelist's gameplay last week (in the trailer above), showing how players control a ghost who can help shape the future of a vacationing family. However, many details have yet to be uncovered for this mysterious and clever game.

Here, Hudson opens the book wider on his project, touching on his use of text clues as rewarding and not hand-holding, his making a game's story more immersive without too much text, more details on stealth gameplay and memory exploration, and Kent's own mental and emotional challenges of being indie.

What important gameplay elements are not conveyed in the trailer?

There's more to the stealth gameplay than is shown in the trailer, both in terms of player abilities and AI behaviors (especially when the player is spotted). There's also more gameplay related to memory exploration that isn't shown (and that I want to keep under wraps for a little while longer). The trailer doesn't touch at all on who the player actually is, which is revealed in gameplay sequences not shown in the trailer, and the player also has ways to make smaller adjustments to the character relationships outside of the major chapter decisions.

How will you know when you are too close to humans?

The game has a traditional stealth model based on line of sight, so if you've played Thief or Deus Ex or Splinter Cell you'll have an idea what it's like. If you're spotted by a character they'll stop what they're doing and start searching for you as you try to get away (though unlike most stealth games they're not trying to kill you). This is accompanied by voice acting and search behaviors, which will make it familiar to anyone who's played a game with a stealth component. There are also visual effects that let you know you've been spotted, but the voice acting is probably the biggest clue.

What do you think is the biggest hurdle for getting people into narrative-heavy games? How have you overcome that?

I can really only speak to my own perspective here, but for me the biggest hurdle is that I feel like narrative-heavy games spend too much time talking at me and telling me someone else's story. That's what books and movies are for. If a game throws an unskippable cutscene at me, my instinct is to put the controller down and go make a sandwich or take a bathroom break. It's a game! I want to play!

That's why The Novelist involves the player in the story. I'm trying to turn that scenario around and ask the player to drive the story forward. That's also one of the reasons I made it a stealth game; I wanted the player to inhabit the same space as the characters and have to get close to them and be active to learn about them (as opposed to sitting back and being told about them).

And finally, I should point out that I think of The Novelist less as a narrative game and more as a relationship game. The narrative choices you make are really just an avenue for shaping the relationships between the characters. My hope is that players will care deeply about their choices from a character perspective, which is why I made the game about real-life situations that most people can relate to.

the novelist 1.png

Can a game be immersive with its story without having to hear or read a lot of text?

I definitely think so, although as you move away from text you start to rapidly increase your content needs. One of the reasons you see so much text in indie games is that it's relatively inexpensive from a content perspective.

That said, when you rely more heavily on text it falls on you to try and make it as engaging as possible. One way to do this is to avoid spelling everything out for players; if you trust players to imagine scenarios and fill in the blanks, you can draw them in and play out some of the story in the theater of the mind. Some of the biggest moments of character feedback in The Novelist are written as off-screen action in different locations so that the player becomes part of setting the scene.

The blue text: was it really necessary to cue players into the two or three words that they need to act upon? How was the gameplay before the blue text, if it wasn't always there?

The blue text was definitely a response to playtest feedback.

Over the course of a chapter the player spends a good amount of time reading characters' thoughts, which are in all-white text. These thoughts provide information about the current chapter and keep the player up to date on the various relationships in the game, so it's in the player's interest to check them out frequently.

I've done three rounds of playtests, and in the first playtest people missed the final clues because they used the same all-white text and were thus visually indistinguishable from the thoughts players had previously seen. Players knew what they wanted to do at a high level but didn't know how to do it mechanically, which was a big issue. I needed a way to make that "Aha!" moment stand out more, and the blue text was a response to that problem.

I was hesitant at first to draw attention to clues by using colored text, but you have to listen to your playtesters. There's a fine line between trusting your players to fill in the blanks and frustrating them by withholding critical information. As a designer, you have to create a fair playing field and let players know what their choices are so they're empowered to drive the game forward.

To me, the colored text in most games is just to make it blatantly obvious, or for those who want to skip thinking about what the text is saying, and want to get back into "the game".

I can see how it may come off that way in the trailer, but it doesn't happen that way during the course of a normal playthrough for two reasons:

1. Clues are only unlocked after you've fully investigated a specific character's situation in the chapter. There's no way to skip ahead to them, so you'll never see them without lots of context. To use an example from the trailer, you would never get to the point of Linda thinking that she'd like to put on a record and relax with Dan without having spent time learning about her by reading letters she's written to other characters, reading her thoughts, reading her diary, and exploring her memories for clues. So when you see the actual clue you'll have spent enough time with Linda to understand why she wants to spend time with Dan.

2. Clues only explain the specific action the player needs to take to pick a path in each chapter, but the player's decision is based on his broader investigation and the emotional choice he or she wants to make. To use Linda's clue from the trailer as an example again, the fact that she wants to put on a record with Dan isn't a huge revelation or twist; they could just as easily go on a date or watch a TV show together or share a bottle of wine. The important thing is that after learning how Dan and Linda are doing, you as a player have decided that their relationship is worth sacrificing other things for. Having them put on a record is just the specific way you enact that choice.

So I don't think of the blue text clues as a cheat or a skip-ahead opportunity. Clues are a reward, so that when the player has learned about a character, developed sympathy for them, and decided to choose them in a chapter, they know specifically what to do to make it happen. But the actual experience you have with a character is deeper, as you're exposed to their personal thoughts and desires.

Why is The Novelist's main character a male? Could you easily swap out gender-related words and his artwork to allow the main character also be a woman?

That's a good question! The key word there is "easily," and unfortunately it wouldn't be as easy as it seems on the surface. I gave a lot of consideration to letting the player choose the gender of the protagonist, but when I dug into what it would take I found that it was unfortunately out of scope for a small-budget game like mine. I realized that I would have to:

* Rewrite most of the text. Simply doing a he/she swap wouldn't work; there's a lot of context that would also have to be updated to keep the writing from sounding like a Frankenstein construction.

* Write and record almost twice as much VO.

* Nearly double the animation budget. I'd have to have typing animations for Linda, painting animations for Dan, and so on.

Those are just a few examples. I was excited about making the gender swappable at a high level, but the low level impact proved to be too expensive. This is one of the areas where having a larger budget and less constrained resources would have opened up more possibilities, but when you're indie you sometimes have to make difficult choices in the interest of building something you can finish.

the novelist memory.png

You left the world of triple-A development behind to work on The Novelist. What were the biggest challenges of independent development for you, and how did you overcome them?

I'd have to say that almost all of the challenges are mental and emotional. I spent 10-and-a-half years working with teams of different sizes in the mainstream industry, and there are a lot of assumptions and processes from large-team development that simply don't apply to independent development.

One of the best things about working with a team is that other people are always adding new things to the game. Every now and then you'll grab the latest build and see that the game is suddenly better because a cool new feature's been checked in. Seeing other people's contributions is a constant source of inspiration.

It's a completely different situation, though, when you're making a game yourself. This sounds stupidly obvious to say, but if I'm not working on the game then no one is. If I take a week off, when I come back the game will be exactly how I left it. This change in pace can be really challenging mentally because you might have 3 different features you want to implement, but you can only do one at a time so you just have to be patient and trust that you'll eventually get to everything. You end up taking big leaps of faith, putting in features that you won't be able to evaluate for a month because they rely on other features that you haven't implemented yet.

In general, making an indie game takes an incredible amount of persistence and mental stamina. I wasn't prepared for how hard it would be to sit in a room by myself for over a year and work on a game that no one knew about, without the camaraderie of a team or constant encouragement from coworkers. It can be really hard to stay focused every day and maintain the enthusiasm you had at the start of the project. Over the course of working on the game I've printed out a number of motivational messages and reminders to myself and hung them above my monitor so that I can always look up and get a boost.

The biggest challenge, though, has been emotional. When you're part of a team, nothing is ever completely up to one person. It's a collective effort, and while people are hopefully invested in the project you never have a sense of complete personal accountability and identification. With The Novelist, it's all on me. If the game is bad, or if people think the concept is a waste of time, that's entirely my fault. If people reject the game, they're rejecting the best work I know how to do. It's impossible to separate the game from my own creative ability and self-confidence.

When I started out I wasn't prepared at all for such an incredible amount of emotional risk. My sense of personal accountability is total. It's the biggest emotional roller coaster I've ever been on, and there's no way to get off now; the lap belt is locked down and all I can do is stay on til the end of the ride. Here's hoping it stays on the tracks.

[The Novelist is due for Windows and Mac this summer and is currently on Steam Greenlight. To hear more from Kent Hudson about player-driven stories, check out this free GDC 2011 talk.
    

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Sunday, January 08, 2012

A Report on Software Tools for Interactive Storytelling by Richard Rabil, Jr

This report presents an evaluation of four tools used to author stories for video games: articy:draft, Chat Mapper, the Dragon Age Toolset, and Microsoft Excel 2007.



The evaluation involved a literature review, web survey, hours of firsthand experience with each tool, and an extensive scoring process. The report contains visual summaries of results, quantitative scores for each tool, a detailed discussion (along with relevant screenshots), recommendations, and an in-depth commentary.

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

LinkedIn Question: How to start as a game writer & story crafter in the games industry?

Keep writing. Look for chances to write for game techs without your skills of character dialog and deep storytelling.

When a Polish programmer--Hi, Darek!--was looking at writers online, he found my author site and liked how I opened with character feeling and action; we've done the Heartwild Solitaire series from that.

I got another break by having a sound set of writing and getting a few game writing jobs at Guru; the Margrave Manor series and an RPG script still waiting to be published.

We all want thee huge AAA narrative we can quit our other many writing and nonwriting jobs for, but that may never happen. We're like movie actors and writers, always looking for another job, hoping we didn't just do our last.

Then again, we may need to start hiring or bartering with programmers to get OUR stories done.

Check the jobs section here, pitch some bids, stay open to writing short stories and scripts/screenplays and even novels for you or as hire.

Author publish.

Set up a writing sample site.

Become a member of freelance writing sites.

We're all scrambling, just keep moving and improving--and relax, there seems to be the perception that there are more writers than jobs. But I can tell you, most of those being called writers are programmers slumming and messing up the storyline and dialog.

Perceptions change everyday.

So, eventually better writers will get the call more often and sooner, we still have a while to that.

But that is why we're showing our face at LinkedIn--we game writers are here, ready, and already writing.

--Neale Sourna
Game Writing Exchange @ LinkedIn.com

Monday, November 23, 2009

From Gamasutra--Upping The Craft: Susan O'Connor On Games Writing

Upping The Craft: Susan O'Connor On Games Writing
By Christian Nutt

Veteran video game writer Susan O'Connor believes that there's a lot of room to improve the writing in games -- and she would know; she's been involved in many of the top projects in the industry, from both commercial success and narrative quality standpoints.

Epic's Gears of War takes (some perhaps deserved) dings for its storytelling, but Ubisoft Montreal's Far Cry 2, on the other hand, was experimental and deeply considered from a narrative standpoint -- and O'Connor worked on both games, as well as titles like 2K Boston/Australia's BioShock, which she won a Game Developers Choice Awards for co-writing in 2008.

In this interview with O'Connor , Gamasutra had a chance to discuss not just the intricacies of what game narrative is capable of, but exactly how development studios should handle working with a writer. What is the best possible process for delivering story that enhances the gameplay experience rather than simply interrupting it?

The following in-depth discussion considers both narrative "tricks" to engage the player, alongside the philosophy and craft of storytelling. It's intended to help spark some discussion of precisely what games and developers can, should, and will be doing in the future with regard to game narrative.

How did you get into games writing originally?

Susan O'Connor: Well, it was really through the back door. When I started I knew that I wanted to be -- the goal was -- to get a job being paid to be a writer. I knew from the age of four that I wanted to be a writer. Then I was like, "I don't understand how writers get paid. I can't connect the dots here." It was really confusing to me.

So, I started talking to people in all different areas and tried to decide if should relocate to Los Angeles or New York. What kind of writing? Playwriting? Do I want to do screenwriting? Television? Do I want to write haiku? Do I want to write crap like on the back of cereal boxes? It was like everything was on the table.

Then, I met somebody who worked at a studio here in [Austin] who made kids' games. At the time, just coincidentally, they were making a slumber party game for girls. There are these four little girl avatars that were on screen jibber-jabbering the whole time. So, they had this immense need for writing, which they never did for kids' games.

I was qualified because, A, I'm a girl, B, I'd been to slumber parties. I was an expert in this area. So, that's how I got started. There was so much work that needed to be done that they hired me on. I was like a writer/producer.

I did that for a few years. We're talking six to eight month production cycles, really for kiddos, really simple stuff. But it was great because it was a chance to make a lot of mistakes without a lot of people noticing. Kids are a very forgiving audience. You can screw up, and they don't get on the internet and go berserk [laughs], not when they're five.

It was really good. None of us had any experience making games. All the designers had architecture degrees. I had an art history and English degree. Nobody knew anything. We were all just a bunch of doofuses. There were experienced people at the time who worked in games, but we certainly weren't any of them. So, it was really fun.

It felt like college again, just sort of banging around and making a mess and learning some things and kind of getting some things done. [laughs] They're not award winning stuff, but in a way it was some of the best times I've had in games because it was really fun. I liked that. Anyway, that is how I got started.


Gears of War

Obviously all games have text in them, but there is still a sort of lag on the importance of having a dedicated writer in games, as a role. How do you get studios to take it seriously?

SO: Well, I think that it's tricky. In a way the pressure is on the writer to articulate what it is that they do. In a way one, of the problems can be that you treat it like a black art. I'm just going to go into a room and shut the door. Six months later I'm going to open the door and, "Wham! Check it out! Here is a story."

I think that it really helps if you can talk to people who aren't writers about the writing process in a way that not only do they understand, but it interests them. That is, I think, a huge barrier to appreciating it.

It's really analogous to design. It also sort of gets pulled out of the ether, but there are enough designers in this industry that there is an acknowledgement that that is a craft worth practicing. There are not many writers in the industry, so we don't get that sense of legitimacy.

You can look around and say, "Well, there are 47 million designers. There must be something to this design stuff." It's not just that you are making up stuff. There is actually a methodology.

There is one for writing, as well. It's a bit softer than design. You're trying to work more on the right side of the brain than the left, but I think it really helps if you can work with teams and help every step of the way articulating what it is that you do and how it can help them. How you can take what they're doing and run it through this writing prism.

Usually, what tends to happen is that at the end of games, they say, "Gosh, we wish we'd hired writers sooner." Yes! That is correct! But that is starting to get better. The game I just finished, I came on at the last minute, which is rough. But the game I am about to start, I am coming on at the very beginning. So, that is really starting to change.

I guess your question was, "How do you make that transition?" I think that anyone who writes anything good helps other people. It just helps me as a writer if someone else writes a great game. Look, they did it. How did they do it? Well, they spent a long time on that project.

Valve's got a great process. They run through it. They iterate like crazy on stuff. They throw stuff away when it doesn't work. They find ways to rapidly prototype. I think everything else in games gets iterated a gazillion bazillion times. When I look at these poor level designers and how much of their work gets thrown away, it's heartbreaking. But, it's what you have to do to get a piece of art finished.

It's the same with writing. Once people make that connection, "Oh, good stuff takes time. If I want the writing to be good, I'll have to invest some time in it."

I get the impression that people think that with writing -- maybe you don't have the same opinion -- you sit down and you write the whole thing in order from top to bottom. Then you're done. I think people even think that novels are written from page one through page 300, just linear and then it's done. It is really not true.

SO: I don't think that is true. I've heard stories that there are writers like that in the world, but I have never met one. I've never met someone who works that way. I'm not. I'm totally all over the place. I'm the queen of the four-by-six index cards and the push pins.

Every writer seems to have a different process, but especially with games, it's not possible.

You want to experience the story and there is going to be a beginning, middle, and end to it. But how it gets told in the game, when the ground keeps shifting beneath you, I think having a nonlinear approach to writing is really helpful when you're trying to integrate it with game design. You've got to be willing to let go of stuff all the time, but somehow be able to hang onto some skeleton, some thread.

When I work on stories, I try to just get down to the absolute, the most bare bones concept you're trying to get across. That is what has to get protected. The story has some meaning; everything else is up for grabs.

That one core bit has to stay in place, otherwise you have a meaningless story. That happens in games. You're like, "I care, why?" [laughs] when you are playing the game.

One issue is when the writer gets brought in late and there are already a whole bunch of levels that are well into production. You have to go, "How can I contextualize these?" Do you run into that a lot?

SO: Yeah, that can definitely happen. Sometimes it falls into place, and sometimes it doesn't. That's a good question. Like on Far Cry 2, there wasn't so much of an issue because they had an overarching structure for the whole thing. In a way it was designed to be more sandbox than freeform. But other games they are. Each level has its own distinct personality.

I worked with this guy Danny Manley, who was a writer on one of my recent projects. He's a playwright from New York. I love working with him, he's so great. He thought about each level as having its own little short story, which I think is correct. The overarching story had to be an anthology that held it all together somehow.

So, I think in terms of how you tie everything together, it seems that most of the time the best bet is to use a really light touch. You have to do a bit of hand waving. If you really try to get to get literal with it, then people are like, "What? That doesn't make any sense," which is always a danger in game writing. At some point, it doesn't make any sense. That's right. [laughs]

People have been experimenting with structure. Some games more explicitly deal with this, but the concept is that each one is like an episode. It has its own little self-contained story arc in each chunk of the game.

I think that, certainly, if you're dealing with a development where you're going to get or lose pieces or shift things around or whatever, that is obviously beneficial. It's practical. But do you think that's a good way to work, or do you think that you'd rather plot it all out as best as possible?

SO: Well, that's a good question. I don't know. I mean every project is different. This is a copout answer. I don't mean to give you a copout answer.

It's true; sometimes episodic is the way to go. Sometimes having one driving narrative is the way to go, like God of War. That's right. I love that game. I talk about it a lot. I really do think it worked. It was just deceptively simple.

I think there's a lot to be said for keeping the content of the story really simple while trying to make the emotions complex, like not asking people to remember a lot. People are like, "Okay, I get it. I need to go kill the God of War. Right. I got it." or, "I need to save the princess."

You just don't know how much player... Ken Levine called it "player RAM". How protective do you have to be of that? They only have so much room in their head, in their brain, to hold things.

How often do you have to get them synced back up again? Keeping the content simple and the emotional subtext complex, for me as a writer, is the goal, so that you don't get this wall of words when you play a game. You get a simple story that resonates with you and sticks with you.


BioShock

As regards that, something else he talked about is how they cut a lot of characters from BioShock 1. They took the original ideas, and they condensed them down into way fewer characters. "How can we make these four characters, their story functions, descend into one character?" Ultimately, people on the creative side don't always realize what people are actually capable of following and what they're actually interested in following.

SO: Yes, I know. It's funny because you live with this stuff day and night, and you can recite it all verbatim. It's really easy for me, or for anyone, to forget that when you're playing the game, it's just washing over you. People who work on movies kill themselves, but people watching movies tend to just kick back. It's the same with games.

Just trying to find what's going to stick with the player and really playing to that, instead of giving them a massive dose of stuff and trying to make something epic that then becomes noise, none of which goes through.

If you talk to different people, you get very different approaches on what even game narratives should be. Even games you've worked on, from game to game to game, like Gears of War.

Obviously, it has a very straightforward narrative presentation. It's basically cutscene, mission, cutscene, mission, and then the barks are character-building, but they don't really contain much narrative, everything from just "Shit, yeah!" to a little bit more than that. It's basically about adding tone.

BioShock doesn't stop for cutscenes. There are character interactions, but there are a lot of the recordings that you find. And then you've got Far Cry 2, which is an open world game. It's all different.

SO: I think on Far Cry 2, they tried some really great stuff. One of the things I really loved... They had a narrative designer on that game, Patrick Redding, who's just unbelievable. How does this man's mind work so fast? It's ridiculous.

He and [creative director] Clint [Hocking] really had some smart ideas about trying to change the way we tell stories in games. They developed incredibly complex systems, which I cannot do justice to.

I can give a really simple example. One of the things I really loved was how they talked about... You have one triangle this way and one triangle that way. You can imagine a Star of David, basically, and then you bisect it twice.

The triangle that's going this way is gameplay information, tons at the beginning and very little at the bottom. The opposite is story information. You've got two lines running through it, right?

So when you walk up to an NPC, you're at the top end of the gameplay triangle. He'll say, "Go across the hill. Go in the hut. Shoot the dude." End, right? You've got almost no story there. You've got tons of mechanics. For players who are interested in just that, that's all you needed to know and you could walk away. If you stay and you hit X, then the next thing he says is going to be equal amount of gameplay and story information.


Far Cry 2

So you've got sort of the inverted pyramid, which is how you write news stories. And then on top of that you have the... I've never heard of the "right side up pyramid", but that's how it is.

SO: Yes, so the first, the middle part of that triangle would be like, "Grab the ledger. It's got all the bribes," you know what I mean? So like there's an equal amount of mechanics and meaning. And if you stick around again, what he says is all story. Like, "I don't give a shit if he's my brother, kill him anyway."

And because it's a pull model, the player asked for it, then that is the story he wanted to hear. That's the biggest challenge for games stories. How do you tell it to them when they want to hear it in a way that means something to them? That's huge.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about cutscene-based narrative, because initially when I started going to conferences, I started to hear people say, "Cutscenes suck. Don't use them." I would always go, "But they don't always suck. Sometimes they are good, actually."

Originally, my first thought was then like, "Well, some games just have bad cutscenes. Some have good cutscenes." It's not that simple, either. It's also about pacing. Pacing is probably even more important. Quality is important, but pacing is super important.

SO: Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah, absolutely. And that involves so much more than the writer. That's why it's really great to have an opportunity to have the writer working with the team for an extended period of time. They don't have to be staffers, but just have them around.

First of all, I think it really helps to have a sense of trust with each other. A sense of respect for what the other person brings to the table. When I work with a designer who I really come to really respect and admire, I just want to know what he thinks about things. And we can talk back and forth.

If I can get their respect as well, then you can really do some great stuff together. And you can think about things like pacing, and "How are we going to integrate?" and "What kind of gameplay experience are we talking about having here?"

Is this the level where we take a deep breath, because the story went nuts in the last level? What do we do here? The last level was a flight of fancy -- so are we getting more into reality, with cold water in the face? Because we're almost at the end, and it's like, "Let's get this done"?

And then we can start to get a sense of momentum, how the designer wants to drive the car. And then how you can build a story to really enhance that. And sometimes, in counterpoint to that. What experience is he trying to create, and then, how can I expand on that, make it more meaningful?

When it comes to team structures, you referred to Ubisoft Montreal, where Patrick Redding is a narrative designer. In this structure, he interfaces with the writers and flows the content to the designers. Do you think it's important to have a narrative designer at that nexus point that can interface with the team and manage that process?

SO: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think you can have a narrative designer that is more involved with the systems design -- that's huge, especially when you are talking about a game that is as big as Far Cry 2. They can really get immersed in the technical side of things, then translate it back to the writer, and vice versa. It's literally like having a U.N. simultaneous translator. [laughs] I think that's what a narrative designer can be.

Or even just having an editor, who has the band width in their brain to actually go and talk to level designers about the levels, while the writer is in his room sort of noodling on a character. I've worked on projects like that as well and it's great. It's great to be the writer in that position and it's great to be the editor in that position.

Because I think what writers need is a combination of really being integrated with the team, right? Like, that's part of it. The other part of it, is you just sort of need space to do your work. And those don't always work together, because most people on the team are not writers.

So if you sit down and you're like, "I want to talk about writing with you all!" It quickly becomes about programming or about design or about what their expertise is, because that's what they have to offer. It would be as if one level designer walked into a room of writers and want to talk about level design, like how long would you stay on topic?

You wouldn't, because before you know, you would be talking about some HBO show. You would be talking shit about Dexter, because that is what the writers would be interested in. And the level designer is like, "Uh, well guys, you know I got a map here I want to draw." "Dexter is awesome!"

And so, as a writer, how do you find a way to carve out the time and space you need to do your work so you have something good to share with everybody, and also have that work fit with what everyone else is doing.

So to answer your point, I think having a narrative designer, or an editor, or somebody is key. I mean that is it. Because when you try to be both, you fail at both. That has been my experience.

Yeah. I mean it seems to me that it takes a lot of time, and polish, and time to rework bits of writing. And that seems to fall out of the possibility with the way a lot of teams have structured it. "Writing is what we will do when we have time to do it," rather than making time for someone to spend time writing.

SO: Yeah, I know. Yeah, that is true. And I don't think it is willful like, "Screw it." I think it is like, "I got a million things I got to do, so I am going to have to prioritize. I know I need programming. I know I need art."

Someone who is the boss is going to have to be the one to say, "I am going to make writing a priority. We are going to make this happen." Because I do think that... Well for one thing, creating a meaningful story, it takes just as long to get to know fake people as it takes to get to know real people. You [as a writer] really have to spend time with your characters to get to know them.

And it takes time for a story to come to life. It is easy to come up with a clichéd, dumb story. It doesn't take a lot of time. But to make something really like, "My God!" it takes time. And frankly, I think it takes as long to develop a good story for a game as it does to create a good design for a game.

I mean, to me, that is the metric. If it takes two years to do that game design, then you need a writer at least involved in the process. Maybe not on site, but coming in and out those full two years. You know?

Because yeah, waiting to the end is nuts. I think that writers... You get the biggest bang for your buck from your writer if you bring them in right away, for a couple of reasons. One, they have more time to sort of do their work. And they have an opportunity to fail, too. They get to try things, be experimental. Whereas if you come in with like a month to go, they want you to hit the target right away.

So what you do in order to hit a target? You play it really conservative. You don't try anything crazy. So even though what you make is serviceable, it is not great. And sometimes you want to do something great. Every writer wants to do something great. Why else would we do this?

Bringing a writer in early, it gives them a chance to be experimental and play with the story and play with what is possible, because this is a medium where we haven't discovered the full vocabulary yet for telling stories in games. We know a few things that work, but there are probably like 20 more things that would work great. We just haven't had a chance to try them yet, because we don't have a chance to experiment.

So there is that side of it, and there is also this side of getting all the other people on the team feeling like they are part of the storytelling process as well. I mean, not everyone is a trained writer, but everybody understands a good story and everyone wants to create a great experience for the player. So if the writer comes on early, he or she can help give tools to the whole team, to create like a back-and-forth exchange between the game design, the art, and the writing and everything. But that just takes time, right? You've got to trust.

You have to build relationships with the team.

SO: You've got to know who you can jive with and who you can just be like, "Dude, come on. Let's just shut the door for a second and let's talk about this." You know?

See, that is why I think it must be hard to really influence the way things are going if you are working externally. I know you move from project to project and you frequently work externally. But sometimes, you spend time at a studio. How does that work? What do you see as the optimal way to go?

SO: Well, I worked on a project that was unbelievable. Oh my God. I loved it. It was partly chemistry. I just really got along with everyone. And that game got cancelled. And I was like... "Print that out." It was like my absolutely all time favorite game. Cancelled!

But I worked with a designer. His name was Pete Low. He was up at Radical. It wasn't like a showstopper, like the world is waiting for it, game, necessarily, but it just worked brilliantly. It was so successful, I thought. And everyone on the team thought so as well.

We got far enough along in the process that the whole story was done and the script was finished. And the cinematics were being made. And everything was sort of integrated, so we could see what we had done. We all felt good about it, which is unheard of, because everyone in games is so critical.

But we were all like, "I think this might be awesome!" And I think it was really successful because I came on early and Pete really set the tone for trying things. He was very accepting. Like, "Yes, let's try that. Let's see how that works."

And we were able to come up with a process where we would take turns. I would spend some time, come up with my story ideas, and then I would present them. And then they would go away and they would come up with some gameplay concepts and come back. And then I would take it. And we would just do this back and forth for a while.

And it was a huge eye opener for me. I mean I had worked on loads of games up to that point. But that process taught me more about what was possible in a game and what wasn't, and how a game designer looked at a story. I could suddenly see my work through their eyes, which was like, "Whoa," and vice versa.

I remember one day having a discussion about the character and how he was going to change at the end. He was going to have a moment of truth. It was going to be like, "What you do in this final moment is going to be who you are," I was like, well, it's because he's a bad guy. And they were like, "What? He is a good guy! What are you talking about?" I am like, "No. He is a bad guy."

Then we had this great discussion about who we thought this guy was, which I thought was so great because we were still getting to know him. It is like we all had different relationships with this guy. And then we all started thinking about how the player would feel about that. "What if he is bad?"


Gears of War

A lot of times when you play a game and you pull back a level, you realize that these characters are the protagonists, but they are not necessarily good people, or doing good things. Usually the ultimate goal is basically good. But they are just sort of running around killing a lot of people in a borderline amoral way.

So when you sort of pull back a level and you think about this on a higher level, then there is more ambiguity. The game situations and the way you actually participate in the game can affect your interpretation of the story naturalistically, but not in a way that is deliberately written.

SO: Exactly. I agree. And that is why I think having a writer in is so helpful, because I think bringing in more ambiguity is great. Like just have things happen and don't explain it. To me, I respond to that as a player, because then I get really intrigued by it. I am not being told what to think; I am just being shown a world. I am being asked to enter a world.

And I think that is the stuff I would love to see more of. And even structurally. Like, whose story is it? Is it the player's story, or is the player going to tell his own story no matter what you do? Why even fight it? Why not let the player tell his story? Screw it! The protagonist is really going to be this NPC. And since you are trying to beat the game as the player, then maybe you are the antagonist.

And maybe what you do really foils the protagonist. We are all protagonists of our own stories. Satan is the hero of his own story! No one thinks of themselves as bad, is my point. And so if you let the player be the hero of his own story...

I just think we have a lot of different ways to think about the antagonist. An antagonist of a story isn't always the bad one. That's what's interesting too. If you get two people operating in shades of gray...

Sure. It's perspectives, right?

SO: Exactly.

Very often I think that stories -- and it's not just in games, but stories in all popular media -- boil down way too far, and that bores me a great deal.

Obviously, something like Star Wars that is bright white versus pitch black, is super popular; it's not like it's not understandable why people like it like that. But I think that very few stories are honestly doing the bright white versus pitch black thing. So, if you're trying to do something with a little more texture, it should be a little less binary.

SO: Yeah, I agree. You know, it's hard to tell a good story in any medium. If it was easy, every movie would be great; every book would be awesome. It's tough. It's tough to find a good story and then tell it well, especially in games, and I think the trick is just having lots of time to get it right.

I think the ones that have been the most successful have been the ones that have really had the chance to learn from their mistakes during production, instead of shipping something that was a mistake.

I think that a lot of games that I play have bad stories. In the end, it might still be bad, but what's really bothersome to me is not so much that like the story is dumb; it's that it lacks craft. You can tell there weren't many drafts of the dialogue, or it's just jammed together. Just stuff like that. That's what I think is missing actually, is craft.

SO: Well, right. And it's funny. As a writer, you have to find the nerve; you have to steel yourself to sound like a total geek in these meetings. You can talk about exposition and rising action, and all these English terms, that really have to get applied to create great stuff.

You can definitely just write, just [makes quick gibberish noises], but to apply a certain craft to it and structural underpinnings to it, so it works for reasons you don't really see; you're not supposed to see it. It's the scaffolding and it's the foundation and it's the lode-bearing walls. All you know is that the room is bright and sunny. You don't have to think about how they get the windows in. That's the builder's job, right?

I try to take a similar craftsman approach to the work that I do, because I've made that mistake myself. I'm just like, "Well, I'll just write some stuff, and it'll work itself out." No, it's crap. "Why was that crap? I need to learn from that."

And so you're like, "I think I'm not taking craft as seriously as I should be." Because, again, you're not surrounded by other writers, so you don't talk shop very much, right? That's one of the reasons I even started this Game Writers Conference [at GDC Austin]. I wanted to be able to talk to my colleagues about stuff that they would take the ball and run with it.

I think one of the important things about writing is what you leave out. I think that's something that people cannot perceive easily, if you don't know about writing.

SO: Totally agree.

I think people are tempted, if they're not experienced, to just keep shoving things into the narrative. And what you leave out, it could be like what we're talking about with Ken Levine condensing characters, or it can be like, "What does this scene do? Nothing."

SO: Yeah, I think that's right. Especially with games. Because you're building around a void, which is the player. You've got to leave space for the player to insert himself or herself, because they're going to do it anyway. Why fight it, if they're going to take it and make it their own?

And creating a structure that allows that, I think, is really huge. And looking at structure, and finding ways to protect the story from the player. Things like inciting incidents, like "When does the story really start? When does the world get turned upside down?" I think, personally, looking at stories, you really have to have it happen before the game begins. If you do 20 minutes where you're doing your thing, and then suddenly something changed, it wouldn't traumatize you.

You wouldn't be motivated to make it go back the way it was. You'd be like, "Oh, cool, right on. I'm underwater. This is great." Or like, "I'm a bat, sure", you know what I mean? Whereas in a movie, they do that very thing.

Starting in medias res is popular in movies, but usually games are like, "Well, we need to do the tutorial first" or whatever. I've brought this up with other people who work in games before.

I felt like Final Fantasy VII had a really strong start. You know you're going to go blow up the Mako reactor, and then escape. And you go through that part and play the game and it's very easy, and it tells you how to play it, and then it stops. That's like 45 minutes or a half an hour. Then the game grinds to a halt, and starts like a normal game, and it's slow.

But the thing is, you're pretty interested because you had that episode of high-intensity gameplay-focused narrative. The game has built up this good will with you as a player, and then it can slow down again. That's such a really good trick. Tricks like that, I think, are important.

SO: Me too. Did you see Up? I thought, in Up, the story with the wife, not having children, blah blah blah, never living her dreams, was so devastating.

It was the best part of the movie, though.

SO: It was. It was so impactful, so powerful, I think it pinned all the adults in the audience to their seats, because they had to process that. And then, while the adults are stunned, and letting it in and having no influence on what they just saw, the kid story starts. It's like, "Whee, fun!", and it's stuff that normally would have bored an adult. They're too stunned to be bored. They needed that time. The adults needed the time to gather themselves. I had that experience when I watched.

Yeah, it was a very elegant part of the film, really elegant filmmaking.

SO: Gorgeous.

Honestly, I don't think the rest of the film is anywhere near as good as first 15 minutes.

SO: But yes, I think you're totally right. Tricks like that, and just thinking about stuff structurally. And knowing that everything in the game is totally and completely made up -- I would love for us to free ourselves more and not be trying to create hyperrealistic situations, or treat stories as though they're hyperrealistic -- as if they're documentaries? Why? That bullshit is all made up!

I think the characters have to be realistic, but the situations don't have to be realistic at all.

SO: And the structure doesn't have to be realistic. It is not a documentary. You don't have to turn a camera on. Let's speed this up; let's do backwards, Where is the Memento? Where is the game version of Memento? Why don't you mess with us a little bit more? This isn't reality! Tell us at the end of the game that I was 50 feet tall. Reality is really overrated. Let's make it up, here.

That's easy to say. Production realities are crazy. Trying to get a bunch of people on board is crazy. It's hard work. You want to be able to tell a story internally that everybody can understand and get behind.

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Friday, December 05, 2008

Naked Gaming: What’s Your Character(s) Heart?

Naked Gaming: What’s Your Character(s) Heart?
By Neale Sourna
Copyright Neale Sourna 2008

“Who am I, MMORPGer? And Who are You, for That Matter?”


I’m curious about you, MMORPGer; and wonder who you are, deep inside.

There are a lot of faces of me, deep inside me. Wind songs and traveling songs talk to the free and footloose spirit in me, making me feel more at home, on the roads of my mind, than at my “home” home.

Does that ever happen to you?

Y’know, do you hear songs or certain word triggers and feel ancient things you’d long forgotten until triggered; about wayward winds or tumbling weeds and talking phantom spirits of dead cowboys, lost on a fantasy wide range, still herding dead herds from Hell without borders or fences.

Freedom and mobility locked in a fantasy’s context; enslaved to that context; or at least merely entirely engrossed.

When triggered, I FEEL that freedom and mobility within me; even on those days when I’m locked inside and hardwired to a thousand things keeping my feet to the taxpayer’s fire, and not at all thinking of MMORPGs.

But, in my head and heart there are cowherds, space warriors, American Civil War officers, Arabic scimitar specialist warriors, vampires with transformation powers when they reach a certain age of strength, and more. A nonending cinematic, plethora of lush detail and meaning and emotion I can never truly explain to anyone, not in just a few minutes.

That’s why there are novels, and graphic novels, and miniseries, and sequels. And MMORPGs. Free ones online and paid ones there, too.

It’s a video game in my head, and it’s always been that way, but now we have the means and ways to explain that to others. Or share with others, and that’s good, because writers usually write alone, and readers normally read alone.

“They Just Don’t Get Me.”


My past experience has always been that Space Invaders and Mario weren’t able to keep up with the wildly graphic and emotionally depth-filled things going on in my Fine Arts, Film and Video, screenwriter, novelist’s mind. This isn’t a resume, so I’ll stop my list right there.

This is me taking a step or two closer to online gaming.

And why I haven’t is that I have a LOT of juice going through my head and body, electrically, already; and contact with crowds and communications equipment, and other busy things, like a lack of sleep just jolt me up all the more.

So, offline games make me nervous, and I’ve assumed, too, that online ones would be about the same, for me; but I also imagined worse, since not only are you playing those old systems, which had glitches, like knowing you’ve hit the spot, but the game says not.

I also have always figured I have enough “real” people telling me no, without a “system” doing the same, and being just as wrong as some people I know. But I gripe, and kvetch.

That was my past experience. The past is over, although it seems to keep informing us and doing recalibration checks on us, as if trying to reset us to a past and outmoded ideal.

“A New World, a New Landscape.”

Although game playing still makes me nervous, I do find some things fascinating. Maybe like me, you used to say that maybe I’d game when the video matched closer to what I saw in my mind. And then came the Wachowski Brothers, Keanu Reeves, and “The Matrix,” and I found not only something that made online MMORPG and computer gaming more fascinating visually, but also emotional and spiritual. And cultural.

I’m not afraid to admit it. I always liked “Tron,” but, finally, online is cool Tron, on spiritual and emotional and visual steroids; girl steroids, boy steroids, elegance and power, ugly and vicious.

Here were full characters, both cryptic but with depth, in limitless variety.

That’s what I write. I take all my scimitar kings, and Polynesian healers, and all the others inside me and write them; for scripts, games, and more. I craft stories layer by layer, skill by skill, breath by breath; until I know that THIS particular character will say this and that, but not THAT stupid thing.

That this one has a limp, so running is limited.

That this one has a brilliant way with people, but a genetic flaw that makes a depth perception defect and a bright day’s reflection things that blind him.

Or, that this one has such depth that I hadn’t realized his high power for healing and talent for leaving out important details about himself, has hidden from me, his author and maker (but not creator, he did that himself), hidden the fact that he is more highly skilled and dangerous than I knew. And I REALLY KNOW my characters.

Are You Making New People, or Retooling Old Ones?


But, there it was, a surprise. I experienced that, of a character withholding from me until the nearly the end, while completing my first novel to publish; finding hidden and surprising depths, hidden and surprising connections; that my main character could come out from me, and yet withhold a major plot point, which changes in the mind the entire book from page one to that spot.

All that was kept from me.

It’s like finding out something about your sibling, whom you always shared a room with and pretty much everything else.

It’s like having kids; they’re part of you and you know them, and then one day, they surprise the H out of you. And you wonder where they got THAT from; not from you, not from your significant other, not the sitter, not anyone. It’s somehow an element of their own creation.

As making a character, an avatar can be.

Some of us keep full control, but, I’m sure, that many of us must find that our onscreen selves are expressing parts of us that seem our best, or worst; expressing a hidden part of us, or something WE always knew about ourselves, but no one else did, because some things are so secret or so much a part of our being, like our cells, that we can’t share, or just never ever considered it.

Or just assumed no one else would want to stare through a microscope and see a tiny us waving back from a glass slide.

“You Want to Show Me … What?”


“I’ll show you my avatar, if you’ll show me yours.”

And that is why I’ve taken another step closer to stepping through the looking glass into the world of pixels and distant strangers meeting on an electronic plain, so like what goes on, in the wild, infinite prairies and deep black of space, and horror-filled, primal forests, and endless days of lockers and mislaid class nightmares, and other bits in my mind, making us all like dreamers wide awake in dreamland, the oh so many dreamlands, dreaming together, where we are more ourselves than here.