On writing, erotica, character, soul stealers, philosophies, sensualities, and inspirations. And How To, if I can.
-- www.Neale-Sourna.com, www.PIE-Percept.com, http://www.ProjectKeanu.com, www.AuthorsDen.com/nealesourna, www.CafeShops.com/NealeSourna, & www.Writing-Naked.com, www.CuntSinger.com
Who hasn't gotten tired, no, cringing-ly exhausted at all the professional radio stations, or even college radio?
The
professionals commercial you to death and play the same five songs over
and over, even when the artist has tons to choose from.
And
college is cool, no commercials and a wide variety of tracks, many,
many the professionals aren't playing, but each favored show is only a
couple of hours a week out of all the hours of the week.
So,
I'm using that frustration and creativity and programming songs and
more that are original, many with covers and remixes, and adding more of
what I miss on broadcast.
I'm pulling new stuff or very old stuff from the collective Radionomy.com royalty library and my own private stock of CDs and iTunes and more....
Originals. Like Brenda and the Tabulations' WHO'S LOVING YOU
Covers
of the originals and / or remixes. Like WHO'S LOVING YOU by The Jackson
Five featuring Michael Jackson and also by Jessica Mauboy from the film
THE SAPPHIRES.
Often
played in themes, hm, like: sunshine, body, location, James Bond, last,
your love, Sympathy for the Devil, cash, get up, God, sex, and more....
I'm still adding and mixing. Come and listen. Come back and listen later and you'll hear....
My answer to a possible client. Actually, I seemed to have worked for this person / group before; and they were unpleasant in the work last Aug and I had to arbitrate at Guru.com in early Sept last.
The same client I.D. invited me last Sept. I reminded them we were apparently in dispute.
The same client I.D. invited me again this month, we've been talking amiably. I've finally had to ask, if they have more than one person using the ID. Or the person is.... What?
My answer to this possible client, re-client? about not playing CYOA games:
CLIENT: ...but you don't seem to play at all.
NealeSourna's Writing-Naked.com:
Gaming is not calming to me. I find limited personal fun and interest in them. That goes for card and table games, even chess, as well. It's just the way my brain functions.
I bore easily with playing the system; but making the puzzle of a well-told story about great characters that a client can come back to again and again is of high interest, though.
Other game companies have not even asked about play activity before ordering, they answer my questions from my game research and guide me with their corrections to suit what they specifically need and want, especially for new genres and then publish the stories I crafted for them.
There are a LOT of different styles and platforms, after all. Story and how to entertain are the cross over between RPG, CYO, and other successfully published online or card games I've worked on.
So, is the show completely to mostly off book now--and, technically, yeah, since book six not out yet--or what...? My opinion. Jon Snow is dead. Yay! He can be temporarily dead then breathe again, knowing he has served his full watch on the Wall and can now move on to higher, greater things to protect us all.
Like discovering that his dad was his uncle and that he is more closely related to the Dragon Queen....
======== Game of Thrones, Season 6: Hall of Faces Tease (HBO) at YouTube
Writers this applies to the page of any sort: short story, novel, stage play, film script, game....
Most clients I've interacted with THINK AND BELIEVE, incorrectly, that
these three words together means they own your work, without giving you
an outline without giving you a substantial payment, and without your
name attached and hostilely shutting you down about using it as a work
sample.
At least Hollywood normally attaches your name to the work for your portfolio.
Me. Always insert in your contract or notes exchanged between you and
the client those hand car dealer words: As Is. Meaning this story in
this exact form only, in case that short story grows into a novel or
three or a screenplay, etc. =========================================
Q: I was hired to work on a film as a DP and the contract stated
that it was a “work for hire.” I’ve seen that in a bunch of employment
contracts, but I never really understood what it meant. Can you shed
some light on it?
The work for hire (WFH) doctrine deals with your ownership rights
over the copyright to any work you produce for someone else.
Unfortunately, it’s so often misunderstood by both employees and
employers that I think people get it wrong more often than they get it
right. And since most filmmakers make their living by creating their
work on someone else’s dime, they rely heavily on the WFH doctrine, even
if the terms “work for hire” or “work made for hire” are never uttered.
So to clarify things, here’s a brief primer on WFH. Buckle up, it’s
about to get informative!
What Is Work For Hire?
The WFH doctrine is a very specific legal principle that arises
under U.S. copyright law. The basic premise is that in certain
situations, an employer will automatically own the copyright to work you
do for them as a matter of right. But the manner in which an employer
can assert that right depends heavily on whether you’re hired as an
employee or an independent contractor.
The Employee Work For Hire
If you’re hired as an employee, the work you create for your employer
doesn’t belong to you, it automatically belongs to the employer. End of
story. In employment situations, the ownership of copyright is not
determined by the artist’s handiwork; it’s determined by the motive and
desire of the employer. How will you know if you’re in an employment
situation?
Look for the traditional trappings of employment: salary,
benefits, co-workers, office, boss, limited control over your work, etc.
If you find yourself in this situation, the only way you can retain the
copyright to work you’ve created is if the employer gives it to you in
writing.
For example, if you’re hired as a full-time editor at a production
company, any work you do within the scope of your employment (i.e.
editing, color correction, mixing) will automatically be owned by the
production company. This, by the way, may also extend to work you create
outside your employment too, especially if that outside work falls
within the scope of work you would have created for the employer.
But you and I both know that most filmmakers don’t work as employees;
more often than not they work as freelancers. And when you’re hired as a
freelancer, the rules change dramatically.
The Independent Contractor/Freelancer Work For Hire
If you’re hired as an independent contractor or freelancer, the
employer will own the copyright to your work only if all of these
requirements are met:
1. The work is custom-ordered or commissioned;
2. Both parties agree in writing that it’s a work for hire;
3. The work falls into one of these nine categories: a contribution
to a collective work, a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual
work, a translation, a supplementary work, a compilation, an
instructional text, a test, answer material for a test, or an atlas.
If you’re a freelancer and just one of these requirements isn’t met,
it isn’t a WFH and you keep the copyright. One of the biggest
misconceptions I see with freelancers is that they usually assume once
the work is complete, they no longer have ownership rights and walk
away, not realizing that they still own the copyright.
So for example,
if you’re hired as a cinematographer on a film, as long as you and the
employer agreed in writing that it’s a WFH, the copyright will be owned
by the employer, since film is always a custom job and is one of the
nine categories specified under copyright law.
How will you know if you’re an independent contractor? Look for
factors like like greater control over the work, using your own
equipment, working out of your own home or office, working on your own
time, employment end dates, words like “freelance” or “independent
contractor,” etc.
Moving Forward
Believe it or not, it’s not always easy to tell whether you’re an
employee or an independent contractor, and you and the employer may have
different views on it. In many cases, you might find that the employer
refers to you as an “employee” even though from the outside it looks
like you’re a freelancer. Maybe you work in the employer’s office and
you receive a salary, but you’re using your own gear and set your own
hours. How do you deal with an employment situation where it’s unclear
what your status is?
Clarity is the antidote to that kind of ambiguity. Every employment
contract should state whether, a) you’re being hired as an employee or a
contractor, and b) whether you or the employer retains the copyright.
In fact, WFH can get so muddled that I’ve stopped using the term in any
contract I draft. I simply state which party retains the copyright
because the actual words “work for hire” can cause more confusion than
they resolve.
Film producers, take note: Be clear and concise when hiring. It’ll
help avoid any copyright ownership conflict down the road. If you’re a
filmmaker looking to get hired on your next job, make sure you discuss
what to do with that copyright in every contract you sign with an
employer. You will probably have to give it up in the end, but that’s
the price for continuing to work in a field you love. And if you’re an
employee in the film industry where job security is scant, you may not
own the copyright to your work, but you can take solace in the fact that
you have a steady job. MM
Have a legal question you want our advisers to answer in a future installment of Cinema Law? Send it into staff@moviemaker.com with the subject line “Cinema Law Question.”
Gregory R. Kanaan, Esq. is a Boston-based attorney representing
artists, filmmakers and designers in Massachusetts and New York. His
practice focuses on entertainment and art law, as well as intellectual
property issues. He has resolved disputes involving copyrights,
publicity rights, trademarks, and contractual disputes for a wide range
of independent filmmakers and design professionals.
Prior to becoming an
attorney, Mr. Kanaan was a television producer, creating documentaries
and series for The Discovery Channel, Court TV, TLC, and A&E, among
others. When not practicing law, Mr. Kanaan writes for his blog, The [Legal] Artist, which aims to educate creative professionals on the legal issues that affect them most.
The answers to legal questions provided here are for general
education and information purposes only, and are not legal advice or
legal opinions. The information provided in this article is not intended
to create a lawyer-client relationship between Mr. Kanaan and a reader. Image photographed by Mark Simakovsky, posted on MovieMaker‘s Instagram.
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some after Amazon had contractually accepted and SOLD for years. Anyway, there are OTHER STORES ... to help YOU READ WHAT YOU LIKE. ------------------- REMINDER,
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Other projects Neale Sourna has written and have been published beyond PIE.
In our Logical Marketing work with partner Peter McCarthy
over the past couple of years, helping publishers with the next-phase
challenges of digital marketing, we have identified three specific
cross-functional opportunities that exist in every publishing house that
are especially difficult for the biggest ones to address internally.
All three of these can unlock substantial revenue and save the house
from going down costly rabbit holes trying to address pain points that
are clearly felt but not so clearly understood.
All of them are obvious to one degree or another (and have previously
been talked about in some fashion on this blog), so they are being
addressed in ad hoc ways. But structural barriers, most importantly
organizational silos, make it hard for companies to evaluate them fully
and come up with solutions that maximize the opportunities. The effort
to take a systematic approach would have a big payoff for any of these.
For that to happen, they’d have to be elevated to strategic issues being
examined by the highest levels of the company.
1. AUTHORS. Author activity is becoming an increasingly important component
of any book’s marketing impetus. Publishers not only don’t control the
author efforts the way they do the marketing the house executes itself,
often what the authors do isn’t even evident to them. That means the
work by the authors is not included in the overall picture house
marketers have of what is being done for the book. (And that can lead to
some misleading analysis of effort and reward.)
In most houses, editors
serve as the point people for interacting with authors. They are
neither trained nor supported for the increasingly critical and
multi-dimensional role of advising on marketing and assuring that house
and author efforts are, if not integrated, at least aware of each other.
This effort depends almost entirely on the skill and initiative of the
individual editors. There are few, if any, repeatable mechanisms in
place to coordinate the author-based marketing efforts with the house’s other efforts.
2. GLOBAL. Both online accounts, most importantly Amazon but others as well, and Ingram have global reach that grows every day.
The publisher’s metadata, telling accounts where they can offer the
book and at what price, and the publisher’s marketing efforts combine to
influence how effectively sales opportunities outside the home market
are exploited. The reps who call on Amazon or Ingram are not adequately
supported to address this the way they should be. They neither have
enough understanding about where U.S. Amazon or Ingram can sell
effectively nor about the house’s marketing efforts now being directed
to offshore markets where real sales could result.
The marketing piece
is definitely non-trivial and how well it is done varies both across
houses and, within houses, across markets. Developing and
applying audience understanding, market-specific pricing, and scaled
global marketing and publicity to many disparate markets worldwide is
a huge challenge.
3. BACKLIST.
Allocating incremental efforts to marketing backlist titles, which is a
clear opportunity in the no-shelf-space digital age, defies the basic
organization of any large publishing house. Publishers have time-honored
processes and rules to allocate marketing spend and effort to books in
their initial push, but not after it.
Unlike the other two challenges, this one has no “natural” in-house
owners. But no matter who ultimately owns the decisions, information
needs to be developed to support them that isn’t aggregated and
delivered now.
Some books have a big built-in “margin advantage” because
their advances will never earn out — the house gets to keep the part of
the sales dollar that would go to royalties — and anybody managing
these decisions would want to know that. They would also want to know
which books have living authors and for which books the author is dead.
They’d want to know which books have authors still active with the house
or were signed by editors still active. And they’d certainly want to
know which books had active marketing still taking place by an author or
any other interested party. In other words, there needs to be the right
combination of marketing information, technology, and staff for
backlist organized into a workflow that does not yet exist anywhere.
All three of these opportunities are very difficult for anybody
in-house to analyze and referee, even if there is high-level recognition
of the opportunity, good systems-development capability (because the
existing systems will not be adequate), and the will on everybody’s part
to cooperate. The fact that they are cross-functional means there is no
natural “home” for ownership of the solution in any house (even though
the author and global opportunities would appear to have nominal owners —
the editors and the account managers — in the current configuration).
All of them require marshaling data that is not routinely assembled
in any house now. They require some funding. And they require placing
authority — or at least some very powerful levers for persuasion — in
somebody’s hands to do things that will still want substantial support
from their colleagues and, perhaps, take some decisions away from them.
These three challenges are all being addressed in some fashion at the
big houses. But the need to respect existing structures means they are
addressed in a haphazard — situational rather than comprehensive —
fashion. Every big house has coordination with authors on marketing
taking place. Every big house has export sales through Amazon and other
online retailers and Ingram in places the U.S.-based sales team never
thought about in the past. And every big house tries to get digital
marketing and sales benefits for its backlist.
What no house we’ve seen has managed for any of these three cases is
the development of policies and workflows to maximize the potential
opportunities across the entire output of the company. The opportunities
here are, one book at a time, almost unavoidably obvious, so they are
addressed in some fashion. But we know of no house where there is
specific ownership of any of these challenges with somebody having the
power to assemble the information and, as needed, implement
cross-functional processes to address them. What inevitably results is
ever-more-widespread recognition of the missed opportunities without a
commensurate capability to fix the problem.
Oddly enough, smaller houses have some advantages here because they
don’t suffer the handicaps of scale. Far fewer books means that ad hoc
solutions are proportionately more effective. They have less bureaucracy
keeping the author tethered to the editor relationship, so it is easier
for marketers and editors to collaborate around promoting synergistic
marketing between the house and the author.
Fewer titles and the greater sharing of information inherent to a
smaller house also make both the global and backlist opportunities
easier to grasp. Of course, they also have less in the way of resources
to help authors with tech, or to do marketing work that will pay off in
far-away places.
And the challenge of maximizing the backlist is orders of magnitude
easier with a total title output that everybody can keep in their heads.
Big publishers with literally tens of thousands of backlist titles need
systems and rigorous monitoring of data and metadata to identify where
to put additional effort.
Within each of the big houses, the first requirement to move on any
of these is an overall situation assessment and some quantification of
the size of the opportunity they present. That requires both
data-gathering and collecting insights from key operators.
No matter what is found through that discovery effort, there will be
choices for a house to make among possible solutions. There is no single
universal answer — no “magic bullet” — for any of these.
What’s best
for each house will depend on existing procedures, personnel, culture,
and capabilities. For some houses, the biggest challenges will be around
developing and implementing the tech they need.
For others, the bigger
hurdle might be imprint silos. In other cases, a lack of transparency in
international markets might be the largest obstacle.
The questions that need to be addressed are pretty clear and those
are the same across houses. Should editors continue to handle all
marketing conversations with authors, or should there be designees from
the marketing department to take that role for some things? (We’ve seen
that solution implemented in some places, but not systematically.)
Do
the Amazon or Ingram rep teams need to have global or export specialists
(perhaps some already do), or should books just be allocated among the
existing teams with foreign market opportunities being one of the
considerations when they are divvied up?
Does somebody in each
publishing group take responsibility for marketing backlist, or is that
role assigned to the sales department? And, in all cases, what systems
are they using to do what they do?
Since no house we know has started with an assessment to bring
organizational consensus to the reality of the opportunity and its size,
these questions are addressed from the subjective perspective each
imprint or function brings to the conversation.
Only by starting with an agreed understanding of each of these
opportunities can there possibly be any consensus formed about how to
address them. And as long as that it isn’t done, revenue is being left
on the table and marketing money is being spent in something less than
the most effective possible ways.
All writers dream of knocking out thousands of words a day,
publishing multiple books a year and seeing them all skyrocket to the
top of the bestseller lists across the country. We dream because it’s a
difficult task and not everyone has the drive to take the right steps.
But of the people who do, they generally have instituted these 10 habits
into their writing life to make sure that they are giving themselves
the best chance to write something great. Here are the good habits you
should develop and add in your writing life if you want to find success. This guest post is by Robert Blake Whitehill. Whitehill
is a classically trained actor, a critically acclaimed novelist, and an
award-winning screenwriter. He has earned film festival wins at the
Hudson Valley Film Festival and the Hamptons International Film
Festival, and has written many highly rated episodes of the
Discovery-Times Channel’s “The New Detectives,” “Daring Capers” and “The
Bureau.”
He lives in Montclair, N.J., with his wife and son, and when
not cruising on the Chesapeake, or knocking around the sky over Tangier
Island in a Cessna 152, Whitehill blogs and posts on Twitter about his
home waters, and has crafted a number of articles for Chesapeake Bay
Magazine.
Yes, this really is about writing. So, I mean it. Read everything.
Authors can get so swept up in our core writing, feeding the ravenous
social media beastie, and schlepping hither and yon for signings, that
the window for reading narrows into a gunslit blocking all but a ray or
two of literary sunlight. Focus on your subject area, but also broaden
your tastes.
You’ll have a deeper reservoir of tropes and details in
which to dip your quill. Refreshing your inner author with invigorating
reading will help prevent your style from becoming stale. The evocative
power of reading is what inspired you to write in the first place, isn’t
it? Stay connected to that wellspring of fresh ideas.
2. MANAGE TIME
When will you write? Before work, or after? On the weekends, or
during the week? One hour-long session each week? Longer? More often? Be
very specific with yourself, especially starting out, about the time
you will commit to writing.
Log and track your hours if you need to. Act
like your own unreasonable boss. A few weeks of practicing mindful
diligence will teach you how many pages you can produce in a given time
period, and help you understand how to set and meet your goals.
One
thing effective, productive writers do not do is wait for inspiration. They go looking for it on a schedule, usually finding it very close by their computers or tablets.
You somehow knew that was coming, didn’t you? Set goals you can
easily achieve. Set the bar low, then lower it even more, so you always
step away from your writing session with a success, with a win, with
progress. Whether you commit to two pages a week, or to twenty-five, as I
do, make sure you get your pages done.
If work, family, or any other
facet of life glints you into distraction, stay up a little later that
night, or get up a little earlier next day, so your goal is achieved.
Fast or slow, stay on track like a freight train.
Family and friends must get used to the idea that your writing is important to you. [Like this quote? Click here to Tweet and share it!]
It requires time apart from the folks you love best, and who love you
dearly. Repeat as kindly, and as firmly as you can that whatever else
your roles in life might be, you are also a writer. Writing is not your
hobby. It is not something to do to pass the time while waiting for
folks to be available to distract you. Honor your calling. Honor your
loved ones.
Demonstrate a passionate devotion required by this consuming
commitment to your people, and to yourself. They might grumble now and
then, but they will get used to it. They will also share in your pride
of accomplishment down the road.
Complete your drafts! Don’t be the writer with that over-edited
first chapter that’s been spun into absolute gold, but has nothing
readable following it. [Like this quote? Click here to Tweet and share it!]
I had a chance to hear Professor Charles Stegeman tell his Haverford
College painting students over and over again to cover the whole canvas
right away, then go back to polish the details. Was I painting then? No,
I was modeling for the class, naked as a jaybird, and still as a stone,
so I heard this exhortation plenty. By the end of every class, I also
saw the wonderful results.
Some days, yes, I warm up for writing by
rereading the last couple of pages from the day before. Sure, I might
toss in an easy edit or two. Then my daily goal beckons me forward into
mysterious new territory, ever onward to completion of the draft. Now
please stop thinking about me naked. That was many cheeseburgers ago.
7. NO SHOPPING
I learned this from my father, short-story author, and novelist,
Joseph Whitehill. Do not shop your story ideas. Tell not a soul. Keep
your thoughts secret. Say nothing until that first draft is complete.
Don’t fear your idea will be lifted and plagiarized. That is possible,
but unlikely.
There is another kind of thief much closer to home. If you
try to beguile and fascinate your family, friends, or lovers with the
precious coin of your creativity too soon, it’s possible you will
vitiate and squander that soul-twisting impetus to get it all down on
paper. Ignoring my father’s advice, I regaled this friend, or that
object of my desire, with some very juicy plots. Didn’t I have to
justify calling myself a writer somehow? These cool plots were ample
proof I was the genuine article, right? Wrong.
It had the opposite
effect on my output, and on my self-esteem. On more than one occasion I
awoke the next day to discover that I could not even remember what my
grand idea was. It was gone, leaving only a smoky, taunting wisp of a
notion behind, like a half-forgotten dream receding into oblivion.
To
make matters worse, no one to whom I blabbed ever asked how that idea I
confided had turned out, or when it would be published. Sit with that
agonizing hot clinker of story burning in your gut until you’ve written
it all down. Then, tell your friends. Hell, tell the world, because now
you’ve earned the right.
8. CULTIVATE YOUR TEAM
In addition to helping your loved ones understand how important
writing is to you, you will need a few folks in your corner with
specific roles beyond missing your face while you are holed up at your
work. Your committed listener will field your emails or calls about how
you are sticking to your page count goals every week, or even every day.
Your editor, as Richard Marek (Robert Ludlum’s editor on the Bourne
series) did for me, will tell you the truth about your work, and offer
suggestions on how to make it better.
Your proofreader will give your
manuscript that polished, professional look, as Suzanne Dorf Hall does
for my stuff.
You will need a cover artist to make your book leap off
the shelf into a reader’s hands, as Studio042 does for my work.
Perhaps
you need an agent, or a manager, like my indispensable friend and
confidant, Liza Moore Ledford.
Whether you opt for independent
publishing, or a legacy publishing deal, you will need a brash, dazzling
PR team to help the world find you. For that, I go with Shelton
Interactive every time. Find the people, the companies, who understand
your work, and who are committed to your success not only as a writer,
but as an author.
I don’t mean that you necessarily should have warm feelings for your
readers. Real love is not just a feeling. It’s a job description. For
the sake of argument, let us imagine a reader can comfortably tackle one
page of a book every two minutes.
This imaginary reader has an average
heart rate of 70 beats per minute (except during the riveting parts of
the story where that rate better shoot up. A lot.) So, that 400-page
book will take about 800 minutes to read, or around fourteen hours for
those of you playing the home version of our game.
More to the point,
that means your reader expends at least 56,000 irretrievable heartbeats
on your work, out of a finite allotment of 2.25 billion lub-dubs. Put
that way, you can see this is a truly enormous commitment. Honor and
appreciate your readers’ investment by doing your very best work. It
cannot be about the money for you. Be sure that your readers’ time feels
well-spent, and not a pointless sacrifice.
10. COMMUNICATE
Be available to your readers. Give them an email address where they
can reach you, confident of your eventual reply. In addition to doing
your best work, this is how you build a community of devoted readers. It
may sound tedious, but after writing my first book alone for so long, I
found that meeting and hearing from readers—my very own readers—made it
all worthwhile, far outweighing a considerable financial return.
Some
writers might believe that good work is all that’s due and owing to
one’s public.
Now you know I disagree. In addition to hearing from
readers, you might find yourself fielding questions from other writers
in need of advice. This is a great compliment. Offer what thoughts you
can. Be the author you wished you could talk to when you were starting
out.
As evidence of my sincerity, I can be reached at rbw@robertblakewhitehill.com. It would be a pleasure to hear what you think of my Ben Blackshaw Series, or to answer any questions that come to mind.
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 Sea’s 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."
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2578390 Writers are often THE LAST TO BE CALLED into the game planning and
development process, but are expected to pull a gigantic elephant out of
the tiny hat. Just like art graphics and programming code good
writing and especially GREAT WRITING needs time to build its
understructure and then layer on muscle and flesh. The more WE
WRITERS share and give one another a hand up to get each and every one
of us into projects earlier, the better our writing will be and THE
BETTER THE GAMES WE WRITE WILL BE, and the sooner we’ll be asked to the
party. No more last minute literary rescues and trying to piecing
together plots that makes all the already chosen graphics work. Which
can be great—if it works—and disastrous and a blame on the writer when
it doesn’t. Let’s all move ahead, together. [game writer group, game writers group, writer, games, game, narrative]
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