The Narrative Design Exploratorium™

Masters of Narrative Design™ 7: Flint Dille

2008-11-22T21:00:00Z

This is an ongoing NDE series featuring interviews with Masters of Narrative Design™. While 'narrative design' is not a term in common usage, the design of story experiences is nothing new. As game developers are increasingly looking to create meaningful virtual narrative experiences, looking at the lessons learned by these masters becomes increasingly valuable. Today's master is writer and author, Flint Dille. As a storyteller whose works have spanned from Dungeons and Dragons campaign modules to Pic-a-path novels, films and videogames and the book The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design, Flint brings an acute narrative sensibility from his vast experience in interactive narrative design. I'm hoping to see what we can learn from his wealth of knowledge and wisdom.

Stephen E. Dinehart: You have been writing for years under the label GZP, can you explain what that is and how it came about?

Flinte Dille: GZP is Ground Zero Productions. That's my company formed in 1991, before the term Ground Zero took on a whole different meaning. I now refer to it mostly as GZP for obvious reasons. It was formed as a holding company for my work and for some copywrites and trademarks. At various times it has served as a film production company, a videogame production company and worked in both the private and public sectors. When I came up with the name, it was both the sense of starting at Ground Zero (the beginning) and the idea that ground zero was the focal point of an explosion. Its served me well because I always feel like I'm just starting out. I had no idea what ghastly implications it would take on. Ironically, Ground Zero Productions has done a lot of work in counter-terrorism efforts with various government agencies.

SED: Is that the same as the Bureau of Film and Games?

FD: No. Bureau of Film and Games is a company I own with John Zuur Platten. I've always liked the name. Rich Liebowitz came up with it. We ran with it. It is mostly a holding company.

SED: When did you first know you wanted to be in the business of stories?

FD: I tried to write my first novel when I was in 7th Grade and wrote a fraternity House murder mystery when I was in college (which has mercifully escaped publication). Went to USC for a masters degree in writing (cinema) and have been doing it pretty much ever since. I'd always known I wanted to do games, but I had no idea how to get into that business. That happened, mostly by chance, a couple of years later.

SED: You have written fiction within high profile franchises like 300, Batman, Dungeons and Dragons, G.I. Joe, James Bond, Superman, and Transformers; just to name a few, how do you approach authoring for pre-established franchises?

FD: I really enjoy translating a franchise from one medium to another. I grew up loving James Bond movies, so it was great to be able to do a James Bond game and live in that universe for a couple years. Same thing with Batman and Superman. With Transformers, it was a little different, we were kind of making up the franchise as we were going along (other people had done the spade work, but we were figuring out the rules and the mythologies, etc.). In some cases, you get to put parts of yourself into them (Flint).

The approach, technically, is first to break down the franchise into Franchise Elements. If you're doing Scooby-Doo, you have to know about Scooby snacks and 'Jinkys' and all of the little things that make a franchise a franchise. With Bond, we isolated 135 things that are part of the franchise, ranging from 'Shaken, not stirred' to "Bond, James Bond' to the mandatory presence of an Aston Martin. You can't fit all of them in, and in some ways the definitive thing about a particular expression of a franchise is what you leave out. Look at what's missing from the new James Bond movies, for instance.

That word, 'expression' is very important.

Every franchise that's been around for a while has had different 'Expressions.' For instance, the Dark Knight is wildly different than the '60's Adam West Batman. Still, they are both Batman, they both have an Alfred and Joker and a Batmobile. But there are franchise elements missing. The Adam West version stays away from Crime Alley. Its not about that. It is the fun, camp Batman. Brutal parental murders aren't a lot of fun. Likewise, you don't see Zap and Pow in the Dark Knight. Different expressions. Frank Miller said something very insightful about Batman. "There are 50 ways to do it, and all of them work."

]]> guys to kill) and more wildly different environments and bosses than a movie. A game is a 10 hour experience (or more) and a movie is a 2-3 hour experience. Different issues. Games are about action and problem solving. Movies are primarily about characters. Also, you have to figure out how to adapt the character. If you're making Mission:Impossible, how much of the game is a Sim of being Ethan Hunt and how much of it is a Mission:Impossible story that the player is working with. Does Ethan Hunt know pretty much how to use his gun (auto target) or do you have to use the gun (manual target)?

Right now, I'm working on Sin City for Red Mile. The idea there is to figure out how to get the mood and tone of the graphic novels into a game. We're wrestling with things like, 'is it really going to be all black & white? Can we tell a jagged, staccato story in games. How do we convey the fact that 'people take a lot of killing' in a game? How do you get across the idea of an impressionistic, surreal world that you could never map, in a game. Tricky and fun stuff.

SED: Does writing for existing franchises differ greatly from writing for original IP?

FD: Totally different. When you are working with an existing IP, somebody has already done all the basic work for you. You have to be extremely aware of what the audience expects and you have to answer to licensors. I always like to bring something new to the franchise when I do a game. When I did Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu, I got to create a new villain for the Batman universe. Warners turned it into a novel that Devin Grayson adapted from the game script.

With existing IP, you are working within the framework of what licensors (the people who own the property) will allow you to do. Everybody loves working on their own IP, or at least 'new' IP. It's hard in a game space, because you have to create so much stuff and because of the intensely collaborative nature of the game business. So many people have to share the vision from inception to expression. There are so many ways to get derailed.

Its fashionable to say that 'it all starts with a story', but I don't really believe that. I tend to think in terms of worlds - good guys, bad guys, neutral guys. A world of order and chaos in conflict. You have to decide what is valuable in your world. Is it money or is it better weapons? Is there magic in your world? If so, how much and what kind? How about technology? What is the morality of the world? What is the scale of the conflict? How serious and how funny is the world? If it is funny, what kind of funny is it?

Its hard to create something that's totally new. Simply to be able to communicate your ideas, you have to reference other things. Or course, the things you reference come from something else. The odd thing is that in western culture it is usually the bible, because it is hardcoded to our culture. Greek mythology is big, too. There are a lot of ways of measuring the success of an IP, both creatively and commercially. To me the validation of an IP is whether it is a cross-media franchise. Can this be a game and a TV show or movie?

When Andre Emerson and I did 'Dead to Rights' we started with the idea that we wanted to do Film Noir meets Hong Kong. We created Grant City and a whole corrupt world filled with colorful characters. The validation was that paramount optioned it. I did a game called Terror TRAX which was really a pick-a-path adventure shot on video about a special squad of cops who hunt the paranormal. Very gritty and street level. When it was adapted as a TV pilot by Renny Harlan, it morphed into a completely different animal not necessarily better or worse, but different.

John Platten and I sold a game document called Backwater to Dimension. What started out as a way of trying to figure out how to do 'auricular gameplay' (play partially by sound), turned into an old school slasher film called 'Venom.' New IPs are like a Rorschach. People tend to see in them what they want to see. If you have a strong vision, you have two big struggles 1) expressing it in such a way that other people understand and 2) protecting it from the elements (time, budget, other visions, etc). There is a good reason that great new properties are few and far between.

SED: Have you seen a tremendous change in game storytelling since you began working in games?

FD: Yes and no. Much of what I'm trying to do now is what we were trying to do back in TSR days with paper games. There's a story narrative and a game component and you want to harmonize them. With video games, it has changed greatly with the technology. The goal now is to make the story and the game so closely integrated that you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.

SED: Are there gamestorys that stick out to you above the rest? Which?

FD: There are a lot that have been very interesting and I hate to answer the question for fear of offending people. Some recent things of note to me have been the minimalist brilliance of Portal, and the dystopic world of Bioshock. In those cases it isn't so much the story itself, but the way it is told and the way it harmonizes with the game. I'm kind of fascinated right now by what they're doing with WoW and the Litch King expansion. They run a cool balance between open world RPG and having an ambient fiction emerge to change the world.   Storytelling in MMOG's is the future. MMOG's and ARGs.

SED: Do you have a set of criteria by which you judge that?

FD: The reason your question is hard to answer is that often, great storytelling is invisible. You just like the game and don't know all the way why. Sometimes, the opposite happens. The game is good, but it somehow feels kind of empty. That emptiness is an emotional attachment, which is what story brings to a game. You can see that with professional sports. The last Superbowl was a narrative about the unstoppable team versus the Cinderella team. The most successful quarterback in modern times and the little brother of a great quarterback who had to prove himself. That's true in videogames. Story gives subtext.

SED: One of my favorites to-date is your title which is to see a sequel of sorts call Riddick: Dark Athena, was Chronicles of Riddick: Butchers Bay. I enjoyed it both analytically and from a fan standpoint. What can you tell me about writing for Butchers Bay?

FD: I did that with John Zuur Platten. That project was one of those projects where everything worked. Great developer. Great producer. Vin was a joy (I was involved with TSR for 15 years and have seen some of the hardest core gamers in the world. I haven't seen one harder core than Vin)... There was a lot of back and forth and some conflict. The results more or less vindicated everybody. Some projects, for their own esoteric reasons, just work.

SED: The simple plot line made it really compelling as a game, the players objective was constantly clear by virtue of story. How did you come to make it a "Great Escape" plot?

FD: The funny thing about Riddick was that we weren't allowed to see the script for the Chronicles of Riddick. When Pete Wanat, the producer pitched it, he said, 'okay, so here's the story. In the first scene, Riddick is captured and put into Butcher Bay (a prison mentioned in Pitch Black) and then in the last scene, he escapes. You just have to figure out the middle part." Wanat was well aware of the irony of what he was saying.

SED: What do you think made it such a critically acclaimed gamestory?

FD: You sort of have a choice. You can say, 'I'm going to tell a very simple story - guy gets captured/guy escapes' and then dress it up with a lot of interesting characters, sub stories and themes, or you can say I'm going to make an extremely complex story, and have simpler sub-conflicts and characters - Dead to Rights, which was the first time I won story of the year' was that. Unbelievably ornate story and simple characters and motivations. You have to balance story and characters. If it is all too complex, it just gets too esoteric and convoluted. If its too simple, it falls into trite and cliché.

SED: Do you think good gamestories effect sales numbers?

FD: Yes. I'll rip off a thought from Danny Bilson on that one. He was saying, 'if you hire a real writer and let him just do his job, it buys you two points on your metacritic score. One is the point you don't lose when somebody says the story sucks and the other is for what you get when they say it is good. Those are the two cheapest points in the game business. The other important thing about story, and this one is so obvious that we always miss it, is that story is the first thing people see in a review or on the back of the box. Yeah, it's important for sales.

SED: You have experience adapting films, "pen and paper RPGS", and even action figures into videogames. Have you seen a franchise which moves well across medium? What kind of qualities helped it do that?

FD: All of the big ones move pretty well from medium to medium. Its hard to think of one that has done better than Star Wars. Its everything. Movies, Novels, TV, multiple types and iterations of video games (who could have ever expected Star Wars Lego to be one of the best games in memory?)... Superheroes live or die on the strength of their Rogues Gallery. Batman and Spiderman have the best. They've done okay in games. But triumphed in every other mediums.

Then there are what I call "Osterizer" franchises. Vice City, which kind of put GTA on the global map, was an assembly of '80's glam crime, starting with Miami Vice. The cool thing was that I got to play one of the ponytailed thugs. Better than being pinned to Crockett and Tubbs, it was about the world of the time. It was a great mirror world of our world. Art directed reality. That's what I was saying before about world. That flamingo pink color in Miami Vice, the Jan Hammer soundtrack and the music video feel was as much of a star as Don Johnson - and Don Johnson did a great job.

Take Conan and Lord of the Rings and a few other things (Gray Mouser, etc.) and throw them into an osterizer and you have D&D. What is Warcraft other than D&D done to an amazing degree.   Bear in mind, I'm not trying to diminish anybody here. Tolkein, Gygax and the WoW guys all did brilliant work... But they were all, to my mind working on the same franchise. And, to return to an earlier point, that franchise was based on Northern Myth (and then grafted on other mythologies, but in the beginning were was Tolkein and C.S. Lewis referred to as 'northerness'.). Talk about tried and true. Try retelling stories over campfires for a couple millennia and you'll work the chinks out... Your stories turn into a Jungian stew which works for reasons that transcend explanation.

SED: What format do you prefer for writing your games? Are you a spreadsheet man, or pen and paper?

FD: Microsoft Word. I use a lot of templates as nets to catch ideas (see The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design for more on that). I draw flow charts like some people doodle. I don't have the art skills to doodle.   Rarely do I use pen and paper. I take notes on a digital recorder when I feel comfortable enough to do so.

SED: Do you think the screenplay as a form has any place in game development?

FD: Yes. Games will eventually evolve their own form, but the form for that medium, like any new medium, will be based on the form for previous mediums. Screenplay format came from the necessity of a page per minute format that also clearly delineated the tasks of different people in the cast and crew. It was an industrial age format. Plays were an enlightenment age format. We'll find the information age format, hopefully before the information age ends.

SED: What do you see as a potential future storytelling in games?

FD: I suspect, and hope, that there will be a million different kinds of game storytelling. One thing I love about the medium is that you start fresh every time. You have a different, and ever technically improving pallet. I think we'll start seeing 'Indy'-style stories, like Indy films, smaller, more esoteric stories from smaller more esoteric teams (like Portal)... We'll see more sophisticated MMOG storytelling where my character lives his own individual epic story inside a MEGAstory... We'll see ARG storytelling where I will adopt a new identity and participate in a fictional world superimposed on the real world. We'll see simple pick-a-path daily comic strip stories on our phones. We'll see kid stories, adult stories... If I wanted to be a billionaire, I'd figure out how to do stories for seniors where they could live alternate versions of their own lives. In short, I think we're entering the richest time in fiction ever, and there are an endless number of ways we can tell stories to ourselves and to others... Or, to add onto what was said earlier, there will be a million ways to tell stories and all of them will work.

SED: Flint thank you very much for your time and thorough responses. As always, it's a pleasure speaking with you.

Flint has an acute sense of storytelling that emerges from his vast experience in story development for popular media franchises. I know I have learned, and I hope you can say the same. For The Narrative Design Exploratorium™ this is Stephen Dinehart.

My new shoes - Narrative Designer/Lead Writer at Day 1 Studios

2008-11-16T22:00:00Z

I'm happy to announce that as of November 1st I am Narrative Designer and Lead Writer for Day 1 Studios, LLC in Chicago. It's been a rapid process from application to the negotiation table and it feels good to be part of such a talented independent studio. This is the first such position for Day 1, having worked in the past with contract writers and/or publishers to deal with most of the storytelling, and I'm glad to say everyone I work with seems very happy to finally have a FT storyteller in-house. Everyone at Day 1 understands the narrative needs of modern interactive entertainment, and I'm happy to fill that gap.

The studio's most recent title, published by Lucas Arts, Fracture, has had mixed reviews with a current metacritic score of 64, but overall has come out strong (85 being the highest rating) for it's terrain modification tech, which allows the player to modify the terrain for tactical purposes. The studio has received acclaim in the past for it's titles Mechassault, Mechassault 2 and the port of F.E.A.R. which is to see a continution in the franchise this year with F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin by Monolith and Warner Brothers Games.

As a bit of a side-note the studio is run by the talented team from FASA Interactive. They created the Battetech transmedia franchise in 1984 which I enjoyed very much as a teenager. My favorite manifestation of which was the location based-entertainment (LBE) at North Pier and the Real-time Tacitcal game (RTT) known as Mechcommander. These great games allowed the player to step into the the cockpit of their favorite mech and do battle in real-time with other players.

The pressure is on and as a department of one my job is to insure that the narrative experience in our products is compelling and in-sync with the studio's vision of the games in development. As a "two game" studio dealing in AAA-game development I have my hands full trying to catch up with all the work going on at the studios 2 locations (Hunt Valley and Chicago) and 130+ employees. After working with THQ on PC titles its good to cross back into the world of cross-platform development.

Being that I am a Midwesterner, and native Chicagoan, it feels great to get involved in entertainment production outside the west coast, where I've spent the better part of the last 5 years. Chicago has been a hot bed of development as of late with new studios popping up after the dissolving of EA Chicago; Midway games also continues to be a great source of talent for the city.

I'll be sure to keep NDE readers informed as developments in our products are made public. Thanks to the Day 1 team, particularly Denny Thorley and TJ Wagner, for believing in the future of Narrative Design as an integral part of next-generation video game development and for placing me in the cockpit as I prepare to co-author a new landscape in the possibilities of videogame storytelling.

Game Writers in the Trenches™ 3: Sande Chen

2008-11-15T18:51:46Z

Galatea 3.0 - Writing Great Game Characters AGDC08

2008-09-17T21:57:26Z

Tom Abernathy gave a stellar talk at the Austin Game Developers Conference entitled "Galatea 3.0: Designing and Writing the Great Game Characters of the Future". His focus was on how the symbiosis between writing and design can create richer experiences and help play designers better do their job. His fundamental thesis: Good characters, and subsequently story, make good design better. It is his belief that a tighter integration of writing and design will create better experiences for future players.

Story is derived from characters. It emerges from the internal desires of a character. When a character acts to achieve an object of desire, hence externalizing internal desires, those desires come in conflict with the outer world. It is here in this conflict that story emerges. This is truly a classical Aristotelian approach, emphasized by Tom's references to the Iliad and Casablanca. It is also very reminiscent of Robert Mckee's screenwriting techniques, which too are derived from Aristotle's Poetics.

Tom took it a step further and suggested that characters not only make a story, they sell a franchise, creating hot intellectual property (IP) and marketing hooks. It's true, and as storytellers we must remind the pockets and purses that our craft drives sales and deserves development dollars. It is only through emphasizing the fiscal prudence of investing in story that we can convince producers and investors that we deserve just as many dollars as the art or play design pipelines. As too many of us are familiar with the opposite and clearly see the detriment in product quality, and subsequent sales, which results from a lack of investment in story development.

The Future of Interactive Entertainment AGDC08

2008-09-16T20:53:15Z

Bruce Sterling, legendary science fiction author, was unable to make it as our keynote speaker as scheduled. He instead sent a graduate student of his from the future to address the conference, or so said an individual representing Bruce on stage, who looked remarkable like the man himself. At almost 90, with the skin of a ten year old and the hair of a rocker, he was unable to make with his Segway from 2043. The good news is that in 2043 Austin is still weird, because as Bruce, or his representative said "they kept it that way." According to Mr. Sterling's representative, computers in 2043 are boring; they are really quite boring, in fact they are quite like towels, paper, and other normal things of mundane human existence. His General Electric Pocket Mediator, apparently a handkerchief, didn't function as it should, since the cloud isn't existent in our time, and I'd say the same for most of his aspiration filled techno-jargon.

Bruce's representative spoke at length, rather poetically, about the incoherence of the future. His performance at first glance seemed to add little to the conference in the way of real substance. The main hall was empty, and virtually silent, less the lonely laughter of a few forced giggles, as if to say "I get it". Though I did enjoy his rather slanted take on a GDC keynote, it was a performance, and superficially contained little helpful substance for the world of today's game makers. If I were to take anything away, beyond a glimpse into living on the edge of keynote infamy, it would be:

1) Redefine video games for the future.
2) Don't be a clog in modern video game publishing.
3) Explore other forms of interactive media.

Looking back it was quite refreshing, there were no product pitches, no self-comparisons to Walt Disney, he did not even try to wow the audience. Instead he was honest, humble, and insisted on 'taking the piss' out of all us self-righteous gamemakers. He threw off the rules, and that's exactly what he called upon industry vanguards to do.

Death of three-act structure AGDC08

2008-09-16T17:52:57Z

Andrew Walsh presented the session posed on the question 'Are game writers witnessing the death of three act structure? Mr. Walsh was alive, full of passionate self-reflexive humor. His talk was a great postmortem on how layered interactive storytelling can further game experiences while maintaining their classical roots. Clearly defending the form forged by Aristotle, he went on to explain how he used the form in Prince of Persia and how it lent to creating a next-generation interactive story experience.

In creating his installment in the Prince of Persia series he had set some clear markers for successful storytelling:

A strong identifiable story.
A simple playing experience.
A deep story world.
Allow the player choice and control.
Making the characters feel alive.
Providing a next generation experience.

What is his conceptual tool? "Ondemend storytelling" Just what is it? Andrew went on to explain, "Ondemand storytelling is a story design that allows the player to choose when to access the story and how much of it they want to experience." It is a layer of interactive depth that is available to the player at the designers discretion to give the story hungry player additional content. The Ondemand elements are not required to forward gameplay, they exist to provide depth to the player, in that they allow the player to customize their own experiences. Anyone who has played Gears of War will be familiar with such systems. By holding a button (Y) on a console controller a player can shift focus, shift control, to the game makers, so they (writers/designers) may direct their focus to story points of interest.

]]> Like the tapes in Bioshock which are available for the player to listen to anywhere, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the segments are "carpeted" or as Andy refers to it "story carpeted" so that segments of story are available in certain rooms, missions or levels. Andy sees story as a thing of words, dialog, and cut-scenes, while I appreciate his perspective, he is clearly missing, perhaps purposefully, the importance in our craft of visual storytelling. As a writer it's understandable, but as a Narrative Designer, it would be expected one would emphasize the use of embedded story within the environment via art and non-dialog driven sound. Environments were touched up briefly, but I believe he could have placed more emphasis on the ability of setting to drive stories. He mentioned the use of the car-radio within GTA as a way to paste story on top of gameplay without requiring the player to directly engage with the story element, but again it is a story element that is driven by voice-over (VO).

In the end, the answer to his question is no. According to Mr. Walsh, the 3-act structure is not dead, it's alive with a new depth previously unseen in linear media experiences. Andrew was clearly successful in his aim. Prince of Persia has a strong, deep, player driven story. It's a next generation play experience which brings characters and worlds alive.

"If you use a cutscene you are not a leper." -Andrew Walsh

Moving From Games to Interactive Storytelling AGDC08

2008-09-15T15:30:09Z

At this point Chris Crawford is a legend, since his beginnings as a game designer for Atari in the 1970's he has been a proponent of dramatic games, ones which push the boundaries of the the medium to new heights. In this 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC) Session, Crawford focused on the creation of a new medium, one which focuses on interactive storytelling. As creator of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) he was one of the first to speak at this years conference, over 20 years since he held the first GDC in his living room.

Apparently Chris's first proposal for this talk "14 Conceptual Shifts..." was turned down, and most recently he was asked to speak and rewrote the talk to be "15 Conceptual Shifts"' When asked why he was turned down he quickly replied, "Because I'm an asshole." Apparently Chris does not care for games, and as a result has made some sworn enemies. He seeks divergence from the game industry as interactive storytelling is to create a new form of entertainment; one beyond useless interactivity not driven by compelling human drama. Storytron, Inc. is in fact his venture into creating this new industry. His company's website proudly displays the copy "Play a Storyworld".

He was/is a big shot, 14 hits, wrote the first book and journal on Game Design, about 16 years ago he walked away from it during the creation of the game Wing Commander. He saw the industry falling down a dark path, away form drama and towards toys, puzzles, things which are antithetical to the dramatic potential for interactive storytelling. Games are supposed to be about people, there is no real feelings, emotion and people. It's taken him 16 years.
]]> 15 shifts for the interactive storyteller

1. People not things
Fundamentally the focus of interactive storytelling is on human relationships, the game industry as a whole doesn't understand this. Human social experiences are the important thing to worry about.

2. The primacy of interactivity
The primacy of interactivity is fundamentally accepted by the games industry, but not writers. "Interactivity is the sine qua non of software." Without interactivity you ain't got nothing.

3. Screw Graphics
Interactivity has primacy. Graphics exist solely to support the interactive activity. What graphics do you need for storytelling. Novels don't need graphics, storytelling does not require graphics, "in fact screw graphics." Anything that is not central to this task get's in your way"

4. Ditch plot
Stories have plot, storytelling is not the same as stories. Story is data, storytelling is process. Allow players to interact with process not data; "You can't put plot in interactive storytelling."

5. What does the user DO?
Ask yourself this fundamental question, not what they see, what they feel, it' about doing things. "Act", interactivity.

6. What are the verbs
Make a list of verbs to describe your software, this is what is fundamentally important about the system.

7. Linguistic User Interface - LUI
3 Classic systems 1) command line interface: 20 verbs 2) GUI: 100 verbs 3) LUI: >1000 verbs.
There are two forms of software, 1) Civilian software, less that 100 verbs, and, 2) pro-software, more than 100 verbs. A "Little Golden Book" has 122 unique verbs. We need to be able to speak to our computers, just like in Star Trek.

8. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Can't do natural language, Sapir-Whorf: language mirrors reality, if you want language to fit inside a computer you need to put reality inside a computer. Stories have toy realities, ergo us a toy language. That world is a toy universe, a toy reality, use a toy language, therein limiting yourself.

9. Language = Reality
Don't design reality, then fit language; don't design them together, as one entity. You want the language and the reality to be the same thing. Design them as one entity. This requires a powerful auditing system.

10. Inverse Parser
Parser analyzes sentences, user must conform to parser, Invert the process and the user rules. Parser puzzle problem, has plagued us since the beginning of adventure games,Chris's solution is an inverse parser. What words are acceptable at this point in the input process? Syntactical context dramatically narrows the range of words that are possible. If you do syntactical parsing in advance you can limit the verbs offered to the player. Dramatic context also narrows the range of opportunities, so the list of verbs in narrowed to the user. Verbs must be reusable, iterative, and incremental.

11. Ditch Space
Gamers are obsessed with the spatial (3D). Why do we need space in drama? Hamlet would never say "To turn left or to turn right, that is the question" Characters are about social cognition not spatial cognition.

12. Programmers are not storytellers!
Ergo, storytellers must "program". Doing a professional story requires a professional storyteller.

13. Algorithms Animate!
Interactivity is about what people do. They make choices, those decisions are driven by algorithms. Choices are context-dependent, express that context-dependence with algorithms. "The ugliness of a truth has no barring on it's truth value". They story algorithms must be designed by the storytellers.

14. A programming Language for Storytellers
Sappho, Color-coded, No acronyms, Syntax errors are impossible.

15. Kinder, Gentler Math
Bounded Numbers, special arithmetic for storytellers. All numbers fall between -1 and +1. A special math for storytelling and storytellers must be created. Storytrons simple math system is based in their proprietary tool Story World Authoring Tool (SWAT)

Laura J. Mixon, an engineer and professional science fiction writer, whom shares Chris's vision for interactive storytelling also shared the stage. Believing in Chris's theory he hired her to test his system in 1997. They are not satisfied with story which is added onto a game, their focus is drama. She believes verbs must be sourced from atomized plot.

She discussed the Implications of the Interactive Storytworld. Interactive Storytelling will be structured as spirals, they will be incremental, and iterative. Players need to genuinely care about characters, or Non-players Actors (NPA), must have thier own goals. Player must sense, increasing tension and building stakes, and a resolution at the end. Theme emerges from events, inextricably linked to characters and events. Theme is as important to interactive storytelling success as it is to a traditional story. "Stories help us remember what it is to be human, the help us find faith in humanity and the future. They give us the courage to stand up for what we believe in." The challenge for interactive storytelling is to bring this to the interactive medium.

The interactive Storytelling Revolution
We must learn from lessons from the past. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones was arguably the first novel, and it was a major conceptual break-through, creating a whole new industry. The second transition was D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation, the first film to break from stage craft and to bring the audience into the dramatic action rather than keeping them behind the fourth wall so commonly associated with the stage. Now we are at the breaking point for a new form or story.

"How many times in your life will you be able to get in on the ground floor of creating a new art form?" -Laura J. Mixon

Game Writers in the Trenches™ 2: Tom Abernathy

2008-09-11T04:25:29Z

This is an ongoing NDE series featuring interviews with Game Writers in the Trenches™. The game industry is riddled with the unsung heroes of interactive storytelling. As game developers are increasingly looking to create meaningful virtual narrative experiences, listening to the real-world wisdom of these writers can help everyone on the development pipeline understand their trials, tribulations, and needs, in hopes of enabling them to do their job as they know best. Today's game writer is Tom Abernathy, his journey as writer began in film, and now continues into video games. I'm hoping to see what we can learn from his experiences in the trenches of game development.

SED: You are currently a Writer at Microsoft Game Studios. Your career has had you focused full-time on storytelling in some of the worlds top-tier studios, what is the most challenging part of writing stories for games?

Tom Abernathy: Without question, the interactive element. Those of us who have worked as writers in other narrative media are trained and experienced (if we ARE trained and experienced) in linear narrative. The spin that interactivity - which is to say, non-linearity - puts on things can really mess with your head. There are so many tools we're used to having at our disposal - timing, sequence, parceling out information in a certain way, dramatic irony, on and on and on - that increasingly fly out the window the more control over the direction of things you give to the player. We writers are used to driving the experience, and then in games, suddenly we're not. That's a tough transition to make, and, after ten years in this industry, I'm still making it.

That being said, the challenge it presents is incredibly rewarding; you're forced to take out and reexamine all your habitual ways of doing things and to ask yourself WHY you've done them that way and, now that you can't, how else you can do them and still get the kind of effect on the player that you want. Certainly, the more linear the narrative, the easier it is. But I've really come to appreciate and embrace the challenge of giving some control over to the player. It's a Zen experience; it's all about letting go.

SED: Was there a realization at some point in your life that you wanted to write specifically for games?

TA: I think so, yeah. Not in the sense of an apple-on-the-head moment, but I remember quite clearly when I was in film school at USC getting my MFA in '95 or '96, being in my apartment and looking to video games to give me a break from the grind of that program, firing up the PS1 and playing the stuff that was out that had any pretension to narrative, and just wanting to hurl the controller at the TV set. The kindest thing I can say about most of those games was that the writing seemed to have been done by a well-meaning amateur with some innate ability but no craft, no sense of what separates good writing from bad or good storytelling from mediocre storytelling or flat, boring characters from characters that pop off the screen and get you interested. (Never having been a big PC gamer, I wasn't aware at the time that, even then, there were some PC games that aspired to more, writing-wise, and even a few that achieved more. But even if it had, I think the contrast would have just made me angrier.)

And the thing was, given my varied background as an actor, a theatre director, a filmmaker and a screenwriter, I just KNEW I could do better. I didn't know how well I could do, but I knew I could do better than what I was seeing, just by bringing some of my skills gained in other media to games. (One thing I think helped was that, with such a varied background, I was already used to approaching a new medium and figuring out how I could take what I had learned in another and bring it to bear; I'd had to do that several times already.) So I went on a crusade to find someone in the games industry who would give me a chance to do that.
]]> SED: Can you tell me the story of your first gamewriting gig?

TA: Having determined to set myself on the aforementioned crusade, I found myself fortunate in friends - my girlfriend at the time, though a Cinema Studies MA candidate at USC, had taken a job as an assistant to Howard Marks at what was then Activision Studios (because no one ever tells you how hard it is to actually get work in the film industry). (She actually now runs a games localization company, so it all worked out for her.) A close friend of ours moved to LA to take a production assistant job at Activision which she had alerted him to, and so suddenly I knew two people in games. (If Constant Reader gets nothing else out of all my blabbering, get this: The cliché about it being all about who you know? You have NO IDEA how true that is, in Hollywood and in games. Networking is the name of the game, end of sentence. And here I was, doing just that, essentially by accident.)

My friend agreed with me 100% about the state of writing in games, and together we conspired to get someone at Activision Studios to let me write on their game instead of just handing it off to the level designer or the audio engineer or the producer's friend who was taking an Intro Screenwriting class at UCLA Extension (don't laugh; that's who usually wrote whatever needed writing, and still often does). My Big Break™ came when the honchos making Heavy Gear finally decided they were tired of listening to my friend harangue them about me and, after seeing a sample, contracted me to write the cut scenes for their game. This being 1997 or '98, there were only about five cinematics, as I recall, and they gave me not one iota of guidance as to the world or the characters - and why would they have? They didn't understand that I needed that stuff, because they didn't really know anything about what a real writer did; that was the whole point. So I muddled through and turned in a draft of which I was inordinately proud, and then I never heard from them again. Being a Mac person, I was never even able to play the game, so to this day I don't know for sure if they even used what I wrote.

But the foot was in the door, and my own learning process about the differences between writing for movies, television or the stage and writing for interactive experiences had begun. It will probably never stop. And when Activision shuttered their studio and some of the guys there spun off and created Pandemic Studios, my friend went with them as one of ten or twelve original employees, and that led to me doing more work for them as a contractor and, eventually, to my writing Destroy All Humans!, which became my real big break (ironic trademark reference not included).

SED: What are the primary creative differences between the, contract and staff, writing positions you have had?

TA: Well, in this industry a contract writer is nearly always brought in late in the process to write or re-write dialogue originally produced by, usually, a level designer or audio engineer or producer's best friend, etc. (see previous answer). His or her creative input is likely to be neither desired nor appreciated, since by that point the team is generally dealing with much more urgent issues, like the fact that there's no way in hell they're ever going to make their date. So you smile and listen to what they have to say, which is generally brief and harried, and then you go off and you try to make something coherent and interesting out of the odds and ends you've been given. I've described the process as being akin to trying put together a jigsaw puzzle in the dark; you're given as many pieces as the team can put their hands on, but there's often no one who can explain to you how it's all supposed to fit together - which is the whole point; that's why they need you, although they may not realize it. In every other dramatic medium, that's the writer's job description: to see clearly how it's all supposed to fit together. That's what we do better than anyone else...which is why I far prefer being on staff. Even leaving aside issues like having a stable income and benefits and all that stuff - which certainly held appeal for me with a new baby on the way when I came on-board full-time at Pandemic in early 2005 - the only way a writer is ever going to get to do what a writer is SUPPOSED to do is if he or she is on the team from the beginning, playing an appropriately core role in the development of the game's IP, world, characters, and story. We are uniquely qualified to do those tasks - they draw directly on expertise we bring to a team that, in most cases, no one else on the team has - and, speaking for myself, I'm only really happy if I'm in on that part of the process.

I mean, I can toss off witty and character-specific dialogue all day long, but, contrary what most people running game developers and teams seem to think, that's not the meat of what a writer does. The meat of our job is the THINKING that goes on before a line of dialogue ever gets committed to paper - the brainstorming and developing of fully imagined and realized worlds and people and situations. One reason we haven't seen much good game writing until the last few years is that few developers were giving good writers the chance to do in a games context what good writers do all the time in other contexts. (Another reason is that the discipline is still inventing itself; even skilled writers still struggle with the challenges games present.)

So if you're an aspiring game writer - if games are your medium and you're not just killing time while you try to sell your screenplay - I honestly don't know why you'd prefer contracting to being on staff, assuming you can find someone who's willing to hire you on full-time. Even the money isn't different enough to offset the loss of creative input. If you're younger and like the flexibility, or if you get your primary creative satisfaction from something else you do on the side, I guess I can see the argument. But that's not how I work.

SED: As a staff writer are you able to have more influence on the design of a game in preproduction?

TA: Unquestionably. The team knows you; you interact with them constantly. You're not some interloper from the outside, you're one of the team. Just being able to have ad hoc conversations about stuff in the break room with designers and artists and even programmers is invaluable.

SED: Why is that important?

TA: Well, if you're not a very good writer, or if you're just an English major who wants to break into games but knows you're not very technically inclined, maybe it's not. But as I said, I don't work that way; if I'm not creatively invested in what I'm doing, I lose interest. It's not the most effective way for a developer to use me. Put me on the team early and let me do what I do well: contribute to creating and developing the world, the characters, the story, the tone, the mood - even, given my background as a director and filmmaker, the look - of the game. Let me help craft the big picture. (If there's a creative director or a team lead or a lead designer doing that, great. But often there isn't, and heaven knows somebody needs to. Might as well be me, since I'm good at it.)

I mean, look, at some level this comes down to something as elementary as: Why do your job well? Why care that much? And I've certainly known and worked with (and, sadly, for) plenty of people who didn't much care about doing their jobs well. For them, it was about the money or the cachet (speaking of some of the ones I worked for) or the chance to actually make a living in video games (some of the ones I worked with). And I guess you might find that in any line of work. (It is sad, though, when it's the guy running things. I mean, imagine the impact on a team if their director clearly is coming in to work for no reason other than the money he's getting paid or the stock he's hoping to get if the developer gets bought. That sort of thing will kill morale faster than a BFG to the left temporal lobe.)

As stated, that's not how I work. I care about what I do. I care just as much if I'm the lowest paid member of the team as I do if I'm the highest. That's not to say I don't want to be fairly rewarded for what I do, and by normal standards (i.e. those found anyplace outside Los Angeles County), I have been. But that's not what gets me going; that's not what makes me grind and crunch and go to bed and wake up thinking about the project. Pride in my work, that's what makes me do those things - and that's why any dev team should be thrilled to have a writer who feels that way, and that's why any writer who feels that way should want to get on staff full-time. Contractors don't get that; they get higher per-week fees (and also have to pay for their own health insurance), but they don't get THAT. I can't work without it.

SED: As a gamewriter how does well-crafted gameplay affect your work and vision?

TA: It aids me enormously. What I think helps the game even more - and I'll be talking about this in my session at Austin GDC - is when the designer and writer have worked through the process to craft the gameplay and the narrative in concert. What I do is properly viewed as a part of the design process, and my work benefits enormously when choices are made in collaboration with design, just as the designer's work will be strengthened by choices made knowingly in sync with the characters and story. I won't go into specifics here, but even a cursory look at a game like Bioshock shows the creative power and the magnitude of the experience to be had by a player when game mechanics and mission design are created in concert with the development of a character's tactics and sequence objectives. The things the character wants and needs dovetail with the designer's mission plan; the character's strengths and weaknesses are inextricably woven into the powers and limitations the player is given. Interdependence like that between design and writing is hard to do, but the payoff is undeniable. The only question to the designer and the writer is, are you willing to work that hard? Do you care that much? (And if you don't, why the hell are you doing this? There are easier ways to make money.)

SED: How do you see game development changing to meet the growing expectations of today's audiences?

TA: I'll be honest: I don't see it, not yet. In my new position at Microsoft Game Studios, I come into contact with a lot of developers, and I see them all struggling with the massive practical difficulties of ratcheting up their operations to make next-generation AAA titles. The technology is outpacing our ability to develop for it, both effectively and economically; the process takes too long, and it takes too many person-hours. The industry's reigning business model no longer works as currently constituted - companies can't continue spending $20 million, $30 million or more on games that have to do Gears of War numbers to make it back, because most of them won't do that kind of business. I personally haven't heard of any company who I think really has that problem licked, at least not outside a specific successful franchise.

So the question is, how do you lick it? Well, you can do what Valve does, and finance your games with technology you develop and license, and thus remove some of the financial pressure of having to rush a game out before it's really ready. I know some business development people who are skeptical of Valve's model, especially the downloadable part, but I see in it a similarity to what Pixar did, developing RenderMan and tasking John Lassiter et al. to create content with that technology to show it off and sell it, until they were able to get to the point where the content was really driving the company, as they had always hoped and planned for. Even now, they still make a lot of money off the technology they've created, but it gives them the freedom not to be dependent exclusively on the whims of the market. That, it seems to me, is a direction Valve could move even farther in if they want to. (I have no idea if they do.)

But to really lick it, I think we all may have to adjust our idea of what a video game is. Every day we move closer to that Matrix-y ideal of creating experiences so fully immersive that the user might even forget it's not "real." In some ways that goal is almost in sight, in terms of environmental art and physics and stuff like that. But making something that looks and feels like a world is one thing; programming it to come alive in a way that supports such a fantasy is another. From a writing point of view, I won't be truly happy until somebody writes AI code that, working from my first principles, can create its own spontaneous dialogue in the voice of a given character, thus bringing into sight the possibility of an experience that, once set in motion, literally creates itself based on user input. I don't see that happening anytime soon, but I can dream.

In the meantime, some designers and programmers may be dismissive of game writing - though I think their number shrinks each day, and has never included the best ones I've met - but players are not. I just finished reading the reviews gathered on Metacritic for Pandemic's Mercenaries 2, a game that I'm rooting for since I know a lot of the people who worked on it. I've been astounded to see how many of the reviews have dealt with the story and the writing - especially since the story in the first Mercenaries was non-existent and writing was NEVER sold as a big part of that franshise. Like it or not, players and critics are coming to expect ever-more sophisticated writing from all but the most narrative-free of games. It's not really optional anymore, and developers and publishers would be smart to sit up and take notice. (MGS has done, which is why it hires writers like me and great editors to work with us on all the games it publishes.)

SED: Having worked with THQ where the Narrative Design position is being 'openly' embraced, do you see you work as a gamewriter being different?

TA: Well, it's not really accurate to say I worked with THQ in any significant way, aside from their producer on the DAH! games, Derek Proud, and in any event DAH! 2 came out almost two years ago. I was unaware that they've embraced the Narrative Design position - I don't know that they had done so while I was still involved with them - but if so, I applaud them for it.

I'm not particularly doctrinaire about titles, aside from the issue of the lack of respect that of "writer" tends to engender at game companies. While at Pandemic I was made a "writer/designer" (and, later, "senior writer/designer"), a title change I welcomed simply because I knew people in this business respect designers a lot more than they do writers. All things being equal, I'm prouder of the title "writer" than anything else I've ever been called (except "Daddy") and more than content to be called that.

The problem, though, is that everybody has a different idea of what "writer" means. Given my background, I have a very specific idea of it, as noted above. In every other narrative medium in which writers are involved, the writer is the originator, and frequently keeper, of the vision of a project, the creator of the blueprint from which others build the actual edifice. This has not been the case in games - in the same way, and for the same reasons, that early 20th Century filmmakers had no one "writing" their movies but simply made the stories up themselves on the day of the shoot - but there's no good reason it can't be the case, assuming the writer involved understands gameplay and game design well enough. In earlier days the technology wasn't sufficiently advanced to need narratives more sophisticated than what a talented amateur could come up with, but those days are gone. Of course the concept for a great narrative game can come from anyone - but to develop that concept with skill, craft and artistry you need someone who can do what a writer does every day on any project in any other medium. It's simply a matter of a branching-off of a sub-specialization, just as game design itself was once a branching-off of a sub-specialization, and the fact that some designers are so threatened by game writers is mystifying to me.

As far as "Narrative Designer" goes, then, I think that what I've done in my capacities at Pandemic and, to some degree, at MGS falls under what many people would see as that title's job description. Standardization of titles and roles in this industry wouldn't be a bad thing; I guess that's what the IGDA is trying to accomplish. In any case, if it makes someone happier to call me a writer or a narrative designer, or to be called one or the other themselves, that's cool by me. I'm going to be approaching my work in the same comprehensive fashion either way. So for me, no, there is no significant difference. (Ron Shelton's Bull Durham: "Honey, would you rather I were making love to him using your name, or making love to you using his name?")

SED: What does gamestory mean to you? How does it differ from other forms of storytelling?

TA: It means the story that the player perceives through the experience of playing the game. That's potentially distinct, of course, from the story the writer or anyone else intends the player to perceive. In other narrative media the writer, or the writer and director, determine the story and the audience receives it; he or she has a subjective experience, but that experience is a reaction to stimuli which are the same for every member of the audience.

In a game, on the other hand, the player is active and makes choices throughout the experience that change the stimuli, and perceives his or her resulting experience as the narrative. What's important about that is that it means that EVERYTHING that happens to the player is potentially a carrier for story: the sounds, the environments, the NPCs, the physics, everything. Put simply, it's the difference between watching someone else's experience - even at an intimate remove - and living it yourself. For my favorite recent example, please see Portal, a game with two characters and perhaps fifty lines of dialogue, but LOADS of story.

SED: Is gameplay capable of creating the same kind of emotions experienced when consuming a well-crafted film or novel?

TA: I don't know, and I'm not sure it needs or should even want to. Again, I come back to that key distinction: In other narrative media, we receive the artist's work and experience it as at least somewhat passive observers. In games, however, we are a full partner in the work itself. We live it; we determine its course, to some extent at least. Can we feel those Aristotelian states - pity, revulsion, catharsis - about an experience in which we are not merely an observer but a participant? Or are they by definition the emotions of an observer, and rendered unattainable and irrelevant when that distance is removed?

It reminds me of the way that, after I went to film school, friends sometimes remarked that I was less fun to go to the movies with - I couldn't discard the knowledge I brought to it; I couldn't, as Lawrence Kasdan wrote in The Big Chill, "let art wash over me" anymore the way I used to before I could analyze what I was seeing. Now, that didn't make the experience any less enjoyable for me - I loved going to movies more than ever - but the way in which I was engaging with movies was more active and analytical, less passive and purely emotional, than it had been before. I wonder if that's the natural state of the game player, and if, by logical extension, it's foolish of us to dream of evoking from him reactions which are passive and emotional and, in the end, simply not viable in our medium. Perhaps we should embrace the cooler, more active and analytical reactions of someone who is aware simultaneously of living in the real world and yet acting in the one we've made for her. (Of course, that's another kind of distance, in itself.) I don't know that that's true, but I do wonder about it.

SED: How does narrative structure help you create a better game?

TA: One might as well ask how structure helps a writer in any medium, or indeed any artist at all. My acting teacher in college, from whom I learned more about the creative process than from anyone else, used to quote an old martial arts mantra: "Discipline is freedom." Sounds absurd; what in the world could it mean?

What it means is this: talent without technique is useless. It flounders about like a headless chicken. You cannot grow at anything you want to be good at until you learn and practice and master its technical elements, because until then the work you do will be sincere but amateurish. Charlie Parker did not pick up the saxophone and immediately begin to improvise; he mastered scales and fingering and embouchure and modes and harmony and syncopation... and then, and only then, once he had learned and practiced those things until they were ingrained deep into his bones and he could call them up effortlessly into his mouth and fingers without conscious thought, only then did he begin to improvise. When you have learned and mastered everything you can in your craft, then you are liberated. You can stop thinking about that stuff and start creating.

The analogy to narrative structure is worth making. One of the great things about learning the craft of screenwriting is that you grasp quickly the inescapable truth of William Goldman's dictum, "Screenplays ARE structure." Meaning that a screenplay is a blueprint and the structural integrity of its story is essential to its success; the natural rhythms that emerge from a story soundly built are almost inevitably more satisfying to your audience than a rambling, "this happened then that happened" tale. Imagine a building made from a blueprint that ignores the need for structural integrity and weight support, and you'll get a small sense of the potential dangers implied in the analogy. A story without structure meanders aimlessly without purpose, and sooner or later loses the interest of its audience. With extremely few exceptions, people need to feel that the storyteller knows where the damn thing is going. (Goldman's other famous dictum about Hollywood is "Nobody knows anything," which, while unquestionably true, is another meme for another conversation.)

SED: What is one of your favorite gamestory experiences and why?

TA: I'd have to go with Portal, because that's the game that still stays with me ten months after I played it. I truly think it's a harbinger of things to come, not just because of the minimalism and the clinic that Wolpaw and Swift and the rest of them put on in giving us less rather than more and letting us fill in the blanks ourselves, but because it does what gamestorytelling must do if it's ever going to grow beyond just aping the conventions of other media: it recognizes the demands of an interactive medium and adapts to them. There are no cinematics. There are only two characters, and one of them's a cipher. The gameplay never stops to give the player an information dump. The storytelling is woven into the gameplay and the environment and the (very little) dialogue, spoken only by GLaDOS; it's subtle and organic and inextricable from the experience of playing the game. It is, in my opinion, the best example yet of video game writing working hand-in-hand with design in a way which can only happen in this medium. (This is one of the big points of my talk in Austin, by the way.) The more I think about it, the more I think it's practically perfect, an exquisite sonata of a game.

SED: How do you see story fitting into the interactive entertainment of tomorrow?

TA: Here's the thing: there's no getting away from story. The recalcitrant designers who refuse to see the similarity between our situation now and theirs twenty-five years ago can turn a blind eye all they want, but the simply fact is that, as I said earlier, people perceive a narrative whether you intend it or not; our brains are hardwired to seek out patterns in noise. And the more sophisticated the rest of the interactive experience is - the more it replicates reality, or at least "realities" - the more the audience is going to expect narratives on the same level.

And the bottom line is (and I know I'm making few friends among designers when I say this): Most game designers can't do what a good writer can do. It's not in their skill set, though some of them would like to assume it is. While a writer/designer at Pandemic, I learned enough about design to know what I'm not good at. What the really talented designers I've been privileged to watch, like Tom French or Scott Warner or Chris Blohm - the things they can do, I just shake my head in wonder at. They're brilliant people and thinkers in their discipline, and I would never in a million years be able to do what they do. And their role in the game development process is central, and nothing will ever change that. But most designers (though not all) have no real training or experience working as a writer or a shaper of narrative in any medium. And the good ones know that, and welcome good writers, because they know we'll make the game better, and in the end, that's all most of us in this industry really want.

SED: Thanks for your time Tom. I look forward to your session at the Austin Game Developers Conference.

Tom stands out as a great example of a cinematic storyteller swayed by the power of interactivity. His works stand out with the character, charm and wit he clearly displays as a person. In the trenches of game development lurks a creature so heinously talented that he will one day shake the media we so proudly stand upon, that creature is the game writer, one we will surely come to learn more about. Tom's session at the AGDC "Galatea 3.0: Designing and Writing Great Game Characters", is on Monday at 4:30 PM. Hope to see some of you there. For the Narrative Design Exploratorium, I'm Stephen Erin Dinehart.