The first panel which was something of a disappointment. There’s a tendency for industry panels to turn into a reinstatement of the accepted wisdom (Or, at least, the accepted forward-looking wisdom). Even as someone not actually in development, there was little about the writing process which was new to me. That said, one of the panelists – James Swallow – is a writer on Deus Ex 3, and let out a few minor details on the process, which are worth reiterating.
The panellists were the aforementioned Swallow (Maestrom), Justin Villiers (Games still under NDA) and Andy Walsh (A heaving mass of games). There’s much about process – the wisdom really is that you need a writer as early in the process to get the best out of them, and there’s no standardised place where writers enter. Get a guy in late, and basically you’re just getting a guy who’s hanging wallpaper in an already existent house.
(That line’s mine rather than the panellists by the way. I suspect that’s my biggest disappointment with the panel. For a group of writing, I’d have hoped for more sign of writerly flair in their presentation)
The method most seemed to hail involved a centrepiece writer brought on earlier – a Narrative Designer or Narrative Director, analogous to any other head of department on the team – who is the one who oversees all elements of this sort in the game. As the development amps up, assuming a text-heavy game, other writers are brought into fill other roles. Some will concentrate on barks, others cut-scenes and so on. There seemed to be a general agreement there’s too much work for one writer to do.
(And while the industry seems to agree with that, and it seems to be the sane thing to do, I wonder about it. When our general high-point seems to be Planescape Torment, where half of its 800,000 words were apparently written by Designer/Writer Chris Avellone, you wonder whether what games actually need is someone to go absolutely mental and take on the Sisyphean task rather than doing the sensible thing.)
Perhaps the most interesting point for an actual gamer is the understanding that what we’ll often dismiss as shit writing is nothing to do with the writing at all. In the earlier example, if a writer is brought in after they can change the structure, they’re often left dealing with plot holes that they can only paste over. Even if they are earlier, if the design team add levels that need to be integrated, the writer has to work out a way. And then there’s implementation itself, the time to script stuff in game – the time to make the dialogue actually work in game is always underestimated. My take away message was something which I already knew, but is worth restressing: it’s safer to damn a game for bad writing rather than a bad writer, in the same way blaming Quality Assurance for bugs is unfair.
Walker’s perennial bugbear of bad voice-acting and how to get the best was explored thoroughly, with notes on how much and how little extra detail you should add to a script to make sure an actor understands the line. In short, key words. And the best option, of course, is to just be there. Also interesting was the back and forth with a publisher wanting a maximum efficiency of voice-over and a developer not being able to implement everything that’s been recorded. If a publisher sees that only half the dialogue they taped is actually in game, they suspect waste, and cut the budget for next time. Of course, this just means that half of *that* dialogue ends up in it, making it far worse.
And finally, the Deus Ex snippet. Swalow talked a little about how writing isn’t just words. You use every tool available, including the environment the player passes through. As such, in Deus Ex, they’re embracing the pathetic fallacy and making each hub area in the game actually mirror the rollercoaster of emotions which the lead is experiencing. At a time of tension, you’ll enter a gloomy, cramped hub. If a major opponent has been defeated and things are looking optimistic, expect the next hub to be a wide-open space and generally airy. In other words, the writers influence the art team and the art team influences the writers – as when you see the environment which results, it inspires the writers to take a different angle.
[Main-image clip-art taken from here.]
Related Stories:
re: Mirror’s Edge and the story, plot. It was a bit of a revelation to me. I am 99% certain it happened the way we think it did – story came too late in the process. However, I DID think that it worked better than in most games. There was no single point in the game where I thought “What the hell am I doing now?” I know this because my girlfriend would keep seeing what I was upto and asking and I’d always be able to fill her in. Each mission moved the story forwards a step. I liked the characters. And in all fairness it was a pretty straightforward story – a bit of an 80’s cop movie type of thing.
Also, as an aside on this, I really like the indoor parts of the game as well. I thought they were great atmosphere, and they tended to fit in with the story. They were claustraphobic, sure, but that was appropriate.
@ Nalano & obscura. Excellent, now we just have to convince the industry. Any idea how we do that?
Oh and also!
@Fenchurch: You’re very right. It was pretty cool how you could beat the entire game killing virtually no-body. It was the depth of roleplaying that made that title stand out.
It really made a difference if you were a meat head or a fast talker or a moody but intelligent weasel to the entire game. God i love that game.
@SanguineAngel
We show them by the games we buy and the games we dont. We show them by being vocal about the POSITIVE element of games, rather than just the negative, like so many game players do.
And then of course, if you have the skill and the passion, you could just get involved!
The log is basically civpedia, there if you want it, ignorable if you don’t.
It’s actually quite a handy way of showing the ‘invisible book’ of background without making it seep into the actual narrative, it acts like an appendix on a novel.
@ Gap Gen
It’s “A handbag!” because it’s funny. If it was funnier to be long, it would have been long, the length serves the material, not the material the length.
If The Importance of Being Earnest was written with the minimal amount of dailogue to forward the plot, it’d be about three lines long.
Anyway, this has drifted a bit, what I’m trying to say is that you might be right about the line in question (I don’t remember it) but beware advocating minimalism as general policy, while it might work for some (Isaac Asimov wrote minimally in order to focus attention on his real strength, the idea).
Blanket rules serve no-one, everyone needs to play to their own strengths. The most important thing is giving the creatives freedom and putting them in control, not the executives (or in some games, the coders).
And be aware you’ll still get some stinkers, because if the good writers get freedom so do the bad ones, and not everyone can tell the difference.
I’m playing Morrowind at the moment, and it does some subtle storytelling well – for example, your Blades contact has a skooma pipe just peeking out from his under his bed – while there’s the annoyance of many characters being walking encyclopedias, with some of them having dozens of dialogue options among which is buried one or two specific to the character. It feels like a version of the “hunt the pixel” adventure game problem.
(If anyone knows of a mod that prunes these extraneous dialog options, please let me know.)
P.
Yeah, yeah. I’m not arguing that short is always better. Obviously there are no hard and fast rules for writing. What I am saying is that games like Mass Effect are not served well by copious amounts of dialogue and backstory.
I cite Half-Life 2 because its storytelling, in my mind, worked perfectly – there were hints towards the backstory, which is exactly the way it should work – if you’re sitting listening to a speech about the history of the Seven Hour War, the writer has failed. Better to do what it did, which is focus on the game itself and leave hints on the story in newspaper clippings, short mentions in dialogue, and so on. Of course, Half-Life needs a minimalist storyline, and I accept that Mass Effect, say (sorry for picking on this game…) needs more than that. But Star Trek has done aliens with funny coloured heads already, and if you’re going to do that, I suspect you can take it as read that they’re funny and alien, and get on with what’s interesting and new about the story you’re telling.
I really detest the idea that you have to read backstory for games. Backstory is only there to make the game richer – you should never have to stop and read it. Newspaper clippings are OK – Bioshock’s audio recordings suffered from being too quiet, but otherwise they were a tolerable way to tell a story.
I can’t say I got on with Half Life’s storytelling method. For the simple reason that I managed to blunder through it without really realising any of that stuff was there. Perhaps some sort of general prod at the start to let me know that’s how it was going to go down might have been in order.
Yeah, maybe it was too subtle. Also, the game still did suffer from the bit where you’re trapped in a room talking to someone and you start jumping on tables and stuff. In this room were some of the clippings (although possibly if you had textures set to Rubbish Mode, they might not have been visible). Still, the writing in Valve games is excellent, and the scenes that you do have to sit through in Half-Life 2 + episodes are nearly all worthwhile.
It might have been that it was one of the first to really try this on such a scale, after Portal and L4D I’m used to checking walls for graffiti and such. I mean there’s in game colour all over the place in say, Deus Ex, but they’re all items you can pick up, rather than wall textures.
That said, HL2’s plot isn’t really any great shakes, it’s just delivered in an interesting way, but I’m not too interested in the tale they tell (aside from who G Man is perhaps). What it does capture well it a particular moment in a familiar narrative (the otherthrow of an oppressive dystopia), perhaps going back to what someone said about scenes earlier. It doesn’t really tell a story so much as capture the mis on scene (ooh look at me with my fancy words) of that moment.
Like I said, there’s lots of ways to do this thing, and I don’t think any one is superior to the other, Deus Ex, for example, puts a premium on plot, with the twists and turns of the conspiracy. Prince of Persia (the first one) tells a traditional Arabian Nights tale, but concentrates on the two main characters and their interaction to really charm the player. Whereas Monkey Island, for instance focuses on crafting indiviual gags (form).
Of course, there’s plenty of big games that cack this up no end. Gears of War, for example, fails on every level; it’s characters a cliches, it’s ideas are derivative, it’s plot is riddled with holes and it’s form is clunky, ugly and uncharismatic. Some people however, think it’s narrative is high quality, when faced with this, you have to wonder what you can do.
I’m quite happy for games to look outside the genre for inspiration, it’ll hopefull stave of the self propigating flaws of storytelling in a medium where Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy are considered things to aspire to, rather than things we need to move past. I only hope they reach beyond the familiar Aliens/Predator/Terminator reference pool, perhaps beyond films altogether, into novels? It would certainly be refreshing.
I’m totally going on a tangental rant here, so I’ll stop.
Yeah, it doesn’t need a rich, deep universe to be set in. It’s a shooter. If they’d provided reams of backstory it might have grated. But what story it does have is well handled, I think. Like you say, its way of telling stories is often implicit through the action, which is a very effective storytelling method in games.
Yeah, the MGS series is alleged to have terrible verbal diarrhea. Never played it, though.
The thing about Gears is that it doesn’t need to be sophisticated. It’s a dumb shooter – if it were Proust, again it might seem out of place. I agree that this doesn’t mean its storytelling is good (and as a qualifier, again, I haven’t played it).