     |
 |
 |
 | | | | |
 |
|||
 |
||||||
          |
 |
 |
||||
|
DD: That’s a good question. I guess we always like to fall back to some basics and do structural 100,000ft to 10,000ft plans. I’d say the 100,000ft plans for Too Human, we break the games down into themes. The theme of first game is discovery, the theme of the second game is revenge and the theme of the third game is enlightenment. That also is scalable, if you take Aristotle’s theory of Poetics and the way he would create narratives – it’s normally broken down into parts. We often structure and take Aristotle’s Poetics, which is used a lot for entertainment, and break it down into linear things that we do, like gameplay and interactivity and combine those with our theories. We’ll often produce graphs of plotlines and stories that are going on, and we basically planned out the entire trilogy from beginning to end and then we’ve looked at good places to say, ‘Okay – here’s a good component, and the first story is going to end here with these things happening, the second story’s going to end here with these things happening’ and you make sure that they’re self contained and the story makes sense. If you were to cut out the first and third parts of the trilogy, would the second part make sense on its own? Then you just iterate, and iterate, and iterate until you get all of those things together. GS: What about balancing your plans for the narrative with the actual gameplay? I think there’s a concern from a lot of action gamers in particular that they don’t actually want an overtly story based experience. DD: I think that’s generally because the story based experiences that most action gamers would be familiar with are absolutely horrid. I think one of the problems with narrative in the industry right now is with the quality writing in general. It’s not everyone – there’s some well written games, that for sure. But they’re so far and between that when someone actually sees one, they go crazy and there’s a real rabid fanbase for games with an excellent narrative. I think we’re known for that because we pay attention to it, but most people don’t want to do it. One of the big problems in our industry – and it’s still rampant today, and we’re very much against it – is the idea of completing a level and then getting a story segment as a bonus. That whole mentality is really old school; coin-dropping. ‘You beat the level, you get this little cinema’, which gives you a break from the repetition of the game because you’re so tired of it. Nowadays, you play games at home, you don’t have to drop coins in, and the story has to be so essentially interwoven into the game. In order to tell a good narrative, it has to seamlessly mix and integrate with the gameplay. At Silicon Knights, our structure is, we have a director for every department – sometimes two, depending on how complex it is. So, there’ll be someone like myself on Too Human, working as director of the entire project. Then we have five departments which we think are extraordinarily important in making non-linear entertainment or video games. There’s audio and sound, so we have a director of that who interfaces with everyone. He’ll read the scripts over, and he’ll look at the gameplay and he’ll create the appropriate audio and sound files. Also, the people in his department are there to make sure everything balances well. We have a director of technology to make sure the tech supports everything we do. We have a director and gameplay and game design, and he looks over everything and makes sure it intermixes with the technology and the story and the artwork. We have art directors, obviously. And we have a director of content, and he makes sure that the story is interwoven with gameplay and the technology and all those.
Our theory is that you take all those five areas, and you mix them together and try to balance them all so they’re all equal in strength and then suddenly you start to get something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. You create this completely immersive experience, where the gamer is so wrapped into it and loses track of time. We really feel strongly that we’re creating entertainment, and in order to hit the greatest entertainment experience, we have to balance all those five things. The thing that really separates video games from other forms of entertainment – traditional forms like books, television, movies, radio – is technology is so rapidly advancing. Then the game design part, where we’re actually in an interactive media – those two things break all the previous rules, so applying something like Aristotle’s Poetics really is challenging because a lot of the rules, if they apply, you have to be very creative about the ways that you apply them, and sort of look at them from a very proactive and future-forward perspective. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with some stuff that doesn’t work, and that’s traditionally what’s happened with all the bad games that have tried to make movies into games, and that’s why you’ve got to take an aggressive perspective and a future looking perspective. I hope that all made sense. GS: So, that synergy between departments is what you think is most important for the future of narrative in the industry? DD: I think it’s absolutely the future, and Silicon Knights has structured the whole company around that philosophy, and if you notice, we have a sort of guild mentality that’s inspired by the works of Shakespeare where it’s widely believed – or at least believed in a few circles – that Shakespeare wasn’t just one person, it was a guild of people and writers that iterated and learned off of everything that they did with their plays and they created something that resonated for long periods of time. That’s something we’re trying to do by balancing these synergies over all the departments and trying to come up with the perfect balance. GS: Do you think full interactivity is where things are headed, or do you believe some kind of linearity is necessary within the narrative of games? DD: I think a balance and a mix, for sure. I think if you’re completely, absolutely non-linear, then you start running into problems with navigation and if you’re going to have any kind of story it has to have a beginning, middle and end. That is the definition of story in some ways. You can certainly build your own stories, but there needs to be a beginning and an end - you can have multiple paths and things, but it will eventually cumulatively explode. So, I think the perfect mix is to have some sort of guide walls; some way of guiding the player so they know what to expect next and they know that they’re making progress. At the same time, make it so that they can make decisions that affect the game and do things where they really feel that the gameplay is emergent and their decisions are having an effect on it, but at the same time they’re also in a big world and a living world, and just like in reality, as much as we may think we’re an effect on our personal lives, how much we affect the world…it’s still going on and there’s still things happening. So, I think those kinds of balances are what we’re looking for in the ultimate experience. Others may disagree – a lot of people think that’s not the case, and they’re trying to do more aggressive things or less aggressive things, but we think a balance is the way to go. |
|||||||||||||||
Previous
|
|
|