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Brandon Sheffield:
It'll still make it more cohesive as well, just as a whole game, to actually
have narrative that supports the gameplay, rather than gameplay supporting the
narrative, like the gameplay is driving it.
PR: Right. Absolutely. Yeah, I think we spend a lot of time,
and I spend a lot of time on the narrative design side, talking about
readability, and it's still our biggest problem. It's still the thing I
struggle with more than any other aspect of the game, is how well does the
player understand why things are happening in the game world.
How well does the player understand the motivations - their
own motivations as well as the motivations of the NPCs and the AI? How well can
they read the reactions of characters? To me, that's vitally important. And we
struggle with it, we continue to fine-tune it, we re-do things.
Like, to us,
it's a really, really fluid and organic process, because so much of the game is
systemic that, stuff that sounds fantastic on paper, you can implement it, or
prototype it, you can build it. It might even work pretty well. You get it in
the game, and you're just like, "Oh God, nobody can read this."
Right?
So you have to be prepared to go through the pain of that
process over and over and over again. And as you say, the function here is
really to have, I think, a narrative approach, or a narrative premise that is
really tightly integrated with the gameplay that we have in mind. The two
should not be independent; they should really be developed in tandem.
CR: It does seem that
your narrative is - from what you're saying, and also from what I've seen of
the game - more of a thematically-driven thing. You've got a low-tech feel, a
muted palette; the player has malaria, things break. Those do all seem to be
sort of painted with the same narrative brush.
That maybe overrides a more
traditional narrative in some ways, especially when you bring up things like
the player can theoretically kill some major character in some mission because
they're in the world. And you said you don't have really many spawning
characters. That does seem to really put themes over plot. How do you actually
write that? Do you ever have conflicts with writers?
PR: Oh yeah! Yeah yeah yeah. No, absolutely. But the good
thing about it is that they're not conflicts over whether we should do it that
way; it's conflicts over execution. And I should say they're conflicts in a
good sense. Like, Susan O'Connor was really kind of our principal writer on the
project. She's somebody who... she worked on BioShock, she's worked on tons of stuff, she's very prolific, she's
award-winning. And she deserves it. Like, she really gets it.
She gets the difference between writing for this medium, and
writing a screenplay, or writing a novel, or writing a stage play. And I think
that what's awesome about that is that, yeah, like with the fights that we have,
and we had some doozies, and points where we're like sending kind of, like,
terse and heated emails to each other, I mean, it's over the right things.
And it's always about this idea, like I will say the story
is about X, or this part of the story, this character is doing this because of
this reason. And I think it's very reassuring in a way that she will push back
and say, "The player will never understand that." Right? That's her
point. And that's the right thing to be arguing about.
And I've done the same thing with her. She'll say, "Well,
I really think that this and this and this is true, and this player ought to do
this because of some previous thing that happened with them and somebody else."
And I'll say, "Yeah, I don't think the player is going to get that,
because up 'til now we've been telling the player this, this, and this."
So, I mean, I'm giving you kind of broad strokes versions of
all of this, but I think the point is, is that, she and I were constantly
checking each other on this stuff. And it was really, really good. It was a
really effective working relationship for that. I think that there will always
be games where the so-called narrative designer is also the person doing the
writing, but I think that on a game like ours, with the complexity that we're
talking about, with the amount of assistants that we need to try to give
them notification on, I don't think it's
a good idea.
I think it's a little bit like... the reason why a film
director probably shouldn't edit his own movie. It's that thing of, you know,
you fall in love with things because you worked on them, not because they're
good. Or because the player will enjoy them. Or because it will help the player
understand things you want them to understand. I think that there is an
important dynamic there, and I think it's often a struggle, I guess, really on
the higher level with producers and stuff to make sure you have the resources
to have separate people doing these things. But I think it's a good way to do
it.
CR: When you look at developers
trying to do ambitious things, there's almost kind of two categories. You've
got the developers who are trying to really perfect things that have been done,
and really bring a certain dimension to that stuff.
Well then you have developers
who do more or less what you guys do, in trying to solve problems. Take things
that people have not quite figured out yet in game development and trying to do
the first pass of it, and see where you can take that. Clint Hocking is someone
that has done that, I think, multiple times in his games. How do you deal with
that? That seems like a fairly nebulous area to go into, working for a big
publisher.
PR: Yeah, it's a kind of a cultural value that I think that
Ubisoft has been, if not 100% encouraging of, at least indulgent of. You know
what I mean? Like, they're willing to acknowledge that this is a valid way of
approaching that. Clint and I always said, from the very start, "Let's
fail as big as we can on this." Let's take such a radical swing at this...
let's put it all in and bet on red 12.
And honestly, if we mess this up, it will be one of the most
useful epic failures of all time, because the shrapnel will be useful. There
will be a lot of good forensics to have on this. Other developers, with whom we
hopefully have a pretty decent relationship, just informally, they know what
we're trying to do. We talk to them a lot about it. They appreciate that we're
doing something that's risky, and that's ambitious, and also, hopefully, to the
benefit of games as a whole.
And my feeling on the matter is, even if we don't achieve
everything that we set out to achieve, I think there's a lot of really smart
guys out there who are going to look at it and go, "Oh man, I see exactly
what these guys were trying to do. That's really cool." And then they'll
be thinking about it, and they'll have the benefit of having not spent three
and half years on it, and they'll be like, "Oh, well why the hell didn't
they just do X?" Or some super-programmer will come along and say, "Well
why didn't they just build an animation system that did this procedurally?"
You know, maybe we couldn't have done it, and they can.
So I think the point is, yeah, we're trying to raise the
bar. I mean, it's often the case, as I think Clint found out going from the
first Splinter Cell to Chaos Theory, that you have to kind of
take your lumps on that first iteration. And you have to kind of just cringe
your way through the parts that don't get to be as tight as you want them to
be, in hopes that the message is delivered loud and clear to both players, as
well as developers, as well as the publishers that, "Listen, whether you
like it or not, this is something that needs to be done."
I think, like for example, I look at the use of the
introduction of things like Euphoria for procedural IK, and character
animation, and how it's been executed a couple of times in ways that I think
are interesting but slightly gimmicky. And then a game like GTA can come along and use a very, very
restrained subset of those features in a way that I think really adds a lot of
verisimilitude to their game world. And I think that's really interesting,
because that's a perfect example of that.
And maybe the one that kind of is the lowest-hanging fruit
for some... but I mean, what I know is, given the amount of headaches that
we've gone through trying to have a living, open world, that the next time we
go about this, people are going to be hard-pressed to say that we shouldn't
have some kind of procedural animation system, right? They're going to be like,
"Well, yeah, that really seems like the right way to do that." And I
think we've always kind of felt like it was, but maybe we didn't want to be the
first ones to try it.
Here, we're trying to be the first ones to do the kind of
dynamic story architecture applied to a first person shooter in an open world
setting. And there's no way we would have tried this unless someone had done Deus Ex. Or they'd done System Shock. Or they'd done these other
types of games.
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And I fully - given the number of talks on narrative that were happening - I fully expected to have somebody show up and go, "Hey, look what we did." And totally just render moot everything we've been working on. And it never really happened."
I didn't attend that talk, but I've been working on modular and systemic storytelling since 1995. I taught it for six years at one-day tutorials at GDC beginning in 1997, and continue to present it at conferences today. My book, Character Development and Storytelling in Games, published in 2004, goes into detail on how to create stories in the way Mr. Redding describes.
In the beginning I was told by people who thought stories must be linear and strictly authorial that games and stories didn't mix. Then when I started talking about modular storytelling, I was told it wouldn't work. Then I was told okay, maybe it would work, but it was too hard. Now that I've moved my systemic storytelling to virtual worlds, I'm told that narrative-driven virtual worlds won't work, especially worlds with on-going stories. We're building one now.
And for the past two years at Indiana University I have been teaching the techniques Mr. Redding describes, and other skills, to the next generation of videogame and virtual world storytellers. They get it.
The next step is to convince the majority of game companies that hiring 70% programmers , 30% artists, and 0% writers may not be the best way to build games that transcend, challenge, and inspire.
"The sense that we must push the medium toward a form of interactive narrative that is as strong and vital as the innovations in other areas of gameplay and technology has taken hold with many creators."
I guess my reaction is: "It's about time."
Even with modular storytelling you'll probably get a better experience by letting a group of people drive the creative process, and just acting as a guiding force to this group (creative director?). You might be pleasantly surprised to find that many of the programmers and artists have very good insight into what makes a great game play experience, what constitutes a great story, and in general, what interesting characters are all about.
By the way, I should mention, I'm one of those 70% programmers you mentioned, and yes, I often feel like my creativity is not being put to its full use. :-)
"You might be pleasantly surprised to find that many of the programmers and artists have very good insight into what makes a great game play experience, what constitutes a great story, and in general, what interesting characters are all about."
They'd better be able to do more than have insight. They'd better be able to write, too.
My point was that the practice of creating a game development team composed of 70% programmers and 30% artists guarantees you aren't going to have any dedicated writers around.
I have several friends who are equally good at programming and writing, but it takes more than insight. I have insight into the jobs programmers and artists do on my games, but nobody in their right mind would hire me to code or draw.
I guarantee the actors at the Globe Theatre had insight in all of those things. Only one of them was Shakespeare.
And those aren't my percentages. Those were given publicly at a conference I attended in June by a senior HR person who works for a huge game publisher.
I look forward to playing Far Cry 2 and witnessing the degree to which it drives me to emote. While working on "COH Opposing Fronts" I was able to do some user testing in relation to narrative and it proved very helpful, though in post. I imagine more robust narrative related user-testing during production would be tremendously valuable, to understand just what a particular narrative element, narreme, is conveying to the VUP and how that narreme might be improved to encourage concinnity with the intended metanarrative.
Speaking just as a lowly critic, the way I think of these kinds of games is that they are a series of inter-operating vignettes. Moments or scenes that are created by a writer are activated based on the actions allowed by the game design and given meaning by the art and speech.
In other words, the writer doesn't create events. He creates reactions.
I too echo Stephen Dinehart's remarks that it's nice to hear from a narrative designer in the trenches. It's always a good thing to hear about the work of game writers who "get" games.
As freelancers, Anne Toole and I are lucky that Writers Cabal does get the chance to work with developers at the earliest stages of game development.
If you have a bad day, there are any number of events that could make it a bad day.
You can go through these even in any order and still have a bad day.
You could even have the same dramatic "This is the last straw -- worst day ever" moment regardless of which event happened last.
The theories behind it have essentially already been in a lot of games, but those games have described them in a far more abstract way... Civilization, Total War and X-Com (as mentioned), feel more like emergent, player owned sets of events than guided narrative. Those games have never represented themselves as if they're *trying* to tell a story, and so they aren't landed with the criticisms that most conventional literary figures point at game narrative.
Instead, they create something *new* - a medium unto itself. A player's generated story is not necessarily going to be Dickens every time, sure, but the important fact is, it belongs and responds to them. That creates a completely different relationship with the audience. They're not an unpaid actor in a scripted world anymore. They're being listened to, responded to. While designers still have the "hands off" control through systemic design, the players forge their own path through possibility. I think that that, alone makes it a unique medium worth pursuing. We're growing up as a medium, and realizing that this whole interactive storytelling thing is NOT about self consciously, cow-towingly trying to make a perfect generative Dickens with every play-through, or trying to ape narrative conventions of fixed storytelling in order to justify the endeavor. We're discovering that we're making something brand new - something different from what the movement set out to create.
FPS game productions have typically had to be more focussed on their own core gameplay - the moving and the shooting. So much focus is required just to get those fundamentals right that higher level things suffer. Focus on the higher level things instead, and you get pretty clunky core gameplay (I'm a deus ex fan, obviously, but seriously... its combat is not what you'd call "fun").
Because of this deep focus required, the scope for adding this extra layer of *deep*, granular narrative interactivity on top of an FPS is rare, to say the least. It requires a lot of guts to back, from the money men all the way down to the devs in the trenches. I salute you!
I'm so glad we're over the notion of Branching Plot structures being the be-all and end all of interactive narrative, by the way.