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CR: There's still a
scale, though. I mean, even in this industry, you've got guys like Tim Schafer,
who wrote every line of dialog in most of his games, has his name on the box,
and Fumito Ueda, who does Ico, and Shadow of the Colossus. But on the other
side you've got Valve, who goes so far as to list everyone on the credits
alphabetically and few titles. And then you've got everyone in between, and I
think most people are probably somewhere between. That does seem to... and all
those people have made great games.
PR: Yeah, and here's the thing. Obviously I'm being super...
CR: ...prescriptive?
PR: Yeah, and I'm disregarding the efforts of people who've
done incredible work in independent game development, which is largely
auteur-driven. I mean, debatably, a game like flOw isn't going to happen without Jenova Chen sitting there making
that game happen. Right?
It doesn't matter who's working with them on it or
not, ultimately, as good as the contributions may have been of other people on
that, somebody needed to sit there and say, "Listen, guys. This is a game
about flow." That's like an abstract idea, and to make that work,
someone's got to hold that in their head. Yeah, I'm kind of being obnoxiously
one-dimensional in my definitions of these things...
But in the specific context of writing, I think what I'm
getting at is that authorial control, and the desire to cling to it, is a
dangerous tendency in games. Because we're in an interactive medium, and our
job is not to make the player feel anything, not to give the player an
experience. It's to enable the player to do the things that make sense in the
kind of metaphor of the game.
CR: That's kind of
what I was getting at with that idea of kind of, novel to film to game, where
you've got someone like Stephen King who, speaking of Kubrick, hates Kubrick's
reading of The Shining - but at the end of the day, in film, the screenplay, or
the original author's intent, becomes subservient to the film. A lot of people
worked on it, but sometimes you've got the crazy auteur. And then that's what I
kind of meant with games going sort of even further than that.
PR: Well, okay, you know where I'm going to be proven dead
wrong, and so let me try to approach this with as much humility as possible.
Where I'm going to be proven dead wrong on this, is when we finally support
tools for the generation of systemic AI behavior that are so intuitive, like,
as Chris Hecker was saying, essentially as easy to use as Photoshop, that are
so intuitive that, at that stage, it really does become about generating a set
of dialogs. And the AI has the intuition to do what an actor does, and do what
a stage director does.
And at that point, maybe a writer can step up and say, "Okay,
you know what? Let me just tackle this one on my own." You know? Which
happens. It happens in film, and it certainly happens in other traditional
media. Maybe we will hit that point where I can sit there and hold rehearsals
with my AI until I get something that feels like the game that I want. I mean,
I don't know.
CR: You've probably
got a while before you're proven wrong on that one.
PR: Yeah, hopefully I'll have retired by then, or been
committed to an insane asylum or something.
BS: How do you record
dialog, when you don't know exactly when, or in what context it will come up,
if that is indeed the case?
PR: Yeah, that's a really hard problem. In fact, the way we
approach it is, it becomes a minimization effort, where we know that, to a
certain extent, we are going to have to say, "Well, there are a dozen
characters who could possibly deliver this information to the player. Let's see
if we can build that scene as much as possible out of pieces that are
reusable."
And that just involves an enormous amount of up-front
planning. And luckily we have some pipeline... like we do have some tools for
managing that. And then at that stage you know that maybe 10% or 20% of the
content you record is throw-away. You know? It will never be heard. But
hopefully the 80% will be usable elsewhere.
BS: Forgive me for
not knowing this, but does the player-character speak?
PR: No. The player-character doesn't speak, and in fact this
was one of the motivations we had for letting the player pick his avatar from
the buddies. Because what that gave us was sort of the idea that the buddies
represent kind of a mirror that we hold up to the player.
So as the player begins to understand that these are guys
just like me - they're here, they have
their own agendas, maybe they're even here to do the same stuff that I'm here
to do, they're taking mission for the factions, I'm taking missions for the
factions... The idea of that is that when I hear them talk, and I hear their
back stories, and I hear the rationales that they give for doing what they do,
I kind of see a moral spectrum there, and I know that I fit somewhere in there.
And as the player, hopefully I'm trying to fill that avatar
up, as an empty vessel, with my own beliefs, and my own worries, and my own
doubts. And that way I can kind of see how I fit in. And these guys represent a
kind of a buffet of moral positions on that. Right? And that's the reason why.
Because we didn't want to give the player-character a voice. Because, again, we
didn't want to presume to know what was in the player's head.
BS: Writing to a
character that doesn't speak, it's basically like writing a very long series of
monologues, which is... it's strange.
PR: Well, yeah. It's super weird. Because everybody speaks
in an oddly expository way. Although it has...
 CR: Like Gordon
Freeman.
PR: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh yeah, well, and that's the good
thing about it. It's not like we were the first ones to do it. We can look at
the way other things work. And again, because we were working this chunky
modular approach, it gives us a little bit more freedom to be slightly more
mechanical about how we deliver information to the player. So yeah, is the
player going to feel like some of the dialogs are a little... odd? Probably.
As much as possible, we tried to offset that by having
fairly naturalistic deliveries. Like, trying to get the actors to be very
conversational. I mean, okay, is it David Mamet conversational? No, probably
not. But we're trying as much as possible to... "Yeah, okay. I'm going to
listen to this conversation. I'm going to get some essential information out of
it. I'm going to get a sense as to who these people are, and whether I like
them or not. And then the information is added to my objectives screen."
Right? At the end of the day, we have that as our safety net.
BS: If enemies aren't
really spawning in very much, do you have the ability to cleanse the game world
of humanity?
PR: Well... no. We're not spawning enemies into active areas
that the player is in currently. But there's enough fluidity to the world
that... I think we justify the idea that if I leave a location, and I go across
the map and do something else, and then I come back to that location a couple
of hours later, that there are different guys there. I think we would not feel
quite so justified in saying, "Oh, hey, he's not looking behind that tree.
Drop a guy there." We won't go that far with it. We don't do low-level
spawning. But we're willing, at a high level, to say, "Let's repopulate
this location."
BS: It's seems
difficult, just from a high-level perspective, to write, or to design a story
for a game in which - or any scenario, really, although we do it all the time -
in which there's a character in a world. Everyone is that character's enemy,
and that character is still alive and going. It's very... it's an odd place to
be, and taking a step back from it, it's like, how do you really write for that
convincingly?
PR: Well, one of the central conceits that we indulge in is
this idea that the two factions are kind of in a state of impasse. They're in a
kind of uneasy détente. Neither one really wants to win outright, because
neither faction wants to govern the country. So there's the sense of there
being kind of like a low-level, low-intensity conflict, kind of on the
boundaries between their territories. But the rest of the time, they're kind of
guided largely by necessity.
So what that means is that both factions are willing to work
with the player, in spite of the fact that he's occasionally doing jobs for the
other side. They view him as a tool. He's effective. He's powerful.
As his
infamy builds, they're even a little scared of him; they respect him. And I
think the idea is really that, yeah, when you go into their turf, they're not
warning their guys that you're coming, and telling them to leave you alone.
You're still going to take a bullet from their side as well. But there is that
sense that they're not necessarily in a position where they can just rally all
their efforts to kill you, because they're also kind of holding each other off.
Like, if the player gets into a chase, and he leads - I
don't even know if I'm answering your question, exactly - but if the player
gets into a vehicle chase, and leads guys from one territory into the other,
there are consequences to that. Like suddenly fights will be breaking out
between AI, and all this kind of... So I think the feeling ought to be to the
player that, you know, "I'm just one guy who's kind of weaseling my way
around in this world." Right? And then later on, as the game progresses,
he does become more of a target.
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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.