Fine, you try captioning this one.

On October 26th, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) invited four games writers and narrative designers for a small panel on the theory and practicality of writing for games. Since I was visiting a friend in Wales at the time, I was unable to attend myself. Fortunately, I managed to sneak a recorder on an unwitting attendee, and she captured the entire panel for me. If this unwitting attendee whose name may or may not be Nina is reading this, you have my eternal gratitude. So while this is an indirect account of the panel, I hope to offer a short but thorough recap here. Read on to find out about the improper use of cutscenes, the challenges presented by a silent protagonist, and why a games writer is like a feng shui guy.

The panel consisted of three established game writers: Rhianna Pratchett (Mirror’s Edge, Heavenly Sword), James Swallow (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Killzone 2), and Ed Stern (Brink, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars). They were being chaired by a fourth: Andrew S. Walsh (Risen, Prince Of Persia). The hour-long panel focused mainly on writing meaningful game characters and their relationship with the player. Since several themes frequently cropped up during the discussion, I’m going to disregard chronology and arrange the major talking points by those themes.

Rhianna Pratchett, James Swallow, and Ed Stern, all noticing something to the left.

What makes a game character tick

Walsh opened the panel with the question of what a character in a game constitutes. Stern took this opportunity to elaborate on the overarching challenge of writing (a character) for a game, which is interactivity. Rather than passively reading a book or watching a movie, an audience actively plays a game and has control over the proceedings. While this element of free will remains an illusion at best, it still forces a reexamination of existing tools and methods of writing characters. Other media may offer convenient shorthands and tropes, but games present a unique challenge of their own. At this point, Stern viewed the crafting of believable characters from a visual standpoint. Explosions and toppling buildings are easy, but two characters having a meaningful conversation is incredibly hard to create. As Tom Jubert once said: “An actor in a film can convey with a single glance what a games writer has to bring across with one or more lines of dialogue.”

Swallow made a distinction between two types of player characters: well-rounded protagonists and empty vessels (or blank slates). Well-rounded protagonists (like Uncharted’s Nathan Drake) have a defined background and personality, whereas empty vessels (like Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman) are usually silent leads without any defining characteristics, allowing the audience to imprint their own. Swallow used Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s Adam Jensen as an example of a middle ground between the two. Jensen’s history is established by the game, but not his conduct. The game defines his past, the audience his present and future.

It is also pointed out that the background (if any) of not just the player character, but also every NPC, is rarely communicated directly to the player. Stern and Swallow called this “invisible writing”. Visible writing is dialogue, e-mails, and even shouts made by the enemy (known as “barks”), but this is merely the tip of the iceberg. Most of the writing is used for internal consistency in design documents and character sheets. Incidentally, this makes Excel to be a games writer’s best friend.

Walsh then went into specifics by asking about the dissonance created when a character’s actions don’t dovetail with his characterisation. An example is Grand Theft Auto IV’s Niko Bellic, who can be steered into massive chaos and destruction by the player, but still comes off as caring and sympathetic in cutscenes (as pointed out in this post). Pratchett picked up on this by talking about immersion and suspension of disbelief. Coinciding the motivations of a character and the player who’s controlling them is a writer’s sweet spot, and if this is not the case, the immersion is easily broken. Niko Bellic may not want to hit that pedestrian, but the player might. The same frustration appears when a player character does something incredibly badass or horribly stupid in a cutscene, which can or would never happen in gameplay.

Pratchett also noted that a game environment can represent a strong character in and of itself. Using BioShock’s Rapture as an example, she explains that the level design of a game can tell a story as well (what I call an “aftermath story”). Stern likens this to setting up a crime scene, and notes that this type of storytelling is never forced on the player. That being said, sometimes it is unconsciously absorbed regardless.

How genre and platform affect and influence writing

A question from the audience prompted a talk about how a specific genre can influence writing for it. Pratchett had some interesting experience here, since she has worked on a franchise that spanned different platforms. In the Overlord series, she had to write a character for a game released on the major consoles, but also introduce that same character in another game on the Nintendo DS. Going from full motion capture to a blurb of text on a screen really forces a writer to know the universe they’ve created and underlines the necessity for the aforementioned invisible writing for internal consistency.

This then spilled over into a discussion of how first-person and third-person perspectives call for different approaches. The player character is entirely visible in third-person games (even if only their backside is visible most of the time), which allows for animations and even camera angles to help with characterisation. First-person games tend to have more silent protagonists whose thought processes are then externalised to other characters in the world. Pratchett mentioned that Mirror’s Edge’s Faith had a lot of comments and reactions during gameplay, but these were cut at the eleventh hour as they tended to confuse playtesters. The mind automatically links a voice to someone speaking it (which is how ventriloquism works), so if there’s no one visible, there’s just a disembodied voice floating around.

Stern added that audiences have very conservative expectations when it comes to genres, and went on to state that games are still trying to find their specific language. He used Marshall McLuhan‘s theory that things are often defined in terms of what they’re replacing (with “horseless carriages” as an example). As such, games are often judged by the standards set by movies, just as those were judged by the standards of theatre plays.

Why cutscenes aren’t always bad

Pratchett stressed that cutscenes are not an indication of lazy storytelling. They are simply a tool, but as Stern stated, when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Sometimes a player doesn’t mind being told a story, as long as it’s a good one. An expertly crafted cutscene can be a reward after a challenging piece of gameplay. The problem is that cutscenes are difficult to produce. They need to be carefully planned ahead and wrapped early on in development, especially when they involve motion capture. Without naming names, Pratchett aluded to her work on Mirror’s Edge, which was hampered by incongruous cutscenes and art styles as a result of time constraints (as pointed out in this post).

She continued that not all story needs to be relegated to cutscenes. It’s often far more effective to layer it into the gameplay experience as well. She uses Half-Life 2: Episode 1 as an example. At one point, Gordon Freeman and Alyx are pushing through a darkened parking garage infested by zombies. When an off-screen groan indicates the presence of another zombie, it turns out to be Alyx playing a little prank. This little unscripted “character nugget” resonated with Pratchett far more than any cutscene would’ve. A narrative that is created around and reacts to the player’s actions is something that requires forethought, which is translated as bringing in a writer as early as possible.

Involving a writer from the word go

This point was raised organically at various points, and ultimately forms the synthesis of this panel. If there’s anything to take away, it’s that there is an inordinate amount of factors that influences the craft of writing games. This plays into the medium’s relative youth. Games are still discovering what makes them unique and how that creates a new language rather than one cobbled together from what came before (i.e. movies). And that is why it is incredibly important to have a writer or narrative designer on board as soon as possible. Layering story into gameplay is but one example of a tactic that can only be put to full effect if there’s a writer who can make it happen early enough. Stern joked that his job is like that of a feng shui guy: no one really knows what it is he does, but it’s lucky to have one around. He moves individual bits of furniture around and everything seems better, though nobody really knows why.

Next we'll dream you up some facial hair, okay darling?

Inception. A great movie by a great many standards. It gleans elements from a wide variety of genres and skillfully combines them into something that carries enough weight to become more than the sum of its parts. Its far-reaching appeal has naturally led to an enormous outpouring of articles and discussion, not in the least geared towards theories about what it all means. A subset of such articles focuses on the relation between Inception and videogames. It should therefore come as no surprise that Christopher Nolan himself has announced an intention to craft a game based on/in the Inception universe, and this post looks at the way in which it lends itself exceptionally well as a blueprint for a (certain type of) adaptation.

While a more obvious and seemingly opportunistic take on the relation between Inception and videogames, one needs only to examine the following piece of dialogue to understand why it warrants this kind of scrutiny.

If one were to go through the Inception script and replace every instance of the word “dream” with the word “game”, it couldn’t get spelled out more clearly than that. “[Disguising] the boundaries of the dream” basically comes down to level designers using tricks like invisible walls and skyboxes to make the game world seem more expansive than it really is. This article even sees Inception as the perfect allegory for the process of game development. But before we can delve into the nature of Inception and how it relates to game design, we must take the reality of the industry into account and ease the minds of the money men.

In this post, I satisfied Call Of Duty: Black Ops’ desire to be a movie by comparing it to Transformers, a commercially successful product that neglects to challenge its audience because it feels it doesn’t need to. Inception proved that a challenging story does not preclude commercial viability, given that the movie has recouped its budget fivefold. The game industry has already seen that milestone in the form of BioShock, which offered more than cheap thrills with an engaging storyline and still managed to sell. As this article points out, “great big explosions always win out”. In succeeding on both those fronts, Inception has paved the way for a game set in its universe to do the same.

Another point is the track record of games based on movies. Critical reception of such games has been poor across the board, save for a few exceptions. Games like GoldenEye 007 and The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay clearly stem from movie licenses, but haven’t suffered the same fate as their ilk. The reason is that most other movie-based games are rushed through development so their release can coincide with those movies. Because of Nolan’s direct involvement, a design team tackling an Inception game would have both the backing and clout to take its time and deliver a highly polished product that’s more than a mere interactive promotion for another product.

With market considerations aside, we can focus on Inception’s central conceit: shared dreaming. Just like the Animus allows Assassin’s Creed to embrace the fact that it’s a game rather than mask it, so too can shared dreaming allow an Inception game to use its very nature to its advantage. It’s more than a broad, catch-all concept suitable for explaining away videogame tropes or covering for anything out of place or fantastical, it actually provides many opportunities to link story and gameplay at a fundamental level. Let’s look at a few ways in which this can be implemented practically.

Imaginative and wildly divergent levels

What? I just played some Modern Warfare 2 before going to sleep.

In the game development cycle, writing often plays second fiddle to level design. A story dictating the type of level it requires is a rarity; the opposite is the norm. This is natural, because a level has to be fun before it has to mesh with the story (gameplay comes first, remember?). But sometimes this makes things hard for a writer, who has to keep adapting his work to a highly fluid situation. This GamaSutra article specifically mentions this, as well as Eisaac‘s comment to this post.

Inception doesn’t amend this situation, but turns it into an opportunity by making a designer creating levels analogous to an architect building dreams. It’s essentially the same process, as illustrated by the piece of dialogue above. So if a designer desperately wants to put an oil rig into the game, a writer’s job of fitting that into an overarching narrative becomes a whole lot easier by virtue of symbolism. For instance, Ariadne builds a hospital in a snow fortress so Fischer will subconsciously put his dying father there. The actual reasoning was that Nolan was inspired by On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to include a ski-chase sequence, but the setting still manages to gel with the story.

This element of symbolism has already been put to fantastic use in Tim Schafer‘s Psychonauts, a game which has been likened to Inception because of its similar subject matter, albeit with a more humouristic bent (for instance, emotional baggage is represented by crying suitcases when exploring people’s minds). That’s not to say that the analogy of architects and designers wouldn’t allow for humour of its own. In fact, it creates many opportunities for metahumour. Saito might rub his face on a misaligned texture, which then becomes the architect’s fault, not the designer’s. This is just one example of how common design flaws become excusable when seen in the context of shared dreaming (as long as it doesn’t foster complacency).

There’s more specific ways in which shared dreaming provides unique opportunities for not just level design, but also gameplay. For clarity’s sake, we need to pinpoint the exact technique of shared dreaming as it’s established by Inception. First off, at least two people are needed (otherwise there wouldn’t be much to share). The architect builds the world of the dream and the subject is brought into that dream to populate it with their subconscious. Normally the architect is also the dreamer, but this doesn’t have to be the case. It’s never fully explained exactly how the architect conveys the dream they’ve constructed to whoever is hosting it, but what’s important is that it’s the dreamer who can actively alter the layout of the dream while inside it. Besides some impressive set pieces (like folding Paris on top of itself), this has interesting implications for gameplay as well. An example would be an NPC who can shape movable walls for cover or entire bridges or tunnels to get out of a tight spot. This naturally necessitates a balance between scripted and dynamic alterations.

A different approach to the dream-building aspect would be to put it entirely in the player’s hands (effectively turning the game into its own level editor), but that is likely too ambitious for the type of game currently being described. Something like Minecraft on the scale of a AAA title would be closer to a mechanic that allows the player to create his own levels and play them out. The challenge of such a mechanic has already been voiced by Clint Hocking in this post. I quote: “On one hand, you want to give players unchecked freedom to design and build any environment they can imagine. Conversely, you also want player-created environments to play well within the context of your game. Designing a level editor that connects creators who want to express themselves with players who want tightly designed levels is a challenge I believe can be overcome by making level building into a game itself”. This challenge is close to the issue of trying to keep a tight storyline within what amounts to a sandbox game, which is something I’ve expounded upon in this post.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. To fully include everything that shared dreaming permits for level design would require a post of its own. There’s collapsing dreams, one dream level being affected by whatever happens in the one above it (causing a flood or loss of gravity), the limitless possibilities of Limbo, and much more. For now, let’s move on.

Stealth and escalation

Christ, they're everywhere. Did Eames use his grenade launcher again?

As Cobb specifically points out to Ariadne when she starts radically changing the dream she’s in, such behaviour is not without consequences. The dream is populated by the subject filling it with their subconscious, which manifests itself as crowds of people (called “projections”). Changes to the dream tip off the subject’s subconscious to the foreign nature of the dream, causing these projections to attack whoever is making the changes. This is also used as a rationalisation for the dream levels adhering so closely to reality and obeying the same rules, which makes me question Cobb’s assertion that dreams only feel strange after we’ve woken up from them. Pointing out possible plot holes, however, is not the purpose of this post (go here for that).

When the dreamer (be that the player or an NPC) makes changes to a game level, they inevitably cause the projections to react. This would start with a crowd of people quickly glancing at the dreamer, followed by fixed, judgmental stares and hostile gestures. If more radical changes are made, the crowd starts converging and bearing down. Translating that to a specific game mechanic would introduce an element of stealth (if allowing the player himself to change things cannot be introduced somehow). To wit, the opening moments of Inception show Cobb using a silenced weapon to keep Saito’s projections from detecting him. This becomes even more of an issue when dealing with militarised projections.

In the world of Inception, shared dreaming is often illegally used for corporate espionage (which is the crux of the movie’s storyline). As a response, many influential individuals have received training to resist extraction, even (or especially) when asleep. This is called a “militarised subconscious” and, depending on the depth of the dream layer, either augments or wholly replaces crowds of projections with highly efficient soldiers or mercenaries who relentlessly attack whoever is invading the subject’s mind. This “subsecurity”, as it’s called, would represent the standardised enemy that makes up the bulk of the opposition. Since militarised projections actively seek out the player, stealth is no longer a viable option, which brings us to escalation.

In the movie, there are subtle hints that the subsecurity adapts itself not only to the nature of the dream level that they’re in, but also to the actions of the dreamers. Militarised projections carry weapons and employ tools that are a direct proportionate response to what the dreamers are using. Fischer’s subconscious attacks Cobb’s team with PMC-like mercenaries in the city level. The hotel level then has Cobb and his team forgoing any weapons, which results in besuited guards brandishing no more than sidearms. Conversely, the veritable platoon of soldiers in the snow fortress reacts to the team coming in with assault rifles by using vehicles fitted with heavy machineguns. In an Inception game, this escalation mechanic could be entirely dynamic. An example is the Wanted rating in the Grand Theft Auto series. This would require each dream level to be designed in a fashion that accomodates every manner of escalation from the start, in case the player immediately uses his grenade launcher.

The nature of the projections also logically explains and excuses common facets of crowd rendering techniques. One such facet is identical NPCs. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that Cobb’s team battles the same projections over and over again. This is because they’re not real people. Quite the opposite, killing projections doesn’t even negatively affect the subconscious generating them. Inside a dream, the (militarised) projections wouldn’t need to be anything more than what they amount to in a game: faceless and mindless automatons designed to get in the player’s way. As such, killing scores of these projections doesn’t turn the player into a mass murderer, an outcome that plagues other games that do not dehumanise their enemies (as illustrated in this post).

Player death and save games

Yeah, there's a tank up ahead, so I'm just quickly saving.

Fighting militarised projections obviously involves plenty of gunplay and shootouts, which will result in one of the most common occurrences in shooters: player death. This is something that has been implemented in an incredibly varied myriad of ways. The standard method is to shunt the player back to his last checkpoint or quicksave, but some games have gone the extra mile and actually used it as part of the story, which in turn has an impact on gameplay. Examples include the Vita-Chambers in BioShock and the spirit minigame in Prey. Inception allows for such an implementation through its depiction of the Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous (PASIV) device, the briefcase used to share dreams. It receives only minimal exposition in the movie itself, but this promotional website explains its function in greater detail. It’s also a testament to Nolan’s attention to detail that its operation by the characters in Inception follows this instruction manual to the letter.

The PASIV is not what actually makes shared dreaming possible, it’s a controlled delivery method for what does: Somnacin, a drug intravenously introduced to anyone who intends to share a dream. As shown in the movie, the PASIV allows its users to accurately determine the duration of a dream (a timer converts the Somnacin flow rate to a practical countdown). As long as the flow of Somnacin remains steady, the dream will continue uninterrupted. Besides waiting for the timer to run out, the only other way to wake up from a dream is to die in it. This is first shown by Cobb shooting Arthur in the head, which also causes the dream they’re in to start collapsing (Arthur having been the dreamer). In that respect, death actually becomes the mere nuisance it is in shooters.

Adding dream layers complicates things. Under normal circumstances, dying kicks a dreamer up one layer, even if that layer is still another dream and not the real world. When further layers are introduced, a powerful sedative is required to maintain stability inside and between the dreams. In Inception, this sedative adds an element of danger, because it changes the outcome of dying in a dream from waking up to dropping down into Limbo. This absolute deepest level of the mind is never clearly defined; it’s assumed to be some form of collective consciousness. When a mission involves great depth and the type of sedation that sends dreamers to Limbo when they die, then death can become a minigame where the player has to find a way to kill himself there to get back to the level he died in. Limbo would then have to be an open expanse filled with a variety of lethal hazards. Such a mechanic would eventually need some form of abstraction, as it can quickly turn to frustration when the player finds himself repeatedly dying in a challenging section of the game.

Saving games is also something that the PASIV can handwave into an actual part of the game world. An example of a game that has tried this is Outcast, which had an inventory item called a “Gaamsavv” that imprinted the player’s essence and allowed him to return to it at any time. While no more than an in-universe replacement for tapping F5, it turned saving a game into a physical action that has to be performed in the game itself. In the world of Inception, this could be explained with a new version of the PASIV which comes with a “memory backup designed to flash and retain a current dream state for later recall” (because who hasn’t woken up from a dream that they’d rather have stayed in?). Like dying, this mechanic can be abstracted so it doesn’t become an annoyance.

Memorable adversary

My bad. That's a manifestation of my guilt from when I ran over my dog.

Most shooters (and games in general) feature a single adversary that the player pursues, or is pursued by, for the duration of the game. The challenge lies in crafting an adversary that makes sense from the perspectives of both story and gameplay. This topic has been voiced by Anthony Burch in one of his rants (available here). His example of Half-Life 2′s Wallace Breen is very fitting, because it’s one of the few games where gameplay has been tailored specifically to the adversary’s character traits (in this case, cowardice). Like level design, the opposite is usually the case. In games where the adversary is not capable of posing any danger in a boss fight, they’ll either evolve into a form that can (like getting into a robot suit) or have someone else fill the role for them (like a security officer for an evil CEO).

Inception featured a relentless, psychotic, and scary adversary in the form of a handsome French woman, Mal. Because of her nature as a projection of Cobb’s guilt, she manages to repeatedly thwart his efforts, despite her lack of physical prowess. In the snow fortress, she even dons arctic gear to fit that dream level’s theme. In an Inception game, the player can be haunted by a projection of someone or something from his past, which would turn up at the most inopportune moments to necessitate a battle. Because this projection can shape itself to match its environment, it can offer a wide variety of different threats while still retaining an overall consistency in its presentation.

Of course, the knowledge that an enemy cannot die during any encounter but the final one diminishes the tension and gravity of those encounters. That’s why BioShock 2 ultimately featured several Big Sisters as opposed to just one stalking the player throughout the game. Zak McClendon, lead designer for 2K Marin, puts it thusly: “If you have a single character that the player knows they can’t kill because they’re so important to the story, you’re completely removing the triumph of overcoming that encounter with them”. But the world of Inception makes this perfectly excusable, as a projection cannot be killed by conventional means. It can only be effectively eliminated when its originator comes to terms with whatever unresolved issues are creating it. Which would make for an interesting boss battle, as it won’t be fought with weapons, but with feelings.

Not like this.

Conclusion

This is currently the longest post on the blog by far, and it’s only managed to scratch the surface of what an Inception game is capable of. Over and above the specific mechanics listed above, a game set within the world of Inception can have a story that deeply challenges and engages the player. Just like Nolan used Cobb’s spinning top to leave the viewer guessing what is real, so too can an Inception game include subtle clues to leave the player wondering whether any given level is the real world or not. Metahumour can also play into that, since seeing two identical NPCs can either be a design flaw or an indication that they’re projections and not real people.

Nolan has stated that he is interested in pursuing other stories in the Inception universe, which he is doing by helming the development of an Inception game. I hope that “other” is the operative word there, since it implies that the game will feature a new set of characters and not those from the movie, which would present an unnecessary constraint. For my part, I’m curious to see what genre the game will tackle. It’s clear that I’ve gone ahead and thought up a shooter in this post, but that’s because it’s the genre I tend to play the most. After all, you dream what you know.

E3's lesser known cousin, E2.

I am currently located in Belgium, which has a relatively small game development community (focused more on games for portable phones and social networking sites). Besides my efforts to expand my experience locally (like this), I’ve recently been travelling abroad to places that play a larger role in the game industry. One such excursion led me to both attend and volunteer at this year’s Eurogamer Expo in London. It was a marvellous experience and a definite recommendation for anyone trying to break into the business, whichever aspect thereof is one’s focus.

Walking around as a regular gaming enthusiast on Saturday gave me a slew of impressions. As a PC gamer, it felt unnatural to grab hold of a controller (I swear I’ll never get used to biaxial aiming), so I focused mainly on the indie games (Gemini Rue and Fractal were especially striking), Brink (which looks set to be a very polished narrative-driven online shooter) and the career fair (with excellent 15-minute talks with developers organised by BAFTA). I only found out on my arrival there that Deus Ex: Human Revolution was one of the games featured in the developer sessions of the day before. Hence, my biggest regret is missing out on seeing it in action, accompanied by the words of its art director, Jonathan Jacques-Belletete. I maintain a cautious optimism that this game will live up to its originator’s name, as evidenced in part by this write-up.

I volunteered on Sunday, the final day of the Expo. Fortunately enough, I managed to get a position where I was placed inside the auditorium for each developer session, arranging seating and handling the microphone for the Q&As that followed. This allowed me to sit in on every session, which was a very exciting proposition, because this gave me the chance to speak with such eclectic developers as Tameem Antoniades (Ninja Theory, working on Enslaved), Edward Stern (Splash Damage, working on Brink), Tim Willits (id Software, working on Rage) and Georg Backer (Lionhead Studios, working on Fable III). Since every developer session was headed by the creative minds behind each game being presented, the focus was largely on some of the thinking that led to the decisions made before and during the development process.

The Eurogamer staff was also present on and around the floor, and they were an absolute joy to talk to and work with. They also hosted a session of their own, expounding on the inner workings of the Eurogamer site and how they see it going into the future. It’s always a pleasure to see people who not only like what they do, but also have enough of a sense of humour to engage in a little self-mockery on occasion. If by next year I’m not yet an established Narrative Designer (ho hum), I’ll definitely be volunteering again.

In other news, now that my schedule has cleared up somewhat, I can finally get down to playing Mafia 2 and giving it its Short Script treatment. I’ll also be going back to a few older games that will be getting sequels (or prequels) soon, so keep an eye on the Upcoming Scripts tab to see what’s in store.

Who needs character development when there are EXPLOSIONS!

There’s a great deal of articles floating around which deal with the gap between story and gameplay and the efforts made to bridge it. Having assimilated quite a few of them, I’d like to see if I can’t synthesise a common denominator to build on.

The main point of contention which returns pretty much everywhere is the diametrical opposition of what story and gameplay want to do. The authors of this article mention that “a game writer looks for brief moments — cutscene or otherwise — when she can take control of the game so that she can create throughlines, pacing, conflicts, character development, plot twists and thematic meaning, while a game designer looks for ways to give control — not to the writer, but to the player”. Henry Jenkins confirms that opposition in this publication, which opens with a selection of quotes illustrating the different approaches to games: “Ludologists want to see the focus shift onto the mechanics of game play, while the Narratologists are interested in studying games alongside other storytelling media”.

Let’s first attest that not all games require a story. Tetris would not benefit from a compelling narrative that lends its simple yet effective gameplay mechanics a social commentary on fitting in. With casual gaming now rapidly becoming a defining force in the industry, the proliferation of games that all but forgo any story will only increase. While this relates more to demographics and target groups, it nevertheless affects the entire playing field. Proof thereof lies in this year’s E3 conference, which was dominated largely by motion control and handheld gaming. However, those are still subsets, no matter how prolific. Not all games may require a story, but it plays a large role in those that benefit from it. In this post, I’m limiting myself to games where story is, if anything, a factor.

One of the key points is something that has cropped up under a wide variety of names, the most prominent of which is “interactivity”. In and of itself, it has been repeatedly touted as the singular aspect of games that separates them from and elevates them above other media (worded more effectively here). One of its firmer proponents is Clint Hocking, former creative director at Ubisoft. In his essays (most recently this one), he goes one step further and claims that players should be given free reign within a game world, to the point where the developers should practically efface themselves (fitting Hocking’s denouncement of auteurship in game development). If a player performs a certain act in a game and thinks himself clever for figuring it out rather than thinking the developers clever for covering the eventuality of performing that act, then according to Hocking, the developers have succeeded. He calls this “agency”, the player’s ability to effect his decisions inside the game world.

As I see it, the aspect of agency as articulated by Hocking is more a result of emergent behaviour in gameplay and has little bearing on (shaping) the story. Every player will experiment with the game mechanics he’s presented with, if only to see what would happen. There are many instances of players trying things that the developers hadn’t foreseen. One of the more well-known examples is “mine climbing” in Deus Ex, which Harvey Smith uses to illustrate the success of implementing a degree of player freedom (as mentioned here). More often than not, such things break the flow of the game and are not meaningful when seen in the context of an overarching narrative, which doesn’t react accordingly.

But there is a subset of games that actively encourages such experimentation. Sandbox games present the player with an expansive world and a set of tools and then set him free. However, sandbox games often suffer from poor stories that exist only to justify the gameplay. While not entirely unnecessary, such stories fail to engage the player because they really don’t need to. Just Cause 2 is a game that fully understood this. But sometimes, stories designed for sandbox games try to be more than they need to be, which often leads to a disconnect specifically between what the player does and what the character embodied by the player does. I already touched upon this in this post, using Uncharted’s Nathan Drake as an example. While a highly linear game, the same disconnect can be applied more broadly to sandbox games which specifically attempt to depict their protagonist as a moral individual.

Take Grand Theft Auto IV‘s Niko Bellic. In cutscenes, he is shown to be a sympathetic person who cares deeply for those who matter to him. But this characterisation does not dovetail with how the player is allowed to behave. Wantonly running over pedestrians while evading the police only so Niko can be on time for a date (thank you again, Penny Arcade) is a perfect manifestation of this narrative dissonance. Prototype is an even worse offender. Alex Mercer brutally kills scores of people in ever more imaginative and over-the-top ways, yet in cutscenes he’s made out to be compassionate and remorseful (get out of my head, Penny Arcade). In this regard, Just Cause 2 simply isn’t kidding itself.

Nevertheless, the relative freedom on offer in sandbox games still has to take a backseat if the main storyline is to be played out. In all the cases mentioned above, a player can screw around all he wants, but if he wishes to see the story unfold, he’ll have to reel himself in and do as he’s told. While the how of it is then up to the player, the what is definitely not. However, there are games where the story is largely, if not fully reactive to a great deal of the player’s inputs. The Civilization series allows for stories to naturally emerge from a gameplay model that has no predetermined definition for victory or failure. Also, indie games like Sleep Is Death or Dwarf Fortress permit the player to generate a story of his own making (in a sense, stories told as games and not in them).

Pictured: Dwarf Fortress. I think.

But games like Dwarf Fortress are too overwhelming to provide general accessibility. A fully dynamic story is something that’s impossible to attain in a more mainstream game. Heavy Rain comes to mind as a valiant effort, but it’s still less about what the player wants to do and more what the developers allow him to do. Those two can be the same if the developers did their job with a modicum of foresight, but it remains a compromise at best. So where does this leave us?

On one end, we have highly linear games which (can) tell profound stories but fail to offer the player meaningful gameplay choices. On the other end, we have sandbox games which give the player a profound level of freedom but fail to marry that to a meaningful story. Games like Deus Ex, BioShock and Mass Effect represent the middle ground on that spectrum, albeit with variations of their own. For instance, BioShock provides more gameplay options than Mass Effect, but has a much less reactive story (although Mass Effect seems to be more reactive to what the player decides to do first rather than what he decides to do). But does it all come down to a precarious balance between story and gameplay?

Not quite. While story is a factor that merits more of the attention it’s currently getting, it cannot overshadow gameplay. Because in most cases, gameplay is the story. A story shouldn’t dictate the type of game it needs. A story can be a good one on its own, but once inserted into a game, it can either shine or suffer, depending on how it is implemented into the gameplay it contextualises. So in the end, gameplay comes first and foremost. And not to beat a dead horse, but that is exactly the reason why story needs to be a consideration from the get-go.

A quick final thought: while this article is geared entirely towards single-player games, the above assertion that gameplay is the story may find more support in multiplayer games, as evidenced by this example.

After 18 seasons, David Caruso just had retractable sunglasses grafted onto his face.

Some new information regarding the third entry in the Deus Ex series has recently surfaced. Eschewing the standard tradition of naming sequels, the game is now called Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I don’t have to tell you how much I love the first game, so my interest is more than piqued. With regards to Deus Ex: Invisible War, many fans of the original would like to pretend that it doesn’t exist. The Deus Ex: HR developers jokingly do the same, as mentioned in this article: “Going back to the original was very, very important. We all started playing [Deus Ex] thoroughly, and then somebody voluntarily played the second one, just to make sure”.

I managed to enjoy Deus Ex: IW, but it was more out of a sense of nostalgia rather than on its own merits. In the first few levels, you’re walking around in cities and interacting with a wide variety of NPCs who all give you conflicting goals on both a microlevel (collecting evidence on a corrupt senator or helping him out for cash) and a macrolevel (aligning yourself with one of the game’s central factions against the others). This evoked a familiar sentiment, which was subsequently snuffed out as the game moved forward to generic bases and uninspired set pieces where the stunted combat mechanics became more apparent.

Regarding Deus Ex: HR, a new (CGI) trailer was recently shown at the GDC (available here). What I like about it is how they show that the biomechanical implants are unsightly and cumbersome. They significantly alter a person’s appearance and are designed for combat, which makes certain everyday tasks difficult (as shown by the glass cracking), which was an aspect that Deus Ex focused on with the characters of Gunther Hermann and Anna Navarre (especially when explicitly contrasted with JC’s augmentations).

I remember that during BioShock’s development, it was stated that the player’s humanity would suffer under repeated splicing, but in the game itself, this was quickly swept under the rug. The gruesome effects the plasmids had on the body (for instance, charred skin with Incinerate and a beehive for an arm with Insect Swarm) were temporary, and the question of “sacrificing one’s humanity” was left by the wayside.

I mention this because it would be interesting if Deus Ex: HR introduced this aspect in full. I like how Deus Ex subtly illustrated the stigma laid upon those who chose biomechanical implements over social acceptance. And although the trailer shows a protagonist already rife with robotic limbs, there is nothing in the preview coverage to indicate that he starts out this way. Just because he is a “private security officer with a company that specialises in these augmentations”, there’s no need for him to have already dipped his pen in the company ink.

Basically, what if Deus Ex: HR were like this?

From left to right: not me, not me, me, not me.

I was a participant in this year’s Global Game Jam (GGJ), which is an annual event organised simultaneously by many countries. It marked the second time that Belgium participated, and this year’s attendance of 40 more than tripled that of last year. GGJ’s goal is to create a functional game based on a single theme in a timespan of 48 hours (this year the theme was “deception”). At first I was somewhat daunted as the room slowly filled up with programmers and 2D/3D artists. Introducing myself as an aspiring Narrative Designer elicited some worries in a “getting-picked-last-at-gym” sort of way, but fortunately enough I was quick to glom onto a team in which all necessary skills were accounted for.

I really got the feeling that I experienced the entire cycle of game production over the course of 48 hours (albeit on a much smaller scale, of course). The initial brainstorm (concept) was followed by forming a group (hiring) and working out the game mechanics in conjunction with the story (pre-production). Then we got to actually creating the game (production), all the while allowing others to sample early versions (quality assurance) and working within a set of rules, confines and themes (publisher oversight). In the last few hours before the deadline, the code needed to be finalised to incorporate all visual assets (post-production), after which the whole game was compiled and uploaded (release). Admittedly, the game I helped create didn’t make it to completion in time for the deadline, but a playable version was ready to be presented.

All through this process, I was confronted first-hand with many hurdles a Narrative Designer has to deal with, including but not limited to:

• crafting a story suited to gameplay mechanics (and vice-versa)
• adapting that story to fit technical constraints
• repurposing story elements to support existing assets
• cooperation with different departments (represented by single individuals in this case)
• rapidly responding to dynamic situations (more so when approaching the deadline)

In the end, GGJ proved to be an invaluable experience, mostly because I met and interacted with a great deal of like-minded individuals. Not that my desire to become a Narrative Designer needed any more affirmation, but if it did, GGJ provided that and more. There were many photos taken during the event, and I’ll post some here once/if they get uploaded.

When this gun goes up, you guys are so dead.

Note: this post does not mean I wholeheartedly condone Modern Warfare 2′s linear narrative structure because I choose to work inside its confines. It’s simply an interesting exercise to write within a predetermined framework, something game writers unfortunately have to do entirely too much.

I recently reread Tom Francis‘ brilliant reimagining of BioShock’s ending, and it got me thinking about my previous post which detailed my views on Modern Warfare 2′s “No Russian” level. My main complaint was how the linear narrative of Modern Warfare 2 isn’t suited for such a set piece, yet it was limited to just that: a complaint. Everybody can point out problems, but only a few go that extra mile and come up with a solution. So I aim to provide an answer to the narrative problem presented by the “No Russian” level. This might go against the very spirit of a Call Of Duty game, which has built its entire union of story and gameplay around linear progression. But at least Infinity Ward are not kidding themselves. They have finetuned that union to the point where they can experiment with it and push it to new limits, with the “No Russian” level as a result. Granted, I wouldn’t be surprised if another part of Infinity Ward’s reasoning was to stir up some controversy and free publicity. But I’m pretty sure they figured they had built up some credit with Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (and in particular, its nuke and AC-130 gunner sequences).

THE PROBLEM

The main question that caters to both the story and gameplay point of view is: “How do you offer the player an element of choice in the “No Russian” level without sacrificing any subsequent missions?”. What we require is a setup that accomodates a player’s choice to stop the attack from happening but doesn’t break the flow of the story. No easy task, considering that writing within a preset setting (a presetting?) presents unique challenges to overcome and compels a writer to invest more creativity. Tom Francis redesigned the entire second half of BioShock to fit his ending, but we don’t have that luxury (which by no means detracts from the level of genius he poured into it). I realize that at any rate we’d still be cheating the player because the choice he makes can ultimately have no effect in the grand scale of things. But in this case, it’s better to feel slightly less cheated.

Let’s first look at the narrative traits that set up the “No Russian” level, so we can accurately determine the confines we have to work in. If you are unfamiliar with “No Russian”, read my previous post. The fact that the game ends if you choose to stop the attack means that your character, Joseph Allen, has made the decision not to interfere, and you’re playing out his decision. That’s an element we have to remove. The choice can then be broken down into two optional paths: allowing the attack to take place, regardless of participating in it (which is the way “No Russian” plays out in its current state) or stopping the attack by killing all of your comrades at any point during the level without dying (which is the option we now have to fit into the whole story).

In that respect, I made a mistake in my previous post in pointing out that the missions set in Washington D.C. depend on Makarov’s attack being carried out. Modern Warfare 2′s intro tells the player that the Ultranationalists have seized control of Russia, and the mission set in Kazakhstan to retrieve an ACS module provides clues that they are preparing logistics for an invasion, regardless of any provocation. This means the Washington D.C. missions are not wholly dependent on Makarov’s attack and need only the slightest of motivations, because the Ultranationalists clearly want to invade the United States. Maybe even the intent of Makarov’s attack is enough. No matter how the level plays out, there will always be a presence of heavy weapons alongside an American in a Russian public airport. And since the link between Makarov’s attack and the invasion is only explicitly stated once (“They’re killing a thousand Americans for every dead civilian in Moscow.”), the briefings introducing the Washington D.C. missions would require only slight rewording.

It’s in fact the missions set in Brazil and revolving around Captain Price that are in danger if the player chooses to stop the attack, because that choice involves Makarov being killed, which has far-reaching repercussions for the remainder of the story. There would be no need to track down Alejandro Rojas in Rio De Janeiro (a very simple mission objective which sets up a substantial portion of the game’s content) and no need to extract Makarov’s adversary from a Russian gulag (thus eliminating the setup which brings back Price). So how do we keep those elements while still accounting for Makarov’s death? His physical presence is sorely underused after “No Russian”, so his absence in the game itself should be no large hurdle to overcome.

A SOLUTION

A simple solution would be to have Makarov direct the attack from an armchair rather than having him be physically present in it, therefore precluding the player from being able to kill him while still affording the option to stop the attack. But this feels like a cop-out and diminishes Makarov even more as an adversary. So we go deeper. For convenience’s sake, let’s say the mission starts exactly the same. Makarov and his men walk out of the elevator while the player’s weapon is lowered. The fact that the player can’t use his weapon at this point would mean he can’t turn on his comrades just yet. But while it’s more than plausible that Allen has at least an inkling of what is about to go down, we’ll keep the weapon lowered until the first group of civilians comes into view. As Makarov and his men open up, only then can the player choose to break his cover and take out his comrades. This ensures that there can be no doubt about Makarov’s intentions, and seeing the first civilians fall will definitely solidify the player’s decision, whatever it may be.

Taste sweet justice, you godless commie!

Now let’s assume the player has decided to stop the attack by killing his comrades. This means Allen ends up standing over their corpses, a smoking gun in hand. What happens next unfortunately means taking control away from the player, a lazy technique but one that doesn’t seem out of place within a game that regularly employs it. Allen tosses the weapon he is holding, raises his hands in the air and kneels down (much in the same way some civilians do during the attack). A few airport guards run up, weapons drawn, and approach Allen. They forcefully subdue and handcuff him, and at this point, the level ends (prematurely). The net result is that Allen is alive but in custody, while Makarov is dead, his attack not carried out (or only in part, depending on when the player decided to stop it).

The crux of this solution is the Ultranationalists’ desire to invade the United States and their willingness to accept or manufacture any pretext to do so. And now that they have an American operative in custody who can be implicated in an attempted terrorist attack on Russian soil, they have everything they need. Allen’s protests aren’t heard and he is sequestered, cut off from the world’s eyes or perhaps paraded around in the media as living proof. If his status as a CIA operative were revealed, the Ultranationalists could allege that the American government had knowledge of an impending terrorist attack on Russian soil but chose not to intervene. And if not, it’s still an American posing as a Russian who had a role in the attack, however far it went. In either case, the Washington D.C. missions can go ahead unchanged.

With Makarov dead, Task Force 141 can no longer draw him out, but needs proof of his involvement in the attempted attack. While Imran Zakhaev got himself a statue in the middle of Red Square, it would seem implausible if Makarov were equally canonized by the Ultranationalists. His status as a terrorist is plastered across all the early mission briefings, so his death could not be portrayed in the same way as was Zakhaev’s: as that of a man who was martyred for his country. Instead, Makarov’s role is covered up, every trace of his involvement carefully removed by Russian officials answering to the Ultranationalists. This means Task Force 141, who was aware of Makarov’s plan, would need to counter any claims denying Makarov’s presence by uncovering irrefutable proof to bring to a higher court. On that note, it’s interesting that there is never a mention made of a formal declaration of war, which makes the Russian invasion of Washington D.C. an illegal act.

Task Force 141 follows leads to Rojas in Rio De Janeiro and ultimately to Price, who is now not required to find Makarov, but to aid in the search for proof. It is implied that Price knew about Makarov before his rise after Zakhaev’s death, so he can help Task Force 141 in finding evidence, if he himself can’t be the evidence. After Price goes rogue and detonates a nuclear missile over Washington D.C., he lays out two of Makarov’s former safehouses which might hold vital intelligence. These locations are raided, after which General Shepherd’s betrayal takes center stage. Price learns of Shepherd’s location another way (perhaps through interrogation of a Shadow Company soldier) and the endgame plays out the same way.

It’s apparent that the flow of missions doesn’t need to be altered when following from the player’s decision to stop the attack. All that needs editing are the briefings between missions and a few lines of in-game dialogue (mostly limited to changing a few verbs to the past tense when referencing Makarov). Every mission can play out the same way, only the context is sometimes different. For instance, when retrieving Makarov’s personal files from his safehouse in the Caucasus Mountains, the troops that attack the player during the retrieval are now taking orders from someone within the Russian government in order to ensure that no damning evidence falls into the hands of Task Force 141.

Overall, this solution comes off as inelegant and compromising, but since no missions are sacrificed, it’s a good way of affording the player a choice to stop the killing of innocent civilians, albeit without that choice having any significant consequences. That unfortunately renders the choice meaningless, but the point is to adequately accomodate it regardless. It’s a shame that choosing to stop the attack can’t have any graver consequences than the ones currently in place, because those need to stay the same.

By all means, kill Makarov. You'd be doing me a solid.

Incidentally, this lack of a different consequence can also be justified by another narrative strand: General Shepherd is working off his own agenda and wants the attack to happen in order to drive Russia and the United States into war. Moreover, Shepherd and Makarov were dealing with each other, so it’s likely that Shepherd said: “Alright, I’ll put a guy in your group you can pin the attack on. He doesn’t know the first thing about undercover ops, so just go along with his ineptitude and make him think you trust him”. This is also the reason why Allen was inducted into Makarov’s group quite so fast. Deceived from the get-go, Allen was therefore doomed to fail, an aspect still upheld if he now survives by stopping the attack.

I’m not saying that this is what Infinity Ward should have done. It’s what I would do if this assignment was given to me. It involves the adding of content that may not even be experienced by some players, but a touchstone of good design is the quality of any content that the player will likely never see.

I'm not crying. My biomechanical eyes are leaking servo fluid.

Note: this post was first made on the official forum of the Narrative Designer’s Network. I’m reproducing it here with a few minor edits, because it nicely sums up my views on game narratives and flows into the point I made in my previous post. Be warned, it’s a long one.

[This post is about] the depth of a narrative in a game and how the concept of choice factors into that (I also branched out to characters on a whim). This argument is predominantly geared towards action games, partly because this is the genre I play the most. But since it is also a genre in which story plays a large role, I do not feel I am constraining my points. Throughout this piece, I draw examples from Half-Life 2, Deus Ex and Mirror’s Edge, so there are some spoilers for those who have not yet played these games.

CHOICE

Games are purely by nature an interactive experience. Input from a user is required to keep the flow of events going. Naturally, there are degrees to distinguish. On one side, there are games that deliver a similar, if not identical experience on each and every playthrough. This enforces the idea that the player has little influence in the grand scheme of things (thus implying a low degree of interactivity). An example is the Call Of Duty series.

On the other side are games that factor a significant level of redundancy into their design, so that the player has to make choices about what to experience. In practical terms, this means such games often offer a choice between two (or more) different paths. This can range from choosing an approach to gameplay (action or stealth) over character development using skill points to dialogue trees during conversations.

When the word ‘choice’ is thrown around in terms of gameplay mechanics, players generally assume overt choices between two extremes (more often than not, between right and wrong). The game in fact takes a moment to announce to the player that a choice will have to be made. This can range from picking a certain dialogue option to choosing whether or not to kill a major character. Sometimes, such choices feed into a morality gauge, creating a character that’s either righteous or evil. In this respect, choice has become a valuable marketing tool for certain games, going so far as telling players they can ‘create their own experience’.

But what is often overlooked is that choice is already an inherent aspect of games, though less exposed and on a more basic level. An obvious example lies in the weapon the player chooses to deal with a certain enemy (or more abstractly, the tool he uses to deal with a given situation). Does he choose a pistol or a rocket launcher? This is a gameplay choice, one as valid and as persistent as the type of choice mentioned in the paragraph above.

Now we can also apply this basic level of choice to the story of a game. I believe that the most successful games are those that have stories that are as deep as the player chooses them to be. Looking beyond the simple decision of whether or not to skip a cutscene, I’m more referring to the practice of adding content to the game world that is optional to the player, but adds a layer to the overarching narrative that enhances it. Deus Ex is a wonderful example of this practice, littering its game world with datacubes, terminals, newspaper articles and even character interactions that are not essential to progression, but freely available to the player to explore at their own pace. More often than not, such content allows players to glean more information about the world in which they’re operating and the characters that inhabit it.

Another way to enhance the story of a game is to introduce side stories that do not necessarily relate to the player’s story arc. The most recent example I can think of is Sadie’s Story, a secondary narrative threaded into the main story of Halo 3: ODST. Players piece together the flow of events by collecting audio logs scattered throughout the game world. Thusly, the plight of one of New Mombasa’s citizens during the Covenant invasion is told, but it is not considered as imperative knowledge to the main story. Instead, it enhances the overall experience.

Yet another way recently occurred to me when reading this post over at The Escapist. It details how most game levels are effectively over once the player has finished his mission in it. We hardly ever hear what happens in the aftermath, negating any feeling of agency the player might experience because there were little to no consequences to his actions. But such a thing does not require much work. I refer to a small but effective example from Deus Ex, where a mission has its protagonist (JC Denton) infiltrating the headquarters of a pharmaceutical company in Hong Kong. Long after this mission is completed, the player may come across a datacube where this mission is referenced. Apparently, JC’s actions have upset his adversaries to the point where they had the building destroyed, killing 35 people in the process so the act could be masked as a terrorist attack. In effect, the player’s actions led directly to this loss of life. In this case, and all others, the devil is in the details.

CHARACTERS

The article I linked to in the paragraph above also mentions how an ordinary NPC can be humanized by mere words, which can completely alter a given player’s approach. Again, I refer to Deus Ex for an example. JC Denton has a formidable foe in his former colleague, Gunther Hermann, a biomechanically augmented agent. Hermann has made it his mission to seek out and kill JC, because the former’s partner was killed by the latter (which is, incidentally, the only NPC that has to be killed in order to progress the game). Once again, a single datacube brings so much more to the character of Hermann. The datacube contains the diary of a guard who detailed Hermann’s behavior, which included him standing guard for 10 hours, unmoving, and apparently crying at one point. It almost made me want to save him. If a single NPC can be humanized with such sparse means, what of the protagonist?

I’m taking a page from one of Anthony Burch’ rants (available here). He makes a distinction between Mirror’s Edge and Half-Life 2 pertaining to character empathy. When we want to create a character that the player cares about or at least can relate to, this character needs to be empathetic (something Robert McKee emphasizes in his seminal screenwriting book Story). This means the player wants the character to achieve whatever it is he or she desires. This is no easy task, and in games this is made more daunting by the fact that the player is the protagonist and views the world through their eyes.

In Mirror’s Edge, the primary motivation for many of the protagonist’s (Faith) actions is her sister’s plight. But because the two share a history that the player is only indirectly aware of (largely through animated cutscenes), it’s difficult to create a connection. This is best evidenced by a piece of dialog that occurs after Faith hijacks a prison transport to save her sister. When asked why she did what she did, Faith simply replies deadpan: “You’re my sister”. On the other hand, the narrative backdrop of Half-Life 2 allows its protagonist, Gordon Freeman, to meet Alyx at the same time the player does, which creates a stronger bond than can be exemplified by a single statement or piece of dialogue. I’m not saying either is a preferable approach. The point is that there are many more ways to create empathetic bonds between characters beyond the obvious ones.

She's either really determined or in dire need of a toilet break.

One such way is to maintain a consistent visual style throughout a game, especially to render characters. Mirror’s Edge uses animated cutscenes to tell most of the story, but they come across as disconnected from the game’s overall aesthetic. I don’t remember who, but a game writer once said that “in an RTS game, you can’t have your characters dying horribly in a Saving Private Ryan-esque FMV video sequence when those same characters are otherwise represented by a couple of blurry pixels rendered against a battlefield”.

Mirror’s Edge also serves as a good example of the final note of this piece. Its narrative was added at a late stage in development, when the core gameplay concept was already in place (as evidenced by this interview and, well, playing the game). An illustration is the very loose way in which characters and their alliances are handled, in the sense that many are superfluous and interchangeable (which then results in there being very little attachment to those characters). Incidentally, that might also be the reason why the developers opted for animated cutscenes. There was little development time left to properly implement the narrative provided by Pratchett. As such there is a clear distinction between story (in the form of cut-scenes) and gameplay, with the two rarely crossing over.

This feeds back to the venerable chestnut which those active in the field of writing for games strive for, namely the involvement of a writer from the start of the development process. More often than not, writers are brought on after the game design is locked down and told to rub on layer of text in order to lend meaning to the gameplay. Interfacing writing and design at the foundation is better suited to have story and gameplay reinforce one another, rather than the former merely serving as a context for the latter. It is for that reason that the title ‘Narrative Designer’ is such an apt one. Let’s hope we can look forward to a time when we won’t be merely writing for games, but writing games.

Stephen has recently founded the Narrative Designer’s Network, a community for burgeoning and established Narrative Designers. A post made there goes a long way to explaining what it is a Narrative Designer does exactly, but looking beyond the responsibilities of the specific function, I’m going to delve into the overarching concept of Narrative Design.

Videogames are often compared to movies, and the former are described as indebted to the latter because of borrowed mechanics. Games are a unique medium with a unique dialect, and as long as they keep borrowing from other media for a semblance of maturity, they will never be held to the same regard. Often this situation is likened to the first movies ever created, which were no more than stage plays recorded with a static camera. Movies only matured when they discovered their own language and possibilities. Games are still in the process of developing that language, and while significant strides have been made to that end, there is still a long way to go.

A current trend in the development of games that require or benefit from an engaging story is to bring in a professional writer. All too often, such writers write what they know, and what they know comes from books, movies and/or television. With a limited understanding of the unique complexities of writing for games, the stories thusly developed end up shoehorned into the game. It is this disconnect between writing and design (and, as a result, between story and gameplay) that often plagues today’s games.

This is exactly why the term “Narrative Design” is so apt. Two things are needed for this to work: the involvement of a writer at the very beginning of the development process, and that writer having a clear grasp of how games work and the unique opportunities they present as a medium. As such, the Narrative Designer can not only adapt his story to the gameplay, but vice-versa as well. A confluence of writing and design is better suited to have story and gameplay reinforce one another, rather than the former merely serving as a context for the latter.