How Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is a response to the state of story and game writing over the last few years. by Dan Pinchbeck on 06/08/15_Gamasutra

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/DanPinchbeck/20150608/245370/How_Everybodys_Gone_to_the_Rapture_is_a_response_to_the_state_of_story_and_game_writing_over_the_last_few_years.php

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Let’s talk about Nosgoth. The environment of Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain is, for me, still an outstanding example of world design, but also a great example of what we wanted to try and do differently with Rapture. It remains one of my favourite ever games (I’m a huge Amy Hennig fan). For me, what’s so special about Nosgoth are places like this:

That’s Nupraptor’s Retreat and you can explore it, climbing up through the skull, and right at the top there’s the Stone Glyph. That’s not in any way essential for the main quest, it’s a complete diversion, but it’s a lovingly crafted diversion that is amazing probably because there’s nothing there really that is essential.

You don’t engage with it for a goal, particularly, but because of the love of exploration. It adds depth to the world, and I think this is largely because of two things. Firstly, it’s because of this lack of goal orientation (I wrote about this a little while back in relation to Far Cry 4). Secondly, it remains deeply ambiguous. 

I hadn’t played Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen when I played Soul Reaver so I didn’t know any of the mythos or background for it – it was just a big artificial skull lying in a desolate landscape and that just screamed “ATMOSPHERE!” at me. It’s like the ruins in the Forbidden Land in Shadow of the Colossus. They are powerful because you don’t know. Or like the subterranean Dwemer ruins in Skyrim, the real power comes from what isn’t there, not what is (for me actually, the Dwemer’s got increasingly less interesting the more I knew, the more my imagination was replaced by fixed mythos – which is a perennial problem with RPGs and the old school approach of chucking as much mythos at the screen as humanly possible, which is something – interestingly – the Bloodborne doesn’t bother with, but still creates a phenomenally powerful sense of place).

Likewise, The Forbidden Land in Shadow of the Colossus is amazing because it’s already gone, dead, there’s nothing you can do or understand. It draws its power from its ability to harness your imagination as a player because it doesn’t crowd it out. This is tried and tested in games – Bioshock relies on the gaps between the narrative beats – the lack of knowing exactly what has happened allows you to fill those gaps with your own interpretation. It’s the old horror adage that there’s nothing as scary as the monster you create yourself. Games might be awesome but they have nothing on player imagination.

Anyway, it was this absence and the power of inferred story rather than explicitly told story which led to a lot of the design decisions, particularly early on, in Rapture. The other major thing we wanted to look at – again as a replacement for the traditional model of linear story threads in a non-linear argument – was the idea of the discovered fragment that forces, or rather inspires, you to re-evaluate what you know about the world that’s been presented to you. This is trickier to achieve without resorting to linear narrative twists, which are a common enough tactic. 

It’s a filmic and novelistic conceit really, or at least, it’s an inheritance from those traditions, the reversal twists of films like Shymalan’s The Sixth Sense or novels like William Golding’s Pincher Martin. Whilst not going as far as that, most narratives do rest on the continuous re-evaluation of events and characters as our knowledge changes, but games tend to not be very good at this. It’s perhaps a result of the fact that most game dialogue still tends hover around the descriptive level, not pushing for more poetic or ambiguous language, so the subtleties get lost. This is exacerbated by the majority of game narrative being tied to pushing the player on, or providing a narrativised wrapping for actions. 

The oldest gameplay function of story being to create a framework for repetitive activity that if not actually cloaking the repetition, gives us a get-out suspension of disbelief architecture so we don’t get bored of just hunting down and pressing the Big Red Button for twenty plus hours at a time. This is something I wrote about a lot when I did my PhD on First Person Shooters – if you’re feeling strong and can bear to wade through a lot of academic stuff, there's a lot more detail there.

What I really love about game writing is rarely the core stuff, the plot, the main thread, which can be great (actually, it’s rarely great, but it can be great and not always where you expect it to be, like Wolfenstein: The New Order which is my favourite game writing of last year, and criminally under-rated), but in the incidental narrative fragments. Metro: Last Light has some brilliant vignettes that just fall along your path – I’ve talked recently about the “Can you catch cancer” dialogue between father and daughter fishing, and there’s also the brilliant diatribe by the old critic just outside the theatre in Bolshoi.  

These moments might not be plot twists or reveals but the affect your emotional mood – this is the real power of environmental storytelling or, as Rob Briscoe once called it “emotional signposting”. 

Game story is not just good at telling you what to do next, or providing a bandage for it, it’s absolutely terrific at creating an emotional architecture that you carry forwards, changing the way you relate to or even interpret the game. 

Argo’s death creates a different emotional tone for the final Colossus, even if you strip away everything else. It matters. Your own anger and sense of betrayal at the end of Red Dead Redemption give the final sequence meaning – and the really clever thing there is, if you are like me, you are really hacked off at the game for putting you in an unwinnable position so there’s a genuine anger being co-opted by the fiction.

So anyway. Here’s the two key components underpinning what I wanted to do with Rapture’s story:

1)      focus on inferred story by foregrounding absence and inspiring you to use the most powerful tool in our design kit – your imagination – to create a story together (rather than offering what usually transpire as meaningless, frustrating branches where I’m actually forcing you to accept my inevitably limited reading of events rather than letting your imagination flourish)

2)      play down a central linear plot that is all about solutions, or tied to goals or serving gameplay as a mechanic, and create a space for those small moments that really create depth and a rich, full capacity for emotional signposting to be the core of the experience.

In other words – here’s the basic premise. It’s your story, as much as mine. We’ve been talking about this as a community and industry for a long time now, how your actions throughout a game, if it does its job of connecting to you properly, create a narrative. What still is the normal model however is that you have to wedge your story into the spaces left by a plot that is like an unwieldy oil tanker wallowing in rough seas, as it tries to force you into the correct emotional tone to justify the story itself. This is really wrongheaded.

I’ve used the example of shooting Jen in Prey before, where the game was so desperately heavy-handed and clumsy in its attempts to make me feel sad, the whole thing became unintentionally comic. 

I had a similar experience at the end of Far Cry 4 when I took great pleasure in capping Sabal on the basis that I was so sick and tired of the hamfisted ‘oooh, but every moral decision you make has a counter-argument’ crap I’d been hosed down with for the last few hours. I sided with Pagan frankly, because he was only person in the ENTIRE COUNTRY who wasn’t serving up a moral lecture EVERY DAMN OPPORTUNITY HE GOT.

I wanted to write a story that left you free to form your own emotional connections that let the core of the experience be about how you felt about what was going on, that didn’t restrict your imagination to branches or a pre-defined slot, and where what you found and how you felt about it was given room to breathe. A genuine collaboration between the game and your imagination.
We’ll find out in just a couple of months whether or not I managed it, I guess.

Tips for Writers / Ubiblog Columns by Richard Dansky | Central Clancy Writer | on September 19, 2013 |

http://blog.ubi.com/the-write-stuff-september-2013-advice-for-writers/

Columns by Richard Dansky | Central Clancy Writer | on September 19, 2013 | 5 comments | in Blog Updates

The best resource you have as a writer is other writers.

For those of us of a certain age (which is to say, those of us old enough to remember typewriters, buy music on vinyl in a non-ironic way, and have fond memories of non-CGI Transformers), the image of the lone writer holds a romantic appeal – one that’s definitely echoed in the wider audience. The idea of a solitary wordsmith – locked in a room with only a typewriter and a blank page – plays to a certain fantasy of the artist, and for some forms of writing there’s some merit to it.

But even the most supposedly solitary forms of literary expression, be they novels or short stories or naughty limericks that include the word “Nantucket,” aren’t entirely solo efforts. There are editors involved. First readers. Copy editors. You get the idea. And that’s for forms that involve no other asset besides the words.
And believe me, it’s a good thing to get those other folks involved.

Most writers, in their more candid moments, will simultaneously admit to being their own worst critics and getting so wrapped up in what the writing should be that they can’t edit it properly. Having other eyes on your work is a tremendous help. Good readers and editors will mercilessly uncover the weak spots and the cheats in your narrative, will relentlessly expose places where you got stylistically lazy, and call out the places where you shortchanged the reader.

Also, if you’re lucky, they’ll catch the typos.

The trick is, of course, finding readers and editors who can do that for you, who can read what you’ve written and provide feedback that is not only not yours, but also actively useful.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to games.

 

Don’t Go It Alone

For a long time, most game writers were solitary creatures, whether they wanted to be or not. The role of narrative in game design wasn’t necessarily highly regarded, and a dedicated writer was viewed as a luxury. The idea of two – or more – on a single project was mind-blowing in its extravagance.

Good readers and editors will mercilessly uncover the weak spots and the cheats in your narrative [Digression: At the first Game Writers Conference, now the Game Narrative Summit, I walked into the conference room before Marc Laidlaw’s opening talk and my first thought as I scanned the room was My God, I’m not alone. Every other person I’ve talked to who was there that day has told me roughly the same story, often using the same words.]

Which meant that when a writer wanted feedback on something they were doing, they weren’t getting it from writers.

Now wait a minute, I can hear you saying. Most of the people who are going to play the game aren’t writers, so feedback from writers is kind of key there, Spartacus. And yes, that’s true – knowing that things are or aren’t working for an audience is vitally important. If a reader hates the protagonist, it doesn’t matter if they’ve memorized Strunk and White or not; that feedback is useful.

But.

What that feedback is not, is directed, which means it’s not necessarily phrased in a way that makes it actionable. I don’t like the main character is feedback; there’s a serious disconnect between the way you position your protagonist’s backstory and her diction in the dialog you’ve written is actionable.
Let’s rewind a bit. Imagine you’re an artist and you’re showing someone your work. Their response, quite reasonably, is that they don’t like it and something’s wrong with the way the sky looks. Now, this is useful feedback insofar as it A)suggests that the project needs more work and B)calls out a rough area that could use some improvement. However, what that feedback is lacking is technical criticism, using the language of the visual arts. There’s nothing there about composition, about color, about tools – in short, it’s not couched in the professional context that would allow the artist to use it as a clearer roadmap to iteration and improvement.

And just like art, or engineering, or any other discipline within game development, writing has its own professional and technical language. Here is where the romantic notion of creation-exclusively-through-inspiration breaks down; writing is first and foremost a craft, requiring sweat and iteration and technical skill.

Like any other craft, it has techniques and best practices and standards, and the people best equipped to give feedback that addresses the needs of the craft are – wait for it – other writers. They do the job, they speak the language. And just as artists get valuable feedback from other artists, and engineers get better feedback on their code from other engineers, some of the most directed, useful feedback a writer can get will come from another writer.

[This assumes, of course, that the writer in question is good at critique and isn’t a jerk. But for the sake of continued employment of all concerned, we’ll assume both.]

I’ll confess, the first time I was put in the harness long-term with another writer (while working on Splinter Cell: Double Agent), it was a weird feeling. I’d gotten used to working alone, to the point where I wasn’t sure how to interact. I’m fairly certain Taras Stasiuk, the other writer in question, felt something similar. This was something new and different and challenging. (Which is writerese for What if they don’t like my stuff?)

 Then something weird happened. I passed Taras some of my stuff. He passed me some of his. He sent back comments on mine, which were very useful, and I sent him a few on his. I didn’t agree with all of his notes, but we discussed the places where we disagreed, which made me lay out why I’d made those choices and what they implied, and that led to some new discussions about where the characters were coming from, and before you knew it A)we had a great working dynamic and – this is the important part – B)the work was better. And I’ve relished having other writers to work with ever since.

Writing is first and foremost a craft, requiring sweat and iteration and technical skillThis is, of course, old hat to folks who’ve worked in TV writers’ rooms or found that mythical beast, the useful writers’ group. But for too many writers out there, there isn’t or hasn’t been a professional peer they could turn to. That means learning to rely only on themselves, to set up perimeters around their work, and – after too many rounds of being told I would have done it this way, and you should totally add a few dinosaurs – learning to view feedback as not necessarily in the work’s best interest. Those are hard habits to break.

They’re worth breaking, though, and that ultimately circles us around to the original premise, namely, that the best resource you have as a writer in games is other writers. Specifically, other writers who know and understand the sort of work you’re doing and who can give you the targeted feedback that will allow you to improve specific aspects of that work. So if you’re lucky enough to be on a team, or in a studio with multiple writers, then the best thing you can do is use them. Share your work, and let them share theirs with you.

Because they’re the ones in the best position to give you specific feedback you can use to make your own writing better.

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Perhaps best known for his brief stint as the world’s leading authority on Denebian Slime Devils, Richard Dansky has been with Red Storm/Ubisoft since 1999. His first game was Shadow Watch and his most recent one is Splinter Cell Blacklist. In between he’s served on the advisory board for GDC’s Game Narrative Summit, helped found and develop the IGDA Game Writing SIG, and appeared on Gamasutra’s list of the top 20 game writers in 2009. He has also published six novels, one short fiction collection and a ton of tabletop RPG sourcebooks, which is why you should never tell him about your character. For a tantalizing taste of Dansky's inimitable insights, read his recurring column on the UbiBlog ("The Write Stuff") and follow him on Twitter: @RDansky