My answer to a possible client. Actually, I seemed to have worked for this person....

My answer to a possible client. Actually, I seemed to have worked for this person / group before; and they were unpleasant in the work last Aug and I had to arbitrate at Guru.com in early Sept last.

The same client I.D. invited me last Sept. 

 

I reminded them we were apparently in dispute.

The same client I.D. invited me again this month, we've been talking amiably. 

 

I've finally had to ask, if they have more than one person using the ID. Or the person is.... What?

My answer to this possible client, re-client? about not playing CYOA games:

CLIENT: ...but you don't seem to play at all.

NealeSourna's Writing-Naked.com:

Gaming is not calming to me. I find limited personal fun and interest in them. That goes for card and table games, even chess, as well. It's just the way my brain functions.

I bore easily with playing the system; but making the puzzle of a well-told story about great characters that a client can come back to again and again is of high interest, though.

Other game companies have not even asked about play activity before ordering, they answer my questions from my game research and guide me with their corrections to suit what they specifically need and want, especially for new genres and then publish the stories I crafted for them.

There are a LOT of different styles and platforms, after all. Story and how to entertain are the cross over between RPG, CYO, and other successfully published online or card games I've worked on.

Thank You,

Neale

Sunless Sea, 80 Days and the rise of modular storytelling

The last few years have seen the rise of modular storytelling, which offers players something akin to a collection of short stories tied together with character or theme. They offer a wealth of self-contained vignettes for players to interact with, and new ones can be continually added, increasing the breadth and richness of the narrative.

Inkle's 80 Days is the most prominent example of this, casting players as Phileas Fogg’s personal valet, Passepartout, as the two make their way around a steampunk Victorian globe. Each city on the trip offers its own self-contained story, occasionally spilling out into other locations, but by and large limited by geography to something that you discover and leave behind as you circumnavigate.

Failbetter Games’ Sunless Sea adopts a similar approach, casting you as the captain of a vessel in the game’s ‘Unterzee’, ranging out of a mostly submerged London to discover the islands of its unlit ocean, each with its own history and events.

This story-telling approach fundamentally alters the structure of the development process, both before and after release. “The main reason to build the game this way was because we didn’t know how big it was going to be” Jon Ingold of Inkle tells me. “To be frank, we didn’t know if Meg [Jayanth, 80 Days’ writer] would give up halfway! We needed to make sure that, whatever happened, we could pull the game together and deliver it. But it also meant that we could be very flexible about adding diversions, side-content and additional routes.”

"This story-telling approach fundamentally alters the structure of the development process, both before and after release."

Alexis Kennedy, the Creative Director on Sunless Sea, has similarly positive things to say about how modular storytelling impacted scope-management. 

“It gave us a natural pattern for production. We developed the game through Early Access, we pushed out monthly-ish updates, and each update had 3-5 islands on it, until the whole sea was populated. That’s much easier for players to understand than story-line based announcements.”

What this also means is that players are less likely to see the ‘seams’, so to speak. Often in a standard linear narrative there are difficulties including everything that was initially planned, leading to scenes, plot points and sometimes whole characters being cut from the final game. 

With a modular approach, those ‘missing’ pieces are almost completely isolated from the other pieces of the story, leading to their absence being very hard to feel, as a player moves through the game.

Talking about the iteration process with both developers, it’s clear that modular storytelling helped immensely when it came to playtesting and iteration, too. For 80 Days, all Inkle had to do was get one trip around the world complete and they essentially had a working prototype. From there, it was just about adding cities that branched out from that already established route, and the game grew from there. A complete experience that just became broader and richer as content accumulated. 

Similarly, Sunless Sea’s islands ‘worked’ as soon as there was one of them thrusting out of its Unterzee. “We had much more informed ideas on how island stories should work by the end of the process than we did at the beginning,” Kennedy tells me “We didn’t have to commit to one form from day one.”

This was an important point, especially for Failbetter, but also for Inkle; both companies brought in freelancers to help write their games, and while Jayanth for 80 Days played a very central role, Sunless Sea had fully 30% of its islands written by freelancers. But when those freelancers don’t have to worry about maintaining absolute consistency with an already established story, they can produce much more interesting work.

“The Fallen London universe is big, sprawling and complex in the way that only worlds built by thoroughgoing nerds are complex.” Kennedy continues. “By isolating stories on different islands, we allowed our freelancers much more liberty to experiment, to add new odd lore, and above all to use a voice that was very different from our well-established house voice. The polyphony of different voices - I think – really added to the sense of exploring foreign spaces in Sunless Sea, and gave us a range and breadth of perspectives that would have been impossible if we’d had to squeeze everyone into the same approach.

"The benefits of the approach extend past release, too, as both games have proven. Taken today, 80 Days and Sunless Sea are far more expansive than they were when they originally launched. In the case of the former, each new platform (Android and PC), gave the team at Inkle a good excuse to add a big chunk of new locations and stories, each more outlandish and unique than the last.

“The post-release updates were an unexpected benefit, and not something we had planned for in earnest.” Ingold tells me. “But when we came to do it, it was just like continuing our development process from where we left off. It’s been particularly satisfying to weave extended new storylines into the existing framework, such as the jewel thief plot that, once activated, follows you around the world wherever you go.”

Similarly, Sunless Sea has been receiving regular new geography to its eponymous body of water, but despite the already well-established lore that they created with their browser based Fallen London, writing a new island didn’t require an absurd amount of research; instead they just had to reacquaint themselves with one element, and then the isolation of the sea did the rest.

None of this is to say that modular storytelling is a cure-all for games’ narrative woes. It’s difficult to argue that having isolated vignettes is more emotionally rewarding than wholly bespoke cinematic experiences, but that is also not to say that they can’t deliver a satisfying narrative arc. Both 80 Days and Sunless Sea have created their own ways of delivering that arc, and they’ve both managed it, with varying degrees of success.

“The level of drama [is] proportional to longitude.” Ingold tells me. “So the soup is too hot in Europe, the soup is on fire in India, and the soup is talking to you about your death in South America.” This, combined with the natural drama that comes out of dwindling resources and health states, means that on the average trip in 80 Days, you’re running out of money and time by the time you’ve crossed the Pacific. 

That the stories themselves then escalate in drama and stakes means that the final leg of your journey should feel like a third act, so to speak.

Sunless Sea is less rigorously structured, so it can’t rely on the same tricks. “One of the things we got right was the strength of the core loops.” Kennedy explains. 

“You leave port; you cross the darkness; you find the lights on the far side, which you’ve been anticipating during your time in the darkness. You do that again and again. And then, in aggregate, you complete a much larger loop, where you leave London for the unknown; explore a series of ports, and then return home. That outgoing-homecoming loop, with the relevant music and visuals to signal your departure and return, is the heart of the game.”

This structure also has a knock-on effect that I hadn’t considered until Kennedy pointed it out to me; player choice, when framed as a choice of where to go rather than explicitly what to do, becomes something that’s both very interesting and exceedingly manageable on the part of the developer. 

Instead of having to limit choices to the world of morality, and all the design headaches that that naturally leads to, you instead need only to provide a fork in the road, and the player will feel the weight of that choice bereft of the trappings of ethics that often present a choice that’s barely a choice at all.

“For the player to feel that the journey has meaning,” Kennedy says. “They have to be free to decide where they’re going; for them to be free to decide where they’re going, the ports have to be untethered and modular. Players long for the opportunity for self-expression. Anything that validates and extends that self-expression is welcomed, and plays to the medium’s strengths. 

"At Failbetter, we talk about ‘fires in the desert’ as a model for our variety of storytelling. Imagine a desert, seen from above. Paths lead between the villages in the desert. When travelers cross the desert, you can clearly see the route they take, where they stop off, and so on. But what if night has fallen? Then, all you can see are the little fires in the village. Occasionally, travelers emerge from the darkness and sit by the fires for a while, and then move on. But the routes they take between those fires belong to them alone.”

In other words, the player provides the context, and the game provides the stories. While the developer can provide certain elements that influence the order with which the stories are experienced, ultimately the final call is with the player. Especially in Sunless Sea, there’s no guaranteeing that a player will go to this island or this island first. In 80 Days, the only constant is Paris; everything else is up for grabs.

“Just as in a film the story is told through the edit, [here] the story is told through the darkened paths between the fires.” Kennedy finishes his conversation with me by saying. “In cinematic terms, it’s a montage; we provide the shots, the player does the arrangement. In comic terms, Scott McCloud calls it ‘the blood in the gutters’ – the creative space that exists for the audience to instantiate the potential between specific events. There’s not much space in a traditional told story for that."

A Practical Guide to Game Writing By Darby McDevitt

A Practical Guide to Game Writing

By Darby McDevitt

[In this detailed Gamasutra feature, veteran game writer McDevitt (Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines, Where the Wild Things Are) outlines useful processes for collaboration between design, production and writing staff, from pre-production through production of a game.]

Video game writers are a frequently misunderstood sort. Even in the most ideal situations, we are often relegated to the status of mortar to the designers' bricks, slipping between the cracks to paste fun moments of gameplay together with a few lines of snappy, expository dialog.

Writers can be further marginalized by a lingering sense among our team members that we want nothing more than to stuff our games full of melodramatic, Metal Gear-sized cutscenes, burdened by a cast of dozens sputtering flowery lines from our 450 page script.

I'd like to steer us clear of this idea, one likely sustained by the apparent misconception that writing is fundamentally about arranging words into meaningful strings.

Clearly this isn't the case, but somehow a large contingent of the game industry has institutionalized this attitude anyway, and its effects can be found in an upsetting number of games released in the past few decades.

Just count the uneasy puns and strained moralizing spilling from your favorite avatar's mouth -- when a writer is hired to write a game, and is subsequently barred from having input into its pacing, its setting, the motivations of its characters, and its mood and tone, writers resort to the only weapons they have left: wry witticisms and declarative pop-philosophy.

The spirit of collaboration games are supposed to embody often seems well outside the writer's reach.

But the truth is, we don't want to hijack your game with pointless soliloquies, and we don't want to write a posturing Hollywood-style epic. Game writers simply want to help designers craft an immersive, interactive narrative experience. With or without dialog, with or without characters, we simply want the game to start somewhere interesting, climb its way over a few emotional peaks, and end somewhere even more interesting. We're good at that sort of thing too.

Not all games require a narrative arc, of course, but it's a rather common feature of quite a few mainstream console titles, and these days if an actual writer is going to pen the script of one of these games -- as opposed to the lead designer or the producer -- some Very Important People probably have a Very High Opinion of the property.

But this doesn't happen as frequently as you might think. Consider yourself blessed if you have actually seen a game writer in the wild, for they remain one of those elusive, added-expense luxuries that many game producers -- their eyes always on their margins -- believe they can do without. And in many cases, it humbles me to say, they're right.

The average game-playing public will suffer a deluge of poor storytelling if a game is knock-down, drag-out fun. But a great story with terrible gameplay will die a fast and lonely death on the shelf. I respect and support this pecking order. Gameplay must come first -- this is the golden rule.

However, if some form of narrative happens to play a design-critical role in your proposed game, it is vitally important to treat it exactly as you would any other design element, not as a separate discipline. So if your team has taken that bold extra step to build a narrative-driven game, there are a number of precautions you can take to accommodate the writer and prevent the story (and your writer) from getting buried beneath endless revisions of your GDD.

First and foremost among these is to make one simple conceptual change: treat your writer as an associate designer. Involve her in the design process from the outset. Even if she is not an experienced technical designer, a good writer can be instrumental in helping inspire unique moment-to-moment experiences that provide gameplay variety while integrating seamlessly into the narrative.

Again, writing is not just about clever sentences -- it can also be about narrative shape, motivation, and pacing, i.e. what you do, why you do, and when you do.

Most of my favorite narrative-driven games contain very little dialog in them at all -- Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Flashback, Out of this World -- but even these titles are "written" in the sense that they have a clear set of emotional shifts, tonal changes, and meaningful moment-to-moment events that compound into emotional pay-offs.

When writers and designers band together and discuss a game's story, characters, dramatic set-pieces, and settings in parallel with ideas about the game mechanics and levels, the team will begin to find exciting and creative ways of conjoining the two disciplines into a more unified experience.

Unfortunately, this synergy can be difficult to find, especially in the trenches of third-party development where the average dev cycle is less than a year. When schedules are tight, producers and designers often maintain a slight distance from writers, imagining we are off "doing our thing" while they do theirs.

But our thing is their thing too. Writing is design. We are both building a world from scratch, after all. So if you empower a writer to absorb and occasionally contribute design ideas, she will carry on with a solid understanding of how the narrative elements contribute to (or detract from) the overall game experience.

---

Before Writing Begins

For a clearer picture of this process, let's pinpoint a game writer's most critical early-milestone tasks, beginning with a few pre-production goals. In these early weeks, it's easy to get drunk on a thousand and one ephemeral ideas -- by all means do -- but you'll need to conclude this reverie with a few tangible results:

High Level Narrative Summary. During preproduction, the design team should work directly with the writer to concoct a brief (one to four pages) high-level summary of the primary story. Think of it as your elevator pitch: make it succinct and snappy. This short piece is probably the only story document most of the team will ever read, so it should be clear and compelling.

Do this early, and get the client to sign off on it as soon as humanly possible. Read that previous sentence again. Get quick client sign-off every step of the way. Failure to guide your client to a swift agreement on the story may result in endless misery for the remainder of the project.

Major Locations / Levels. This is one area where writers can really get sore if they are left out of the conception process. Designers frequently forge ahead with level concepts and designs without consulting the writer, not taking into account the huge role that setting plays in crafting an interesting narrative.

In video games, place is often more important than character, so this is doubly important. If the writer, designers, and artists band together to nail down the scope of the game's environments, and get a rough idea of how much is needed and how much is feasible, everyone will walk away happy.

This cuts all ways: writers need to know that they'll have the locations they need to tell a good story, while the artists and designers will want to make sure the writer is asking for content that is relevant to gameplay.

Obviously this "relevance threshold" varies with the size of the project, but on small projects with short schedules getting this right can mean the difference between environment artists going home at 6 pm or 6 am the next morning.

Once production begins, the writers work ramps up. This is the point where the entire design team needs to function as a single unstoppable force (for good):

A Detailed Story Outline. With the narrative arc complete, it's time to produce an exquisitely detailed story document, complete with scene descriptions and gameplay objectives. The amount of detail in this doc will vary according to how much the story influences the design, but it should be as thorough as possible. In any case, generating a detailed outline will give you an early understanding of just what sort of game you're making, and how reliant on the writer you will be for design iteration down the road.

In the case of heavily plot-driven games, the design challenges will stem directly from the story -- e.g. rescue a prisoner, assassinate a guard, courier a package. For non-linear games like RPGs this document should be incredibly dense and detailed. For less structured games, the writer's direct impact on the design may be minimal. Understanding this balance ahead of time is critical.

Story Presentation Plan. How, exactly, is the game's story being told, and who is responsible for telling it? Do you have pre-rendered cutscenes or in-engine cutscenes? Who will be putting these scenes together? Perhaps you have no cutscenes whatsoever, and would like to tell your story on-the-fly. Is this feasible? Possible?

Figure it out early.

Nothing is more frustrating for a writer than seeing a project scoot forward without anyone having a firm understanding about how the story will be told, since this will affect what she intends to write.

Estimated Cut-Scene Breakdown. If your game does contain cutscenes or animated in-game sequences of any kind, it is crucial to estimate their number very early on to get a good sense of the work to come. If you have a detailed story outline, this should be easy. On tight projects it also helps to determine ahead of time what the expected intricacy and quality of each scene is so your teams can allocate their resources appropriately.

Characters. As you generate your detailed story arc, you'll need to make a clear list of the number of characters needed. Who are these people, and what roles do they play in both the narrative and the gameplay? Which are simple NPCs? Which are robust, interactive characters? Which are bosses? Mission givers? Shop keepers? Tutorial mentors? Et cetera.

The artists will be generating all character models and animations, and they'll want to know the scope as soon as possible. If you spring 15 new NPCs on your artists halfway through the project, they will shank you in the break room -- believe it. Getting the character scope nailed down early will also help you determine how much "incidental dialog" the game will require, for these throwaway lines frequently take up as much space in the script as the main story dialog. This is no trivial amount, so keep close track of it.

Sort Out Your Text Database. This can be a tedious task, but it is crucial to sort out your text pipeline very early, and get your tools up and running. The longer you wait, the more you will hate yourself. Some games have complex or esoteric text requirements -- non-linear conversation systems, for instance -- so it is critical that you organize your data cleanly and clearly.

Also, take a moment to decide how the script will be delivered. Not all writers are familiar with the esoteric architecture of your text database, so if your writer is delivering the script in Word or Final Draft, you're going to need a pipeline to handle its transfer.

---

When Writing Begins

Once your game's foundation has been laid and the team is ready to start production, the actual writing can begin. This is the fun part. Writers love to write, but without constant contact with the design team, they run the risk of giving you more script than you need, or a script you don't need at all. This wastes everyone's time and makes the writer sad when you have to tell him, "as beautiful as they are, your 100 part limerick-cycle has no place in Chaz Dastard's Intergalactic Star Safari 2: Misremembered Legacy".

Nip your writer's graphomania in the bud by establishing clear boundaries. This should be simple if the writer has been involved in the design from the beginning, since all parties involved will understand the extent of the game's writing needs. Keep track of everything before it needs to be written, as it is being written, and after it has been written. A game writer without defined boundaries or direction -- especially an off-site, contracted writer -- runs the risk of writing something as sensible and useful to your game as Andre Breton's Soluble Fish.

Script, First Draft. Between the greenlight and first milestone, the writer should be busy as hell. On short projects, ideally she should have a finished first draft of the script by the first production milestone, as this will help the level design process move smoothly.

On longer projects, the writer and level designers will be working back and forth quite a bit to make sure neither one lets a detail slip, edging ever closer to a first draft.

Demand Story and Script Sign-Off, Again. Be crystal clear with your client: the script needs to be read and comments forthcoming as soon as possible. Of all the client-side headaches I have ever encountered, this is the most painful.

Many clients make the mistake of believing the script is the single most important aspect of their game, and therefore spend months and months poring over details that contribute very little to the final game experience. Delays of this sort can hold up level designers and cutscene artists in the most asinine ways imaginable, wasting time that cannot be easily recovered.

One little discussed benefit to hiring an experienced writer is the fact that, relative to coders and artists, good writers work incredibly fast. Text is cheap and takes very little time to edit and revise. But this advantage is of no use to anyone if writers aren't aware that anything needs revising.

I have lost count off the number of times a seemingly innocuous level design change or map layout has rendered a chunk of my dialog obsolete. When I have not been made aware of this chance, the resulting headache cannot be cured by earthly medicine.

Darby: Listen to this gem, guys: "Sally forth to yonder Black Forest, stalwart Wayfarer, for there you shall find a crystal dagger of such rare-"

Producer Person: Ah, Darby, sorry... the Black Forest was scrapped and replaced by a Walmart. We should have told you.

Darby: Ah... okay, hold on. Where's my pen?

Woe betide the team that discovers this incongruity only after the actors have recorded all of their dialog. Again, keep the writers and designers partnered at all times.

Into Production

Now you're well into production, and the heavy lifting has begun. If you have nailed all the earlier tasks, the rest of production should proceed smoothly, barring any client interference. This is supposed to happen only if you've been naughty, but the unfortunate truth is not so black and white.

There are more than a few imposing clients out there who, for understandable if not always sensible reasons, believe the story can be endlessly revised up until Beta. So be wary, keep calm, and carry on.
At some point during production, the script will be finished and the writer will feel like she is nearing the finish line far before the rest of the team. Don't let this illusion persist. There is still a bit of work your writer can help you with:

Casting. If you are recording with actors (and who isn't, these days?) now is the time to figure out who will be making your characters speak. On small projects that don't have an official story director, the writer can be of immense help. It's crucial to get your casting done well in advance of your recording date. Actors have hectic schedules and you'll find all the best ones rather busy if you try to snag a few the week of your recording session.

Final Script. As difficult as it is, the writer will have to stop tweaking her dialog and settle on something. Of course, it's a good idea to encourage the writer to streamline what she can. The script may be laden with timely wit and wisdom, but it is still, above all else, a game script and if it tests a player's patience, that can be a problem.

More to the point: the longer the script, the more time it will take the cinematics team to craft the cutscenes or scripted sequences. So when the writer buckles down and kills her darlings early, it keeps everyone from doing superfluous work.


Voice-Over Recording Sessions. Some writers make great VO directors; some don't. But all good ones should be able to re-write their dialog on-the-fly, so make sure your scrivener is available for the recording sessions. When she hears her dialog spoken aloud for the first time, she's probably going to want to change it. Allow some leeway, but don't let her get carried away. Try to limit changes only to what is egregious or erroneous.

Once you hit Alpha, the writer's job gets a lot easier. But there are still a number of good reasons to keep one around, locked in a cabinet somewhere, just in case.

Proofreading. Writers should never copyedit and proofread their own work, it's true. This is a fact that holds doubly true in the game industry where the volume of text written is often comparable to that of a novel. On the other hand, it's rare to find excellent proofreaders hiding in the QA department, so make sure as many eyes are on the text as possible, including the writer's.

Non-Dialog Text Revisions. It can take a long time to nail down all that tutorial, database, and menu text your game has accrued slowly but consistently over the span of the production. Lucky for you, text is cheap to implement and fix, and is quite safe to alter even up to the last minute (provided you're still proofreading).

And with that, your writer's job is finished and your game is nearly complete. Well done, folks. Take a breath and clean your white board. The whole process starts again in five... four... three... two... one...

Return to the full version of this article
Copyright © 2015 UBM Tech, All rights reserved

Steam Is Getting An Uncensored Sex Game by Patricia Hernandez RE: Steam 9/01/15

http://kotaku.com/steam-is-getting-an-uncensored-sex-game-1728006494?utm_campaign=Socialflow_Kotaku_Facebook&utm_source=Kotaku_Facebook&utm_medium=Socialflow

Kindred Spirits on the Roof is a game about two ghosts who are eternally bound to a school—and the only way they can finally rest in peace is if they get to bone each other. Really.

Steam has gotten a number of erotic games like this over the past year, many of which have been tweaked so they don’t show nudity on Valve’s service. Valve has not only pulled sex games from Steam, they’ve also straight up said that “Steam has never been a leading destination for erotic material.” But according to game developers Liar Soft, Kindred Spirits will have zero censorship. It might be the first erotic game on Steam that can claim this.

“This is monumental news for the industry as a whole,” Kouryuu, translator on the title, wrote on Manga Gamer. “Everything will be open and up-front with this release; no off-site patch or workarounds.”

Here’s how the game is described on its Manga Gamer page:

Kokonotsuboshi Girls’ Academy of Commerce, a school built on the site of an old castle, nicknamed “Shirojo.” One day, the timid Toomi Yuna, who had been living a quiet life at this school, suddenly met two ghosts on the roof during lunch:

Enoki Sachi, who died in an accident before the war, and Nagatani Megumi, who died of illness 30 years ago. The two “kindred spirits” died with unrequited feelings in their hearts, met, and fell in love. They ardently wish to experience their “first time” together before their eternal rest.

...But they don’t know how.

The two who are bound to the site of the school enlist Yuna to help them create more “yuri” couples at the school so that they can glean some sexual insight from observing them, and to assist the girls struggling with their hidden feelings.

Yes, it’s a yuri game. 

“Seeing frank depictions of same-sex relationships welcomed on such a major gaming platform is a true testament to the open-mindedness of our society and the growing desire for mature entertainment that people of all walks of life can enjoy,” Kouryuu wrote.

While doing away with censorship is good news, it’s unclear whether or not Valve has actually changed its policy on erotic games, or if Kindred Spirits is simply an exception to the rule. We have reached out to Valve about this, and will update this post if we hear back.

Goliath Games is looking for innovative skill and action tabletop games.

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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

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

---

 

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.