How an experienced game developer looks at the story development process:

[from Bob Bates, "The Art & Business of Selling Games"]

STORYTELLING

When our industry was young, storytelling was the exclusive province of adventure games. Then role-playing games appeared on the scene, and they, too, had strong storytelling elements. Now we find story in many genres, including action, real-time strategy, and sims.

But if you?re going to tell a story with your game, it?s important for you to understand the fundamentals of how tales are told. Traditional authors deal with plot, setting, and character. As game designers, so must we.

PLOT: THE THREE-ACT STRUCTURE

The basic structure of a good plot was discovered a long time ago. It?s called the Three-Act Structure. Aristotle first identified it in his Poetics, which gives it the kind of halo that sometimes makes ideas unapproachable. What he?s saying is very simple, though. A story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

THE BEGINNING

A story begins at the moment your hero has a problem, and that?s the moment you should begin your game. Many writers make the mistake of starting their story before the beginning. They open with a long-winded introduction that sets up the world. They recount events long past, fill in the details of the hero?s ancestry, and finally, when they think that the player has seen enough to appreciate their special creation, they get around to kicking off the action.

This is all wrong.

If you pick up a best-selling book at the newsstand and turn to the first page, you will find yourself in the middle of an action scene. Chances are, the author will start with bullets flying and bombs exploding, and only later will he pause to catch his breath and explain who these people are and how they came to be in danger.

First, he gets your attention. Then, he fills in the backstory.

That?s how you should begin your game. Start with a small piece of gameplay where the player doesn?t have to know much but has an easy task to perform. He?ll pick up a lot on his own without any formal exposition from you. The mere look-and-feel of the environments will introduce the player to the world. By putting a simple obstacle in his path and forcing him to deal with it, you?ve already begun the process of storytelling.

In Abe?s Odyssey, the true beginning of the story is when Abe learns that they?re planning to make meat out of him. In Unreal, it?s when the ship crashes and you have to get out. In Half-Life, it?s when you learn that something has gone terribly wrong at the Black Mesa site.

Think about the opening scene of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.

A mysterious figure in a hat emerges from a jungle to stand before a waterfall. He puts together two pieces of paper to form an old map. Without any dialog, this instantly establishes character, setting, and goal. Here is an adventurer in a remote wilderness searching for treasure. This is the beginning. The hero has a problem. How does he get the treasure?

In the next few minutes, he flicks a gun away from a man with his bullwhip, enters a cave full of poisonous spiders, puts his hand in a shaft of light to set off a booby-trapped wall of pointed spikes, swings on his whip over a bottomless pit, uses a torch to spring a paving-stone trap, swaps a weighted bag of sand for the golden idol, and then runs for his life to outsprint that huge rolling boulder.

In each of these cases, the hero is presented with threats or obstacles that are appropriate to the exotic setting. In each case, he uses the material at hand to overcome the problem.

The job of the game designer is exactly that, to create threats and obstacles that are appropriate to the story and the setting and to give the player the means to solve those problems in a way that makes sense within the story?s genre.

The best designers do this from the very start of the game.

THE MIDDLE

When Indiana Jones emerges from the cave and the bad guy takes the idol from him, you have the end of the first act and the beginning of the second. Now is the time to fill the player in on some of the hero?s background and to set his actions in a larger context. We learn that Indiana Jones is not just a fortune hunter ? he is an archeologist with much nobler motives.

If you map out the middle of the story on a piece of paper, it should look like a series of ascending arcs. The player knows what his long-term goal is, and you let him make progress towards that goal, but every time he overcomes one obstacle, you put another in its place ? not just any obstacle, though.

In the best stories, the hero has to work his way through inner conflicts and overcome them. Only when he has done so will he be ready to go on and achieve his final goal.

As a game maker, of the hundreds of obstacles you can design to put before your hero, you should pick the ones that reveal his inner workings. They should expose his faults and fears. In conquering these challenges, he is not only making progress towards his external goal but also conquering his inner problems ? he is experiencing character growth.

THE END

The story ends when the hero solves his problem.

The third act should be like the completion of a symphony, where the many musical themes introduced along the way are brought together in harmony at the end.

In your game, after your hero overcomes his own problems, he is now ready to face the external embodiment of those problems, which usually appears in the form of the Ultimate Bad Guy.

In the best of games, it is revealed that this Ultimate Bad Guy is the source of many of the obstacles your hero has encountered in the course of the game.

This only makes sense. For any story to be interesting, it must have conflict. There must be something or someone who does not want your hero to succeed. To face off against that someone at the end of the story and whip his butt is a very satisfying experience.

A simple tip for remembering this three-act structure is an old writer?s maxim: In the first act, you get your hero up a tree. In the second act, you throw rocks at him. In the third act, you get him down.

SETTING

As an industry, setting is one of the things we do best, so we don?t need to spend too much time examining it here. Our artists are constantly creating new and evocative images, and as tools and hardware improve, game graphics just keep getting better.

However, setting is not just a physical location ? it?s the whole world you create in which to tell your story. For a fantasy game, this can include magical creatures who live in the natural world before the age of machinery. For a science fiction game, you can create a distant planet subject to unusual laws of physics.

In creating the basic rules of your universe, you should invent only one major ?what if?? and everything else should follow logically from that. What if you discover a hidden organization that seeks world domination (Deus Ex)? What if government experiments at a secret facility have opened a transdimensional rift (Half Life)?

After you have established this major premise, people will go along for the ride, but only if you make everything else as real as possible and avoid contradictions. John Gardner writes in The Art of Fiction, ?Vivid detail is the life blood of fiction ? moment by moment authenticating detail is the mainstay not only of realistic fiction but of all fiction.?

One of the most celebrated sequences in recent games is the opening movie of Half-Life. As you take the tram ride down into the belly of the Black Mesa facility, you are presented with a continuous stream of images and sounds that authoritatively place you in time and space. Through the use of consistent and concrete detail, the game draws you into its fictional world while the real world around you dissolves, unnoticed.

So choose a setting that will visually entertain the player. Let your artists supply a stream of fresh backgrounds and creatures. By making your setting vivid and consistent, you will transport the player into the waking dream that is at the heart of all fiction.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Characters are the most fascinating part of stories. Events themselves are interesting only in so far as they give us insights into people. That is why you always hear that there are only seven basic plots, yet millions of stories somehow are told. It?s because we?re always interested in the people to whom those plots happen.

Plot without character is about as interesting as a shopping list ? it?s just one thing happening after another. The poet said, ?Man is the measure of all things,? or, put a less elegant way, ?What people are interested in is people.?

Many designers don?t want to create a strong central character because they believe the player?s own personality should take center stage. Beginning with the amorphous you of the Infocom games, some games sketch in the barest outline of the hero and leave it to the player to fill out that outline with his own idiosyncrasies.

This might not be wise. Successful games (from both a commercial and an artistic point of view) frequently have heroes with well-defined personalities. Players seem quite content to step into the shoes of characters such as Duke Nuke?Em, Lara Croft, and James Bond without trying to impose their own personalities on the character. Just as movie audiences identify with action heroes on the screen, gameplayers revel in taking on the hero?s personality for a few hours.

Creating one of these memorable characters from scratch is hard, but the rewards (again, both commercial and artistic) are great. One tip for designing such a hero lies in a quote from the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of Our Disorder, in which author John E. Mack writes:

A vital ingredient in hero-making is the resonance that the follower finds between the conflicts and aspirations of his own and those he perceives in the person he chooses to idealize? The hero needs to appear to have mastered his struggle to achieve his ideals in such a way that an identification with him seems to offer the possibility of similar mastery to the follower.

This is great stuff. As you think about creating your hero character, try to find problems that we all have as individuals, and let us fantasize through your hero that we can actually solve them.

NPCs can also fill an important role, one frequently filled by secondary characters in films. They can reveal emotions and reactions that the hero can?t show. How often have we seen the over-matched , steely-eyed hero face down the evil villain without so much as a tremor, while off to the side, the locals cower with knuckles between teeth and eyes wide in horror? This technique allows you, the storyteller, to instill in the gameplayer emotions that you might not otherwise be able to create. Steven Spielberg is the master at this, and it?s something to keep in mind when creating secondary characters.

CHARACTER GROWTH

In traditional literature, the worth of a story is often measured by character growth. What changes are wrought on the hero by the misfortunes that fall his way? What does he learn? How does his approach to life alter? How does what happened to him turn him into a different person?

However, in some stories, the hero doesn?t change at all. He remains the same throughout, bending events to his will. James Bond is a perfect example. He is the same suave, debonair secret agent at the end of the movie that he was when it began. We can count on him to be so the next time as well. In fact, if he were not, we?d be disappointed!

Currently in our games, what little character growth we do is generally accomplished through statistics. Our avatars acquire more strength, experience, skill, and so on, as they move through the game. Seldom do we have the opportunity to move beyond such trivialities.

This is so because of our medium. Character development in linear media is accomplished by putting people in stressful situations and showing who they truly are by the choices they make. But in a game, the choices lie in the hands of the player! This brings us to the problems created by interactivity.

INTERACTIVITY

The demands of interactivity present a special challenge to the game designer who would be a storyteller. In traditional media, the author controls the story , and the audience passively absorbs the choices he has made. But in games, there is a direct conflict between the freedom we must allow the player and the linearity necessary to any well-constructed story.

The solution is to create areas in which the player has freedom and then to string these areas together in a linear series.

In RPGs, this frequently is organized into geographical areas or missions. In adventure games, it means giving the player more than one set of puzzles to work on at a time. In action games, it translates into levels.

The idea is to present the player with a limited challenge that somehow fits into the larger story. How the challenge is met will vary from player to player, depending on his particular abilities and wits. What actually happens can vary wildly from player to player. But what the storyteller can detect is the moment that all the tasks have been completed and the challenge has been met. That?s the moment to slip in some more storytelling ? perhaps through a new set of mission instructions or maybe through a cut scene that shows the results of the level?s action and pushes the player towards his next challenge.

As a limited example, think of an area in which the player must reach an inn by sundown, but to do so, he must cross a well-guarded river. The player can succeed by swimming across, swinging on a vine, or defeating the troll guarding the bridge, but the important thing is that he triumph over adversity and live to the end of the day. The player has filled in certain details of the story, but the main threads have stayed in the hands of the author, who says, ?Yes, it was your individual ingenuity that got you to the inn, but now a new set of monsters is preparing to attack you tomorrow, and meanwhile, here is what has been happening back at the castle.?

This technique is applicable across many game genres. With this linear series of open environments, the player interacts with the game in meaningful ways, yet the author retains control of the story.

CUT SCENES

Cut scenes are mini-movies. As the game-designer, you get to be screenwriter, director, and cameraman all rolled into one. With those roles come responsibilities. Everyone who plays your game has grown up watching television and movies, and each player will have internal quality benchmarks for dialog, camera placement, acting, and action. If you do not deliver professional-quality work, the player will roll his eyes and the reviewers will skewer you.

Each cut scene should have specific goals, whether it is to develop character, introduce a new environment, advance the plot, or set out mission goals for the section to come. When you design the scene, you should do so in collaboration with professionals (usually writers and artists), who can help you accomplish your goals with the most economy. This has double benefits. Not only will the player appreciate your professionalism in moving the story along, but you will also help your budget by avoiding long-winded scenes that ramble along at great expense and even greater boredom.

SCRIPTED EVENTS

Scripted events are brief sequences within levels that are usually triggered by something the player does (although they can be time based as well). Whether snippets of dialog or small bits of action, they can be very effective in imparting backstory, building character, or redirecting the player towards new goals. Probably the premier example of the use of scripted events in an action game is the early portion of Half-Life.

DIALOG

Good dialog sounds nothing like regular speech. In real life, we pause and stumble and repeat ourselves. In a movie or a game, dialog has to be better than that. It has to be crisp and to the point, without a word wasted. You can?t waste the player?s time with a single extra word.

Furthermore, every line of dialog must do double duty. It must both advance the story and develop character.

Here are a few quick tips for writing dialog.

Never have a character say in dialog something that the player already knows. It?s a waste of the player?s time.

More subtly, never give information to the player by having one character tell another something the other character already knows. Nothing reveals the amateur status of the writer as much as a line such as, ?Well, as you already know, Lord Veldran, the spell can only work if all three of the magical stones are in place??

Remember, when writing dialog, less is more. Keep it short.

THE HERO?S JOURNEY

In the end, your game should be your hero?s story. Sure, you have to be careful not to screw up what makes a good game in the first place, but you can still make the gameplay experience even more interesting by wrapping a good story around it.

Each genre is restrictive ? we?ve got conventions we must observe, and it might seem that there is little room for creativity ? but they are certainly less hidebound than the genre of the Elizabethan ?Revenge Tragedy,? which is what Shakespeare was faced with when his producer told him to sit down and bat out the play he eventually called Hamlet.

But it?s not good enough to understand how to tell a story; you also need a story worth telling.

Don?t sell this short. You can?t just say, ?Hey, it would be cool to have this villain kidnap the hero?s sister and now he has to go rescue her.? This can be where you end up, but it should not be where you start.

Where do you start?

You are the author. Your job is to have a vision, a purpose, a greater truth. You have the job of any artist. You need to think of yourself as a hero ? not a Lawrence of Arabia-kind of hero but a Joseph Campbell-kind of hero. Every author and every artist must make what Campbell calls the hero?s journey. You must step outside conventional society or philosophy and look back at the way things really are, or perhaps the way you think they should be. You must go beyond the boundaries of the known and accepted in search of something new and important.

What you acquire on the Journey is the Hero?s Prize. It is that thing which only you know. Many of you have probably already taken that journey. You have a vision of your own, a personal slice of reality, something that you know in your heart is true, even though the rest of the world doesn?t believe it.

When you find it, you must bring it back to us so that we will all benefit from it. That is what a hero does. That is what you must do.

If you take that journey, that piece of knowledge will become imbedded in your story. Not in a preachy way ? it will just be there.

So before you sit down to write a story game, think hard about that thing which only you know. If you do, it will subtly inform all the design decisions you make in your game. It will be the thing that sustains your interest across the eighteen months to two years you will be working on the project. Eventually, it will become the thing that your game is about. And that story will be one worth playing.

Serious Games

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Breeze presentation on Visualization

Storytelling Outline: Creating the Narrative

Bob - Storytelling

CUT SCENES

Links - Week 6

Monday, October 8, 2007

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Course offering details_Jean Marc Gauthier

Friday, October 5, 2007

First webcast...

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