The talk was fun!

 

I'm giving a talk!

 

I'm giving a talk tomorrow at Cinesite in Montreal about "What Game Devs Should Know about Narrative." (You can still buy a ticket! 5 places left.) We're going to play a round of Ludonarrative Resonance. As I've mentioned before, this is a game where you draw cards for Player Character, Situation, Goal and Mechanic, and you have to make up a story that works within those parameters.

Tomorrow's cards are:

Player character

• An apologetic Englishman
• A beginning witch
• A misunderstood monster
• An addicted detective
• An escaped android
• A sulky teenager
• A new vampire
• An orphan girl

Situation

• A building with a secret
• Zombie apocalypse
• A decayed city in a faithless empire
• Paris in the 1920s, sort of
• Alien invasion
• A forgotten town
• Renaissance Florence
• Civil war

Goal

• Escape
• Break the cycle
• Bring your beloved back
• Bring back the Old Gods
• Infiltrate the Organization
• Get home in time
• Reveal the Truth
• Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, etc.

Mechanic

• Deck Builder
• Time Loop
• Romance Sim
• City Builder
• Rhythm
• Shmup
• Metroidvania
• Roguelike
• Soulslike
• Crafting

I did this a while ago with a large group, and one person kinda monopolized the conversation, so this time I'm making teams of four, and each team can pitch their idea.

Additional rules are: 

• you can interpret the words on your card however you like
• if you absolutely hate your combination of cards, you may throw out ONE card and replace it with something better that you made up.

What do you think? What cards am I missing?

I didn't come here for an argument

 I was listening to Julius Kuschke's Narrascope 2019 talk about interactive dialogue systems, and it occurred to me that we don't see enough dialogue systems where you get at least one of the options almost as soon as the other person starts talking. Because, let's face it, people do not listen very well. Sometimes they're just waiting until the other person stops talking so they can say what they planned to say all along, and some don't wait. 

Firewatch gives you dialogue options before your dispatcher is done talking. But the conversations are fairly slow and thoughtful. It's not really the cut and slash of repartee.

Obviously, this sort of system requires a bit more programming (gasp!) and the conversations have to be designed more carefully. But it does eliminate those dreadful pauses that kill the momentum in most conversations with NPCs. 

I'd love to see a dialogue system where individual responses pop onscreen as the NPC's dialogue triggers them, so your "yeah yeah yeah whatever here's what I want" response might pop up immediately, while an emotional response to the NPC's heartbreaking dilemma might require listening to their whole speech. 

What would be superfun would be the occasional dialogue option that the NPC interrupts, but that's probably too much to ask. 

Conversational Combat?

Dialogue is a core narrative delivery system in most narrative games. However, games rarely offer players dialogue choices that matter. Cutscenes can be lovely, but the player can’t interact with them, just watch and enjoy them. Branching dialogue is normally only informative – the player can find out various bits of information about the world and the characters if they are so inclined. 

At a basic level, dialogue choices are expensive because you have to record and animate content that the player may never see. Producers hate that. 

Game designers often want to minimize dialogue, especially cutscenes. After all, as you’ve probably heard before, “It’s not a movie, it’s a game.” 

Early on in the development of South of Midnight, our creative director insisted that he only wanted 1% of the game to be cutscenes. (What he wanted those scenes to do seemed like it was going to take much more than 1% of the game, and in fact the game ended up more like 8%-10% cutscenes.)

Informative branching dialogue involves more button-pressing than cutscenes. But it usually requires no thought on the part of the player. You can just click through as many dialogue options as you like, and at the end of it, you’ll get a new objective in your journal.

If you’re lucky, you might be able to sell your colleagues on purely expressive choices, where you can choose what your character says, but only so long as it has no effect on anyone but the player. In Kentucky Route Zero, for example, dialogue choices are there solely to allow you to define your instance of the main character. You can pick any dialogue option, but only you will ever care about it. This can go awry. In a certain well-liked RPG, I picked all the nastiest responses. NPCs never reacted negatively to them. They certainly didn't tell me to eff off and come back when I had a better attitude. I felt betrayed and stopped playing the game.

(By the way, I'm not against purely expressive dialogue choices. I pitched an expressive dialogue system on a game I was narrative directing. The main character could say her dialogue angrily, sarcastically, or hurt. The next NPC line would respond to that emotion. The idea got cut for scope.)

The shame of it is that good dialogue is dramatic. My definition of a drama is that at least one, but hopefully both characters are asking the other for something, and aren't getting it, and don't want to give the other person what they are asking for. Dramatic dialogue is dialogue where someone is trying to get something from someone else by talking. The scene is over when they get it, or give up on getting it.

A dramatic scene is, therefore, a form of combat. Each character can win or lose the conversation. 

But it is almost never a form of combat in games. Why? Because we feel that it’s too much to ask of the player to listen to the NPC and make their dialogue choices accordingly. I mean, what happens if they fail the conversation? No, no, better to put it in a cutscene or an in-game scene you can’t fail.

It’s possible to find examples of “conversational combat,” but they’re rare. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided gives you five conversations you can succeed or fail at. For example, you need to get into the morgue in the police station. You can talk a desk cop named Wayne Haas into letting you in there. 

You succeed by realizing he’s motivated by guilt for killing a fifteen-year-old kid pursuant to an order that Adam Jensen, the hero, refused to do. But you can’t just take one consistent tack in the conversation. Depending on what he says, your best choice may be to absolve him of his guilt, confront him with it, or plead for him to cut you some slack.

The "social boss battles" in DE:MD aren't easy. I beat Wayne Haas, but there was at least one I did not beat. .

Deus Ex as a franchise is famous for giving players multiple ways to accomplish missions, so while you can fail the conversation with Wayne, it does not block your progression. You can still sneak into the morgue through the air vents, or, y'know, simply slaughter everyone. 

But this is not an ideal model for games. Offering the player two separate ways to do something is expensive. It’s the sort of thing that will get cut when you inevitably scope the game down. 

But if we adopt a different paradigm, it’s simple to provide dialogue choices that don’t require any branching narrative. That is to treat conversation as just another form of combat.

We expect combat sequences to challenge us. If there is no way to fail a combat mission, it’s not a game, it’s a walking simulator. What happens when you get killed in a combat mission? You go back to a checkpoint.

If we adopt this paradigm, then what happens when you fail a conversational combat? No problem. You go back to a checkpoint. You can try a slightly different or a very different strategy. You can avoid the dialogue choices that got you “killed.” 

Obviously this is much, much cheaper than providing an alternate way to fulfill the mission.

In turn, this allows the conversational combat to have varying degrees of difficulty. We know the player is sooner or later going to make the right choices. So we don’t have to make it obvious which they are. To make it fair, we need to give the player enough information to make an intelligent choice. 

But we don’t even need to make it fair. Combat in, say, Dark Souls isn’t fair. Some of the encounters are designed so that you will only know there’s a guy hiding behind that pillar with a crossbow once he kills you. 

In conversational combat, that could mean introducing a ruthless, cold-hearted killer who, surprise!, gets very upset at the thought that you might have been mean to a puppy. How could you have known? You couldn’t. But now you do.

After all, real people are not logically consistent. 

Making conversations into combat has some key benefits. It means that players will be more inclined to pay attention to who they’re talking to and what they’re saying. They can’t just wait for the recap in the journal. It also means that they can be longer and richer, because the player is playing them rather than watching them. It’s a game, you know, not a movie.

What are some other good examples of conversations you can fail?

The Dawn of Everything

Normally I blog about creative writing, but this was a great book:

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that convincingly rejiggers your entire understanding of something.Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus convinced me that the Americas were heavily populated before diseases wiped out 95% of Native Americans. Back in the day, Robert T. Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies convinced me that dinosaurs were warm-blooded and had feathers.

Here, the authors take aim at the idea that human societies inexorably grow from small bands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers to grain-based dictatorial bureaucratic states. Turns out the archeological record is full of bureaucratic states like Ur that were egalitarian and not dictatorial. Living at the same time as the brutal, dictatorial Aztecs were the Tlaxcala, who had a form of repubic; the people of Teohuatican avoided building temples and instead built housing. Peoples at all levels of social organisation have rejected big men. Iroquois leaders had no power to compel their people to do anything. Some hunter-gatherer bands mock the best hunters. Other people, like the native peoples of Southern California, have gone to great lengths to avoid building up surpluses of resources, and so have made war useless. Many peoples avoided agriculture for thousands of years even though they knew perfectly well how to do it.

Turns out folks are pretty smart and self-aware, and Western civilization is not the culmination of knowledge, but merely one particular way of living that has its pros and cons.

If you're looking for another "big think book," this is it.

View all my reviews

Dansky's Book

My dear friend,  the legendary Richard Dansky, has published The Video Game Writer's Guide to Surviving an Industry That Hates You. Richard has been at this for two decades. If you're a videogame writer or (Lord help you) an aspiring videogame writer, you need this book!

Most of it is, like it says on the tin, about surviving as a video game writer. And you can tell from the title that he pulls no punches. But he has an interesting tool for finding a character's voice:  write down ten words the character likes to say. Now write down ten words the character would never say. Let these guide you as you write the character.

I wrote a few hundred lines for a sound set for a new character. Our peerless editor and fellow writer Alexia pointed out that maybe 20% of those lines were generic. Any of our characters could say them.

In a shooter, that's inevitable to some extent. There are only so many ways someone can say "reloading!" But wherever possible, you want lines that only could come out of that character's mouth. 

It is a very high standard, and it is a mostly thankless standard. Your game designers will not complain if all your lines are generic -- they'd be happy if the character said "reloading" only one way. The artists won't care. And most players won't notice.

But players will appreciate it, even if they don't notice it. The characters will sparkle a little more. They will enjoy playing them more.

And a few of them will make some fun YouTubes out of them.

And the challenge makes us better writers. I want my writers to treat the dialog as if we're shooting for Game of the Year. It will make the game a little better, but it will make their writing much better. It's the last few reps, when your muscles are burning, that build more strength. 

Ludonarrative Resonance: The Game

 All the ganz mespuchah came to town for the office summer party, and we had narrative workshops. These were in no way silly fun games, they were Very Serious. Okay, they were silly and fun, but they were also serious.

One game we like to play I dubbed Ludonarrative Resonance. I don't claim it's original -- my friend Shelly made a similar game for movie pitches, and probably lots of people have something like it. It's a card game for breaking folks out of their familiar tropes.

What you do is you take index cards, or blank playing cards like these and separate them into four piles:  Setting, Main Character, Goal, Mechanic.

You write a mess of cards with the word Settings on their backs, for example:

• 
  Paris, in the 20's, sort of
• A city with a dark secret
• Zombie apocalypse
• The dreams of a dying scientist
• A decayed city in a faithless empire 
• A forgotten town in the Deep South
• Sparta!!!
• Renaissance Florence
• A volcano island

Then you write a bunch of cards with Main Character on the back:

• An apologetic Englishman
• Member of an arcane order of assassins
• A mysterious circus girl of unknown age
• A sly fox with poor impulse control
• The Monkey King
• A beginning witch
• A not entirely harmless lamb

Next, Goals, for example:

• Become a Real Boy
• Bring back the Old Ones
• Bring your beloved back
• Get the MacGuffin
• Survive
• Heal the monsters
• Go to there

Some of these are a bit specific; ideally the cards should be ideas you can interpret in different ways, but also evocative. By now you've probably recognized the games, movies and fairy tales I stole these from (some of which I wrote).

Finally, Mechanics:

• Social stealth: pass as one of them
• Deck builder
• Walking simulator
• Parcour
• Battle Royale
• Romance simulator
• Enter dreams and alter them
• Soulslike
• Punch them in the face
• Time loop

Now, the dealer deals three of each kind of card, and someone else picks one from each three. There shouldn't be two cards from the same source material.

Then everyone collaborates to pitch a game using the selected setting, main character, goal and mechanic.

Initially, this will seem ridiculous. But with a little thought, the ridiculous becomes plausible -- and original.

In our workshop, for example, we had:

A lamb

A volcano

Go to there

Puzzles

We ended up with the idea that The Lamb is solving puzzles to climb the volcano to get to Mary. The puzzles come from spectral lambs. Over the course of the puzzles we discover that Mary has been abusive towards the Lamb, and we're worried that we are in an allegory of someone returning to their abuser. But it turns out the Lamb is there to kill evil Mary and set the spectral lambs free.

We had:

An apologetic Englishman

A zombie apocalypse

Bring back his beloved

Social stealth

That turned into a game pitch where the apologetic Englishman has to rescue his beloved, who has become a zombie. That means he will have to infiltrate three groups:  the zombies (to get to her), the lab guys (to get the cure) and the kill teams (to prevent them from killing her before she can be turned back). Being an apologetic Englishman is a nice impediment to passing as any of these groups, and failing to pass will result in him being eaten, killed, or used as an experimental subject.

Both of those are perfectly cromulent games, right? I would at a minimum watch the trailer for these games, and probably wishlist them on Steam. 

Aside from exercising your ludonarrative muscles, which is always good, you quickly learn how many possibilities there are. When we were thinking about our next game after We Happy Few, we only seriously discussed two possibilities. We should have been discussing twenty! I mean, if you're planning to spend a couple of years making an indie game, or five or more making a AAA game, would it kill you to spend a month or two pitching crazy ideas? You don't want to be making a cookie-cutter fantasy game because that's what's at the front of your brain.

Make randomness your friend!

EDIT:  This game is probably better with small teams. Some folks like to hear themselves talk, and in large groups people are inclined to let them talk. If you have twenty people, you might want five teams of four or four teams of five, and give each team five or six minutes to come up with a pitch and two minutes to pitch it to the other teams. 

A Misconception or Two I Had About Escape Rooms

For some time, I avoided playing escape rooms. Being trapped in a room with a limited time to escape seemed stressful, and I'm really good with the amount of stress I already have in my life. 

I have since discovered that almost no escape rooms are about escaping. The genre is stuck with the name, though. 

I just finished playing a baker's dozen of escape rooms here in Montreal, courtesy of a tour run by the fine folks of Room Escape Artist. (They also run the excellent Reality Escape Pod.) They also run tours of escape rooms in various cities that are hubs of escape rooms. Turns out Montreal is one of the top eight cities in the world for escape rooms. I did not know that.

I've been intrigued by immersive experiences, including escape rooms, for a little while. There are a bunch of ways in which they are not like video games. They are local -- if you want to play an escape room, or experience immersive theater, you have to go to where it is. You can't download it. They are tactile:  you are physically in a space. There may be be actors who will improvise based on your responses. 

There are of course many ways in which escape rooms are like video games. You are the hero of your own adventure. There is a mission that only you can accomplish. There are characters who are there to help. There are obstacles, and sometimes antagonists. You have to solve puzzles. You often have to platform. You can theoretically win or lose, but you really only lose if you are dead set on testing yourself in hard mode. 

Some games are very heavy on the problem solving. Some make an effort to create a convincingly real environment that tells part of the story. Some are there more to tell an emotionally truthful story, and the puzzles are there more to engage you in the story than to present a difficult challenge.

Escape rooms have been flowering for only about the last ten years. Folks are still figuring out what the genre can do. 

According to Morty, the Yelp of escape rooms, there are on the order of fifty thousand escape rooms. 

In the past three days, I saved a magic forest, saved the world from vengeful Poseidon, released souls trapped by a witch, broken into my high school to get out of having to go to summer school, helped a Lego man succeed on his date, stopped a mad bomber, stopped a mad poisoner, helped an agent shut down a drug operation, saved another magic forest, rehabilitated myself after having been arrested for tampering with an android, and broken a curse.

Turns out, Montreal has the top-rated room in all the world, Magnifico, at Escaparium, itself probably the top escape room studio in the world. Magnifico is Not Cheap -- it's $200 Canadian, not $30-$40 Canadian like most other rooms. But it is a 2.5 hour masterpiece. The Cirque du Soleil of escape rooms. The Punchdrunk of escape rooms. It brings together stage magic, spectacular special effects, actors, puzzle-solving, wit, music and tragedy. It took me to another world, and got me in the feels.

Come on up to Montreal and check it out! We also have circuses.