Small Story Choices in WHF?

michael4771 has an interesting question on the Compulsion Games forum for We Happy Few:

WHF is often compared to Bioshock Infinite with good reason, and while WHF has a LOT more features than Bioshock, there is one aspect that WHF lacks: story choice. Bioshock Infinite is a completely linear game but the story does include choices that doesn't affect the overall story beyond a small aesthetic change or getting/missing a powerup, and yet it's very significant.

For example, one of the first choices the player is presented within Bioshock Infinite is whether or not to harm an interracial couple which is being accosted by the crowd. You can choose to throw a baseball at the couple, throw it at the @sshole announcer, or do nothing. That's 3 choices that don't affect the overall story in any way but give the player the feeling of choice. What you decide will radically define who you are no matter what else happens

I guess what I'm asking is, can the development team please let me not be a jerk to Sally, Ollie, etc? It doesn't have to affect the storyline, just let me decide what type of person Arthur (and his friends) will become. It would make it so much easier to connect with him and the other two characters. If 3 options is too many, at least please give me a total of 2, a positive and negative. It would be massively appreciated. Arthur and his friends will still be mildly terrible people even if they treat each other fairly.

So. The lack of story choice - with the exception of Arthur's two big choices - was partly a result of bandwidth. We just didn't have enough level designers and animators to make small story choices.

However, it is crucial to the story that certain characters are terrible to certain other characters. Everyone in our world has been broken by the experiences they've had. If we let the player play these characters as less terrible, then that might come through as an idea, but it wouldn't punch you in the gut.

Bioshock Infinite kind of lets you off the hook, doesn't it? You can throw the baseball at the announcer because you're a decent non-racist person. But the truth of the situation is that lots of decent non-racist people would throw the ball at the interracial couple, because they're in the middle of a scary mob, and then feel horrible about it, and then attempt to justify their actions to themselves for the next thirty years.

Our story is about memory and denial. Those have a terrible cost. If you felt uncomfortable, well, then you entered into our story, and believed it at some level. Which is awesome, and thank you.

How to Suspend Disbelief, or, Easy to Learn, Hard to Master, in 5 Minutes

The irrepressible Richard Rouse III invited me to be part of his annual MIGS "Brain Dump" panel. I thought I'd post my thoughts from that here. The overall topic was "Easy to Learn, Hard to Master." I decided to talk about--

How to Suspend Disbelief.

As you probably know if you're reading this blog, in August, we shipped a game called We Happy Few. It’s set in a Britain where everyone is taking a drug called Joy to forget the terrible things they did in the War. Also the terrible things they’re going to do to you.

My job as Narrative Director is to get people emotionally engaged. Which means immersing people in a convincing world.

This turns out to be quite hard to master. It’s given me grey hair.

Making a convincing world is not easy, because the real world has bazillions of elements, while your fellow devs have to painstakingly create every single object, every gesture, every behavior in the world. And obviously, they need to keep things as simple as possible.

Thing is, when players meet a world that is too neat, too simple, too symmetrical, they call shenanigans.

Reality has a shape, and its shape is ... queer. Asymmetrical.



The Earth is not really the center of the Solar System.


Reality is made of temporary solutions that got potchkeyed on top of other temporary solutions, and now everything’s all stuck together, and nothing can be fixed. Reality is not the game you designed, it’s the game you shipped.

So if you want to create a reality, don't design a fish. A fish makes too much sense. Someone could have intentionally designed a fish. Instead, design a platypus.

When I was at Yale, I took a course on the Afro-Atlantic tradition. Of all the courses I ever took on screenwriting, this one, which had nothing to do with screenwriting, taught me the most about screenwriting.

In West African drumming, I learned, you don’t play the beat. You play around the beat. In West African textiles, you don’t make a perfectly symmetrical quilt. At least one of the squares is off center. Or different.


Our game worlds tend to go in the opposite direction. Everything is a little too symmetrical. Too relevant to the main character. Monsters hang around for you to kill them. Quest givers wait around to give you a quest.



The player is the center of the Solar System.



To create a convincing world, you need to create a layer of asymmetry. Of kruft. Rumple the bed so it looks slept in.

Give your non-player characters stories that the player will never know the beginning or end of. Yes, as far as game design is concerned, they’re there to give the player a quest. But they think they’re trying to settle a score, or get laid, or renovate their kitchen. The player is just an accident that got in their way.

Give your characters secrets. Hint at these secrets in their dialog, in the way they dress, in their animations, in what they clearly mean, but can’t bring themselves to say.

Let the player unravel the secrets if you have time and resources, but secrets are good even if you never reveal them. They shape the world, like whatever it is that makes that bump under the rug.


Let your world have absences: things that are so obviously missing you can’t help notice they’re not there. The adults in Wellington Wells jump in puddles and play in playgrounds. Uh, that reminds me, shouldn’t there be kids?


Let your world have mysteries. The backstory in Horizon Zero Dawn is a mystery which gives a structure to the world.

You don’t even have to resolve all the mysteries. People want to know what happened to the kids in We Happy Few. I know, but I’m not gonna tell you.


Sometimes the opposite happens. Your fellow devs will also want to add things that have nothing to do with the player, the story, or the world, because they are “cool” or “funny".

Oh, God. “Cool” and “funny” are the death of a thousand cuts of immersion. Reality has an asymmetric shape, but it does have a shape. Players can tell the difference between things that happen for a hidden reason, and things that happen for no reason. One “cool” won’t kill immersion. But the world loses a bit of blood, and the players start to care a bit less, and more than anybody realizes. They will call shenanigans. In other words,

the players don't know. 

But they know.

To create a convincing world, you’ll have to kick up a fuss from time to time.

When I worked in TV and film, I used to wonder why directors were such jerks. Then I directed a bunch of short films, and there were things I knew were wrong during the shoots, and I didn’t kick up a fuss to get them fixed, because I didn’t want to be a jerk. And the films weren’t as good as I’d hoped.

You will have to piss people off from time to time.

That doesn’t mean be a jerk. You have to be passionate and convincing, but not be a jerk about it. If you do it right, people will love you even when you do piss them off.

I’ve been passionate and convincing, and I’ve been a jerk.

It helps if you don’t fight for “your” ideas. If you fight for what the game needs.

And that’s how I really got the grey hair.

Another WHF Update

This one dates to November 25, but I forgot to put it up on the blog.

Three recording sessions this week.

I brought back the Voice of the Honey Bandit, Jay Simon, for a slew of new barks about, among other things, the Plague. A big Marvel no-prize to whoever figures out what the Plague Wastrels are saying, once they start saying things in the game.

Lisa (new writer) and I finished our rewrite of the playthrough of She Who Must Not Be Named, which meant I was able to call back the actor who plays One of Her Many Fans. And I brought back the utterly charming Alex Wyndham (Arthur) for a slew of new barks – plague, again – and to pick up revised lines for many of the cinematics. There’s been a fair amount of carnage in the cinematics; it’s a sign of how healthily we’ve staffed up that we can afford to burn some old work in order to do even better work.

We are starting to design a slew of new encounters, particularly in the Village. It’s always challenging to write dialog for an encounter that hasn’t been built yet, because I have to guess what the events will be that will trigger the dialog I’ll write. On the other hand, I get to shape the encounters so that they are revelatory of our world and its people.

A little while we all went to MIGS. I blogged a bit about what I heard about dynamic stories in Richard Rouse III’s talk.

Two more recording sessions next week, one with She Who Must Not Be Named, and one with an evil Hammer-movie-villain scientist named…

So we at Compulsion Games are looking for a third writer.

The immediate need is for someone to work on We Happy Few DLC in Montreal with us. This is a contract gig, so probably you have experience working in video games; but if a TV writer/playwright/novelist, at least you play video games.

We are agnostic about some things (PT or FT? junior or senior?); the key criteria are you know what a video game is, and you can write dramatic dialog with distinct, memorable voices. So I'm asking for a 2-4 page scene, which I'll probably look at first.

By "dramatic dialog" I don't mean "people shouting while exciting things are going on." I mean, two characters are talking to each other in order to get things they want (respect, an orange, the truth, assistance, etc.).

Also Compulsion is a really cool place to work.

Check out our posting for the deets...

Gamesutra Interviews Yours Truly

“We started with a few mandates: an isolated town that takes drugs and wears masks; Britain in the early '60s; no kids. From there, we retro-engineered the story. Why are they taking drugs and wearing masks? Probably to deal with a trauma. What sort of trauma? Why not something to do with the kids? If it’s Britain 1964, it probably is a trauma associated with World War II.”

Each piece led to others. After roughing out some ideas about the setting and the time period, more details started to fit naturally into place. “Given the drugs, it made sense that the characters all have individual traumas in their past, in addition to the overall ‘original sin’ of the town.”

Alan Bradley asked me a few questions about how Early Access shaped (or didn't shape) the narrative in We Happy Few. Check out the interview.

Q. How do I be a voice actor

A. Get a demo reel together, get an agent, audition for roles, get a better reel.

This is my current casting proecess

1. Post a breakdown on Breakdown Services (North America) or Spotlight (UK). Generally I will only send it to agents, because those actors are already “curated.”
   
2. They send me submissions of people with demo reels.
   
3. I listen to the demo reel. My #1 criterion is “do I believe this performance?” Does the actor sound like they’re reading lines, or do they sound like a person in a situation.
   
4. My #2 criterion is vocal charisma. Does their voice “pop”? Some actors sound a bit generic. Some have a distinct voice I want to hear more.
   
5. I ask some of the submitted actors, through their agents, for an MP3 of them performing sides - a scene I’ve written for the audition. Here’s where having a home studio is better than just having a phone to record the audition, but so long as I can clearly hear the performance I don’t care about sound quality.
   
6. I listen to those. Same criterion. Obviously, are they right for the part? Do I believe the performance? Do they have charisma?
   
7. I direct (and record) an audition over Skype / Facetime / Google Meet. I see how well they take direction.
   
8. I pick an actor.

To give you a sense of the scope, I just got 200 submissions for a role, listened to maybe 50 demo reels (I was pressed for time), asked 8-10 people for MP3's, and called back about 4. I have no idea what other people do, but I think I spend more time on casting than other voice directors.

Seth Barton Interviews me for MCV

Seth Barton and I had a lovely chat for MCV.

We all remember things in ways that suit us. In Arthur's playthrough, he is the hero, or the victim, of events; it's not his fault. Sally comes across as a bit of a flake, a bit of a mantrap, even though he's mad about her. But maybe he was not listening carefully, because Sally's explanations sound a whole lot more convincing in her playthrough. Sally even remembers saying some things that Arthur flat out doesn't remember."

I've been in the news!

With WE HAPPY FEW coming out in three weeks, I've had some lovely chats with journalists about the game. Here are some of them:

• WCCFTECH's Nathan Birch, We Happy Few Interview: Alternate History, Early Access, Retail Discs as Coasters, More

  I do think our world is grounded in some sort of honesty and reality. I think the best science fiction takes the real and pushes it further, until it can make its point. But if there’s no reality to begin with, it’s not grounded and there’s no emotional meaning. If it is grounded, it becomes clearer what you’re trying to talk about.

• VARIETY's Giancarlo Valdes, The Evolution of ‘We Happy Few’ From Survival Sim to Story-Driven Adventure

  “What the community told us is that they liked these goofy encounters with these crazy people more than they liked the systemic situations. We said, ‘OK, we’ll write more goofy encounters then,’” said Epstein.

• Xbox Achievements's Richard Walker, How Compulsion Pulled Back on Survival Gameplay and Put Narrative (and Puke) Up-Front

  I think we have an organic process, so I can't speak for Guillaume (Provost), who's the studio head and the Creative Director, [but] we're a studio that has kind of a flat structure, so Guillaume hires immensely talented people like Whitney Clayton (Art Director), David Sears who did SOCOM, who is our Design Director on this game, and then, y'know, lets them rip. And it's an iterative process, so you don't want to draw up a design document and then just make that design document, you know?

• READY:SET, We Happy Few built a dystopia with Mod culture, psychedelia, and Facebook

  “There’s a proverb that you shouldn't copy the masters — you go after what they went after,” says Alex Epstein, the Narrative Director for We Happy Few.

• PC Games Insider's Alex Calvin How Compulsion developed We Happy Few on Early Access

  "On our forums, people were asking over and over whether there was going to be a story. We were like: "Yes, there's going to be a story. We're making the story; we're making three stories". But there's been so much vapourware in this business that people are like: 'Pull the other one'."

In which Alex is interviewed at E3

So at E3 I had a super fun interview with the brilliant Julia Alexander of Polygon about We Happy Few. Did I mention it's coming out August 10th?

Can't wait to see what she thinks of Sally.

Pitch, Beat Sheet, Step Outline, Treatment

Q. Do you have examples of great treatments you could send me?

I don’t. I will read a great script, but I don't read other people’s treatments. Most pro writers will tell you that a treatment isn’t really a thing they like to write. It’s a step in the WGC contract, but it’s not really useful.

There are two things that look like treatments:

a. pitches
b. beat sheets

A pitch is for selling. It tells the story of the movie in 3-8 pages. Shorter is better. The idea is to get someone to pay you to write the movie. Or, if someone is saying they only want to read an outline, this is what you give them. There’s a fair amount of handwaving in a pitch. You don’t have to work out every last detail. You should put lots of sizzle in a pitch. Make sure the reader knows how cool everything is. Don’t put in dialog.

A beat sheet is for the writer to write the script. Mine are usually 10-12 pages single spaced. There’s usually about 40 beats in a movie. A scene can have two beats, or a beat can comprise several scenes, in the case of an action sequence. A beat sheet can include the emotional heart of a scene, if you think you might otherwise forget. If you have much more than 45 beats, you probably have too much going on in your movie.

Once you add sluglines (EXT. IAN’S FLAT - DAY) it’s a step outline, which is just a more detailed beat sheet.

Almost no one except writers and a few directors can read a beat sheet. Producers think they know how, but they don't, and giving a beat sheet to a producer usually results in tears. It is often unavoidable though. Producers will complain that a comedy beat sheet isn’t funny, or that a horror beat sheet isn’t scary, because beat sheets don’t express style or tone or pacing or emotional well. Beat sheets are the skeleton you hang scenes on. Never give anyone a beat sheet if you can avoid it, without first telling them the story in person over lunch.

Some producers and funders (e.g. Telefilm) are now requiring a 20-page “just add water” treatment, with indicative dialog. This creature is an abomination before the Lord. To get to this thing, you have to basically do all the work of writing a script without getting paid for a script, and without any of the fun. No writer I know considers a just add water treatment to be a useful step in writing a script. I have literally written the script first and then boiled it down afterwards, because writing a script is easier and much more fun.

The best way to write a pitch is to tell the story off the top of your head, without looking at the script. Just tell it the way you’d tell a friend the story of the movie. Then punch it up. Feel free to move events around if they sound better that way.

The best way to write a beat sheet is to tell the story to anyone who’ll listen, for three months, until you’ve worked out all the kinks in your story. Then write it down.

The second best way to write a beat sheet is with index cards, on the kitchen table. That way you can move things around easily.

I’m not sure looking at other people’s treatments is useful, except to see how different they are. The key point is to remember whether you’re writing a pitch or a beat sheet. If you’re writing a beat sheet, it doesn’t matter how you write it, because it’s just a long aide-mémoire for yourself (and your writing partner if you have one). If you’re writing a pitch, it’s a sales document, so just make your movie sound as awesome as you know how.

It's really simple. I didn't say it was easy, I just said it's simple.

I watched the first ten minutes of the NBC's live Jesus Christ Superstar this morning, the Overture and Judas's opening number, "Heaven on Their Minds." One thing struck me hard about Brandon Victor Dixon's performance of the song: he's lost Judas's intention.

Intention is the core of any acting performance. What is the character trying to do? Drama is all about people who want things from other people.

The song is a warning: Judas is scared, and he wants Jesus to cool it before the crowds get out of hand and everyone gets killed. And in the movie, that's how Carl Anderson performs it. He's warning Jesus, in song. He barely takes his eyes off Jesus.

Brandon Victor Dixon barely looks at Jesus until two thirds of the way through the song. He's got an amazing voice and he's doing all sorts of American Idol gymnastics with it. But what he is not doing is warning Jesus. He is singing about warning Jesus. He is, as my old acting teacher Joanne Baron would put it, disconnected from his imaginary circumstance and the characters around him.

Intention is big. Intention is huge. The single most important thing you can do as a director is make sure that the actor is clear on their intention. What are they trying to do? Adjustments are important ("now try doing it as if..."), but intention is the backbone, and without it, there's no drama.

Video games are all about their "verbs." What does the player get to do. Shoot? Climb? Punch? Break? Loot? Pick locks? Persuade?

Drama writing is also all about intention. As David Mamet puts it: "Who wants what, why can't they get it, why do I give a shit?" My formula is slightly more detailed but it's the same idea. A story is:

a. a character we care about
b. who has an opportunity, problem or goal
c. who faces obstacles, an antagonist, and or their own flaws in resolving (b)
d. who has something to lose (jeopardy) and/or
e. something to gain (stakes).
f. A story is told to an audience.


So: acting is about the actor convincing themselves they want something, and reacting with emotional truth when they discover (surprise! hopefully) that they can't get it.

It is literally that simple. If you can get that, you've done 80% of your job as a director.

(Casting is the other 80%.)

Dramatic writing is about characters wanting things. It is literally that simple.

If your character wants things and can't get them, you have drama. If your character is not trying to get things from the other people in the scene, then there is no drama.

Now, I said it's simple. I didn't say it's easy. Intention is really easy to forget. There is probably no pro writer who hasn't struggled with a beautifully written scene that doesn't work, up until the point where their trusted reader pointed out, "there's no dramatic conflict." There is probably no pro actor who hasn't lost their intention in a scene because they were focused on their adjustment ("as if") or their accent or their divorce or whatever.

But it is that simple. The first question you should ask yourself as a director or an actor, if the performance isn't working, is: are you, or is your actor, trying to get something from the other person? The first question you should ask yourself as a writer, if the scene isn't working is, is the character trying to get something, and is something stopping them?

If not, fix it.

Unfaithful Adaptations Are the Best

Q. Picked up a paperback (interesting blend of action and horror) at the local dollar store and when I finally got round to reading it, liked it enough to inquire about optioning film rights. They are available.

Tha author's LA agency strongly suggests "partnering" with a producer who will let me write the adaptation. They also would be receptive to an offer by me.

I don't have a strong relationship with a film maker to trust not getting cut out of the picture. That leaves the scenario of making an attractive offer, writing the thing, then doing The Shopping (without an agent, of course). Sheeesh!

Here's the thing. A bestseller is valuable to a producer or a studio. It is a bankable element. There is a proven audience for this world and this story. Most books you find at the dollar store are proven to have a small audience. So basing your screenplay on one may not be helpful.

On the other hand, how faithful an adaptation do you plan to make? You can't copyright an idea. You can only copyright the expression of an idea. E.g. no one can copyright "girl romanced by vampire"; they can only copyright a girl named Bella being romanced by a creepy stalkery sparkly vampire and a hot werewolfey dude on the West Coast, etc. etc.

Novels don't usually adapt well to movies, because the plot of a movie is basically a short story.

(Some novelists write in a very cinematic easy-to-adapt style. There are reasons every John Grisham novel gets an adaptation, and being best sellers is only one of them. They generally have only one or two points of view, and time flows at a regular pace. There's no, "Over the course of the next few years, Johnny came to understand...." Everything that happens in them is a scene involving at least one of a core cast of a few people talking, fighting or going somewhere in a hurry. There are few flashbacks. You always know exactly what is happening and who it's happening to. The characters have very little inner life unless it's also expressed in dialog. Etc.)

So the best adaptation is often an unfaithful one, or rather, one that is faithful to the theme and the spirit of the novel, not the details of the plot. An introverted character may need to become talkative. A long thought process will need to become a verbal argument. You will almost certainly merge characters and cut others.

It may be that your unfaithful adaptation winds up so far from the novel that you really only have to change the names of the characters, and you no longer need to option the novel.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, and no lawyer is likely to tell you exactly where that line is. But consider that Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fanfic. And consider that there are a bazillion books and a bazillion scripts and really not that many plots.

This approach will also free you to write a better screenplay. You can usually tell a movie adapted from a book because there are scenes that are cool that don't really forward the story: that's the screenwriter trying to keep a scene from the book that really doesn't fit in the movie.

So what I would do in your case is read the book and then put it away somewhere. Do not read it again. Write a script based on it. And by "write a script," I mean, as always, tell it as a story, orally, over and over to anyone who will listen, until you can tell the entire story off the top of your head because it flows so naturally. You will wind up adding scenes. You will forget a lot of scenes; oh well, they were forgettable.

After you've finished writing the script, reread the book and see if you have stolen anything copyrightable. My guess is you will not have.

You have now saved a few thousand bucks, and you can't get removed from the project.

Not everyone will agree with this advice, and the line between copyrightable and not copyrightable is not bright and clear. But the times I've optioned material it's generally been a pain in the ass that I optioned it, especially because the script came out so differently than the source material. So there you go.

Note also that this process is not how producers generally approach adaptation. That's because (a) they have money (b) scripts cost more money to them than options (c) they can take a book and an option to someone else to give them money. Hence the above is not how, say, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds gets made. But if you're a screenwriter without a track record, then optioning a book may not be the best way to go.

Sketch Comedy Pitch Questions

Q. I've been writing comedy sketches. The producer of a sketch comedy show said I could follow up with him next month.
When I follow up with him, shall I ask if they’re accepting pitches and include a short pitch for my work or just stick to asking if they’re accepting pitches?

A. Wait till you’re asked, I think.

Q. I’ve written lots of one-page queries for novels/short stories and picture books (which, usually, also want you to include the first 10 pages of your book or an entire picture book or short story). I’m assuming, that for screen, these are even shorter pitches? I was thinking I’d pitch about three sketches to start, so maybe just a line each?

Sounds good.

Q. I’ve been reading some on screenwriting format and all my sketches will be formatted to what I have read on very basic style. Do you think they’ll be really sticky on how perfect the format is/isn’t? (i.e. including title pages for each sketch, camera instructions etc.)

I can’t imagine they’re too sticky about how to format sketches, so long as they’re in regular screenplay format. I would never include camera instructions unless they're essential to a joke. Personally I wouldn’t put title pages on sketches; you don’t want anything getting between the funny and the reader. But I’m not a sketch comedy writer.