Lucien Soulban, Part Four

Alex: So, obligatory question: How did you get into game writing?

Lucien: Through the long road. I started off writing for tabletop role playing games. I was friends with a new buddy, Jean Carrieres, and they saw my D&D writing. We were part of an APA, an Amateur Press Association. Bunch of friends get together once a month and pull together articles that they've written. They get it photocopied 20 times, all the copies stapled together, and then you hand it back out to the members. I'm showing my age with that. 

Well, my friend saw my writing and he was like, hey, I work at Dream Pod Nine. We have a lot of French writers, we need somebody to go through and help them with smoothing out their English. So I started doing that. Then they said, would you like a shot at writing a book? So I did my first couple of game books through them. 

And then I went to Gen Con and I was blown away. Thousands of gamers in one location. All the big companies were there, and I was like, that's the industry I want to be a part of. So, I started going with the books I had written. I started introducing myself and getting contracts with White Wolf and with Pinnacle Entertainment and companies like that. 

My friends started making the jump into video games as designers and they started saying, hey, we know a writer we think can hit the mark. And so they gave me my first breaks. My first published video game was Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, my first published video game. I did a vaporware game that never went anywhere. So we don't count my first.

Alex: We should!

Lucien: We should.

Alex: You did the work.

Lucien: I know.

Alex: --like this concept, "must have shipped three games" in a recruitment ad. I can't force the game to ship.

Lucien: Yeah.

Alex: Like you can work at Ubisoft, and three games you worked on get killed by Paris. And that's your entire video game career. And you did great work!

Lucien: Well, I've been fortunate enough to have a lot of a lot of games under my belt since then. And so after a while, I put that project aside...

Alex: Dropped that off your LinkedIn.

Lucien: My first game, friend of mine was working at Relic Entertainment and they were doing Dawn of War. And he said they need a writer. I interviewed, I got the job. And then after that, another friend of mine, well, you know Rich -- Rich Dansky [Chief Clancy Writer at Ubi] -- said, OK, Ubisoft in Montreal where you live is looking for a Rainbow Six Vegas writer. So I interviewed and I got that. I was there at the company for two or three years working on that. 

And then I was on Splinter Cell Conviction before it got rebooted. But I was contract at that point, went independent, worked on a whole bunch of DS games, including a princess game and all these movie tie-in games like Enchanted, the Golden Compass, Kung Fu Panda. And then I went back to Ubisoft when I realized I needed a steady paycheck and I wanted to work with a team rather than being at the tail end of something where I was only filling in a required sheet of needs.

Alex: What's misconceptions did you have coming in?

Lucien: I thought, I'm bringing stories to video games. I am going to bring a story and I'm going to do something awesome with it because I love video games. 

And I didn't think that I was going to be the only person responsible for a game. But I thought, I'm the writer. I thought I would be given a bit more leeway. I didn't think that I would have to justify everything. I had at one point, a line where one of the soldiers was saying, "If you're looking for your pound of flesh, you're gonna have to wait till this is over." 

The creative director was like, pound of flesh, what's that? I'm like, well, it's from [The Merchant of Venice by] Shakespeare. And he's like, no, nobody reads Shakespeare, drop it. Suddenly, I’m in what felt like an hour-long argument with him over something that’s a common English idiom. 

The misconception was that I could operate in my own bubble. I didn't realize how integrated you need to be. So when I see writers saying, oh, the writer is the gatekeeper of story, I'm like, no, that's not it. You're there to help.

Alex: The writer is the punching bag of story!

Lucien: I think you need to be seen as a troubleshooter. They need to know that they can come to you with problems, and you're there to help them get through it. You'll find they’re a lot more open to incorporating your ideas, because they trust you. So I build up good relationships with level design, who might come to me and go, hey, we need a reason why the player would go here. And so you help them troubleshoot so they do not hesitate to come back and talk to you again. But operating in a bubble is a fallacy. You can't be outside of the team working on script or else you're going to have a game that is disconnected from its story.

Alex: That's what I like most about video game writing. You're right in the thick of it. If you're a film screenwriter, you do your things and hand it off to the crew, and they go play in the sandbox and have fun, and you go home. You get to see it eventually, but you stay at home. 

I was on set for a show I'd created, and the director sincerely asked me, "Why are you here?" I like the integration. I like, you know, looking at someone's screen in the office and, oh, so that's what they're doing. Okay. Well, my story won't work in that case. What would work?

Lucien: Yeah.

Alex: And sometimes it's a surgical thing that you can do. Oh. I just change this one thing. Now it all makes sense again. And that's the math again. If I just change the polarity on this, now it's good again.

Lucien: Yeah, totally. When I went to Far Cry, it was the first full-on open world game that I worked on. And because of various circumstances, including people who were all vying for creative control, narrative ended up by being insular and working on its own stuff. And as a result, there was a disconnect between what you did in the main storyline and what you did in the open world. So in the main storyline, you're like, all my friends are kidnapped, everything is terrible.-- Oh, look, I can kill a rhinoceros to craft a wallet! And while some people appreciated not having that pressure on them all the time, some players felt guilty for engaging in frivolous activities when their friends were being held hostage.

Alex: Oh, that's one of the worst things about putting a clock on a video game. A clock is great in a film. But in a game, you know, you're Captain Shepherd, you're trying to save all intelligent life in the entire galaxy. But here's where you hang out with an old friend and have beer.

Lucien: Exactly. So when we did the jump to Far Cry 4, there was much more of an effort to tie the global geography into what was happening within the story. So if you go out into the open world and if you take that tower, if you burn down that poppy field, if you do this, if you do that, it's all contributing to hurting the enemy. 

So now I take those open world lessons and I get to apply them even more with: what is it about each region that informs the whole. What is the mythology of the region, what is its importance, and how does it uphold the main storyline? So again, it's that balance. It's finding that that scale is off balance and saying, “Where do we add more weight to make things balance out?” I feel like writers should be more and more involved in what the player experience is, not just what is the story experience, but what is the [user] experience?

Alex: UX, the user experience.

Lucien: Yeah. Exactly.

Alex: Last question. Why do you stay sane?

Lucien: What do I do to stay sane? Dear God. Well, let's start with this. You can't see it because I've got this thing on here, but right here I've got a punching bag. Honestly.

There were a few times where I almost burned out at Ubisoft. Watchdogs 2 was a grueling process. Elements of Rainbow Six Siege and the project that came after it were grueling and emotionally draining. 

The tips and tricks that I picked up? One was when you leave the office, you leave the office. I had this mental exercise when I walked out of the offices. Right before I left the lobby of the building, I stood still for a moment. I imagined all the day's issues being dumped into two suitcases that I was holding in my hands. And before I walked out that door, I dropped the two suitcases on the floor and I walked away. And any time I started thinking about work, I'd be like, no, they're in suitcases. They're in a suitcase and they're in the lobby. They're waiting for me when I get back. I don't need them. And oftentimes when I came back in the morning, the issues aren't really there anymore...

Alex: That's certainly what happens if I leave suitcases in the middle of a lobby. They're not there anymore.

Lucien: ... or the stress that created them wasn't there anymore. I didn't hesitate to seek out help at Ubisoft from what we call an ergotherapist, which wasn't a psychologist or a therapist, just somebody who would say, what are the issues you are facing? Have you considered doing this? Try these exercises, try these techniques... she provided me with tips and tricks to cope with the stress. 

But she also allowed me to forgive myself for not being on top of everything, because we tend to take things personally. And we take it all on ourselves. Even if it’s somebody else's fault or anything, we sometimes receive feedback on soemthing and go, “did I fuck up? 

And so... self-forgiveness and removing yourself from the issue unless you are actually responsible, but not second guessing everything and putting it all on your own shoulders. I find that we as writers tend to take on a lot of the project’s problems-- no, no, no. Bring it up. Let other people worry about it. You're part of a team. Solve it as a team. It's not just you. 

Breathing exercises too. I started employing the seven four eight breathing technique. Are you familiar with it? It's where you inhale for seven seconds. You hold your breath for three or four seconds. Then you exhale loudly for a count of eight. And then you do that four times in a row. It causes the brain to calm down and still itself. I found that it was a great technique for fighting those moments where anxiety was just building up and the emotions were starting to get a little bit too raw. So for me, the luggage exercise, the breathing techniques and such. Knowing when to talk to people and who to talk to at your office to say, I'm having this issue. And being honest with them, because I think mental health has become a huge part of our everyday discussion at companies. I think a lot of companies are paying attention to that now.

Alex: Talking about the writing team, you're involved in the decision of who to hire. What do you look for?

Lucien: I'm looking at a lot of people who come from a lot of different writing backgrounds. I look for, how good is a person with characterization? But I think you need to have someone who is more than just writing cut scenes. You need to have worked in the guts and the mechanics of a video game.

Alex: People sometimes think narrative is the cut scenes. Cut scenes are the easy part. I mean, when we're scheduling, people ask, "how many conversations do you have?" But the conversations are not what take the time. I can write ten pages of dialog in a day and not feel winded. 

The hard stuff is like, what five objects can we put into this room that tell a story about the person that isn't there? And hopefully they are five objects we can buy the wireframe for. What gestures, what body movements, what can we see in a dumbshow that would communicate what's going on, without anybody saying anything. Like readables and dialog are the easy parts and everything that's not dialog is where I spend my time, because it's the stuff that has to be implemented well by other departments, the stuff that has the most dependencies, that stuff is 90 percent thinking it up and then 10 percent writing it down.

Lucien: Yeah.

Alex: And that's that's really where most of my time goes, is either thinking of the thing that would be really evocative that somebody else is going to make. And then, you know, talking to people about what they're doing and saying, OK, here's how your idea will work with the story or how it might break the story.

Lucien: Yeah, I've had those before. I've had those conversations before.

Lucien Soulban, Part Three

Alex: Is there a narrative delivery system that you wanted to implement that you couldn't? Or, is there a narrative delivery idea that you thought of as a victory?

Lucien:  Yeah, yeah, there was. I was working on a game for Ubisoft, and I ended up leaving before it was complete. And I had the support of the team, but we were a victim of time. I wanted to do a system that didn't slow the player down from jumping in from multiplayer match to multiplayer match, but that still allowed players who like story to feel like it had more meat to it than just a multiplayer PVE style game. 

So I pitched a narrative system that I thought would allow people to seamlessly go in from one match to the other, but if you were somebody who enjoyed story, if you were a lore diver, you could go into elements of the menu system and explore and find things, and things that you did in the game reinforced that. It allowed players to feel that they were part of a greater storyline, that the multiplayer matches fed into a more global element and that there was progress and process there. So you could hear the characters voicing their approach and take on things. 

Unfortunately, it just wasn't something that we could pursue.

Narrative systems that I am proud of having accomplished, though, is with the Far Cry games. I was able to create randomized bottles of conversation that mixed and matched so that the player could feel like they were walking through a world and not hear the exact same conversation repeatedly. 

I would have one container where NPCs are talking about immediate needs, right? And so two NPCs would come in. I knew the minute that their animation cycle synched up, and that when they were standing there, I would have approximately 30 seconds. Okay, we timed all of this out. We talked to the animation team. 30 seconds for these two NPCs to talk. 

Then they break and go on their own individual animation cycles. They go on patrol and they might come back, sync back up again, 30 seconds again. 

So I said, okay, so I have 30 seconds. So the first NPC would always state a need. And it was one of four or five needs. "We need medicine." "We need food." "We need fresh water." "We need supplies." "We need ammunition." 

The second NPC had multiple responses, each of which would reinforce whatever was being said: "I know somebody who can help with us with that." "We're gonna have to steal it, but I know where we can go." "I have a stash located somewhere nearby," that sort of thing. 

Then the first NPC would respond with something like, "OK. Thanks. That helps a lot." That sort of thing. But because each response was randomized, the conversation was rarely repeated note for note for note.

The one that I was really proud of, was on Rainbow 6 Vegas. I created chained barks (based on game verbs: "Reloading" "I'm being shot at!" "health down!" "friend down," that sort of thing). So the first NPC would always say his line, no matter what. It didn't matter if he was there alone or if he was there with other combatants on his side, he would always say something like, "I'm under fire." 

The second NPC had a second-stage response that never required an answer. Something like, "I've got you covered." Or, "Keep your head down!" 

Then there would be a third NPC who would say something like "shut up and fire back" or, "cover each other!" -- something to reinforce what was there, but would never necessitate any sort of response. It actually got called out in reviews for Rainbow six Vegas, where reviewers were like, “Wow, the A.I. is really smart, it knows when there's a whole bunch of people there, and they're talking to each other and everything.” 

And I felt smart because it wasn't A.I. It was just a matter of how we strung the bottles together and ensuring that the rules made sure that they never broke one another.

Alex: Is there any philosophy or academic theory that you find useful in your work?

Lucien:  I take a nibble from here, a nibble from there. I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama and Education, and the writing that I did initially were plays. And so I think I take the playwright’s approach, where I'm not focused on what the camera angle is, or zoom in on the eyes, or anything. It's characters in that moment, what I want them to say and what I want that subtext to be. 

Every project has its own DNA, how it approaches things, the problems, the troubleshooting, I think you need an arsenal of tricks. So for one game, I might rely on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. In another game, I might apply the Pixar approach to character design: what is their greatest strength? Their greatest weakness? What gets them into trouble? How do other people perceive them? It's a variety of tricks based on the genre or style of game and the project itself.

Alex: When you talk about grazing, I think one of the things I like about being a writer is, I don't have to cite any work. It's okay if I don't truly understand somebody's philosophy. Or misunderstand it in a useful way. It's okay if if I use the Wikipedia entry. Because I'm making this all up anyway.

Lucien: Right.

Alex: I'm not saying that this is how the world is in 99 percent of the cases, I'm just saying this is true for the protagonist. 

E.g., Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said that grief has five stages, anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Is that true? Who cares? If I put a character through that, they'll have a trajectory. I'm not responsible for whether that is scientifically true.

Lucien: On this last project that I've been working on, I realized that the villain didn't have a very concrete set of ambitions other than just being the villain. So I applied the Dan Harmon story circle to who he was and what he wanted and where it brought him. I find that these little tips and tricks are really useful when you want to get your team on board. Because if you're telling them, oh, you know, the villain does this, then he does that and this is why he does the things that he does... their eyes glaze over. 

But if you say, look, story circle! Interesting, huh? This is where the character is. This is where they're going. This is where they get what they wanted but at a cost, where they realized what they really needed instead of what they wanted... it gets other departments excited. 

And they're like, “yeah, OK, very cool. Have you thought about doing this. Or, you know, where does this put the character at that moment of the game?” And I find that sharing the mechanics of what you're doing sometimes aids in communication.

Alex: One of the hardest things for me is I see a sort of shape in my head.

Lucien: Mm hmm.

Alex: Like to me, the story is math. You know, in the way that a mathematician will see an equation as a shape in their head. I read that when they're doing higher levels of math, they're manipulating a shape in their head, they're not manipulating the formula, the formula is just how they put it down on paper for other people. And a nonverbal shape is hard to impart.

Lucien: I think that's unique to yourself. For me, there is a scale. OK, there is there is a sense of balance and weight, and I start reading it and I'm like, “oh, wait, wait. The scale is shifting.” And I sometimes have a problem articulating it. I'm looking through it and I'm like, going, let me see how I can get the balance back because it's too heavy on this side. What if I short it here -- oh hey, that works, actually.

Alex: So what I get from what you're saying is that often these philosophies and theories are a way to convey what's in your mind to people who don't necessarily grok story.

Lucien: Yeah.

Lucien Soulban, Part Two

Alex: So when you're iterating, particularly during a vertical slice, do you find that there's a back and forth between design and narrative. Does narrative ever inspire design? Does design inspire narrative?

Lucien: A vertical slice is often a linear experience showcasing going from A to B to C to D on a guided tour. And while there may be a small open-world component to it, it's so self-contained that narrative is there helping drive that momentum forward. 

But by the time the vertical slice comes around, narrative has already been involved in who is the main character? What is his or her main motivation? What are they trying to accomplish within the game? 

But there are times where there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the vertical slice. And either you can apply them directly within the vertical slice or you can say, OK, this is something that we need to address moving forward. But I think that once you're in vertical slice territory, it's far less blue sky. 

Alex: And hopefully by then you have ironed out any sort of basic ludo-narrative dissonance.

Lucien: You have to.

Alex: Or do you ever find during a vertical slice that you're going, "Oh, wait a second, this narrative is totally at odds with what the gameplay has turned into."

Lucien: I think they're always be a little bit of that friction just because you're finally starting to see the narrative in conjunction with other elements of gameplay. You see the game theory being put into practice. And thus you realize where things may not match up. 

But generally, when it comes to, well, how many people are we killing? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? All those sorts of things, that should be well and done and decided. 

I think that if you're trying to go into vertical slice, unless it's a technical vertical slice, you should already have your beats nailed down. You should already know exactly what point you are in the story, what it might mean to the characters to be where they are in the story so that the people playing the vertical slice, especially the studio heads, don't feel like they've just been slammed and overwhelmed with a bunch of stuff. You need to be very surgical and methodical in what you give them as a relatable experience, but still make it feel like it is a well-realized experience.

Alex: What would you say are the hardest battles that you fight?

Lucien: It's kind of a tricky question. Fighting people's experiences. So I might come on a project and I'm like, “hey, I want to do this.” And they were like, “oh, you know, we tried that in a previous game and it failed. So we're not going to do that.” Rather than saying, OK, what lessons did we learn in the previous game? 

The other thing is fighting against people's preferences, against what they watch on television or movies. People really want to push what they've seen and loved. OK. So you'll have people coming up with ideas that, you know, just played out on the last episode of this show and you're like, no, we can't do that. I had an argument once with somebody about, what if these aliens are advance scouts? And what if they're creating a portal. And [[Expanse Spoiler Alert]] they were telling me one of the plots from The Expanse. “We can't do that! The Expanse just played on Amazon.”

I'd also say the hardest battles that I've fought is with people who think that they should be writers. So they end up by trying to push their vision or ideals on you, thinking that you are a secretary for whatever their vision is. Rather than allowing you to sort of explore things. I had literally one script review that took five weeks as I went through the entire script with the powers that be and had them literally fight me on word usage, saying, “oh, no, no, no. Over there, I said this specific word, not the one you used.”

Alex: I had an argument a couple decades ago with a French producer on the TV show I created, over punctuation. And I was thinking, hey, (a) I'm the writer and (b) your native language is not English. Though I realize now that I should have changed it the way he wanted it, because (a) definitely not a hill to die on, and (b) the actor is going to deliver the line however they feel like it anyway.

Lucien: People that rely on a lot of television for [their cultural references], they expect you to share that common bias. And they try and pull you in that direction. And so it was, OK, now I have to watch 24, because Rainbow Six Vegas wanted a 24 experience. It's 24, meets this, it's 24 meets that. They want that fast pace. And if you're not writing Jack Bauer lines and everything, it's not good enough.

And then there're fights I have with my own cleverness. I'll say, oh, these are my Rosencrantz and Guildenstern characters. And I make the mistake of bringing that up. And people are like, oh, I don't think people will know who Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are. Maybe we can use two characters more like the two characters from Pineapple Express. So you sabotage yourself.

Alex: "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was not a buddy cop comedy.".

Lucien: The darkness of it really appealed to me and having two characters that were questioning their own existence and trying to find purpose in between the scenes really struck me. But I should never have mentioned it. I was trying to sound smart, and that bit me in the ass. 

Oh, another hard battle is that everybody's got an opinion on writing.

Alex: "If you can talk, you can write."

Lucien: Yeah, exactly. And so because everybody has an opinion on writing, they will not only criticize, they'll offer you the wrong path. Because they don't understand exactly what they're critiquing. They're only talking about what they don't like. 

When I was at Ubisoft, I ended up doing a two-week program at the design academy. This is where they send people off to Paris and they learn how to make video games by designing a video game on paper. When I did it, it was just basically this thing that we did in the office. It wasn't as romantic as going to Paris or being fed by a chef. I didn't get that treatment. 

But there was one thing that they talked about... the way designers pursue things. It's an obvious one: form follows function. It was a bit of an epiphany for me because designers always, always focus on the function of something first and then the form afterwards. I realized I could understand their position better and break down arguments better if I said, “I get that you don't you don't like what you read. What is the function that it fails to accomplish?” With that lens, they were able to better articulate what the issue was. Or they were able to understand that what they were espousing was a preference, not an actual issue.

Alex: Yeah, I think we all have to remember, rather than just getting our back up and saying, I disagree with you, ask: what are you trying to solve? If they give you a solution, which is usually wrong, ask: what is the problem that this solution is supposed to fix? Because then I may be able to solve their problem in a more productive way, and one which also abides by the six other mandates that my solution was trying to abide by. 

What people don't realize about writers is that we're reluctant to change our story not just because it's our baby, but because we have been given multiple mandates it has to satisfy: themes, and world, and main character, and tone, and the scope of the game, and the scope of the narrative within the game, and the limitations of narrative in the medium of games, and in some cases, the shortcomings of a particular actor or two, and so forth. 

And your solution may fix the problem that you're seeing, but it also breaks all those other things. So that's how a lot of criticisms fall short. But then we writers also fall short when we just come back with, “here's why the solution you're proposing sucks.” Instead we have to say, "What are you trying to fix, exactly?" And nine times out of ten that we do that, there's a simple fix we can think of that doesn't break all those other mandates.

What do you keep in mind about feedback? One of the skills for any writer is learning to not only accept feedback but to seek it out; and another skill is how to use it. So do you have, like, a mantra, or do you have tools that you apply to criticism?

Lucien: Yeah. One is try not to take it personally. You will have people that are going to be blunt and it may feel personal, but you've got to divest yourself from the process because we're creative types. We put a lot of emotional investment into the things that we write. Therefore, we're a lot more protective of it because it speaks to our ability. 

So I think one of the lessons is to take a step back away from the criticism. Take a walk. Go back to it, reread what was said. If there is an issue with the way it is said, I'll address that. I'll talk to the person. But often I'll find that the person isn't trying to be personal. They're targeting something. So I try to see it from their point of view. 

An interesting thing that I had heard from a friend of mine by the name of Aaron Loeb, really smart, brilliant fellow. Oh, he's a theater playwright as well, but also works for video games. He's an amazing writer. Well, one of the things that he said was, assume that the person you're talking to isn't an idiot. Assume that they are intelligent. Are reasoning. Are an expert at what they do. Once you approach them like they're an expert at what they do, then allow yourself to ask the question, “How can I see what I wrote through their eyes?” And it's a difficult thing because sometimes your ego is bruised and, “no, no, fuck it they didn't get it, fuck them.” I'm pissed off and I'm going to have my moment. 

But, you know, do that in private. Don't do that to their face. Take the information that was given to you. Walk away. Come back to it. Then look at it and remind yourself that they’re an expert in their domain; at least give them the benefit of that doubt. Can I see their point of view? Is it a misunderstanding or is it just a difference of approach? And sometimes you'll find that, no, you still disagree with them and sometimes you'll find, oh, I see what they're saying. 

A lot of the feedback that we receive is through email, especially now because of COVID. There's a lot of opportunity for misinterpretation. So especially there, I advise walk away from what you read, come back to it, reevaluate it. And then, approach it with, “How do I see the issue through their eyes?”

Alex: I had an acting teacher who would say, "Find the truth." Even if the feedback is 75% wrong, it's 25 percent true. It's coming from somewhere. Find 25 percent as opposed to dismissing the 75 percent. And that's why I try to remember the Hollywood writer's mantra, which is "We'll take a look at that."

Lucien: Yeah.

Alex: And it sounds like, "Fuck you, we're not going to do that." But it actually does mean, We'll go take a look at that. Because we might find out it's actually a good idea, or there is a good version of that idea, and if it's not a good idea, it's better to come back afterwards and say, "We tried that and we couldn't make it work," instead of rejecting something in the meeting.

And then we always have to remember that the version, like when we're communicating between devs, if they say something, they maybe have a dumb version of that in their head, and then they propose something, and they have a brilliant version in their head, but I have a dumb version in my head. And I'm rejecting the dumb version or their idea, not the brilliant version they actually had in mind. So it's hard.

Lucien: I try and give more of a specific timeframe. Like, I'll tell them. Okay, listen, I'll get back to you within 24 hours. That way they feel more like it's a legitimate thing because I've given them a timetable.

One of the biggest battles that we also face is that we're talking with people who don't brainstorm in the way that we're used to. People find an issue and then want to throw everything out and come up with their own idea. Because the new idea sounds sexy and is lacking in any sort of issues. But it's just that we haven't had a chance to explore their idea yet to find where the issues lie. So one of the biggest fights I always have is trying to convince somebody not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I get that there is an issue with this. We don't need to scrap everything. Let's just reexamine the small part and see if we can't find a solution for it.

Alex: Is it important for a videogame writer to have a voice, or is it better to be a chameleon. And how did you find your voice?

Lucien: I think what happened was I didn't second guess my first draft. The way I found my voice was one being a lot more self-assured about what I was writing. OK, reading it out loud. Seeing what worked, what didn't. Talking to the actors that I worked with. Listening to them doing a performance, seeing where they were stumbling and everything. And then you start arming yourself with a whole bunch of tricks to move forward. 

But I think that every writer has an internal voice when they write. And it's that natural voice that allows them to write the quickest and commit to the ideas. And there's a flow to it. I think you need to appreciate your voice, but know that you need to go back over it and start editing it. My initial voice is humorous and sarcastic. And so I use that voice to write the first draft of whatever I'm writing. Then I don't hesitate to go back in there, create a slush file. So I don't feel like I'm just dumping stuff off, you know, into the trash chute.

Alex: So you can save all your darlings in a file somewhere so you don't actually have to kill them. I think a lot of writers do that.

Lucien: Don't be self-critical when you first write. But once you're done with that first draft, go back in there with the critiques. I go back in there with the actors in mind. I go back in there with the performer's eye, or the audience's eye, and start finding ways of making it sound stronger and better and working around my own weaknesses.

Alex: Yeah, I mean, my wife Lisa always talks about the vomit draft. I've never understood novelists and screenwriters who try and write a perfect page and then another perfect page. I'm, like, once I've got the beat sheet, I want to get that first draft written. I think, Don't look back. Don't read anything that you wrote.

Lucien: Yeah.

Alex: Push through it and then the pressure is off. You can start tinkering.

Lucien: I found that going back and rereading and rereading and rereading the first draft while it was being written in order to get that voice right in your head was a form of procrastination. It was stopping me and I would often use it, like, "Oh, I don't feel like writing right now, I'm just going to review what I wrote." 

I think you need to trust your first voice. What you write needs to sound like it comes from a natural place. And I think you need to get that out there and then go back over it with the more seasoned professional eye on things and see whether or not it sounds good or whether or not it sounds grounded or evocative or whatever it is. But the job of the first draft is just to get written.

Alex: And sometimes, you know, the things you write without criticizing it is actually pretty good. Winging it, with an outline, sometimes you come up with something pretty good.

Lucien: I think you've got to tap into the joy of why you started writing in the first place. One of the things that I'm re-learning right now, now that I'm in quarantine, is looking at stuff that I wanted to write and realizing I was like putting all this gravity and importance behind the words. 

So I stepped back and I said, when did I stop having fun writing? When did it I put so much weight on it? And so I just started writing a story without any planning, just a basic understanding of who the character was. I was like, screw it. Yeah. 

Sometimes that gets me in trouble. Sometimes it backs me into a corner. Sometimes I come out with a novel and I go, “that didn't go in the direction I anticipated.” But I'd rather do that and complete something, then get stopped halfway through it because I'm over analyzing. Because by the time that I'm done with the planning and I start writing it out, I'm a really kind of fatigued with it.

Alex: I have a theory that 40% of the way into anything is the Sucky Point. 40% into any creative project, and you start going, oh, this is terrible, what am I doing?

Lucien: Yeah, totally.

Alex: There's an initial excitement. And then once you're over 50 percent, you can say, oh, yeah, I got half of this done, and it's all biking downhill from here. But at 40%, it's like, ooooh, I have to do more of this and I don't believe in it anymore.

Lucien: I think for me middles are the hardest part. I generally don't start a story unless I know who my main character is. And I ask myself some questions like, what is the conscious motivation? What is the subconscious motivation? How do these two elements scrape against each other? 

And if a character fails to resolve that friction, then they're going to fail. So what is it that they need to do to acknowledge that their subconscious motivation is the real motivation? So I've got my beginning. I've got my end. 

And now the middle part is where the heaviest work ends up. I have to ask myself, could this be shorter? Am I just delaying or offsetting the action and the drive towards the end because I'm trying to fill up the middle?

Lucien Soulban, Part One

My friend Lucien Soulban is a Lead Narrative Designer at Obsidian Entertainment. He was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Story in 2013 for Far Cry 3 and in 2015 for Far Cry 4. He has a slew of credits on AAA titles, including assorted Far Cries, Rainbox Sixes, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Warhammer: Dawn of War. He is also extremely well loved in the writing community in Montreal; we'll be sorry to see him leave town once it's important to go into an office again.

Alex: So I gather you just moved to Obsidian, and, let's get technical right away, that means learning a flock of new software tools.

Lucien: Obsidian has its own tool set because their games do a lot of branching. The tools have been around for a while now. It's a lot of learning on the fly, because I don't have the benefit of being at the company to sit down with people. I handed in my two weeks notice at Ubisoft, and literally the next day we went into quarantine. And so I left Ubisoft remotely... my last two weeks were remote. I began at Obsidian in April, and it's also been remote. So there's a lot of assumed knowledge that everybody else possesses and they've been doing RPGs for a while.

Alex: Well, learning any toolset is harder when you can't go over to somebody and say, Will you take a look at my screen and tell me what the hell I did wrong? What did I break here?

How is the storytelling different at Obsidian?

Lucien: Well, Ubisoft was only beginning to look at RPG in greater detail over the last few years; there was very little of branching dialogs initially. There was no need to give the character multiple options for dialog. There was no need for UI to call up dialog options. 

Obsidian has been doing more of the sort of traditional RPG approach where a lot of it was, “This is the node where you ask more questions. Here is the node where you progress the quest." So there's a lot more compartmentalizing what you write in order to fit the stubs as opposed to a linear path. You've got to be a lot more careful with how information is transmitted, because if you pass information out along the tree, the player may not see it. 

So you have to be really surgical about what the nodes say along the critical path in order to feed that information. There's a lot more troubleshooting on the fly.

Alex: Are there debugging flags that you can set in your software to say, over multiple playtests, does this bit always play, does this bit ever play?

Lucien: I’m still learning because the system is seriously robust. But yeah, you've got to go into the toolset to do it. It’s built with all kinds of conditionals and pathing options. It’s crazy how much love and finessing went into it.

Alex: Does the software let you visualize the tree easily?

Lucien: Oh yeah, absolutely. Basically, the best way I can put it? It almost looks like a mind map sort of thing, you know, where it can expand outward into a variety of different responses. But you can collapse responses or look at the tree in its entirety. You can highlight specific nodes through menu selection.

Alex: I hope you can do, like, Minority Report. (Waves hands as if moving holograms around.)

Lucien: I wish. I wish. It basically looks like a poster board with cards on it and branching lines. But you can also put conditionals in there. There's a bit of programing. So, for example, you'll put a card there, you'll say, okay, this node is going to trigger three options for dialog, for responses from the player. And then you can put conditionals saying, well, this note is only triggered if the player has inadvertently gone forward and finished the quest before ever talking to the NPC. If that condition isn't met, it then gives you just the other two options. Or this node feeds is shared with multiple conversations. Coming from linear games, that’s a new trick I’m learning to master, like going from Chess to Star Trek 3D Chess.

Alex:  What we do is just linear. You've got a character with a name and a backstory and relationships with people. Even if you were to give the player dialog options, they would have to be within a narrow realm of what's reasonable for this character and the situation. 

Say you're playing Hamlet, he's not just going to go off and say, "All y'all go fuck yourselves." What does low IQ Hamlet sound like? Wow, that's a can of worms.

Lucien: It's up to us to limit the parameters. In general you want a character who sounds at least reasonably intelligent, but not really make any sort of moral choices or decisions until the player is specifically asked to make a moral choice or decision. It's going require testing. There's gonna be times where we step over the line and we give too much characterization or go too flat. I think it's just a matter of range finding. When you pick up a bow, you fire an arrow. The first arrow is too high. The second arrow is too low.

Alex: And the statistician yells, "We hit the target! On average."

So when you're writing for a blank character versus a character with a voice and the past -- how do you think the player experiences those differently?

Lucien: I think that the genre of the game -- whether it's an FPS or over-the-shoulder third-person, whether you can see your character or not -- I think that creates a player expectation of who their character is. The minute you're in the character's head, I think a lot of players are used to having the characterization pulled back more into stereotype or wish fulfillment. 

But when you can see your character, when the camera shows you your character performing, then there's a lot more of an expectation of characterization. In Ubisoft FPS's, we made a conscious decision never to pull the camera out of the character's head, or at least only in very rare moments. The character is a tabula rasa, because [Ubisoft HQ in] Paris and Editorial wanted you to feel like the real you is dropped into the game world. Accessible to your personal reality was a part of the discussion.

Alex: In an RPG, I am the main character, so whatever I want to do is whatever the character wants to do. In a game with a defined main character, the character wants to do things that the player doesn't automatically care about. For example, in our last game, Arthur wants to escape the town of Wellington Wells to find his long-lost brother. As a story-teller, my job is to get you to care about the brother, which we did through a series of audio flashbacks. Is that enough, though? Or do you have to give the player a player-focused motivation for pursuing the levels that make up the game? E.g. "I want to explore a weird world" or "I came here to chew gum and bash heads, and I'm all out of gum."

Lucien: The player needs to empathize or sympathize with the characters. When you're talking about a tabula rasa character in an open world game, you force them to act because the situation itself is going haywire. Their life is in danger. It's more immediate of a concern... it’s survival.

Alex: You're talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Lucien: Yeah. I've been using Maslow's hierarchy of needs so much I was trying to avoid invoking it. But talking about the very base of the pyramid, if you're in a first person perspective, you've got these immediate threats that rob you of security, that rob you of your immediate survival. I think if you have a character who is better realized with motivations and sense of priority and everything, there's more opportunity to push them higher on the hierarchy. Even, by the end of the game, allowing them to arrive at that self-actualization top of the pyramid. 

But you really have to work to get the player on board with those motivations. You take a look at a game like Watchdogs 1. The main character was seeking vengeance. But we almost never saw the niece, we never got to know her, interact with her in a meaningful way, or say, fully saw what happened to her. That character was never a part of our experience. As a result, there was a disconnect. The motivation of the character was only that of the character's. The players were more interested in exploring the open world than they were in pursuing his revenge quest. I wonder if it mattered to them beyond their own desire to stay invested.

Alex: I had the same problem with Last of Us 2. Ellie is so hell bent on getting revenge for something that I don't think she needs revenge for, I don't approve of what she's doing to get it. "I'm out. I can't do this anymore." First of all, you don't need revenge. Second, it's not going to help anybody-- To the creative director, sure, it's a metaphor for the pointlessness of the endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but if you want to make that point score, first you have to bring me in, make me feel, "Yes, I must have my revenge, no matter what the cost!" before you show me that it's pointless. Otherwise it's just pointlessly pointless.

Lucien: Revenge has become a shorthand in a lot of games, because revenge implies a call for action that can involve violence. "Oh, people want revenge. It'll be fine. Somebody wronged you." And you can empathize that if it happened to your family, you'd want to do that as well. But it's a tricky line to walk. The player needs to feel that they've been brought into the situation, or it's just the character going off on their own, and the player feeling, “Well, OK, I guess I'm along for the ride and I'll just use this as an excuse to perpetuate violence."

Jon Ingold, Part Three

Alex: In a narrative game, the main character can be a distinct character with a voice and a past, or a blank slate. How is the player experience different between the two story modes? In the case of a distinct character, is it important to make sure that the player always has their own reason to do what the player character wants to do? How do you make sure of that?

Jon: I’ve got very little interest in blank characters for the player to project onto; I find it makes for very disposable storytelling. (We did it for Sorcery! and it worked out ok, I think, but it does reduce every encounter to “let’s meet another funny local!”) For me, character comes first and story comes second - I think people are interested in human beings, and what those humans do is only a vehicle for letting us spend time with them. (The plot of the Avengers movies are irrelevant, right? We’re there for the banter.)

I also don’t worry very much about the player wanting to do what the protagonist wants to do: it just doesn’t seem to be a problem in my experience. The player, picking up a game, wants to be told what they’re supposed to be doing, because they want to play the game “correctly”.

From there it’s a question of - does the game reward the player for joining in? Does the story surprise and delight you? Do you warm to the characters and want to spend time with them? I have a feeling most people who got into Assassin’s Creed Odyssey did so because they liked Cassandra’s arms; people who got into Outer Wilds enjoyed piecing together its back-story, but in neither of those games does the protagonist’s motivation really matter. There’s enough to keep the game ticking over, and we’re enjoying the ride.

For me the most appealing things about a distinct character are - what is being with this character going to allow me to do? - and I can’t wait to see how this character going is to react to what’s coming next!

Alex: What are the different needs of dialog to be delivered as text on the screen, and dialog intended to be performed and recorded?

Jon: Oddly enough, I’ve got very little experience of recorded dialogue! Almost all the work I’ve done is either prose, or “graphic novel”-style dialogue bubbles, and I suspect all three are different in terms of their pacing and delivery. I generally think a lot about pace and length: our prose games try to be very snappy; ideally every paragraph has a joke or a moment of insight. And I’ve really enjoyed writing “paced dialogue” of Pendragon and Heaven’s Vault, where each dialogue line has to be short, but the way they stack together of chain can deliver some nice effects.

I’d love to work with actors more, though; as a writer it’s a delight to have moments really brought to life. I’d just need them to patient with me while I work out what you can and can't actually *say.*

Alex: I think the key thing is never give an actor a result if you can avoid it — no “say the line faster.” Give them an organic reason to give the result — “Okay, you’ve just noticed that the house is a little bit on fire.”

John Badham has an excellent book about directing actors called I’ll Be In My Trailer.

Jon: I did a day’s work on the film set of the movie The Imitation Game as a mathematics consultant, where I worked with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kiera Knightley teaching them some maths for a scene. It’s blink-or-you-miss-in in the final film, but what was really interesting for me was watching a professional actor trying to absorb “how a mathematician talks” as fast and as efficiently as possible.

Alex: What is your favorite narrative delivery victory? What is a narrative delivery system you weren’t able to implement, what were you trying to do, why didn’t it work, and what were you able to do?

Jon: Wow, that’s a hard question. We’ve done some things that have been lovely and emotional and I’m super proud of - I adore the death of Fogg in 80 Days [Fogg can die??? OMG]; I like the romance between Flanker and the protagonist in Sorcery!; I love Aamir the ten year old space pirate in Heaven’s Vault.

But my absolute favourite beat is either the moment in Sorcery! where you - the classic nameless D&D protaganist - confront the mind-meddling Archmage after four long episodes, and he convinces you that your whole journey has been a brainwashed set-up because, after all, you don’t even know your name.

Or else it’s the bit in 80 Days where Passepartout gets drunks on vodka and can’t spell Novorossiysk; and the journal keeps trying alternatives and deleting them, which was an effect that just fell out of the way we were happening to handle the text UI.

The list of things that didn’t work is much, much longer: every game we release is full of compromises - places where I hope the player can’t tell that what I hoped a scene might turn into is quite different than what it actually was. A lot of those are action sequences; action doesn’t leave much room for player failure - so while you can conceive “Passepartout scales the balloon to patch the air leak," making that interactive doesn’t pan out so well since he can hardly be allowed to fall off. My chapter of Over the Alps has a car chase which seemed like such a good idea until I was trying to write choices to pace out the narrative and I had nothing: er, steer efficiently and drive fast, please?

My solution to action set-pieces, by the way, is almost always to have a secondary character, so the player can be busy arguing with someone while the action happens as it must!

Alex: Many of your games deliver narrative non-linearly; the player can access narrative chunks in different orders. Do you write differently for non-linear narrative? What does that give the player that a linear narrative can’t?

Jon: For me the most important thing is narrative momentum. I hate that thing in games where you’re wandering around aimless waiting to hit the next checkpoint to kick the next bit of narrative along. I want the story to be constantly spooling out - even if that’s the characters walking in silence because that’s appropriate.

And you simply can’t get that effect if the narrative is linearly delivered - or even if the narrative is non-linearly delivered, but non-contextual. (To give an example of that, I loved the Outer Wilds, but I didn’t like its narrative stuff very much because I would do some hair-raising gameplay, then meet a character and have a really sedate chat with them. The lore and content was interesting, but the delivery was only “pick things up”.)

I want the narrative to envelop and evolve around me, and in any game that isn’t a branching 80 Days-style flow, that means in my experience that the narrative has to be built from opportunities and guards. We write a script full of narrative moments, guarded by the conditions that make them make sense; and some of those moments are opportunities that create narrative moments later down the line, and we push those onto the player when the game thinks they’re running dry.

(So for instance, in Heaven’s Vault, Huang the librarian has a story he can tell the player about a trader on the market moon of Renaki. He’ll only tell it to you if you’re nice to him - but also, only if the game thinks you need it.)

But that design means that there’s very little control over what order things happen in - in Pendragon, when characters encounter a scene, we never know who's in the party, how many people are there, how healthy they are - so we try to cover all those possibilities with a strategy of sensible defaults and specific overrides. Everyone will have *something* to say, but if you’re there with Merlyn, you’ll get this particular insight.

It’s all about having a good authoring system; once you have you have your content pattern worked out, this kind of structure is very easy to throw content into because you don’t need to think about the flow of the scene at all, and there’s no limit to how much you can throw it because all of it turns up sometime, for someone.

The flip side is that it does limit your ambitions: a scene which would require too much specific writing to handle being told out of sequence simply can’t go in the game. But writing within constraints is… normal?

Alex: Is there academic theory that you find useful in your game writing? What did you learn from it?

Jon: I tend to pick up theories and advice quite impressionistically: a tidbit here, an idea there; things I hear from clever people that resonate with my experience of writing. I’ve never seen any holistic theories I can get behind; they’re usually too simple, and they never seem to resonate: they often feel like people theorising in a vacuum rather than describing how they work.

The most significant things I picked up were ideas floated by the interactive fiction community in the early 2000s, where we used to make really ambitious text-based games that explored wonderful ideas, like the separation of the player and protagonist (with unreliable narrators, and games that lied to you, and games built on dramatic irony). And I attended a 4 day Robert McKee “Story” course, which I detested, but came away from with a huge number of useful ideas. (I think many of them are actually Aristotle’s, not McKee’s; and many are just ideas - not rules - but I can’t deny I was challenged and stretched by the course.)

But one thing I’ve noticed is that the most useful tools to me are all really lenses for working out why things aren’t working, rather than ideas for how things Should Go.

Alex: I think that’s a really good point. There are all sorts of games and films that seem to break the rules and work anyway. What’s the three-act structure of A Hard Day’s Night? When something works, you don’t need the rules. You need them when it doesn’t work.

Which are the games that inspired you? And did they work?

Jon: Spider & Web - a spy story, told in flashback during an interrogation. Every time you fail a timed puzzle, the interrogator insists that you’re lying and makes you tell the story again. As you fail, you slowly learn a few more details about what happened leading up to that point, culminating in a moment of pure insight which allows you to escape. It’s a bit like the device Prince of Persia used, only tied directly into the core game mechanic.

9:05 - a short game in which you get up and go to work, and then it turns out you weren’t who you thought you were, and you replay the game and realise you just assumed you were, but you weren’t.

Galatea - a short game in which you talk to someone, and that’s all you do, but they slowly change their attitude to you based on what you say.

Rameses - a game about an introvert teen, who refuses to do most of the things you ask him to because he’s too introverted. Has a great twist when you think you know how the story is going, because it’s that kind of story, but then he’s too shy to do that too.

Shrapnel - a game that occasionally types in commands for you regardless of what you type, because destiny

The Gostak - a game that’s written in a language that isn’t English, which you have to figure out as you play

The Edifice - a game where you have to learn an alien language to communicate with another character

Photopia - a game about a tragic, needless death, where nothing you do can change anything, told out of sequence for maximum impact

… honestly, it was a melting point of brilliant ideas, and within the constraints of being parser games they were well-implemented too.

Alex: What do you do to stay sane?

Jon: I don’t stay sane very well, I think; I tend to get over-excited mid-project and then heart-broken post-project, and then pick myself up by doing another project and repeating the whole cycle… luckily, though, I have small children, who are extremely diverting and distracting and ground me in a little in something more closely resembling reality.

Sometimes I manage to read books, too - mostly Agatha Christie, Ursula Le Guin or Gene Wolfe - though I find my concentration span is rather feeble these days. And my wife and I watch dramas on TV but only if they have jokes and no torture, which rules out 99% of shows.

Jon Ingold, Part Two

Alex: One of the hardest skills for a writer is learning how to accept and use criticism. What do you try to keep in mind when you’re getting feedback from above? From below? From other disciplines? How do you get and use feedback?

Jon: The key thing for me about feedback is not to listen to people’s advice, but to try to understand their problems. I mean, sometimes people have good advice, and good ideas, and you should take those, but usually all feedback is an emotional reaction to something, and you have to unpick what that something was before you can deal with it. “I found the story slow” is often code for “I didn’t like the main character”, that kind of thing.

And I try not to be too precious about anything I write. Years ago, I remember hearing an interview with Tony Gilroy, the writer/director of Michael Clayton, a pretty good movie from about 15 years ago. He’d written screenplays before and the interview asked, did you take on the directing role because you were sick of people changing your scripts? And his response was, “changing the script doesn’t matter; as a writer you’re always looking to trade up.”

I love that. Forget the bullshit idea that you’re a genius creating masterworks; or that your truth is the one worth telling; or that there’s a perfect sentence out there… you lay out the thing as best you can, and then you look for ways to trade up, and you keep doing that, until you can’t face it anymore, and then you’re done.

Alex: The auteur theory has done so much damage to filmmaking. You can’t make a film in Canada without federal and provincial support, and in Quebec, the people that hand out the provincial support prefer to give their money to writer-directors. But a film gains a lot from having a writer and director who want the same result but don’t necessarily agree how to do it. If you don’t agree, often you come up with a third solution which is fresher and better.

Jon: I love working collaboratively; it’s one of my favourite things about inkle, and my partnership with Joseph as been so creatively beneficial to my writing, despite the fact he’s not especially interested in writing!

Alex: I think to be a successful writer, you either need to find out which of the things that you love writing are the ones that other people really want you to write; or you need to learn to love writing the things you have to write. That sounds unartistic, but it’s not. When I began as a writer, I loved writing action, and not that interested in creating dramatic moments. I kind of live for dramatic writing now, and it seems to be one of the things people like about what I do.

Jon: When I was younger I would have spat and fumed at the idea of writing things which “aren’t me” - other people can do that, so what’s the point? Then after ten years of no one reading anything I wrote, I think I came around to the idea that maybe I’d be happy to write anything, really. Now, I quite like spinning whatever I need to write into a me-ish version of it. But more than anything, I’ve realised that I’m still very much learning, and always will be. I still don’t feel like a “competent” writer, even though I know rationally that I’ve completed quite a lot of projects by this point. I find that quite reassuring, to be honest: I’m never going to feel like I know what I’m doing, so I can stop worrying about it.

Alex: You’ve hired some fantastic writers for your games, e.g. Meg Jayanth on 80 Days. What do you look for in hiring a writer, and how do you go about finding that?

Jon: I’m honestly not sure, but I’m certainly very happy with our hit rate so far. I’ve done three collaborations - with Meg Jayanth on 80 Days, Graham Roberston on Sorcery! 4, and Katherine Neil on Over the Alps. In each case, going in, I was absolutely certain that my fellow writer was going to be perfect for the game, and in each case they were better than I’d hoped.

I think I go into hiring a writer with a strong sense of what their strengths are and what kind of brief they’ll enjoy: what will allow them to shine. That said, though, they’re good writers and highly professional, and would turn out great performances over a wide range of projects, and I can’t really take credit for that.

Otherwise, I knew them as humans before knowing them as writers, and they were all empathetic, and intelligent and widely read. I think also they were people who I could communicate with easily - now I come to write that down, I wonder if that isn’t really the main point, actually.

Alex: Had you run into them at conferences? Or university? Or in the creative community at large?

Jon: Different places - I met Meg at an industry meet up in the earliest days of inkle, then happened to work with her again on a freelance design gig; I met Katherine through Jennifer Schneidereit who runs Nyamnyam; I met Graham on a writer’s course that I co-led with David Varela. Networks, I suppose, but all professional ones. God, I hate COVID.

Jon Ingold Interview, Part One

 

Jon Ingold is the Creative Director at Inkle, an indie studio known (but not well enough!) for making beautiful, literate, text-based narrative games such as Heaven’s Vault and 80 Days. They’ve just come out with Pendragon, a “narrative roguelike” about the final battle of the Arthurian era. Appropriately, this is a written interview – I sent him questions, and some follow-ups, and he wrote the answers down. This is quite a bit less work for me, though thinking up good questions is still half the work. 

Alex: What phase of game development are you in currently? What do you actually do in a day?

Jon: We just shipped a game, Pendragon, so right now I am in a “doodling” phase, while I try to come up with an idea that excites me enough to work on it! I usually have two or three prototypes kicking around at any time, so the hope is one of them will turn into something intriguing!

Meanwhile, there’s company stuff to handle, and inkle’s cofounder Joe is spearheading our next game, and I’m doing a little work towards that occasionally.

Alex: Who are the people you have to make happy, and how do you keep them happy?

Jon: One of the nice things about running a studio is there’s no one above us we have to please: we make games we believe in, and we make them the way they think they ought to be made. So the only people we really have to make happy are our players, though we never really seem to know who they are, or what they like… they come and go! So we try to keep ourselves happy, and make the things we want to make.

Alex: I’m surprised you don’t know who they are. Surely you must have a fan base? I’m sure I’m not the only player who thought, “Pendragon? By the folks who made 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault? Yes, please.” Is it that as an indie you have only limited resources for community management?

Jon: We have a Discord server which has a community of people we recognise, and there are some familiar faces on Twitter - but otherwise there isn’t a space for “fans” to really congregate and become visible. It’s particularly a problem coming from mobile development - Apple creates a solid wall between developers and customers; which has some benefits - you don’t have to moderate the racists yourself - but it also means it’s impossible to, say, tell people who bought 80 Days that a new game has come out.

The problem is always reach, rather that community management. We can announce Pendragon to our circle, but it’s still going to be the case that 90% of the people who would be interested to hear about it will never hear about it. Even Heaven’s Vault is still being discovered, despite awards, reviews and a year and a half!

But it’s also our fault for constantly changing platforms. A lot of people who enjoyed 80 Days are probably waiting for the iPad version of Heaven’s Vault, and so on.

Alex: What are the hardest battles you fight?

Jon: The hardest creative battle is avoiding cliché. Writing in games has to fit itself around what the player can do, same as storylines in spy TV shows have to make space for a car chase, a couple of fights and a third-act twist. But each scene has got to be different, and interesting. You can’t just have a character tell you to take an object to another character in return for some gold. You can’t. You mustn’t. But the temptation to write the easiest storyline, to just recycle the same flow over, can be very strong.

The hardest actual battle we fight is being seen. Indie games appear, then disappear, taking whole studios with them. Every month we’re asking ourselves the question, how to do we help inkle’s games to stay relevant, to stay remarked upon? It’s a battle we’ll always lose in the end - I recently saw a “10 best video games based on novels” list that didn’t include 80 Days - but every little thing we can do keeps the lights on for a little longer.

Alex: Cheer up — maybe the reviewer never heard of Jules Verne!

One of the striking things about your adaptation of “Around the World in 80 Days” was how you guys changed its world from the colonial one that really existed to one where places like Haiti are strong and sovereign and have their own steampunk technology. When did that idea come up and what went into that decision?

Jon: The core concept was design - we needed there to be good reasons for a player to go to, say, South Africa, even though it’s definitely going the wrong direction. We also played into the fact that most people haven’t read Verne’s book, and assume it’s steampunk, because we associate Verne with steampunk (mostly because of the end of the Back to the Future III, I think.)

Meg Jayanth took that idea and developed it, introducing the idea of non-steam steampunk for places where water was too valuable to waste. That was a brilliant piece of world-building which she grew out to cover the various regions we wrote about.

Alex: Is it important to have a voice as a video game writer, or is it better to be a chameleon? How did you find your voice?

Jon: If you’re a freelancing professional, I’m sure you need to be a chameleon; and I often think that ideally a professional writer can write anything, and if they can’t, they can learn. For me, though, I’m determined to have some kind of voice. We flit between genres and styles and different kinds of frames, but I always want our games to have characters, to have humanity, to have intelligence, and to be about something.

I think I found my way to my style the long way round: bouncing between writing things that were “all me” that no one else could get much enjoyment from and writing things weren’t at all me, that came out a little vanilla, a bit oddly echoey.

Richard Dansky, Part Three

...Did I mention RPGs?  Richard Dansky also writes RPGs.

Alex: You have an M.A. in English.

Richard: I'm one degree away from being completely unemployable, so...

Alex: How has that informed your work? Is there an academic theory you find useful?

Richard: In terms of theory... just the notion of literary analysis and being able to deconstruct story structures and narrative structures. The training that I got as a graduate student, the analysis of those narrative structures, is something that served me very well.

Alex: So the ability to see the hidden structures in stories.

Richard: Yeah. And I could start rambling on about [Russian philosopher Mikhail] Bakhtin and all that, but...

Alex: Oh, please do. "What can Bakhtin do for you?"

Richard: Bakhtin actually helped me write a thesis on H.P. Lovecraft as an undergraduate at Wesleyan.

Alex: And what what was your Bakhtinian take on Lovecraft?

Richard: This was before Lovecraft was cool and long before everybody figured out he was a howling racist. But I was talking about spheres of influence and transgression between those spheres of influence. The idea that Lovecraft's horror comes from the trespass, one into the other, human into the monstrous and the monstrous into the human. I could go into a great deal more detail if I could find in the damn thing somewhere in my office.

Alex: Does that work in games as well, this sense of transgression? Or are we just always in a very carefully defined, consistent fantasy world?

Richard: Our worlds are so carefully crafted that it's hard to be allowed to transgress against them. The worlds generally don't allow for a sense of transgression against the story they want to tell. Every so often you get a game that tries to go there. And sometimes the results are fantastic.

Alex: What's one that's fantastic?

Richard: I would say The Last of Us transgresses. And sometimes it doesn't work so well. Where it comes across as crude or the player does not enjoy the feeling of transgression.

Alex: In what way does The Last of Us transgress?

Richard: Well, the standard ending would have ended with the delivery of Ellie to the doctors, happy ending, OK, they're going to save the world now.

Alex: You're a hero.

Richard: And the fact that it doesn't stop there, the fact that we find out more and we act against what was seen as our heroic goal all the way through the game... I think that's a moment of transgression. And an excellent one.

Alex: It is certainly one of the most earned unexpected endings. You're going, oh, my God, that's horrifying. And then you go, but everything that has happened has led up to this. And he couldn't have made a different decision.

Richard: It feels a piece of the world and it feels like something that character would rationally do. That feels righteous to do. And even though it's going against the proposed heroic ideal of the first 90 percent of the game.

Alex: I think that's probably why it was so memorable. If it had had the standard ending, I don't think people would have been over the moon about it.

Richard: Well, and the giraffes. I love the moment with the giraffes. It's the moment of, This is what you are fighting for. That quiet moment. When the shouting stops and the shooting stops and you're not running, you take a deep breath and say, OK, these are real people, these are people who I can care about because they have this humanity to them.

Alex: They have an ability to experience the quiet moments.

Richard: Yeah.

Alex: I think that's right.

Richard: And you contrast that to games where everybody is always shouting all the time. You don't get an impression of characters, because after a while you tune it out. It's just another order, another description, another bit of pipe being laid.

Alex: What question would you most want answered by this book I'm writing?

Richard: What comes next?

Alex: In terms of ... theory? AI?

Richard: Storytelling. We still don't even have a common vocabulary for video game storytelling.

Alex: What would we be looking for in a vocabulary?

Richard: A common language, a formalization of the role, and a professional jargon that could be respected outside of the club.

Alex: Like in show business with your turning points. Act outs. Teasers. Ghosts.

Richard: I mean, we have barks and that's about it. And I think we need our own language to differentiate ourselves from cinema, from television. Now, obviously, there's a lot of overlap, but there's also a lot of space that's ours alone. And trying to cram us into their boxes has, I think in some cases set video game storytelling back.

Alex: Each medium has things that it does well. A novel can slow down or speed up time in a way that a movie or a TV show can't, because everything has to happen in real time. You can jump between times, but you can't speed up time, except for the occasional slow-mo or time lapse shot. You can't show, say, "over the course the next few months, she began to wonder if her marriage was working..." -- you can't show that. What do you think in that sense the medium of videogames is able to do that you can't do in, say, film and television?

Richard: The cheap answer is, interactivity. But the phrase that I've always used is the "player shaped hole." There is a player shaped hole in the center of every videogame story. And as creators, we write to the possibility space of what the player might do. We don't dictate every moment. We prepare for the eventuality of what the player might choose to do at any given moment.

Alex: I think it has parallels to theater. The thing that theater does is, you are physically in the same space with the actors. And that gives you something that film doesn't do, even though, you know, a stage set is so much more artificial than what you see in the film. The fact that you're actually physically there, breathing the same air as the actor, that creates a sort of ritual space. And when a player does a thing, especially when a player gets to choose a thing, they own it in a way that they can't own it as a passive consumer. As you were saying that, you know, "I did this. I decided to save Ellie." That can be quite powerful.

Richard "Safety" Dansky, Part Two

Richard Dansky is a veteran game writer and horror novelist. Among his many novels, Vaporware is the horrifying tale of a game project that refuses to allow herself to be killed off. There is a monster in it, but not the one you think.

Alex: How would you define a narrative designer versus a writer?

Richard: I would say that the two jobs can overlap, but the narrative designer is responsible for the systems for delivering narrative to the player while the writers are responsible for the content that gets delivered.

Alex: And why do you think it's valuable to separate those job descriptions?

Richard: Because it's…. how can I put this delicately?--

Alex: --Some people can't write, and some writers can't program, is that it?

Richard: Some writers can't program, some writers can't design. As games get more sophisticated, you need more and more sophisticated ways of telling stories, you need more intricate artificial intelligence structures to call on for systemic dialog, you need better environmental storytelling. You need somebody to keep track of all of that, and somebody whose primary skill is writing may not have those skills. At the same time, someone whose primary skill is writing should be able to go ahead and write. Maximize the resources, make sure that you're getting people in a position to succeed. But it's not just writing, it has to be a way of delivering the story as well as the story itself.

Alex: So talking about narrative delivery systems: what's a narrative delivery system that you really thought worked? Something that you thought, This is cool, this is doing a new thing. This is something movies don't do.

Richard: I thought that the narrative delivery in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was fantastic. Really brought you into that world.

Alex: How so?

Richard: For the first time in that series, you really got a sense of who the people in that world were. And it was deeper immersion. The sense that their lives have been going on before you got there and will continue to go on after you left.

Alex: I was talking with Anna Megill and she was saying that's apparently called "negative capability." Was that a term you've heard?

Richard: It's not a term I've heard, but I'm happy to steal it.

Alex: What was happening in the game that was new that was making you feel like these people had lives?

Richard: Part of it was the content, what they were talking about, what they were asking the player to do. The language that was used felt realistic and personable. And part of it was the structure of the conversations. There wasn't a character standing around waiting for you to interact with them, in a way that was obvious that they were just tools in the delivery of narrative. They felt like characters. They did not feel like signposts on the way to the story.

Alex: So were these were these branching conversations? Was there AI going on, do you think?

Richard: Yes. And I fully imagine that QA spent many hours screaming into the night testing that because branching dialog is hell. But they did a wonderful job of it.

Alex: What is an interesting narrative delivery system that you weren't able to implement, that you wanted to?

Richard: Well, the early days of the Clancy franchise we basically had no narrative implementation except for a giant wall of text at the beginning of the missions. And with pressure from production and management to fill in every last detail of the mission, those walls got pretty tall indeed.

Alex: I feel like games had way more dialog in the 90s, and then there was a big step back. Because in the 90s it was all just text, so you could write as much as you like. Like Planescape: Torment, there has to be several novels worth of dialogue in there. And then once we started voicing lines and animating characters, then it's like, oh, my God, we can't do that anymore. And we're only now getting back to where we were in the 90s when it was just texts. Does that feel right?

Richard: I think so. But I would say you look even at a game as venerable as Knights of the Old Republic, that had a metric fuckton of dialog. The revolution happened a while ago, to get us back to more and more dialog. Planescape: Torment, I used to know the word count on that. But if you looked at Old Republic, that must be 26 times as large. Just the blossoming of how much is in there. Part of it is the game types that are available now. Part of it is the idea of games as a service so you can keep extending the life of the game and keep on telling more story with that one game. And part of it, like you said, is the advanced technology and the ability to record more easily and more cheaply.

Alex: The mocap, the cost has come down. We're putting more of those dots on people. They can capture more expressions. People don't have to go to a mocap studio anymore, they can have a mocap room in their studio.

Richard: Yeah, ours is in the break room at Red Storm. So when the animation team is at work, everybody clears out, nobody's getting any snacks.

Alex: Oh noes!

Richard: They all deny that. They will say, “You can walk around the edges.” But you don't want to go in there.

Alex: What can you do in non-linear narrative that you can't do in linear narrative?

Richard: We can do a lot of things with messing with the players expectation. One of the nonlinear narratives that I wrote was Splinter Cell: Conviction. That starts with Grimsdottir shooting him. And then the entire game is a flashback leading up to that moment. It tells you how you got there and why that's actually a perfectly rational thing for her to do. Except there's also a flashback within the flashback.

Alex: OK, but to me that's telling a linear story, just not chronologically. I'm talking about, in games, you can have the player discover narrative bits in different orders.

Richard: Sure, that's something that's more prevalent with open world now. Yeah, games like The Division. You still have a lot of short, overlapping stretches of linear narrative. It's a question of what order of the player encounters them. And whether they're gated by difficulty for the player to only run across some of the easy stuff early on.

Alex: Do you think that that is more fun for the player? Does that create verisimilitude? Is that more powerful emotionally? Does it immerse the player more?

Richard: It certainly gives the player more feeling of authorship of their experience. If you talk to somebody who's played a video game, they're going to say, "I did this." Not, "The main character did this." And by letting them choose, you're increasing the amount of authorship that they can have. They'll even say, "I did this" on something that's a roller coaster ride straight rail shooter. Because they will have a better feeling of ownership of their actions, I think, when they have an open world to play with and they can go in any direction.

Richard Dansky, Part One

I met Richard Dansky when he kindly invited me to give a talk at the East Coast Game Conference, down in the wilds of North Carolina, where you're not sure if the "check all weapons" sign at the entrance to the con refers to twelve foot foam swords or firearms. There was fine dining, and there may possibly have been some drinking of whisky. Richard is a seriously veteran game writer, as well as a horror novelist. This is the first part of my interview with him.

Alex: You've worked at Red Storm for 21 years. That's some serious sitzfleisch.

Richard: Well, I’ve worked with Red Storm, but I've been essentially an internal freelancer for Ubisoft most of the time. So I've been based out of Red Storm, but I've worked with Toronto, with Massive in Sweden, with Shanghai, with all sorts of studios all over the world. And so I've gotten the best of both worlds, the stability of having a home base and the chance to work on different projects and go different places, work with different teams.

Alex: So does that mean you spend a year in Malmö or that you fly into Malmö and tell them a few things and then fly back or...

Richard: It depends. I did four months of Malmö for The Division 2. But generally, I fly in for a couple weeks, get in good with the team, figure out what I need to do, and then go back home and write.

Alex: And as Central Clancy writer, what is it you do in a day?

Richard: You know, that's an excellent question, and if I find out, I'll tell you.

Alex: I've had days at work like that.

Richard: The title "Central Clancy Writer" is kind of an old one. The role was defined as being a resource for all things Clancy and narrative. So it could be anything from writing the scripts for a game to serving as a gut check for how Clancy a story was, to saying, No, you can't set a mission in Rio de Janeiro because we blew up a parade there in the last game.

Alex: So you are the lore-brarian, among other things.

Richard: These days I'm doing less of that, more work on non-Clancy projects. But for a while, I was the resource.

Alex: How important is it that everything be as Clancy as possible? And what does that mean?

Richard: There's pillars of Tom Clancy's writing that you want to stick to to make sure the games have that authentic feel. You want that techno thriller feel. You want, "It's tomorrow, it's not the day after tomorrow." You want a clear and present danger and you want the righteous use of force to solve a problem. Those are the guideposts of the brand.

Alex: And have you worked a lot with him?

Richard: He worked closely with Red Storm on the original Rainbow 6. After that, he sort of drifted away. And I did a lot of the original story writing. Brian Upton came up with Ghost Recon. J.T. Petty came up with Splinter Cell. A slew of writers and designers came up with the games that were Tom Clancy, and I shepherded some of those brands through various incarnations storywise.

Alex: So how do you keep the franchise fresh? Or does history do that for you?

Richard: History does that for us. The world is so different from when I started working on Clancy games. I remember walking into the office on the morning of 9/11 and going into my boss's office and saying, OK, we need to rewrite everything now because the world's changed. And it has and it keeps on changing and that provides... endless opportunities for storytelling. On the one hand, you wish the world would be a little more peaceable place.

Alex: Do you know the speculative fiction writer Charles Stross?

Richard: Yes. Yes.

Alex: He writes novels about bureaucrats fighting Lovecraftian elder gods. And he's been complaining that 2020 just keeps getting ahead of him. He's just throwing out shovelfuls of plot that can no longer be put in a spec fiction novel because it's not speculative any more, it's just real life.

Richard: I've read The Laundry Files novels and enjoyed them.

Alex: I would think they'd be up your alley. You also write horror stories.

Richard: Yes.

Alex: And so is that to stay fresh creatively, to stay sane?

Richard: That's where my voice is as a writer. I can write video games ecstatically. And do whatever voices are needed for a game. But when it's my own genuine voice, it's in the horror field. And so those are the ones where the story won't leave me alone until I put it on paper.

Alex: What are the hardest battles that you fight?

Richard: The hardest battles. In a bunch of different arenas they can be anything from fighting for soft, quiet moments in the story when all everybody wants to do is shooting. Bang bang pow pow. They can be fighting for line counts. They can be fighting for the story. And holding the story up against real life and seeing whether something really is appropriate for us to make a game out of.

Alex: When you say fighting for line counts, for more lines or fewer lines?

Richard: Sometimes for more lines, sometimes for fewer. When you're talking about systemic dialog, sometimes less is more. And people want to have every single possible edge case taken care of, and you're like, no, we only have so much footprint on a disk.

Alex: When you say fighting for soft, quiet moments, I think we both know why those are so important. But how do you articulate that? What do you tell people?

Richard: I tell people that if the volume's at ten the whole time, then it's going to turn into white noise. We need contrast. You need those human moments to show why the characters are sympathetic, why you should care about what they're doing as anything other than a walking gun rack. And to have that change of dramatic pace that allows the story to breathe. And it works better when you're dealing with folks who can see the games as a gestalt and see the whole story. You see every mission at once; where you get into trouble is when you're doing one mission at a time or one chapter at a time. And every chapter has to be the greatest and the best chapter.

Alex: I guess it's the creative director whose job it is to see the whole vision.

Richard: Which is why I keep mine plentifully supplied with Scotch. -- I didn't mean it, that is not true!

[Note: Richard has the best single malt Scotch collection I’ve seen outside that big liquor shop on the New Hampshire border.]

Alex: As you say, you wrote some of the stories for some of these games. What goes into deciding what the story of a game should be? How do you think about it?

Richard: That process has evolved tremendously over the years. From being told, right, OK, we want a game set here, come up with a plot line, to where we are now, which is brainstorming with creative directors and game directors and thinking about the features that we want to show off... all these things that were not on my plate when I first started doing this,.

Alex: Do you think that's because story has become more important and therefore people really want to be involved in it, whereas previously they didn't care?

Richard: I think story’s become more important. I think people figured out the narrative as a place where we can make big gains without spending huge dollars. Sorry, cynical there...

Alex: No, but that's a perfectly valid thing. I mean, there's only so many polygons you can add. People are paying 80 bucks, they want everything to be great. It's not just the polygon count, not just better AIs, or the tightness of the gameplay. Everything has to be better. So that means the stories have to get better. The characters have to get better. The acting has to get better. The character models have to be capable of communicating more.

Richard: Yes, absolutely. And it's funny. When I first started doing the game writers roundtables at GDC, we had this wish list of things we wanted, you know, getting involved in stories sooner, having narrative design taken seriously, all these things that have come true. You know, the pie in the sky wishlist from those early days is now standard operating procedure. And that's good to see it because it makes for a better story and makes for a better player immersion, makes for a better player experience.