Kim MacAskill, Part Three

Alex:  How does game dialog have to be different from, say, TV or film dialog, in order to make up for the less-than-fully-expressive animated game character? What do you have to watch out for?

Kim: This is something I’ve been thinking about myself. We were trying to be funny. And if the animation doesn’t completely match the final voice recording, it can throw everything off. You can’t pull off a gag if things are splintered.

Alex: So you’re animating to placeholder voice?

Kim: Yes.

Alex: Oh God.

Kim: I think a lot of other studios do as well.

Yes, well, we’re working with a placeholder actor for two or three years, and then we cast someone like Mark Hamill to play the Joker. How are we going to match that up?

After that, we asked permission to start showing the animations to the actors. Because beforehand the actor has no idea what their character even looks like. So we started showing them concept art. I do think it helps. But the studio doesn’t like to have materials lying around some studio in LA.

[Ed. note: If you possibly can, record early enough that the animators can animate to the final voice recording.]

Alex: What is one of the most interesting narrative systems that you weren’t able to implement?

Kim: Interruption systems?

Alex: So an NPC’s talking to me, and I punch them in the face, how does the game handle that interruption?

Kim: Right, he’s going to have to repeat some lines, but it’s difficult to get those lines to sound natural coming after the interruption. Say a character is telling a story, and then combat interrupts you. Do you just repeat the line they were in the middle of? Do they say, “As I was saying,” or “Now that that’s done…”

We asked for a tool to implement that. But it was hard, and I don’t think that we really smashed it, because if you’ve got the exact same delivery of the line, it doesn’t sound entirely natural. We tried a number of different things but it never came out quite right. Some NPC will be saying, “As I was saying,” and then suddenly they’re shouting, which was where they left off. “As I was saying, THAT WAS THE BEST PARTY I EVER WENT TO!!”

Alex: Let’s talk about the pros and cons of different narrative delivery systems. What are you best at? What are the hardest to use in games? What do you enjoy writing the most?

Kim: Well don’t get me wrong, a good cinematic is always fun. You’ve got the character to that stage, and I’m going to destroy all the players with this, it’s gonna be great! Yes, that’s amazing.

But I think reactive dialog, dialog reacting to the player’s. For example, the game wouldn’t allow punching children. There’s no mechanic for punching children in the game. But what I can do is give the player character some sort of reaction line that takes the piss out of the player, like, if they try to punch a child, “What is wrong with you? This isn’t who we are.”

Alex: Especially when your player character is a conflicted character like Harley Quinn.

Kim: One of the things I really wanted to do, I don’t know if this went ahead, but every time a player tries to get a closeup of her arse, I just wanted the game to address it. Like, she farts. I like to think, what are the players going to do? Well they’re probably going to try to sexualize her. What can I write that will make fun of the player for doing that?

Alex: In a writing team, what specialties do you need?

Kim: On our writing team, we had a writer who was very good at forecasting what sort of dialog we’d need. Planning. I think my speciality is I was able to spot continuity issues. Some people are funny. Some are literate in writing tools.

Alex: Oh, sure. Some people have read more novels. I’ve probably read more history than is really useful or healthy, and I’m a font of useless trivia about the past, a lot of which made it into We Happy Few. The person we just brought in is more of a narrative designer than Lisa or myself.

Alex: Is there a difference between the org structure and who’s really in charge of what? What have you learned to watch out for?

Kim: I think the moment you don’t listen to someone that the org chart says you don't have to listen to, you’re doing the game a disservice. All feedback is coming from a place of truth. It may not be the right truth.

Alex: Neil Gaiman says that all feedback is true, it’s just the solutions people offer that are usually wrong.

You’ve recently blown the whistle on a pattern of harassment of women at Rocksteady. Obviously it’s horrible to work in a toxic work environment. How do toxic work environments affect the stories that are told? The work that is done?

Kim: You wind up with bad representations of characters. Silly things. There was a character who was wearing a dress, but she’s got a gun holster on her leg. Or there’s a piece of art that says that a character moved here five years ago, but the story is they just moved here. What happens is people aren’t talking or listening to each other.

Alex: So how do you stay sane?

Kim: Alcohol helps. (Laughs). I think it’s important to have someone you can talk to. You can find yourself wondering, “Am I okay?” It helps just to have someone resonate and understand, someone who can say, “you’re not alone, I’ve experienced that too.” You do form a family.

Kim MacAskill Interview, Part One

I’m thinking about a third writing book, this one about game writing. I had a strange trajectory in game writing where my second job ever was Story Director of Contrast. So I didn’t come up through the game writing ranks; I came up through the TV and film writing ranks. I thought about titling my book CRAFTY GAME WRITING: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING BUT PEOPLE SEEM TO LIKE IT. But I also decided to do a bunch of interviews with skilled writers I like and respect.

I met Kim MacAskill (Twitter: @kimmacaskill1) at a game writing summit for first party Microsoft Studios companies. She started in games as Senior Scriptwriter at Rocksteady; when I met her, she was Senior Scriptwriter at Playground Games. She has since returned to her native Glasgow as Principal Narrative Designer at NaturalMotion. So please kindly read all of her responses in a Scottish accent.

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

Kim: I’m in a strange place in between the ending of one game and the beginning of the other. Really we’re in pre-production on one game, and tying up the end of another.

What do I do? It really does vary. I’m not writing every single day. Most days it’s creating a high level presentations where I think we should go. As you know in game development there’s a lot of presenting. There are a lot of moving parts to a game. Often we have to scale back on the narrative aspect of a feature for easier design and coding. So I’m negotiating on that. I really only spend about one day a week writing dialog, if I’m lucky.

Alex: And the tying up of loose ends?

Kim: Oh, I’ll get a ping from someone, oh, UI needs this, can you tie this up? [UI is the user interface – what buttons do what.] There are last minute design decisions which need narrative support.

Alex: Have you ever heard of The Writer Will Do Something? It’s a Twine game about a bunch of game devs handing off all their design mistakes to the writer. Something’s broken? The writer will do something.

Kim (laughing): Oh, my God, that sounds like the best game. It sounds like therapy.

Alex: Therapy or horror, I’m not sure which.

Kim: Like you’ll get the designers saying, “Oh, this gun works under water,” and then there’s the question, well, why does the gun work underwater?” And, “Oh, the writers will fix it.”

Alex: Yeah, if you’ve designed the level properly, the player character doesn’t need to say much, but if you haven’t, then you have the player character saying, “Oh, I bet there’s a trapdoor somewhere around here.”

What are the hardest battles you fight?

Kim: My own preciousness. Sometimes they want to cut a design feature and there’s an impact on story flow. Or we have to cut something, and you have to ask yourself, am I upset because cutting this is not the best thing for the game, or am I just tired? I try not to be precious. Everything is discardable. You have to realize, when people change your story, they’re not necessarily ruining your story.

Alex: So you never find yourself going, okay, this is going to absolutely break the story?

Kim: Oh, absolutely. But when there are so many moving pieces at a time, it’s kind of choosing your battles. Sometimes, okay, that’s going to wreck that scene, and that’s going to wreck the story, and you sit down with yourself and go, Okay, is this when I fight the battle? Is this the day when I push back?

It can be hard, because when you’re so invested in your story, you have to ask, have they actually killed the story dead, or is it recoverable, or can I even make it better?

It’s a constant compromise. Really living and breathing your characters and caring about them and then someone telling you that you can’t tell the story that you intended. But am I really annoyed, or am I just tired? It’s a constant self-mental-assessment.

Alex: How did you get into game writing?

Kim: Total mistake, I think. It was because of the instability of the TV industry. You know this, when you have work, it’s great; when you don’t, you’re like, “When’s my next contract gonna be?” Contracts are anywhere from three months to a year, so you’re constantly always trying to find your next meal.

I was always a big, big comic book fan. I loved Batman. And I played games as well. And I saw that Rocksteady were looking for a senior scriptwriter. And I think at this time, I was sending out about 20 CV’s a day to anyone who would listen. I was just putting everything out everywhere, I was applying to Nickelodeon for a shitty TV show. And I was really surprised when Rocksteady got back to me.

And I told them, I’ve written for film, I’ve written for TV, I’ve even written for wrestling, but I’ve never written a game. But they didn’t necessarily need a game writer, they needed someone with a bit more experience creating strong narratives. And I came from a comedy background, that was useful given that we were writing for Suicide Squad. So they were happy to teach me about game writing as I brought things from my other skill set.

And they asked me to do a writing test. And that was, Harley Quinn, Penguin and Deathstroke wake up in a room. They have no memory of how they got there. How do they use their strengths and weaknesses to get out?

But from then to actually being employed was like three months. You know, in TV, it’s very fast. “I need a script editor, you’re a script editor, okay, here’s your money.” Recruitment in games can be a six month process from applying to actually arriving at the studio.

Alex: Yeah, back when I was in TV I got a call, “How would you like to write on a TV show in South Africa for four months?” “Interesting. When?” “How about Tuesday?” And it was Thursday.

So this is a question that I think no one else will be able to answer for me: what lessons did you take away from writing for wrestling? What’s it like?

Kim: It’s like a soap drama. This one’s going to betray, that one’s going to go away for a long long time and suddenly appear out of nowhere. Someone's having an affair, all kinds of twists and turns. That could be a soap drama. Maybe realism is more of a factor for soaps. But it’s the same sort of, we need the drama and we need it now. You can’t really go too long without something melodramatic happening.

Alex: My wife Lisa was once up for a gig at the WWF, but she didn’t want to move to Connecticut. I’ve always felt that was a missed opportunity.

Kim: It’s really fun. There are all sorts of people writing for wrestling. There was a writer from Family Guy.

Alex: But were there any lessons…

Kim: If I’m gonna be honest, no. I suppose the one thing I’m going to bring out is how are you going to embed heaps of combat in a story while making it engaging? How am I going to build important dramatic beats, and build relationships. It’s all very well and good telling a love story, but you still have to have people fighting each other.

Alex: Lisa has a theory that opera and kung fu movies are basically the same thing, you know, a bit of story, then there’s a fight, or an aria, then a bit more story, and a fight, or someone sings. “Two brothers separated at birth. One’s a cop, one’s a killer, and they’re in love with the same woman!” Is that a kung fu plot, or a Verdi opera? So I suppose it’s the same with wrestling.

More MacAskill Soon!

Walking Dead, the Game

I played Episode 1 of Telltale Games' WALKING DEAD on our Xbox. (It's also available on PC/Mac/PS3 and iPad.)

It's a point-and-click adventure: a "choose your own adventure" book brought to life on the small screen. Mostly you are making choices of which thing to say and whom to side with, and the other characters react differently depending on what you do. There's also the occasional button-mashing combat with a zombie.

Philosophically, I don't like point and click adventure games. They're much more about branching narrative, and much less about gameplay.

The difficulty in branching narrative is that, to tell a truly powerful story, it has to be of a piece. The ending has its seeds in the beginning. The characters are the right ones for the plot. But if you're going to let the player choose his ending, then how do you make sure the character is the right one for that ending? How do you foreshadow an ending, how do you commit to a theme, when you don't know what the player is going to do? The more outcomes, the vaguer the characters have to be, don't they? So how sharp can the storytelling be if one beginning has to serve sixteen endings?

I guess one answer is to make the player character mysterious, and reveal more of him as the player chooses his actions. It would be interesting to try revealing different backstory depending on the player's actions, but I don't have the impression that the game is doing that. We know he's a professor who was convicted of murder; he's pretty up front that he was righteously convicted.

But I gotta say, I never found the game boring. I played the two or three hours of Episode One. I definitely got my $5 worth. (Actually, Hunter's $5 worth.) The game does convincingly put you in situations where you have to choose who to save, and you feel bad about the ones you have to leave behind. Because the characters are rotoscoped, rather than CGI animated, the acting is pretty good. So I really did care about the 8 year old girl I'm trying to save.

Will I play Episodes 2 and 3? Jury's still out on that. This game might be more convincing on iPad, where it would be a really big game for the platform, rather than on Xbox, where I can't help comparing it with AAA games. And I could play it on the train to TIFF.

A Little More About Contrast

Here's a little quick'n'dirty promo video I shot for the game I'm working on, Contrast.



That's the spectacularly good Vanessa Mitsui playing Kat, our film noir shadow dame; she was a joy to direct. Yours truly is talking narrative.

We made the video for our pitch on Steam Greenlight. The idea is that game creators pitch their games, and players vote for which ones they want to see distributed on Steam. We'll be updating our Greenlight page as we progress towards our release early next year.

Papo & Yo

Video games are getting more and more impressive every day, but as an art form they're still in their infancy. DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION and WITCHER 2 may have convincing characters, moral choices and permanent consequences. They are my two favorite AAA games. But you wouldn't call either of them a deep emotional experience. You wouldn't say they say fresh, true things about the human condition.

But every now and then a game comes along that pushes that envelope. PASSAGE was a teeny little iPhone game that managed to say something about the shortness of life and the permanence of decisions. And now along comes PAPO & YO from creator Vander Caballero and game designer Ruben Farrus, downloadable on Playstation Network.

In PAPO & YO, you're a little kid in a hallucinatory barrio where houses can be coaxed into sprouting cartoon stilts and walking around; only by rearranging the landscape can you chase after the little girl who keeps taunting you.

Your best friend is a giant rhino-esque monster, who generally only wakes up for coconuts. By bouncing on his belly (see the pic), you can jump places you can't get. He can also open gates for you. You need him.

But, whenever he eats a green frog, he becomes a true monster, belching fire and beating the crap out of you if you don't run. He's terrifying. Your quest, you discover, is to get him to a shaman who can cure him.

And to do that, you have to manage his rages. Sometimes, you need to feed him a green frog so he'll destroy an obstacle you need destroyed.

So here's where this becomes personal expression. The game is about the creator's relationship with his abusive, alcoholic father; it's dedicated to his sisters and mother, who survived along with him. He needed his father, but he needed to manage his father's rages.

I grew up with very reasonable parents who rarely even raised their voices. I don't think I've ever seen either of them drunk. Intellectually I know that an alcoholic parent is terrifying. I've seen it in movies. People close to me have had parents or lovers who were abusive. I've always wondered why, given the choice, they stayed with their abusive lover. I've always wondered how there's still affection for the abusive parent.

This game taught me something about that. You can't reject Monster. You can't leave him behind. You need him. Most of the time, he's kind of cute, in an ugly way. You wind up forgiving him for his rages. That's just the way he is, after all. It's your fault for not getting out of the way, for not running fast enough, for not hiding better.

I mean, I knew that. But I didn't get it.

PAPO & YO barely has a story. It's a puzzle platformer. But its simple game dynamic and stunning visuals make it a real emotional experience. The mechanics tell the story.

The game's mechanics tell a story. Is there any higher praise I could give a game for its artistic expression? I think the creators have really shown what games are capable of. I hope when CONTRAST comes out, we will have risen to the same standard.

Game Design Template

Q. My friend and I were kicking around ideas for a video game. Is this Baldwin Game Design Template still valid?

From what I understand, it is all but impossible to sell a game concept to a game company with a paper document these days. You need a playable demo. That's a much bigger barrier to entry, but game companies need to see your game idea actually functioning to know if it's worth pursuing or not.

Civ V

Having knocked off a bunch of screenplays I owed, I finally let myself have a bash at Civilization 5. And by "have a bash," of course I mean I disappeared into the game for two 8 hour stretches, barely moving from my desk, to the point where everything kinda hurt. One of them started at 11 pm.

I find the Civ games unbelievably addictive. I have trouble getting away from the game, and when I do, I'm thinking about it. The only way I can stop playing a game once I've started it is either to finish it, or to delete all my saved games off my computer so I have no way to pick it up where I left off. I think I like the decision making. And I like to make things grow. (I also have a garden.)

So every few years they come out with a new version, and I binge, and disappear for a few days. At least this time I was able to stop at the point where it was clear I was going to conquer the world, without having to actually do it, which would have been probably another 8-12 hours.

Happy Canada Day, everyone, and I understand there is some sort of festival going on in Montreal where they play music ... I must get out to that.

Entry Level PR

Wanna do some part-time on-site PR for a very cool Montreal indie game studio? Web stuff, shooting video, writing, social media? Lemme know.

UPDATE: Based some comments I got, I should explain some things.

This is a PR job. You must be able to spell my name correctly. (Someone did not; at his request I've deleted his comment.) You should be able to find out my email address. (Seriously. It should take less than 60 seconds.)

And then you send me your resume with a personable email explaining why you're the right person for the job. And, because you are SO GOOD, you already figured out which game company and which game. And for serious bonus points, your take on marketing the company. Because you want it that much.

For any job, you want to make sure that you create the best possible first impression. But a PR job, in particular, is about contacting strangers. You need to have a talent, or better, a skill, for contacting strangers. You need to know how to draw people into your story. For a PR job in particular, your self-presentation is the test. Your initial approach should knock my socks off. Otherwise the job will go to someone else who does.

More Witcher 2 Love

I'm really enjoying THE WITCHER 2. The story is well crafted. The characters are well drawn and acted. Dialog has consequences -- and you can make a decision in the middle of a conversation -- or a battle -- that puts you on an entirely different narrative path. There are even consequences to whom you sleep with. So you have to really consider how you want to play.

I really, really like the combat system. In WITCHER 2, your opponents will do a number of things that your enemies would do in real life. If you have multiple opponents, they rush you, try to surround you, and the guys behind you stab you in the back, causing much more damage than the ones in front of you. You really, really do not want to let even some sword-wielding mooks get behind you, unless you have developed superlative sword fu.

This all seems obvious, but even in recent AAA games like the ASSASSIN'S CREED games, enemies will hang around you in a circle while only one guy goes in for the kill. You can sit in a circle of half a dozen baddies in AC, wait for one to attack, and then counterattack him and kill him. Rinse, repeat. It's like watching a kung fu film. Everyone is so gallant.

Also, you cannot take potions while in combat. Again, this seems obvious. Who has the time to go into your pouch and sort through your little glass vials, pick the right one and quaff it, while someone is actively trying to stab you to death? And yet in, e.g. SKYRIM, you can down five or six potions right in the middle of one moment of combat.

And, all the potions will immediately take effect, possibly curing you from near-death to perfect health, or restoring all your magical mana.

Of course these are fantasy games, but I feel games lose credibility when you can do this sort of thing. Magic should feel real. In WITCHER 2, you can only down a potion so long as you're not in combat. You can only take a handful of potions at the time -- each has toxicity. And while a potion can make you heal faster, it only changes the rate at which you heal. You still have to stay alive long enough to heal.

So instead of stopping combat to go into your inventory and down 5 healing potions, now you have to dodge and parry and roll. A lot. And if you're surrounded, get the hell out of the middle of all those bad guys.

That feels real.

I guess I want a game that feels more like a movie. I can see someone preparing for combat -- putting a rune on his blade, coating it with deadly oil, quaffing a potion that allows him to survive the dragon's breath. There is a narrative logic to that. It feels "realistic" even if it's not literally real.

So I am really enjoying the game. How cool is it that it comes from a Polish game studio, CD PROJEKT? The game world is truly international in a way that the film world really isn't.

Now, maybe in WITCHER 3 they'll get rid of the silly looting that afflicts most fantasy games. At least you don't find boxes full of gold every 50 paces in a dungeon. But you still can go into random people's houses and steal from them while they're right in front of you, without in any way annoying them. That seems absurd in a game where you don't play a sneak thief.

And I wouldn't mind if enemies broke and ran after you killed a bunch of their comrades, leaving you the choice whether to pursue or let them run for it. Even a wolf pack will run for it once you've killed a bunch of them.

More about the combat system:

Earned Endings

I had a nice chat with some game designers, some of whom may have been from Bioware, about the controversy about the MASS EFFECT 3 ending.

SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:SPOILERS:





So, the hero, Shepherd, does what Buffy does at the end of seasons 1 and 5: sacrifice herself for the good of everyone else. And some players object to that. Even though, y'know, Shep has been dead at least once in the series already.

And the whole 39 hours of gameplay are all about loss and sacrifice.

But maybe the issue players are having isn't that Shep dies. It's that you have no choice about Shep dying. You are given up to three endings at the end of the game, but in each of them, Shep has to sacrifice her life for the good of all, at the end of a long sequence of cut-scene after cut-scene in which you have barely any choices to make or even anything to do.

I think the problem is that the player doesn't own Shep's sacrifice. He doesn't choose to sacrifice his life for the good of all. He has the controller taken out of his hands by the designers.

Sid Meier famously says that there are games where the computer is having all the fun, games where the designer has all the fun, and games where the player gets to have the fun. At the end of ME3, the designers are having the fun.

What if there had been an option for Shepherd not to sacrifice himself? But in that ending, only Earth survived, not the whole galaxy? Or there would have been some other sort of qualified victory? Then most of the players would have chosen to sacrifice Shep, but they would have chosen it. And then they would have owned the sacrifice. They would have got to have the fun.

I had the same issue at the end of RED DEAD REDEMPTION. Marston sacrifices himself to save his family, but the player doesn't get a choice. Suppose the player could choose to send his family to safety, or fight it out with his enemies, his son at his side. If he brings his son, his son dies. And then, bitter, sad, he goes to take revenge for his family. Most players would choose to save the family, if the game made it clear that there were real risks for the son. But they would own that decision. They would feel the redemption mentioned in the title.

I think it would also have helped ME3 if there were a bit more of an epilog. Bioware really saved a lot of money on the alternate endings. They're all about Joker and the Normandy racing to outrun the shock front of Shep's decision. If I choose to control the Reapers, I want to see a hideous giant fleet of Reapers heading out from Earth, with "United Federation of Earth" painted on their sides, so I can wonder if I've given humanity too much power. If I choose to destroy all synthetic life, I want to see the Geth die. Otherwise each winning choice doesn't really feel different. Either way the Reapers stop fighting and Joker fails to outrun the shock wave, and crashlands on a planet with some crew members on board.

It seems a shame that the ending of such a well-crafted game comes up so short. I can see why Bioware made its choice. The end-game cut-scenes are already expensive. It's a game; they wanted to maximize their efforts on levels and gameplay. But if you want your game to tell a story, a weak ending can really spoil an otherwise successful story.

(See all my Mass Effect posts.)

Review: Mass Effect Datapad

You can't "win" Mass Effect 3 without playing an online game. Either you have to play many, many bouts of ME3 multiplayer, or play many, many bouts of Infiltrator, or play Datapad. Datapad is the free iPhone/iPad app that Bioware is releasing so no one can say you have to pay extra in order to win ME3.

Datapad is a Farmville-style app, where you send space fleets on "missions" to raise galactic readiness. You quickly find out that in any of the five quadrants there are 3 missions that never change. Yep, same star systems, same description, same rewards. You have to send your fleets to do those missions over and over to get galactic readiness points. And when I say over and over, I mean literally dozens and dozens of times to get your galactic readiness to where you can get the best ME3 ending.

Which means, of course, that you have to check your iPad or iPhone constantly in order to make sure fleets aren't sitting still. Just like Farmville, the game intrudes into daily life. It will take days of playing Datapad constantly to get your readiness up. I've been playing constantly for two days and I've improved my galactic readiness by 5%.

This is not a game. No one would actually play Datapad if they weren't trying to avoid having to play Infiltrator or ME3 multiplayer. Datapad is a chore.

It could have been given a little flavor with trivial effort. Just write different missions for different star systems. And with a tiny bit more effort, there could have been jeopardy. (Your starfleets can be "crippled" but they fix themselves in an hour, which is tedious but hardly alarming.) But they didn't want to. Bioware/EA don't really want you to play Datapad. They want you to buy Infiltrator for $7, or play ME3 multiplayer (which requires an Xbox LIVE Gold membership). But they want to pretend that they're not forcing you to buy something.

So Datapad is free. And it's worth every penny you pay.

PS Aside from the Galaxy at War "game" on Datapad, you can also access the game's codex, in case you didn't read it in-game, and you can check a Mass Effect twitter feed.

PPS The programming itself is terrible. It keeps losing login information. It keeps claiming that my iPhone is not connected to the Internet. You have to hit the touchscreen repeatedly to get it to respond. No pinch-to-zoom. Incredibly slow to reload. It is a badly, badly made app. .

PPPS It's only free if you're playing the game on your first profile. You'll need to buy a second online pass if you're playing the game on a second profile.

PPPPS: Increasing "bonus readiness" seems to be the fastest way to increase readiness.

Mass Effect 3: A Broken Single Player Game

I have now played through every mission available to me in Mass Effect 3, accumulating allies for the big fight against the deadly galaxy-obliterating Reapers.

Unfortunately, due to really cheesy marketing ploys by Bioware or EA, I haven't actually "won" the game. To get a semi-happy ending, I have to boost my "galactic readiness." This can only be accomplished by:

a. Playing lots of battles in multiplayer mode. This requires a Gold membership in Xbox LIVE. Also, you have to use the online access code you get in the game box, which means if you kid wants to play on his profile, he has to buy another access code. And, of course, you have to like multiplayer. I don't.

b. Buy an iPad game called Infiltrator and play it lots. This costs $7, plus you have to have an iPad. And it's a pure shooter. If I wanted a pure shooter, I'd play CALL OF DUTY.

c. Play an iPad game called Datapad. Datapad is free, but boring. You send out missions and they complete in real-time, hours and hours later. Not a lot of work, but not a lot of fun, either. I figure it will take at least 10 days of attending to Datapad to get my galactic readiness up.

All of these methods require you to invest hours in them in order to get your galactic readiness anywhere near where it needs to be.

Boo, I say. If I buy a single player game, I don't want to have to play multiplayer. I don't want to play online. Bioware/EA are basically selling a broken single player game that can only be repaired by playing online. I feel betrayed and angry. Boo.

And Here's a Little More About Contrast

Here's a little bit more about the game I've been working on... Incidentally, that's not a shadow of the player character running up a bridge. That's the player character, shifted into shadows, running across the shadow of a bridge.

Mass Effect 3

I'm about a ten hours into Mass Effect 3, the latest in the hit third-person RPG/shooter franchise from BioWare, and I'm a little frustrated. The shooting is fun. The story has twists and turns.

It's the characters that bug me. They're not a lot of fun.

Okay, granted, Earth has just been attacked by the Reapers, a race of superpowerful robots intent on destroying all organic life in the galaxy. That does tend to make everyone a tad sad, and a tad focused on fighting for survival.

But isn't there room for a few surprises?

Where's the guy who's just broken up with his girlfriend, and is crushed by that, even though she's still alive? And he knows his loss doesn't compare to the millions who are dead, but damn it, it still hurts?

Where's the girl who's inexplicably happy, because her massive Ponzi scheme was about to collapse, and now that everything's life or death, one con that got out of control doesn't matter any more?

Or the dude who is just a wee little bit happy that his ex-wife was incinerated along with New York?

Where's the character who really, really wants to get himself killed, because life is not worth living, and, if you take him on a mission, he does?

We care about characters because of their flaws, as I said in my MIGS talk. The people you spend most of the time with have no flaws.

Look, I love shooting evil spider cyborgs as much as the next guy. But BioWare is known as a game writer's (relative) paradise. Do all the conversations have to be this sad and grim? Couldn't they be a little less predictable and a little more, well, human?

Contrast Game

Here's the teaser trailer for Contrast, the awesomely fun game I've been working on as Narrative Designer. It's a platformer where you travel places by shifting in and out of the world of the shadows on the wall. It's being announced at GDC in a couple of hours.



More about the game on 1UP.com.

Alex is a Video Game Character

While I was giving my talk at MIGS, Funcom artist Joel Akerman did this lovely sketch. I feel like I'm halfway to being a video game character!

MIGS Talk

So I gave my talk at MIGS about screenwriting tools for game designers, and I thought it went pretty well. If you missed the talk, here are the headlines

• We care about heroes when they have flaws; I proposed some mechanics and story telling approaches to giving a videogame hero a compelling flaw;
• Storytelling should be "pull" and not "push" and how to do that;
• Is there a way to give a player real choices with consequences without getting into the insane cost of binary storytelling?

I wonder if there's anywhere else I should give my talk?

Frustrated with Dark Meadow

I spent about five or six hours yesterday hacking through monsters on my iPad in Dark Meadow. For me it was a very frustrating experience. Dark Meadow is really two games. One is an interesting game in which you explore an abandoned hospital, trying to piece together mysteries -- who are you, how do you get out, and should you trust the creepy guy on the intercom? The other is a game where every two or three moves, a monster comes down the corridor. You shoot it with your crossbow, and then hack at it with your sword. As you level up, the monsters level up, and you get more gear. Because this is a video game, there are bags of gold lying around randomly. You need them to buy more gear.

It's not a terrific combat game. The combat is fairly elementary - just a lot of stabbing at the iPad with your finger, really, and a lot of dodging. I am not very good at twitch, so this was frustrating to me, but to, say, Hunter, it would be fairly trivial, not to say tedious, since the monsters' combo moves are programmed and telegraphed.

It might actually be a good mystery game. But I didn't get to find out, because every two or three moves, I had to fight a monster. This got tedious fast. The monsters have almost nothing to do with the story. You don't learn anything about the mystery from fighting the monsters. They're just an obstacle. When I wasn't fighting monsters, I was reduced to poking at cabinets for money (they replenish themselves) so I could buy better gear. I was longing for a "Tell Me a Story" setting, where I could skip the monsters and just follow the mystery.

In the end, I got so irritated at the game, I killed off my save game, so I wouldn't continue to play out of sheer need for closure. It stopped being fun. I was just playing to get to the end.

In a good story, the obstacle has something to do with the hero and his goal. The obstacles are reflections of the hero in some way; they mean something to him. The obstacles are inherent in the goal; they arise out of the goal in some way. Otherwise you're just hurling monsters down a corridor at the player in order to stretch out the gameplay.

Choices in games

I'm working on my MIGS talk, N+1 Screenwriting Tips for Game Writers. The part I'm working on is about allowing players to make choices that have consequences, particularly to the ending of the game.

The obvious recent example here is HEAVY RAIN, where your success or failure on missions leads you to a bunch of different possible outcomes. But I'm not a huge fan of HEAVY RAIN, which, as I am not the only person to have remarked, can seem more like a "choose your own adventure" than a game with excellent gameplay.

In DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION you can save or fail to save certain characters, and you can decide how to play (stealthy, non-stealthy pacifist, typically homicidal game hero). But the story really doesn't change except at the very end when you can choose one of four buttons to press to decide your values.

What are some emotionally powerful choices that you've been able to make in games that affected the outcome?

2nd Time Through

Weird. My first time playing through DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION, it felt too hard, especially the bosses. It took me five hours (!) to beat the first boss on easy, and I didn't even try on the second. I turned her over to Hunter. I kept getting into shooting matches with squads of guards, and I'm a terrible shot.

Now on my second playthrough, on hard, it's almost too easy. I've learned how the guards' AI's work. They never look around corners. My character has 7 seconds of invisibility, which is enough to go almost anywhere safely, and with a few candy bars he can stretch that to 21 seconds. So now I never get into shooting matches. My character has learned the Importance of Not Being Seen. And that means the nasty shooty robots never even come out of their closets. Playing as a stealthy pacifist is so easy, I'm almost considering stopping playing.

(If I were designing a Give Me Deus Ex hardness setting, I'd just have the guards walk around a little more randomly. Or walk past the corner instead of just short of the corner. As is, the setting only makes guards harder to kill. Which, if you're never killing them, is irrelevant.)

Now here's the weird thing. Even though the game isn't, strictly, a challenge, I still have the urge to keep playing. It feels mildly rewarding to keep beating the guards, even though it's not hard. I like winning the little hacking minigame. Partly it's that I'm enjoying the world more -- actually reading all the e-books scattered everywhere, and paying attention to all the corporate politics. But most of it is, I think, just my lizard brain enjoying all the random rewards.

So I'm torn between quitting the game, and playing right now, in the middle of the day.

I recognize that as addictive behavior, so instead of procrastinating by playing a video game, I am procrastinating in a slightly more productive (and much less time-consuming) way by blogging. The thing about addictions is that the feel more like need than fun. Am I really enjoying DE3 right now, or do I just hunger to play it? I can't actually tell how much I'm looking forward to it, versus how much easier it would be to fall into the game than try to get my 5-10 pages today.

At least I'm not this guy...