Get'em While They're Hot!

Lore Should Read Like Someone Wrote It

We're working on lore for Fragpunk, and as we refine the lore pieces, one thing I keep asking the writers for is translucency. My book (now out from Routledge!) talks about "translucent liars," where you know an NPC is lying, and their lies tell you something about them. But they don't have to be lying. They can be telling the truth -- but telling it from their distinctive point of view.

That way, there's two layers of lore. One is the facts that they are presenting -- oh, there are lizard people in the hills, no one knows where they came from, don't go there or they'll eat you. The other is who the NPC is:  a cranky old blacksmith who's a little hard of hearing, who isn't getting along with his second wife, and now you know that in this culture a man can have two wives.

(They say that France is the only country where you can complain to your wife that your mistress just doesn't understand you.)

Every bit of lore should have attitude. Even if it's meant to be from an encyclopedia, who wrote it? Who was the encyclopediarian? In Samuel Johnson's dictionary, you will find this definition:

Lexicographer. n. s. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge...

Which defines lexicographers, but also tells you what Samuel Johnson thought of himself. 

Every bit of text in our world has an attitude. We are so used to some of them that we think they are "neutral," but the New York Times is not really neutral, and neither is the Encyclopedia Brittanica. 

So give your lore attitude, and tell us who wrote it. 

What's in the book?

Look at all the stuff you get in my new book!
Coming April 28 -- you can preorder now!

 

 

South of Midnight, Fragpunk and my new book, Crafty Game Writing!

 Wow, it's been a little while since I posted last. And it's looking to be a busy Spring.

SOUTH OF MIDNIGHT dropped! It looks great:

I worked on South of Midnight for about three years as the first narrative director, before moving to Highdive (aka Netease) and FRAGPUNK. It was and is an extremely ambitious project:  a Southern Gothic third-person adventure story set in the Deep South, about a young Black woman who discovers the creatures of Southern folklore, and her own magical powers. At one point I think I might have suggested that we were about to go running with scissors through a cultural minefield. 

I'm excited to see if Compulsion pulled it off! You can check the game out on Xbox GamePass as of April 8th. 

Oh, yeah, FRAGPUNK. FRAGPUNK dropped last month! 



This is a multiplayer shooter I've been the Narrative Lead on since I left Compulsion. We have terrific gameplay, a fresh mechanic, and outrageous characters who are a hoot to write.

And... my book drops April 30. The best place to buy it seems to be the publisher's site, where it's about US $50 (minus 20% off through April!).  It's about, what else, game writing. If you liked my books about TV writing and movie writing, you'll probably like this one, too. And if you haven't, you'll probably like it anyway! I mean, you're here, aren't you? 

My name should also be on some indie games later this year, so watch this space...

A Stick of Time

(Spoilers for Shogun)

Episode 7 of Shogun sees the wily central Japanese character Toronaga surrounded, defended only by a weakened garrison, at the mercy of his enemies. The Regency Council has summoned him to Osaka, where he will surely be commanded to commit seppuku. It appears he has no choice but to obey.

But the episode is called "A Stick of Time." That refers to the length of time requested by the madam of a high-class "tea house" (brothel), Gin, to talk to Toronaga: the time it takes for a stick of incense to burn down.

What is so important about this interview, that it gets the episode named after it?

Gin has a request. Toronaga is building a new city, Edo, in the Kanto Plain. She has a tea house in the woods. She wants permission to create an entire district of tea houses in Edo, to give her people a world to belong to.

"My hardships taught me ambition and guile,
and made me the most successful Lady in Izu,
just as your hardships made you into
the cunning man you are today."

Toronaga is dismissive. He does not expect to live long enough to give or deny her permission.

She says, in the nicest possible way, don't bullshit a bullshitter. How has the wily Toronaga been caught with his pants down. Did his scouts forget to tell him an army was surrounding him?

He says, you think I let this happen intentionally?

She says, oh, hey, what do I know, "I'm just an old whore."

One problem in dramatic writing is dealing with characters who have every reason to conceal what they are thinking. How does the audience know? In this case, how does the audience know to watch episode 8, given that it is presumably about Toronaga and all the characters we love being killed?

You can, of course, give the secretive character someone to unburden himself to. But in Toronaga's case, he is too wily to unburden himself to anybody, at least anyone we know well. It would not be in his interest to tell his butler what his plans are.

Instead we have this madam telling Toronaga, "You're up to something, aren't you?" so Toronaga can say "who, me? Never." Which tells the audience, Toronaga is up to something. They can safely watch episode 8 to see how he gets himself out of this one. 

(Act 1: get your hero up a tree. Act 2:  he tries to get down from the tree, but only ends up further up the tree. Act 3: he escapes the tree.)

When you have a secretive or dissembling character, consider having someone else say what is on his mind. The audience won't know if they are guessing correctly, which creates much more suspense than if the character reveals himself to someone trusted. 

Of course, if you know a bit of Japanese history, you know that this district will be built. It will be called ukiyo-e "the floating world," and artists such as Hiroshige will make a zillion beautiful woodcuts of it. You may also have figured out by episode 7 that Toronaga is based heavily on Tokugawa Ieyasu, who outmaneuvered his enemies to make himself... Shogun. You know that Edo will later be named Tokyo (literally "Eastern Capital"). So his eventual success will not come as a complete surprise. But this is a fictionalization, and for all we know, Toronoga's end is not Tokugawa's end. 

So the scriptwriters (and perhaps the novelist -- I haven't read the book in decades) trot out Madame Gin to pull the curtain back just a bit on Toronaga's machinations.

Nicely done!

Life and Trust

We went to Life and Trust in New York. It's a wild Martha Graham-esque dance performance taking place simultaneously on five floors of a fabulous Financial District skyscraper. Like Sleep No More, which Emursive also produced, the actors/dancers do a scene and then scurry off to another floor to do another. You chase after them in a herd, or if you're quick, you chase after them and the herd chases after you. Or you wait around to see what else will happen in the space you're in.

There are zillions of characters and theoretically there are interlocking plots involving deals with devils and a suspiciously addicting syrup, all happening on the night of Wednesday, October 23, 1929. (Guess what happens on Thursday!) I had almost no idea what was happening in the plots, but the dancing is spectacular, and the site-specific set is, too. Go see it if you can get to New York. It may spoil you for proscenium theater, though. It's hard to get excited about theater you watch from a single chair for the whole performance, in a space that has nothing to do with the story. 

 (The set is ADA-compliant, but you can't chase after people on stairs if you're not very abled indeed. But you can guess where stuff is going to happen and they'll give you a guide, if you like, to make sure you're there when it happens.)

Oh, you! New York Times

A civilian friend sent me an opinion piece about video games from the New York Times. It covers the move to live, free-to-play games over single-player games you play once and move on from. Which, predictably, it bewails.

Fair enough. Live games do make it harder to release a new game. The "next Fortnite" is probably also Fortnite. 

On the other hand, I'm working on a live game that releases March 6, and I'm happy that I won't be unemployed on March 7 (inshallah). And if people didn't want live games, they wouldn't buy them.

The article is off base on two points. One, yes, some games do have a lot of sidequests that can come off as grindy chores, but then also, that's an issue that game devs have identified and rejected. We often have conversations like, "We're not going to ask the player to collect one thousand feathers."

The other is that it's ridiculous to say games used to be better. Of course the MOMA is collecting old games. Museums collect old things, after their worth has been proven. There are amazing new games all the time, just as there was filler and trash twenty years ago. Games like Disco Elysium, Balatro and Hades are future classics. The present always looks worse than the past, in any medium, because we only remember the good stuff from the past. Not all ancient Greek epics were Homer. It's just, most ancient Greek epics have gone the way of the ancient Greeks. 

MEGO

As I discussed in my first book (and maybe my second?) I think that the best way to develop a story, any story, is to tell it over and over, to different people, without notes. This gets you a bunch of things:

a. You can tell how it holds together. If you can't remember what comes next, then the story logic needs mending

b. You can immediately tell if your listener is bored. People who read your writing have time to prepare a lie, but if their eyes glaze over, they're bored

c. You may come up with something better as you tell your story on the fly. Writing a story down freezes it, but until then, it's a fluid, living, growing thing.

So here's Yannick Trapman-O'Brian, immersive experience-maker, on Reality Escape Pod S8E7:

"I wish upon everyone an intoxicated audience. The clarity it requires of you, someone just looking you full in the face as you do your beautiful dance piece and they go, 'Okay, this is boring, I'd rather go pee.' That is such good feedback."

See?