People Are Bad At Listening, or, Why Smart Politicians Don't Deny

One thing I have learned is that the audience is a terrible listener. They are pretty good at noticing things they see. But they don't listen so good.

So, first of all, if you want them to absorb a bit of information, it's probably a good idea to throw it at them a couple of times.

"The thing is ... she was thirteen."
"Thirteen?"

Second thing is, the audience often seems to form visuals from the words you use before they process the grammar. So if I write, or say, "she's not a redhead," the first image that's going to pop into the audience's mind is a redhead. And that's what sticks. At the moment they hear or see "not a redhead," they may process the negative, but ten minutes later, they may only remember "redhead."

So I try not to use specific, visual negatives in dialog or in action description. For example, I'd avoid writing, "For once, San Francisco Bay is free of fog." That sentence is bad visually because half the audience is going to just read, or hear, or remember, "San Francisco Bay ... fog." Instead I would take care to write, or have a character say, "Across the bay, he could see the wind rippling in waves across the grass on Mount Tamalpais."

I mean, obviously there's no fog, who's even talking about fog?

This is why politicians are smart to change the subject rather than deny. We remember Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook," partly because he was a crook, and partly because the most powerful word in that sentence, the takeaway, is the word "crook." What people took away from that sentence, to some extent, was "Richard Nixon ... crook." Same thing is going on with "I did not have sex with that woman": aside from its deceitfulness, it makes you think about Bill having sex with Monica, which you probably didn't want to do. Clinton was much better in 1992 when he refused to confirm or deny whether "we've had our difficulties" meant that he was a hound dog; "I think the American people get it," is all he would say, and we did.

Don't put images in people's heads if you don't want them there; it's very hard to get them out again.

We Happy Few Update!

This week I whistled a variety of tunes into a mike for the Bobbies to whistle when they’re alone in the dark.

Figured out with G the mechanics for one of our player character’s interactions with a later player character. It’s important that there is narrative “glue” between the scenes; but we don’t want to over determine the player’s choices. So rather than preventing the player from short circuiting a particular sequence, I came up with a way to handle the short circuiting in narrative. Now I’m rewriting the scenes.

Wrote lines for Uncle Jack to urge everyone to get indoors before it gets dark. I’ll record them next week or over the weekend.

Worked on figuring out which Wellie attack lines are not convincing, so we can disconnect them.

Gave notes on the early animation of one of the cutscenes. It was an interesting conversation because I come from film and theatre, and I tend to want the “actors” to move around the “scene” to illuminate their inner turmoil. But the cutscenes are all first person, like the gameplay, and it’s very odd if the player character is turned away from the NPC she’s interacting with; the player is looking at the landscape. So how do you square the circle?

Created a list of extremely English names so that we can name all the Wellies. Edited Alice Kensington’s Wastrellette lines so we can put them in the game (after José, our audio producer, levels them). Came up with ideas for what’s on the inside of a Happy Face.

The rest of the team's update is here.

Rules of the Game

I played a game that did some interesting things with narrative, which I won't name, so hopefully I won't spoil anything.

The game is meant to be a narrative puzzle. Oddly, it is not a puzzle so much about "what exactly happened" or "who done it," but "what is the nature of the main character?" Are they who they say they are, or are they lying, or are they deluded themselves?

It's usually a rule that the protagonist of a story, or a player character, shouldn't know anything important that the player doesn't know. Otherwise it alienates the viewer/reader/player: how can they feel engaged emotionally with a character that's partly withheld from them. It feels like a cheat if the narrative holds back something that the story later hinges on.

However, in this case, the player character is not the main character. The player character is interrogating the narrative, but never appears in the game, while the main character is the person whose story the game contains.

So it's a legit mystery. The game is entitled to set the goal, and is entitled to set the obstacles to achieving that goal. It's okay that the player character has no way to establish something that, at another time and another place, could have been reasonably easily established. That's the setup. The narrator is entitled to define his or her terms.

What bugged me, I think, is a tone problem. Odd that a tone problem would mess up a mystery story, but I'll tell you why.

There are two main explanations of the narrative in the game.

• One is that an extremely implausible series of events happened.
• The other is that the main character has an extremely rare (and, some argue, nonexistent) mental disorder

But these two extreme, stylized interpretations come out of a series of gritty video clips of an actor acting in a naturalistic, human way. The actor isn't brilliant, but the performance doesn't come across stagey or forced.

So do I set my suspension of disbelief on "high" or "low"? I can look at interpretation one and think, well, that's an extremely implausible series of events. If I heard that in real life, I wouldn't believe it. I'd think I was dealing with a crazy person or a scammer.

But this isn't real life, this is a video game. I've believed crazier stories in video games.

So I go look at the other interpretation. If I met someone manifesting this particular mental disorder, I would pretty much assume they were faking something they saw on TV.

But again: this is a video game. Video games are entitled to heightened reality. And maybe the game makers don't know that this mental disorder doesn't look like they depicted it, and possibly doesn't exist at all.

After all, early on in the narrative we keep hearing about fairy tales, so maybe this is all meant to be interpreted as a fairy tale.

Okay but -- I'm supposed to be choosing between two interpretations, aren't I? So if I'm judging by the standards of fairy tales, how can I possibly call shenanigans on one interpretation and not the other? And if I'm judging by the standards of the real world, I have to call shenanigans on both, and then I got nothing.

So the lesson is: you have to define your tone. If something is meant to be a fairy tale, then you should introduce some magic into your story. It's dangerous to present your fairy tale as a completely naturalistic true-crime story, because it will get judged by the wrong standards. And the flip side of that is that if you intend your player (or viewer or reader) to call shenanigans on a character or a series of events, then you need to make clear that any inconsistencies are the results of the character lying rather than metaphorical story telling...

... or sloppy writing. When the audience doesn't know the story teller, they won't necessarily trust that everything in the story is there intentionally. Does the game maker know his mental disorders, really? Or is he just following what he's seen on TV?

Take Dexter, the TV and book serial killer who only kills Very Bad People. Such a person probably does not exist, but it's the premise of the series, so we accept it, and we also accept that we are not watching a truly realistic portrayal of a serial killer, we're watching a pay cable TV drama.

But that means you couldn't hang an episode on the audience suspecting that he's lying because he's showing empathy that a real serial killer isn't capable of -- because he's not a real serial killer.

And you really couldn't hang a spec episode on that, because how is the reader to know whether you are intentionally writing a character that is inconsistent with reality, or that you don't know what you're doing.

You have to ask yourself if your narrative depends on the audience being sure you know what you're doing.

This is where "hanging a lantern" or "addressing" the plot comes in handy.

If you have a character like Dexter behaving uncharacteristically for a serial killer, you could have two characters arguing about him. One could say, "no real serial killer has empathy." The other one could say, "this one does."

Now the audience knows that you do know what you're doing, and the inconsistency in the episode is intentional. Depending on where you take the scene, you can then leave us pretty sure that the Dexter-ish character is pretending, or that he really has a heart, or you can be ambiguous about it. But at least you're not being muddy.

Because of the way the narrative is told in this particular game, the game maker didn't have an opportunity to tell us whether he means his mental disorder to be a fairy tale mental disorder -- in which case it could be "real" or "true" within the world of the game -- or a real mental disorder -- in which case we'd reject that interpretation. And no actually impossible things happen in the extremely implausible series of events that is the other interpretation, so we can't tell if we're supposed to reject that interpretation as really unlikely, or embrace it as a fairy tale.

Telling a story isn't just about the story. It's also about who's telling the story, and to whom. You have to be aware of who you're telling your story to, and who they think you are.

"I will fight for you," or, Hillary and Story-Telling

(Trigger warning:  politics! This here is a post about narratives in politics, so feel free to skip it if you came here for game writing or screenwriting.)

There have been an awful lot of articles in the press about how Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate. They're making a lot of Hillary's dubious decision to keep her State Department emails on a private server, and her BS explanation that she didn't want to have to carry two devices.

Casting my mind back to the 2008 primary, my memory is that she blew the race in January and February, but by March, she'd found her voice and her message. She'd gone from I Am the Experienced Candidate to I Will Fight For You. She pulled huge crowds in Texas. Sixteen million registered Democrats voted for her. If she'd been that candidate in New Hampshire, with that message, she'd have won the primary, and crushed John McCain.

I doubt that after four years running the State Department, she's a less convincing presidential candidate than she was in 2008.

So where are these articles coming from? The simplest explanation is that journalists love a horse race. You won't get any column inches for writing that yep, the presumptive Democratic nominee is going to win the nomination, or that in a booming economy, she'd probably beat the Republican nominee, who will be a right-wing yahoo or another politically crippled "moderate," unless he is, yikes, Donald Trump.

But, seriously, keeping her emails secret is a pretty weak stick to beat Hillary with. My guess is that most independent voters are going to have trouble understanding what the fuss is about. My guess is that most Democratic voters are going to remember that the right wing has been hating on Hillary since 1992, and accusing her of all sorts of things (she had Vince Foster murdered! Benghazi!), and the attacks are just going to sound hysterical.

Which is kind of a shame, because it was naughty, and her explanation was unbelievable.

But boy, these journalists are repeating each other's talking points a lot. People thought Hillary was being paranoid when she said there was a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against Bill, until it came out that there was, in fact, a vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill. It's not hard to believe that there is some coordination going on behind the scenes. I don't doubt that Jeb Bush would rather run against Bernie Sanders than Hillary. There are probably a lot of Democratic bigwigs who hate on the Clintons, too, and they'd really rather hand this extremely winnable election to John Kerry (who blew 2004) or Al Gore (who blew 2000) or Crazy Uncle Joe (who has been losing primaries since 1988).

(In the absence of a war, presidential elections are almost always about the fundamentals of the economy. The incumbent party almost always wins them if the economy is good. Unemployment is at 5.1%. The market is at an all-time high. The dollar is strong. The economy is fundamentally good.)

So what is interesting enough about all this to talk about on a blog about stories? My point, as always, is the power of a story. Hillary being a weak candidate is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people start telling the story, maybe she'll become a weak candidate. Certainly she won't have any serious competition until enough people start saying it. You'll notice there are, as yet, no Democratic governors running against her, but maybe one could be lured into the race if she seems crippled.

And now, there are polls to point to that say she's a weak candidate. That's the self-fulfilling part. Of course the polls are down, because there's been nothing but negative news about Hillary. But with the polls down, now you can have more articles about how she's crippled, and that will bring the polls down more...

So, what does Hillary need to do about it? She needs a story. So far, she's been playing defense. She's been issuing silly explanations of the emails thing (she didn't want to carry two devices? c'mon), and recently she apologized. That might make the emails story old news, but she needs to come up with something that is a new story. You can't fight a story by telling people it's a bad story. You counter a story with another story.

But how do you come up with a story? Journalists practically refuse to cover policy as a story, even though kind of the whole point of an election is to allow voters to choose between policies. To get any traction with policy -- to make a story out of it -- you have to say something really outrageously stupid, like "I'm going to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants" or "I think we should seriously consider building a wall along the Canadian border."

Or at least, you have to say something daring. E.g. Hillary says "I'm not only going to embrace and defend Obamacare, I'm going to extend it." "I'm not only going to defend investment in solar power, I'm going to double down. Because, y'know, it's a huge success, and nothing would be better for our national security if the Russians and the Arabs stopped making a ton of money selling oil."

(I'm a big fan of Democrats selling alternative energy as a national security issue, rather than solely as a climate issue. If the world didn't run on oil, Saddam Hussein would have been no more than an irritant, Isis would run out of money, and Russia wouldn't be able to afford to invade Ukraine. People are willing to spend bazillions of dollars to blow up bearded guys with AK-47's, why not spend some money bankrupting the real enemy? "Let's stop putting money in the pockets of people who hate us" is a better story to convince independents and even Republicans with.)

But I'm not sure it's even important what the policy thing is, so long as you can turn the story into "Hillary has a bold proposal." The message should be "I have opinions, I have guts, I have new ideas." Americans always want to hear that the candidate has guts and new ideas. Guts and new ideas are practically the American religion. That's why so many people dig Donald Trump. He's an irresponsible blowhard, and he really wants to stand on a balcony in front of a crowd, but at least he's saying what he really thinks, and he's not toeing the party line.

Change the story, save the world.

Politics is story-telling.

Stories: The Hidden Path

This is the other game I've been writing. Reynardo the Fox is a clever rogue, but not as clever as he thinks. He’s got himself sucked into a Rebellion against a mad, wicked Emperor, and he’s got fateful choices to make. Rescue his best friend, the master spy Lapino, wield a gem dedicated to a dead god, or resurrect a legendary siege weapon? He’s still in love with Emperor’s daughter, the sorceress Zenobia. He’s got a million ways to screw this up. And, just maybe, he can figure out how to be a real hero and save the world...

Yep, this is sort of a tongue-in-cheek mashup of the old Renard the Fox characters with a Lovecraftian universe, with fun, Bastion-style narration tracking your choices and their consequences along a branching tree of mostly bad decisions...

More news to come!

The Game Narrative Toolbox

(Click the pic to buy the book)

In between the two games I'm writing (We Happy Few and Stories: The Path of Destinies), I've been perusing The Game Narrative Toolbox. It's written by a quartet of extremely experienced game writers from the world of triple-A, one of whom is my buddy Ann LeMay.

There are all sorts of hidden rules in game writing. For example, one of the challenges in writing We Happy Few for me, as a recovering screenwriter, has been our studio head Guillaume's insistence that the player's goal line up with the player character's goal. A character's goal in a story can be anything: to save the world, to lose his virginity before senior year in high school starts, to show up his father, to make the best cheese in the world, to win a dog show.

In a movie, all I have to do is convince you to care about the protagonist, and you'll automatically root for (or against) him or her achieving that goal. Few of the audience for Best in Show were dog fanciers.

In games, G's philosophy is, the player does not automatically have the same goal. Most game developers have heard of the four Bartle types. Players play to kill, to socialize, to explore and to achieve. Most of the console and PC games you've heard of try to hit three or four of these motivations to play. Witcher 3, for example, which I just finished, is about killing monsters, about exploring a world, and about achieving certain goals. I'm willing to bet that the developers considered making a multiplayer mode, too.

So, back to cheese. While Achievers might dig a game where you make the best cheese, what about Killers? What about Explorers?

So we need to make the player's goals line up. In a shoot'em-up, that happens more or less automatically. You play Splinter Cell because you want to kill dudes. The hero is a dude who kills bad dudes, and the story is about how there are all these bad dudes he has to kill.  But what about cheese?

Say the next step in my cheesemaking challenge is to get a special kind of rennet (a cheese ingredient). The player probably does not have strong emotions around rennet.

But I can show the player a beautiful, high-security building he's going to have to sneak into in order to get it. I can warn him that his chief competitor, Aloysius B. Abernathy, is plotting to buy up all the special rennet. And I have cleverly been building lore about a secret society called Blessed Are the Cheesemakers that hopes to control the world through cheese. I can hint to the player that he will discover a Big Secret about Blessed Are the Cheesemakers inside that high security building.

Now the player has all sorts of game-y reasons to get that rennet. They are not the reasons that the player character has. He'd really rather buy his rennet on Amazon (just as you can, you know, buy the book on Amazon by clicking on the picture of the book). But I've made the player and player character goals line up.

It's particularly important because there is a significant subset of gamers that just don't care that much about story, just as there are moviegoers who are just there for the pod races. They want enough story to tell them why they're supposed to kill the Thing in the Sewers, but just enough. The reason the player character has for doing it is not at the center of the experience; it's an excuse.

It's been on my mind a lot, because I've been working on how to line up the player's goals in We Happy Few with the goals of [character name redacted] as he [redacted][redacted] the [redacted].

Well, triple-A games have more of these hidden rules than indie games do. First of all, in triple-A, the writer is one of a dozen people involved in narrative design, on a team of 600 people, to pick numbers out of a hat. That's a very different writing environment from mine, where I'm the guy writing the story and the lore and the dialog and even directing the voice actors. So communication is much more involved. There are way more memos and meetings.

THE GAME NARRATIVE TOOLBOX (remember? that's what this blog post is about) is all about these hidden rules. It is full of the things that you would not automatically know about AAA game writing, or game writing in general, just by consulting your common sense. How do you make an epic plot into a relatable plot? What are the elements of good quest-giving dialog? When can you give exposition and when should you never give exposition? What's the difference between the lore you can impart to a raid party of players who regularly play together, and the lore you can impart to an ad-hoc party?

Cleverly, since this book is pitched at beginning-to-intermediate writers, the book has lots of exercises you can do for practice, and to build your portfolio. I'll be consulting it too. Indie means you don't necessarily do things the way the big studios do them; sometimes because you're trying to do something interesting, more often because you can't afford, say, motion capture, or 20,000 barks. But you're wise to know how they do them, and depart from their ways only when you have a specific reason to do it.

Good book, Ann! Hi, Toiya!

And He Solves Crimes

It is a bitter joke among my screenwriter friends that the way you get a TV show is that you create a truly interesting character, in a fascinating environment, whose family has complicated, fraught dynamics... "and he solves crimes."


It is a cliché among high school drama classes that Hamlet is about a man cursed with indecision. What is up with that guy? If Othello had been in his shoes, he'd have killed off Claudius in Act One, scene 2. (To be fair, if Hamlet had been in Othello's shoes, he'd have laid a trap for Iago.)

A playwright and perfessor named David Ball has written a really brilliant book on how to read plays called Backwards & Forwards. He makes the interesting point that to understand a play you have to read it, yep, backwards and forwards. Going forwards, anything can happen. Hamlet could find out his mother's married his uncle after his father died mysterious, and bugger off back to Wittenberg U. Hamlet could avoid the poisoned blade. Hamlet could turn out to have ingested small portions of the poison over years to render himself immune to it. But if you notice that (SPOILERS) at the end of the play he offs someone important (HAH NOT REALLY), you can work backwards step by step until you see the train of consequences that gets him there from the Ghost's first speech. Only then can you understand how the play is constructed.

And, in doing so, he makes a much more specific point. Hamlet is not at all indecisive -- once he knows that Claudius is guilty of murdering his father in Act Three.

How so?

Well, you see, in Elizabethan times, if you saw a ghost, you had no way of knowing if it was your father, as it appeared to be, or a vision sent by a witch or a devil. Sure, the ghost says that Claudius murdered him. But maybe he's lying!

So, for the first three acts, Hamlet is a detective. He adopts a pose of madness. He organizes a play for Claudius to watch about a nobleman who snatches a crown by murdering his brother -- and then he closely observes Claudius's reaction to it. He gives a soliloquy about killing himself when he knows that Polonius is spying on him. (It is not, in fact, a soliloquy!)

He is not indecisive. He does not know the facts. He very decisively seeks to get them.

Shakespeare is a funny playwright for modern audiences and modern theatre companies. His language is some of the best poetry in English. His plays, however, are not "poetic" at all. They are not "art plays." Their subject matter is always something clear: power, love, money, love vs. money, love vs. power, power vs. power. They have fast-moving plots, with twists and turns.

And the damn things are well nigh bulletproof. If you put on a Shakespeare play as is, you have one difficult task: get the actors to understand what the hell it is they're trying to say, and then say it like that is the way they talk. If you can do that, the play will work. It will work in period costumes, it will work in modern dress, it will work with the city guards wearing Victorian bobby helmets, it will work when all the characters are women and Mercutio is mortally wounded with a butter knife.

If you can figure out what people are saying, it is not at all hard to figure out what is going on. (E.g. "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York..." = war is over, we Yorkists won, times are good, I hate my life.) Someone will quickly tell you, often three times. Richard III starts his play by telling you that he is a bad, bad man. Romeo & Juliet tells you it's a play about lovers who are, from the first, fucked.

On the other hand, if the actors don't know what they're saying, or think they're presenting poetry instead of people trying to get what they want by talking to other people, then it becomes a morass of poetic syllables. Good poetic syllables, very good, very excellent good, and yet they are but so so, because but no one wants to sit through five acts of that.

Shakespeare is also a funny playwright because his characters are so much more immediate and straightforward than most fictional characters in the intervening Victorian period, that we forget that he is a man from a different time. When he puts witches in his play, he means witches. They're not a metaphor, they're not (just) a plot device, they're actual witches. Everyone knows witches are real! Likewise his father's ghost is not a plot device, it is a real conundrum (true ghost? devilish vision?) that must be solved before Hamlet can righteously assassinate his uncle, the King.

(Hamlet's audiences were also extremely wary of the notion of killing kings, as we are not.)

Backwards and Forwards is a very short book, under a hundred pages, practically a pamphlet, so you have absolutely no excuse not to read it, whether you are a screenwriter or game designer, because it gets to the essence of what storytelling is. Go on. You won't be sorry.

(And here's my old post about why I believe Ophelia is pregnant.)

Spellcheck Be Damn'd

If you happen to be writing that movie or game set in Medieval Europe, you will probably be glad to know that someone has compiled a list of every Medieval name in European texts from 600 to 1600.

Aaron Abba Abbatissa Abbo Abel Abone Abundance Accorsa Aceline Acfrid Achard Achere Acherea Achilles Acledulf Aclehard Aclehilde Aclemand Aclemund Aclinde Aclulf Actwin Ada Adalald Adalbald Adalbod Adaldag Adaleus Adalgarde Adalgaria Adalgaud Adalger Adalgilde Adalgis Adalgisa Adalgod Adalgrim Adalgude Adalgunde Adalhar Adalhilde Adalinde Adalmund Adalrad Adalrada Adalram Adalsinde Adaltrude Adam Adberg Adela Adeline Adelo Ademar Adiel Admirable Admiranda Adolf Adrehar Adrehilde

You're welcome...