If I were hiring a games writer, which I'm not...

I'm not hiring a games writer. But some folks have been asking me how you become one. I think I have a different perspective than some people who give advice.

I believe the classic advice is to write some sort of conditional narrative -- a conversation that could go a bunch of different ways. One company asks you to use the Neverwinter Nights toolkit. You could also write something in Twine.

Another thought is to make a mod. Making a mod is a really cool idea. Some games (I think the Shadowrun games?) allow you to pretty much create your own complete scenario for a game, using the game assets, but changing the names, situation, plot and dialog.

That's what I might be looking for if I were hiring a ... level designer. (I am not even in charge of hiring level designers.)

If I were hiring a game writer, which I am not, I would not need an example of conditional narrative, or a mod. None of the narrative in We Happy Few is conditional. We just don't have the bandwidth to create big chunks of if/then/else.

What I would want someone to be able to do is create some characters who have their own inner life and motivations -- motivations that are at odds with each other. I want great dialog.

Great dialog is characters using their words to try to get things they want from each other, while revealing character.

Good dialog is, "does each character say only things that that character would say?" Great dialog is "does each character say things that only that character could say?"

The test for a great scene is:

a. Do the characters each want something?
b. Do they not get it until the end of the conversation?
c. Does each line flesh out the character?
d. Can I take off the character names and I never lose track of who's talking?
e. Even though the characters have their own distinct voices, is the conversation consistent with the tone and voice of the overall work?

In screenwriting, one tool is to go through the script once for each character, and think, "What would I have to do to this character's dialog so a major actor would want to play them?" Every person is the hero of their own story. If the janitor feels like he is the hero of his own story, if he feels like there's more to him than meets the eye, then you probably wrote good dialog.

Lisa's writing environmental narrative: lots of letters and poems and notes and graffiti and so forth. Each has been written by a specific fictional person, in their distinct voice. Each note of this kind has to satisfy the same criteria. We should get something from each note, and ideally, want to know more about the person that wrote it.

If I were hiring a writer, I would want to know: can you write dramatically, in different voices?

If you can do that, I can sit you down at a desk and within a week you can be adding value to the game.

Most people do not really know how to write dramatically, in different voices. That shouldn't be surprising. Just because you can dance at a party doesn't mean you can perform on Broadway as a dancer.

It should go without saying that a game writer has to play games. You have to have a sense of which sorts of things are easy to do in games, and which are hard. You have to have a sense of what verbs exist in the game you're writing. If you're going to write for, say, We Happy Few, then as you work with the level designers, you get an acute sense of the capabilities and limitations of our AI's.

TV writers watch lots of TV. They need to know instinctively what sorts of things TV does well and what sorts of things it does poorly.

But that's just exposure. If you are even a casual gamer, you can learn most of what you need to know about a game by playing it for, say, ten hours. Or even the better part of a day.

Really, it's all about the ability to create compelling characters through dialog. That's what I would be looking for if I were hiring a games writer.

Which I am not.

Director's Review Week

This week I’ve been mostly reviewing the game. I’ve been playing as Arthur. Anyone who’s wondering if there will be enough game, well, I’ve logged about 550 hours in the game, I know how the game works, and it’s still taking me the better part of the week to play through Arthur. That’s not blockers, although there are some places where progression is blocked; that’s stuff to do and places to go and weirdos to talk to and things to find out.

Probably the most fun part was when an elaborate, phantasmagorical encounter we’ve been working on for three years came to full fruition. It was hilarious. And weird. And yet, I think, at some level true.

“It never happened; yet it is still ture. What magic art is this?” says the Puck in Sandman 34, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” That’s the writing I aspire to.

We also spent a good bit of the week rejiggering the opening island, so that when the player comes out of the shelter for the first time, he is “onboarded” through a curated experience. Some new players were getting lost when they hit the open world – what do I do? how do I play? where am I supposed to go – and we’re hoping to fix that.

When Lisa and I were taking Kenneth Koch’s writing class at Columbia a long time ago, we learned two things: (a) develop a writing style by writing in other people’s styles (b) you will never run out of words. Writing a game is a master class; I’ve got to write in different voices and different media.

Originally we were just going to have audio flashbacks for Arthur, because Arthur’s main issue is someone who never comes on stage in the present, while Miss Thigh High’s issue is clear and present, and the Mad Scotsman has a special friend to talk to. But Sam asked for audio flashbacks for them, too, so I wrote the Mad Scotsman’s memories this week. They’ll have to go into the game in robospeech or temp voice or something, as the fellow who voices the Mad Scotsmen disappears Monday to the wilds of Alberta till just before Christmas; apparently where he is, there are not high quality sound studios. (Everyone now carries a pretty decent microphone in their pocket; but you still need a professional quality sound studio to get clean audio without a “boxy,” “roomy” quality of reverb.)

Other work: figuring out how to bring the player up to speed on the Garden District faster; writing clever journal entries and objectives in the game’s voice for about half the game; and editing Arthur’s nightmares. Oh, he will have nightmares. He was going to have cinematic nightmares, but with our animators working their fingers to the bone and Clara frantically editing Uncle Jack, now it’s audio nightmares.

Mo cap?

Wednesday I flew down to Texas for a motion capture shoot for a key scene in the Mad Scotsman’s story, that will also be the backbone of the story trailer!

This is the first time I’ve ever directed mo-cap. As with most motion capture shoots, we already had edited audio — I recorded one actor in London, and another in Toronto. Now we needed to give arms and legs to those voices.

So motion capture is a bit like dance. My job was choreographing the movements and gestures that are supposed to sell the emotions in the voices. I had a general idea of where the actors could move in the imaginary space we’d already built. On the mo-cap stage, I worked with the actors to express the characters they were there to inhabit. The mad Scotsman is big in all senses of the word. The other person in the scene is a British aristocrat who measures her every move.

But it’s not just gestures. As I was working with the actors, at a couple of points we’d rehearsed a scene to the point where the two actors were getting everything right; but I wasn’t feeling it yet.

In one case I realized that the other party was just sort of hanging out with our mad Scotsman; I needed to tell the actress playing her that she had something urgent she needed to do elsewhere. Suddenly the scene woke up. It’s funny, because exactly none of her gestures changed. But now, I felt it.

In the other case, I hadn’t given the actress her intention. She was saying stuff to the mad Scotsman; but she wasn’t trying to convince him. The actress didn’t know the character’s “verb”. And again, not a gesture changed, but as soon as I gave her an intention for her character, the whole scene came alive.

I find the two most powerful questions I can ask about a scene, whether it’s written, or recorded, or edited, or mo-capped are: do I believe it? And, do I care? If I can get both answers to yes, I think we end up with something pretty neat.

Rest of the team's reporthere

Lists Planned and Unplanned

It's fun to write lists in dialog. A good list has power. In Henry V, the English soldiers charge "For God, for Harry, and St. George!" Somewhere I have a felt banner that says, "For God, for Country and for Yale." (This motto is listed in a dictionary as an example of "anticlimax," no doubt by a lexicographer from Harvard.)

This is the planned list, a list that has solidified in the speaker's mind. I had fun this morning writing the sentence, "No one's going to go to war for the sake of an island of rubble, subsistence farmers, and terribly large badgers," describing our alternative history England. The speaker clearly has said that before, even if only to himself.

Then there is the unplanned list. After Agincourt, Shakespeare has King Henry V read a herald's note detailing the dead among his enemies, the French:

King Henry: This note doth tell me of ten thousand French
That in the field lie slain. [...]
The names of those their nobles that lie dead:
Charles Delabreth, high constable of France;
Jacques of Châtillon, admiral of France;
The Master of the Crossbows, Lord Rambures;
Great Master of France, the brave Sir Guichard Dauphin;
John, duke of Alençon; Anthony, duke of Brabant,
The brother of the duke of Burgundy,
And Edward, duke of Bar. Of lusty earls:
Grandpré and Roussi, Faulconbridge and Foix,
Beaumont and Marle, Vaudemont and Lestrale.
Here was a royal fellowship of death.

When most actors get a list, they tend to read it like a grocery list. They know they're reading a list. Each word they speak is part of a list. It becomes singsong. If you perform Henry's speech like that, it has little power.

Take a moment, and read the above like a list.

Now, read the list, but each time you come to a name, pause for a moment, and imagine someone you know. Now imagine them dead. Only then move on to the next name.

Seriously, do that.

See what that does?

It becomes an unplanned list. Short planned lists have power. Long planned lists are tedious. Long, unplanned lists have power.

It is a challenge to get actors to perform unplanned lists, because they can see the damn list right in front of their eyes. They know how many names are coming up. Yet you have to knock them off that, derail that train, or it sounds like a planned list. You have to remind them that their character doesn't know what they're about to say until a fraction of a second before they say it.

(In Meisner technique we were taught to practice lines at the highest possible speed, without affect: "Whatapieceofworkisman hownobleinreasonhowexcellentinfaculty etc.". That way the words would be there when I needed to say them, but wouldn't be associated with an emotion. So the emotion would come fresh and surprising, even though the line was memorized.)

(The ability to let go of what you know is critical to many artists. An editor has to be able to say, "Who the hell is this character that just showed up?" even though in the 22 previous cuts of the film, that character was properly introduced, so of course she knows who it is. Same thing for a writer.)

One of our characters in We Happy Few has a problem:

"Beatrice says she loves me. But she loves everything! Me... long walks... sunsets and rainbows of course. Simon Says… big wristwatches on a man… wrapping paper… dandelions… a good night’s sleep… ribbons… Uncle Jack’s bedtime stories… six o’clock … commemorative spoons. I have to know if it’s real!"

What's funny about this list, I hope, is that it is (a) unexpectedly long (b) terribly specific (c) weirdly diverse. "Unexpectedly long" is only funny if the actor performs the list as if he does not know how long the list is. If the list becomes sing-song, it's not funny. He has to perform it as if he is searching his memory for everything Beatrice loves. It's funnier if it sounds like he's done, and then he thinks of some more things. Ideally, to make it more comically upsetting, the actor should do homework: create a different imaginary circumstance in which Beatrice liked each distinct item on the list. Then each item comes with its own distinct emotion, and it will come out of his creative instrument sounding distinctly different.

By the way, giving the actor a distinct imaginary circumstance is almost always helpful, not just with lists. With good actors -- and this deep into development we've got an amazing repertory of voice actors -- if you simply tell them something about their imaginary circumstance, the line comes out more distinctly. Even if they've said the line the way I intended it the first time, I'll still tell them something about it sometimes, to see how that informs their delivery. They usually deliver the line sharper. Remember this is in a voice session where we're doing a new line, on average, every 30 seconds. Our guys are Teslas: they go from 0 to 60 at ludicrous speed. Their ability to interpolate the imaginary circumstance I just gave them and deliver the line fresh is what makes us bring them back.

Clarification

If a producer tells you, "I would definitely produce this if you can get a star attached," or "... a known showrunner attached" or "... a bankable director attached," that is a nice way of saying, "no."

Plotholes, and Forward In All Directions!

A friend has been pestering me to blog a bit more. I blog whenever I have something new to say, but after so many years, that's not that much new to say!

And I've been busy. As the Level Designers rush towards content lock, they are finally spitting out the heaps of encounter lines they need, which I am turning into dialog, and then recording. So that’s a lot of writing and a lot of recording. Yesterday, I recorded 208 lines in 90 minutes with one of our key actors.

Writing and recording is a full time job. Another full time job I have is testing the story play throughs. They are still not complete, but they are complete enough that a fellow can play through them... and make copious notes on all the things that are missing, or scrambled. It took three days for me to play through Arthur, even cheating to give myself lock picks and power cells and such, even not doing side quests. When we started out, the idea was a play through was four hours. Hah.

Odd writing note: sometimes you come across illogical things in the game. For example, for design reasons, Miss Thigh Highs currently can’t go out her back door, even though Arthur, in his play through, goes in that way.

However, I have learned, you do not need to close every plothole. Sometimes it works just to “hang a lantern” on it If Miss Thigh Highs says, “What is wrong with this door, it’s always jamming on me!” then it feels like there is an in-world reason why she can’t use that door, even if we don’t get an explanation for it. By addressing the problem, it doesn’t feel as much like a logical inconsistency.

Back to it!

Taking the Curse Off Quest-Giving in We Happy Few

One of my ongoing efforts is to make quest givers not feel like quest givers.

Your typical quest giver is a guy standing around outside a dungeon waiting for an adventurer such as yourself. He can tell you all about a great treasure in the dungeon! Or he will give you a nice sword if you obtain some item from within, like his wallet, or maybe his car keys.

Leading me to wonder why he didn’t go himself. And how long he’s been standing around. Does he sleep? Does he ever go for a pee? Is there a sandwich cart that comes around?

In real life, of course, people rarely offer you jobs out of the blue. (And then it’s in Malmö or Singapore or something.) Generally it works the other way around: you find out that someone has a sword for sale, and you go and ask what they want for it.

The Witcher finessed this nicely. People in that world post “Witcher Wanted” ads near pubs. They are waiting for someone to come to their home to offer them Witcher services, for which they’re prepared to pay.

Fortunately, we have something rare in video games: our characters did not just wake up with full blown amnesia, living in a populated world, where they grew up. They know their fellow Wellies and their fellow Wellies know them.

So we can take the curse off quest giving.

For example, in the Miss Thigh Highs playthrough, you need to learn something about, let us say, washing machines. You know the washing machine repairman, Alfonso Maytag; he has fixed your washing machine, after all. At the pub they say he’s out by the Tor, a local hill.

In a regular video game, you’d meet him out by the Tor, and he’d say, “My friend Freddie has been captured by cultists. Please rescue him and I shall give you this book on Washing Machine Maintenance!”

In our game, he’d say, “My friend Freddie has been captured by cultists!” and your player character, who was in primary school with Freddie, will say, “Oh, my God! Can I help?” Obviously you’re not going to waste time chatting about washing machines while poor Freddie is in danger. After you complete the quest, though, equally obviously, Mr. Maytag will happily let you xerox the manual to your Hi-Capacity 27” Front Load Washer.

From a gameplay point of view, these two setups are exactly the same. Find the quest giver. Learn of the adventure. Complete the quest. Get the payoff.

But from a narrative point of view, one feels more natural and human. That’s important to me. The more real our people feel, the more the player engages with them emotionally.

Video game worlds contain a tiny number of salient objects. Stories allow our minds to weave a whole world in the spaces between them. But we'll only do it if we're engaged emotionally.

Figuring out what makes the quest feel natural instead of gamey is a lot of the effort I put into writing encounters. By comparison, character dialog is easy once I know what relationship the characters have to each other.

Rest of the update here.