Raph Koster has a really interesting post about his experience developing Star Wars Galaxies, and various solutions that were proposed for dealing with Jedi Knights:

This same issue had come up in the Expanded Universe books and stories. You basically have the problem that

• people identify with Jedi
• they’re rare
• they’re incredibly powerful

This meant that creators laboring in the universe had a few choices:

• invent new stuff as powerful or more powerful as Jedi (which was done more than a few times — General Grievous, the Witches of Dathomir, the World Razer, a living planet called Zonarma Sekot, The Ones — OK, it was done a zillion times, which just proves my point).
  
• tell stories with no Jedi in them, as in the original Han Solo books by Brian Daley. (Fun books, btw: The Han Solo Adventures: Han Solo at Stars’ End / Han Solo’s Revenge / Han Solo and the Lost Legacy)
  Of course, the demands of games focused on Jedi also meant that the powers of Jedi kept having to go up, too! I mean, people actually complained when you didn’t start as a powerful Jedi in Jedi Knight II, and eventually, we got to the ludicrous heights of Starkiller in the Force Unleashed games: “sufficiently powerful enough to rip a million-ton Star Destroyer out of orbit and slap Darth Vader around like he owed him money.”
  

He goes on to explain various ideas that the developers had for designing the Jedi. They didn't want to make lots of weak Jedi; that would devalue the canon.

They had a crazy idea where you could develop Jedi powers, but the further you got along, the more trouble you would get from the Empire, until eventually Darth Vader is hunting you down.

And permadeath. Permadeath is, let us say, an acquired taste, and a marketing no-go in the mainstream game arena. (That must be why so many indies love it.)

 So they had another idea where you could develop Jedi skillz, but doing that would be about as hard as it really ought to be. You'd have to accomplish a secret (hidden to you) series of tasks to become a Jedi, and the tasks would fall into all four Bartle types: Explorer, Killer, Socializer and Achiever. So you'd have to, say, climb the highest mountain, and fight X number of duels, and have a conversation with so-and-so, etc.

The Four Bartle Types

Only exceptionally devoted players would achieve Jedi status, and they'd deserve it.

And then they ran out of time, which is Why We Can't Have Nice Things in video games.

One of the things we learn in indie development is to do One New Thing. And to make it so central to the game experience that you actually Git R Done, because otherwise you'll cut it when it gets hard. There was never any danger of our cutting the shadow physics out of Contrast; that was the whole game.

Of course we are always tempted to do more than one New Thing. The danger is that it gets cut when money runs out, the way contingent dialog gets cut unless the entire narrative system is based on it.

In We Happy Few, we are going to have flawed characters. The player characters are all Slightly Terrible People. Fortunately, while that's newish for video games, it's hardly new to me as a screenwriter. On the other hand, we are doing something rather, we hope, clever with the intertwining stories, that will only become apparent after you start playing your second character. (And I can't tell you what it is yet.)

Our big new gameplay mechanic isn't purely new, but it is new in context. In We Happy Few you are loose in a city full of drugged-out happy people who will only attack you if you break the rules. So Social Blending becomes a survival skill. I don't think we've seen social blending in a survival horror game, or in an urban roguelike.

The bad thing about indie development is you don't have enough resources. If you decide to recast a character and re-record a scene (which we did), then that will come out of the budget for something else. The good thing about indie development is that, what little money you do have, you get decide how to spend. So there are no Powers That Be that will take the game out of your hands, at least until you sell it to a publisher. The people who made the features are the people who decide what features to cut. So there is a greater likelihood is that they'll cut fat before they'll cut muscle or bone, and that the game will come out as a coherent (if skinny) whole.

Our Kickstarter is coming up -- June 4. I wonder how many people will share our vision?

A small note on this week's rape in Game of Thrones.

Spoilers, obviously.

There's been a lot of back and forth about the latest rape in Game of Thrones: whether it was a rape considering the Ramsay Bolton-Sansa Stark marriage was arguably consensual; whether Sansa is a "strong woman"; whether the showrunners are putting rape onscreen gratuitously; whether it's "realism" or sexual assault porn or whatever else.

I have another issue with it. The rape seems to me the least interesting choice for both Ramsey and Sansa's characters. Ramsey is a vicious bastard because he's a bastard. Marrying Sansa strengthens his claim to be a legit nobleman. It could have been interesting if Ramsey actually treated Sansa decently because she is the only woman whose opinion matters to him. He's a sadist, sure, but he wants to be legitimate.

And then, of course, the show has some suspense. Can he keep it up? Or will he revert to habit?

Likewise, it could have been more interesting if Sansa had seduced Ramsey, owning her power and position, rather than just waiting for him to rape her. After all, she knew she was marrying the guy, so the sex can't have been a total surprise. Why not show some agency?

The rape is predictable and adds nothing to the story. Other choices might have added something new, and fresh, and compelling.

Is it gratuitous? The best sex scenes, like the best action scenes, are dramatic. They reveal character. They are about the characters trying to get what they want. If there is no change in the relationship, and no revelation of character, then the sex scene is gratuitous.

By that standard, Ramsey forcing himself on Sansa isn't, strictly, gratuitous. It changes the relationship. But he's done far worse things (torture, mutilation, treachery, hunting people down for sport) and Sansa has had worse things happen to her (murder of her entire family). The rape reveals nothing new about either character. A scene of aftermath in which Sansa reveals that she was raped, and what it means to her, might have been more revelatory.

But then, HBO's business strategy is not necessarily to make the best TV shows, but to make must-see shows that can't possibly be on network TV. From that point of view, we're talking about the scene, so it's all win for them.

In Which I Am Interviewed by Austin Miller

So Austin Miller of The Art of Writing asked me a bunch of questions about Compulsion Games and We Happy Few...

Q. From the little I've been able to see (the masks, the irony, the drugs etc.) Happy Few seems to have a more "critical" voice to it, as if it has something to say about society and the way we live. Do you care to indulge us as to what that might be?

A. Sure! We Happy Few is inspired by, among other things, Facebook culture -- the idea that if you're sad you should take a pill and be happy. No one shares their bad news because it would bring everyone down. As a culture, we reject sadness.

But hey, the narrative is much more than its theme. As Sam Goldwyn used to say a long time ago, “If you want to send a message, there’s always Hotmail.” We have other themes in there, like “what is truth?” and how people remember things that never happened, and how the heroic choices sometimes look like the cowardly ones, and how people can talk themselves into anything, and other subtexts and allusions and other good stuff in there, and we’re putting more in there every day, consciously and unconsciously...

More at AustinRayMiller.com.

To clarify, I don't meant to say that you shouldn't take a pill if you're depressed. You should. I do. I'm saying we shouldn't consider it a character failing if someone is legitimately sad about something that happened. We shouldn't feel vaguely creeped out if someone is mourning. 

Back to Index Cards Agin

I'm rewriting a script of mine for a producer. I always felt the script was a little soft -- too much travelogue, not enough story. As usually happens with some time away, the script's weaknesses are so much more in evidence. Time away is almost as good at giving you perspective as a great writing partner.

So, it's back to index cards. Just because you've written the whole script doesn't mean index cards can't help. It's hard to restructure a script with script pages. Even if you have that much floor space, you can't physically see the whole thing. So I generate index cards and start marking them up and moving them around...

Teale's Up for Outstanding Performance in a Video Game!

On Contrast, we had the pleasure of working with the immensely talented, and tiny, Teale Bishopric. She brought our heroine Didi to life with her voice. She was such a pleasure to direct.

And now she's up for an ACTRA Award for Outstanding Perforance in a Video Game, alongside a whole bunch of industry veterans in AAA games!



At videogame dev conferences, I keep hearing how the voice acting process works in many AAA games. The actor isn't allowed to see the script until he's in the booth. Partly that is because of fanatic secrecy, partly because the writers wrote the script the night before.


This makes it very hard for an actor to do their best.


Guillaume, our studio head, and I, knew that a great performance from Didi would make the game, and a weak one would break it. So we rehearsed with her twice. I'm sure her father, Thor, who is a fine actor himself, rehearsed her a few times as well.


We also rehearsed all the other actors. We even got both Vanessa Mitsui and Elias Toufexis in the booth for the Kat/Johnny scenes, because we wanted the arguments to feel like real arguments. Sure, a good director can act the lines with the actor in the booth, and if I'm there in the moment acting with the actor, then I can tell if the performance is where I want it to be. But having both in the booth is more fun, and frees me to listen, and I think the performances show the results.


Yes, it takes time. And money. But actors love to rehearse, and if you give them the chance to rehearse, they will do whatever they can to make one happen. Rehearsing will save you time in the studio, which is far more expensive than rehearsal time, and you will get a much more human and compelling performance.


By the way, I don't really like to feed the recorded performance of one actor to the other, as sound engineers will offer to do, because I don't know how much time they're going to need, and the recorded performance will either cut them off, or give them a longeur to overcome. But I'm the writer, so I know what I want the lines to sound like, and I did some training as an actor, so I can modulate my own performance. If I want the other actor to get angry, instead of asking for an angrier reaction, I'll be more provocative. If I want the other actor to slow down, I'll slow down. Usually the writers are not the directors. And there's your excuse to take acting training.


Anyway, we're all so thrilled for Teale, and we hope she wins a shiny statue!

Jessica Nigri journalizes me

What I been working on...

Not to be confused with "My Father's Office"

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This is almost as good as a free membership to My Father's Office, a fine Irish pub on Montana in Santa Monica. But they don't have Aeron chairs.

All these moments lost in time, like tears in the rain.

Back in my days as a development exec in LA, I nearly worked with both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. I was working for an Israeli producer out of his house in Tarzana; we were trying to make co-productions, to pick up enough money from this country and that to patch together a budget. Shatner signed on to be the star of our action movie, Warriors. We met him up at his house in the hills, and he had some really excellent points about his character's motivation. I went off and rewrote the script, and it was a lot better, and then foreign buyers nixed Shatner as the lead -- we literally could not finance a $2M movie with Shatner in the lead. So we had to apologize to Captain Kirk and cast Gary Busey.

That was before Free Enterprise, in which Shatner discovered that he could play a pompous buffoonish version of himself to great hilarity, which gave him Denny Crane, his brilliant Boston Legal character, and he became a star again.

The Gary Busey movie did not turn out brilliantly. I am not 100% sure Busey ever actually read the script. I'd guess he did not read it before we started shooting. But that's another story. (Actually Gary Busey is a whole flock of my stories.)

Later, we had a movie about the Israeli air strike on the nuclear reactor in Baghdad. Saddam was about to get the bomb in 1981 and the Israelis flew a bunch of F-16's across Jordan and Iraq and blew it up. They did such a good job of flying literally under the radar that the Iraqis thought it had to be the Iranians, until the Israelis admitted it.

Hollywood Pictures, a Disney film label, optioned the project. Soon, Leonard Nimoy wanted to direct it. So we had a lovely breakfast up at the Bel Air Hotel in Stone Canyon -- it's a series of bungalows nestled among trees -- and it was the first time that I'd realized that Leonard Nimoy was an old Jewish guy. He had smart things to say. He grokked the project. He liked my rewrite of the script.

And then Hollywood Pictures got excited about Jan de Bont, a Dutch cinematographer who wanted to direct, and they jettisoned Nimoy. I never felt that de Bont had any particular emotional attachment to the project, like Nimoy did; he just wanted to direct and here a studio was offering him a movie. Two years and $600,000 in rewrites later, Hollywood Pictures pulled the plug on the project. We had various conspiracy theories about why the only film label in town with no Jewish execs would do a movie about the Israeli Air Force; we found it interesting that they pulled the plug shortly after Disney successfully bid for Israel's second (or fourth, or something) broadcast TV channel.

So we never got to work with Kirk or Spock. Damn it.

It's interesting that in all the mourning for Mr. Nimoy, I don't hear the name of the guy who invented Spock, Gene Roddenberry. Nimoy so thoroughly inhabited the role over the years that we forget that Roddenberry invented Spock and the whole Vulcan species. It was Nimoy, though, who invented the Vulcan salute. It's a rabbinical gesture; the hand forms a "shin," the W-shaped Hebrew letter which stands for "El Shaddai," the Almighty: may God be with you.

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory," was Leonard Nimoy's last tweet, and it is true, and profound. And it made me think of Roy Batty dying on the rooftop of the Bradbury building, saying words that David Peoples wrote and Rutger Hauer rewrote: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain."

I have something in my eye.

I wish there was a Vulcan "rest in peace."

May God be with you on the next step in your journey.