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.

The Audience Doesn't Know, But They Know

The audience doesn't know, but they know. That's because reality is shaped weird.

When I'm working on a fictional story, especially in speculative fiction, for a game or a tv show or a movie, there is often pressure to make the story simpler, more streamlined, more concise, more symmetrical. When I say, "Okay, but that doesn't make any sense," or "that's not how that works," or "I don't think he would do that," or "that sort of violates the laws of physics, doesn't it?" I get the response, "Alex, it's a gaaaaaaaame!"

Or, "... moooovie!" Or "teevee show!"

Writers generally care more about the reality the characters are living in than, say, directors, who want everything to look cool, or level designers, who want the player to be able to do cool stuff.

But here's why those arguments are sometimes worth having: reality is shaped weird. Most real things are not that simple, streamlined, concise or symmetrical.

So when we come upon a story that is too simple, too symmetrical, we are not sucked in as much as we are by a story that has a few weirdnesses. The latter feels more like reality.

That's how the audience doesn't know, but they know. If you have too many characters doing things because it simplifies the story, or that violate the internal rules of the universe that you have set up, or (in a naturalistic setting) that violate the rules of physics and biology, the audience may not know exactly what you've done wrong. But they will sense that the shape of your story is the shape of a made-up story, not a real one.

If you have the occasional character taking the story on a detour because dammit that's who they are, the audience feels more like they're in reality.

And that increases engagement, with that character, and with the story in general.

Two Clint Eastwood Stories

In honor of a great actor and director, two stories I've heard on the grapevine.

Clint bought the rights to UNFORGIVEN about ten years before he made the movie. He wanted to be old enough to play the part.

He’s finally ready to go into production. Has the writer, David Webb Peoples (BLADERUNNER) over to dinner. They chat and chat. David’s wondering when Clint is going to explain how he wants to change the script.

Dinner goes on and on. Finally, Peoples says something along the lines of, “So, what do you think you want to do with the script?"  Because every director has the writer rewrite the script, if the writer is very lucky, or has his “guy” (it’s almost always a guy) rewrite the script. I was the director’s guy, for example, on BON COP / BAD COP.

Peoples is waiting for the shoe to drop.

Clint says, “Nope. It’s good,” and pours some more wine.

Shot the script word for word.

Had the self-confidence to know that the script was good. Didn’t need to mess with it just to make it his.

Second story.

Clint is shooting A PERFECT WORLD starring Kevin Costner, back when Costner was on top of the world.

First shot, Costner’s supposed to run up to a line of laundry, steal some clothes, and run off.(His character is on the run.)

They roll the first take. Costner runs up, steals the laundry, runs off.

Clint says, “Okay, next setup.”

Costner says, “Wait, what? I can do better.”

Clint tells the crew, “What are you guys all standing around for? I said next setup.”

Costner gets very put out. Goes to his trailer and slams the door.

Clint tells Costner’s stunt double, “This is your lucky day!” and proceeds to set up the next shot using the stunt guy.

Costner storms out of his trailer, and says “You can’t do this to me!”

Clint looks him in the eye and says, “Kevin, I think I’m the only guy in Hollywood who can do this to you.”

Use This Amazing Trick To Increase Your Verisimilitude!

One of the diseases of videogames is quest-givers who ask you, a total stranger, to solve their problem. Most people don't trust total strangers enough to even tell them what their problem is. The exceptions would be people who desperately need someone, anyone to solve their problem, and are presumably asking everyone. E.g. the postings for Witcher jobs: if you have a dragon problem, you don't care who kills your dragon, or who knows that you have one.

One of the nice things about quests in We Happy Few is that quite a few of the townsfolk do, in fact, know the player characters. So right away it makes more sense if they ask for help.

There's a simple fix, though. Instead of having the quest-giver offer the quest and then offer a reward, give the player character a reason to know that the quest-giver can give that reward. Then if the player character asks, the quest-giver can say, "Well, I might do that for you, but first you have to do something for me." To me that feels more natural.

WHF Update - Dirty World

The other night at the bar, one of the company founders asked me to name one of the things I like most about the game. One of the things that came to mind is how we are telling the story of the world.

What we try to do in We Happy Few is “pull” narrative: we try to provoke the question in the player before we present the answer. I call it “pull” because the question pulls the player into interrogating his or her environment to find the answer.

Our narrative is “dirty.” Most of the stories we tell through lore and through encounters have relate at most tangentially with the player character’s overall goal. NPCs aren’t there to serve your story. They’re there to serve their stories; it’s only an accident that their story intersects with yours. When you meet them, they’re in the middle of something important to them, and they have somewhere else to be after meeting you.

To me, this feels more like real life. No one is on Earth to serve your life story. They are there to serve their own life story. Even your Mom, who loves you, is living her own story. It may be her goal to see that your life is a good one, but that is still her goal, not your (related) goal. To add to this notion, quite a few of our NPC stories intersect with each other. You are not the nexus of all that is interesting. Some NPCs hate each other. Some love each other. Some love and hate each other. Such is life.

In other words: we are hardwired to turn our experiences into story. Which means that, by giving the player chunks of narrative content that could add up to a story, we allow him or her to tell themselves their own story. To my mind, the Holy Grail of game storytelling is: get the player to tell the story, rather than telling the player the story.

The individual chunks of narrative need to be linear in order to bear meaning – Arthur’s story isn’t choose-your-own adventure. But I aim to give you spaces in between the cutscenes which you can fill in. I’m only showing you the peaks; you fill in the rest of the mountain.

That’s my goal, anyway: to let the narrative breathe.

Rest of the update

Don't Go West, Young Man

Q. I live in Montreal and I have no desire to move to Toronto (in part because I hate Toronto but mostly because I love Montreal).

I hear that!

Q. At this point my portfolio consists mostly of big-budget features, which have made the rounds in some of the American screenplay competitions. I'm trying to make sure that I'm on the right path.

Should I continue doing what I'm doing:

Writing feature specs, sending targeted queries to producers and agencies in LA and Toronto, until one of them lands me a sale or a job. 

Or, seeing how Canada is mostly a TV industry (as far as writers go), would you recommend that I try writing some TV specs and pitching them to Toronto agencies instead (like your blog suggested). Just keep in mind that I frequently watch and study a lot more movies than I do television, and feature-writing has always been my primary interest. With that being said, if TV writing is the only way to make it down here, I am open to shifting my focus.

Honestly, I’d recommend you write games. You live in one of five world meccas for game development. Games hire writers all the time. I hear about game jobs pretty often.

Montreal is a backwater of a backwater for writing features. Canada barely has an English language movie business. (French is a different story obviously.)

TV writing is a better business but you can’t do it from Montreal. You have to be in Toronto. Ideally, you go to the CFC Prime Time program. Most of the graduates from there find something to do in the business, though not all writing, and there’s no guarantees.

Or go to LA if you want to work in the real business. This is the golden age of television writing. There are so many scripted series going into production these days.

Kids today mostly don’t want movies and they don’t even watch TV that much. They play games.

... I am not really sure how you get into writing games. There are people who have advice about that and I’ve blogged about it. But my own particular path depended a lot on having written a hit film, so it’s not an easy path to follow.

Denis McGrath

We lost one of the best writers I know tonight. A writer, and a firebrand for writers. And a good friend. And a wit, and a style, and a voice. Damn it.

I met Denis McGrath on a plane to South Africa. We were parachuting in on a show where the previous writing team, who were on a plane going the other way, had not got along too well with the showrunner. When we got there, we had to retcon some sort of sense out of the episodes that had been shot, and then rewrite the next script literally over the course of 24 hours.

We got along like gangbusters. Denis was a New York native who'd moved to Toronto as a kid. He was big, and he was loud, and he was funny, and he was whip smart. He liked to complain. He was generous. He cared. He loved stories. We spent a lot of time breaking story above a nice restaurant, having them bring us takeout on actual plates, since we were right upstairs. We decided his talk show would be called, "Here's Why I Hate That."

A couple years later, Denis and I instigated the Writer Mafia Party At TIFF, which became an annual event for a decade. Starting at The Paddock and moving to Czehoski, it was the antidote to all the producer parties at the Toronto International Film Festival. No free drinks, but your friends were there. Like him, it was big, it was loud, it was fun, it was packed to the gills with brains and creativity.

He would hold court at the Writer Mafia Party. He did not get around easily, so friends would come to him, and bask in him. He always had a bunch of Ryerson kids around him who were starting to break in. He was one of the top television writers in Canada, but he also taught, because he didn't want to keep it all for himself. He said in every class there was one kid you knew was going to do it. That was my experience too. You really taught the class for that one kid that had it.

He had a million friends; he had a few bosom buddies who went back to his high school days. But he always made time for me when I showed up in town.

He was a hell of a writer. He was certainly one of the best television writers in Canada. When, as a juror for the WGC awards, I read a script that really popped, more than once it turned out to be Denis's. I remember an episode of The Border where every act out not only amped the story out, it made you have to rethink everything you'd seen up to then.

He blogged passionately. He got himself in trouble calling a certain very powerful individual a fatuous gasbag, someone who could easily reach out and discourage people from hiring him. He ranted about Canadian networks that refused to believe in Canadian shows, always trying to get permission to stop funding them, even though shows like Corner Gas and Durham County were successful and good. He was a permanent fixture in the Writer's Guild of Canada, a long time counsellor for Ontario, and a member of the negotiating committee. I'm glad I was not one of the producers on the other side. He was not afraid to call shenanigans when he saw them.

Like a rising tide, he lifted everyone around him.

Damn it, I miss him.