Sunday, December 09, 2018

Small Story Choices in WHF?

michael4771 has an interesting question on the Compulsion Games forum for We Happy Few:
WHF is often compared to Bioshock Infinite with good reason, and while WHF has a LOT more features than Bioshock, there is one aspect that WHF lacks: story choice. Bioshock Infinite is a completely linear game but the story does include choices that doesn't affect the overall story beyond a small aesthetic change or getting/missing a powerup, and yet it's very significant.
Image result for bioshock infinite raffle sceneFor example, one of the first choices the player is presented within Bioshock Infinite is whether or not to harm an interracial couple which is being accosted by the crowd. You can choose to throw a baseball at the couple, throw it at the @sshole announcer, or do nothing. That's 3 choices that don't affect the overall story in any way but give the player the feeling of choice. What you decide will radically define who you are no matter what else happens
I guess what I'm asking is, can the development team please let me not be a jerk to Sally, Ollie, etc? It doesn't have to affect the storyline, just let me decide what type of person Arthur (and his friends) will become. It would make it so much easier to connect with him and the other two characters. If 3 options is too many, at least please give me a total of 2, a positive and negative. It would be massively appreciated. Arthur and his friends will still be mildly terrible people even if they treat each other fairly.
So. The lack of story choice - with the exception of Arthur's two big choices - was partly a result of bandwidth. We just didn't have enough level designers and animators to make small story choices.

However, it is crucial to the story that certain characters are terrible to certain other characters. Everyone in our world has been broken by the experiences they've had. If we let the player play these characters as less terrible, then that might come through as an idea, but it wouldn't punch you in the gut.

Bioshock Infinite kind of lets you off the hook, doesn't it? You can throw the baseball at the announcer because you're a decent non-racist person. But the truth of the situation is that lots of decent non-racist people would throw the ball at the interracial couple, because they're in the middle of a scary mob, and then feel horrible about it, and then attempt to justify their actions to themselves for the next thirty years.

Our story is about memory and denial. Those have a terrible cost. If you felt uncomfortable, well, then you entered into our story, and believed it at some level. Which is awesome, and thank you.

How to Suspend Disbelief, or, Easy to Learn, Hard to Master, in 5 Minutes

The irrepressible Richard Rouse III invited me to be part of his annual MIGS "Brain Dump" panel. I thought I'd post my thoughts from that here. The overall topic was "Easy to Learn, Hard to Master." I decided to talk about--

How to Suspend Disbelief.

As you probably know if you're reading this blog, in August, we shipped a game called We Happy Few. It’s set in a Britain where everyone is taking a drug called Joy to forget the terrible things they did in the War. Also the terrible things they’re going to do to you.

My job as Narrative Director is to get people emotionally engaged. Which means immersing people in a convincing world.

This turns out to be quite hard to master. It’s given me grey hair.

Making a convincing world is not easy, because the real world has bazillions of elements, while your fellow devs have to painstakingly create every single object, every gesture, every behavior in the world. And obviously, they need to keep things as simple as possible.

Thing is, when players meet a world that is too neat, too simple, too symmetrical, they call shenanigans.

Reality has a shape, and its shape is ... queer. Asymmetrical.



The Earth is not really the center of the Solar System.


Reality is made of temporary solutions that got potchkeyed on top of other temporary solutions, and now everything’s all stuck together, and nothing can be fixed. Reality is not the game you designed, it’s the game you shipped.

So if you want to create a reality, don't design a fish. A fish makes too much sense. Someone could have intentionally designed a fish. Instead, design a platypus.




When I was at Yale, I took a course on the Afro-Atlantic tradition. Of all the courses I ever took on screenwriting, this one, which had nothing to do with screenwriting, taught me the most about screenwriting.

In West African drumming, I learned, you don’t play the beat. You play around the beat. In West African textiles, you don’t make a perfectly symmetrical quilt. At least one of the squares is off center. Or different.


Our game worlds tend to go in the opposite direction. Everything is a little too symmetrical. Too relevant to the main character. Monsters hang around for you to kill them. Quest givers wait around to give you a quest.



The player is the center of the Solar System.



To create a convincing world, you need to create a layer of asymmetry. Of kruft. Rumple the bed so it looks slept in.

Give your non-player characters stories that the player will never know the beginning or end of. Yes, as far as game design is concerned, they’re there to give the player a quest. But they think they’re trying to settle a score, or get laid, or renovate their kitchen. The player is just an accident that got in their way.


Give your characters secrets. Hint at these secrets in their dialog, in the way they dress, in their animations, in what they clearly mean, but can’t bring themselves to say.

Let the player unravel the secrets if you have time and resources, but secrets are good even if you never reveal them. They shape the world, like whatever it is that makes that bump under the rug.


Let your world have absences: things that are so obviously missing you can’t help notice they’re not there. The adults in Wellington Wells jump in puddles and play in playgrounds. Uh, that reminds me, shouldn’t there be kids?


Let your world have mysteries. The backstory in Horizon Zero Dawn is a mystery which gives a structure to the world.

You don’t even have to resolve all the mysteries. People want to know what happened to the kids in We Happy Few. I know, but I’m not gonna tell you.


Sometimes the opposite happens. Your fellow devs will also want to add things that have nothing to do with the player, the story, or the world, because they are cool or funny".

Oh, God. “Cool” and “funny” are the death of a thousand cuts of immersion. Reality has an asymmetric shape, but it does have a shape. Players can tell the difference between things that happen for a hidden reason, and things that happen for no reason. One “cool” won’t kill immersion. But the world loses a bit of blood, and the players start to care a bit less, and more than anybody realizes. They will call shenanigans. In other words,

the players don't know. 

But they know.

To create a convincing world, you’ll have to kick up a fuss from time to time.

When I worked in TV and film, I used to wonder why directors were such jerks. Then I directed a bunch of short films, and there were things I knew were wrong during the shoots, and I didn’t kick up a fuss to get them fixed, because I didn’t want to be a jerk. And the films weren’t as good as I’d hoped.

You will have to piss people off from time to time.

That doesn’t mean be a jerk. You have to be passionate and convincing, but not be a jerk about it. If you do it right, people will love you even when you do piss them off.

I’ve been passionate and convincing, and I’ve been a jerk.

It helps if you don’t fight for “your” ideas. If you fight for what the game needs.

And that’s how I really got the grey hair.












Sunday, November 25, 2018

Another WHF Update


This one dates to November 25, but I forgot to put it up on the blog.

Three recording sessions this week.

I brought back the Voice of the Honey Bandit, Jay Simon, for a slew of new barks about, among other things, the Plague. A big Marvel no-prize to whoever figures out what the Plague Wastrels are saying, once they start saying things in the game.

Lisa (new writer) and I finished our rewrite of the playthrough of She Who Must Not Be Named, which meant I was able to call back the actor who plays One of Her Many Fans. And I brought back the utterly charming Alex Wyndham (Arthur) for a slew of new barks – plague, again – and to pick up revised lines for many of the cinematics. There’s been a fair amount of carnage in the cinematics; it’s a sign of how healthily we’ve staffed up that we can afford to burn some old work in order to do even better work.

We are starting to design a slew of new encounters, particularly in the Village. It’s always challenging to write dialog for an encounter that hasn’t been built yet, because I have to guess what the events will be that will trigger the dialog I’ll write. On the other hand, I get to shape the encounters so that they are revelatory of our world and its people.

A little while we all went to MIGS. I blogged a bit about what I heard about dynamic stories in Richard Rouse III’s talk.

Two more recording sessions next week, one with She Who Must Not Be Named, and one with an evil Hammer-movie-villain scientist named…


Saturday, November 10, 2018

So we at Compulsion Games are looking for a third writer.

The immediate need is for someone to work on We Happy Few DLC in Montreal with us. This is a contract gig, so probably you have experience working in video games; but if a TV writer/playwright/novelist, at least you play video games.

We are agnostic about some things (PT or FT? junior or senior?); the key criteria are you know what a video game is, and you can write dramatic dialog with distinct, memorable voices. So I'm asking for a 2-4 page scene, which I'll probably look at first.

By "dramatic dialog" I don't mean "people shouting while exciting things are going on." I mean, two characters are talking to each other in order to get things they want (respect, an orange, the truth, assistance, etc.).

Also Compulsion is a really cool place to work.

Check out our posting for the deets...

Tuesday, October 09, 2018

Gamesutra Interviews Yours Truly

“We started with a few mandates: an isolated town that takes drugs and wears masks; Britain in the early '60s; no kids. From there, we retro-engineered the story. Why are they taking drugs and wearing masks? Probably to deal with a trauma. What sort of trauma? Why not something to do with the kids? If it’s Britain 1964, it probably is a trauma associated with World War II.”

Each piece led to others. After roughing out some ideas about the setting and the time period, more details started to fit naturally into place. “Given the drugs, it made sense that the characters all have individual traumas in their past, in addition to the overall ‘original sin’ of the town.”

Alan Bradley asked me a few questions about how Early Access shaped (or didn't shape) the narrative in We Happy Few. Check out the interview.

Monday, October 01, 2018

Q. How do I be a voice actor

A. Get a demo reel together, get an agent, audition for roles, get a better reel.

This is my current casting proecess

  1. Post a breakdown on Breakdown Services (North America) or Spotlight (UK). Generally I will only send it to agents, because those actors are already “curated.”
  2. They send me submissions of people with demo reels.
  3. I listen to the demo reel. My #1 criterion is “do I believe this performance?” Does the actor sound like they’re reading lines, or do they sound like a person in a situation.
  4. My #2 criterion is vocal charisma. Does their voice “pop”? Some actors sound a bit generic. Some have a distinct voice I want to hear more.
  5. I ask some of the submitted actors, through their agents, for an MP3 of them performing sides - a scene I’ve written for the audition. Here’s where having a home studio is better than just having a phone to record the audition, but so long as I can clearly hear the performance I don’t care about sound quality.
  6. I listen to those. Same criterion. Obviously, are they right for the part? Do I believe the performance? Do they have charisma?
  7. I direct (and record) an audition over Skype / Facetime / Google Meet. I see how well they take direction.
  8. I pick an actor.
To give you a sense of the scope, I just got 200 submissions for a role, listened to maybe 50 demo reels (I was pressed for time), asked 8-10 people for MP3's, and called back about 4. I have no idea what other people do, but I think I spend more time on casting than other voice directors.

Monday, July 30, 2018

Seth Barton Interviews me for MCV

Seth Barton and I had a lovely chat for MCV.
We all remember things in ways that suit us. In Arthur's playthrough, he is the hero, or the victim, of events; it's not his fault. Sally comes across as a bit of a flake, a bit of a mantrap, even though he's mad about her. But maybe he was not listening carefully, because Sally's explanations sound a whole lot more convincing in her playthrough. Sally even remembers saying some things that Arthur flat out doesn't remember."

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

I've been in the news!

With WE HAPPY FEW coming out in three weeks, I've had some lovely chats with journalists about the game. Here are some of them:

  • WCCFTECH's Nathan Birch, We Happy Few Interview: Alternate History, Early Access, Retail Discs as Coasters, More
    I do think our world is grounded in some sort of honesty and reality. I think the best science fiction takes the real and pushes it further, until it can make its point. But if there’s no reality to begin with, it’s not grounded and there’s no emotional meaning. If it is grounded, it becomes clearer what you’re trying to talk about.
  • VARIETY's Giancarlo Valdes, The Evolution of ‘We Happy Few’ From Survival Sim to Story-Driven Adventure
    “What the community told us is that they liked these goofy encounters with these crazy people more than they liked the systemic situations. We said, ‘OK, we’ll write more goofy encounters then,’” said Epstein.
  • Xbox Achievements's Richard Walker, How Compulsion Pulled Back on Survival Gameplay and Put Narrative (and Puke) Up-Front
    I think we have an organic process, so I can't speak for Guillaume (Provost), who's the studio head and the Creative Director, [but] we're a studio that has kind of a flat structure, so Guillaume hires immensely talented people like Whitney Clayton (Art Director), David Sears who did SOCOM, who is our Design Director on this game, and then, y'know, lets them rip. And it's an iterative process, so you don't want to draw up a design document and then just make that design document, you know?
  • READY:SET, We Happy Few built a dystopia with Mod culture, psychedelia, and Facebook
    “There’s a proverb that you shouldn't copy the masters — you go after what they went after,” says Alex Epstein, the Narrative Director for We Happy Few.
  • PC Games Insider's Alex Calvin How Compulsion developed We Happy Few on Early Access
    "On our forums, people were asking over and over whether there was going to be a story. We were like: "Yes, there's going to be a story. We're making the story; we're making three stories". But there's been so much vapourware in this business that people are like: 'Pull the other one'."