Kim Belair, Part Four

Alex: If you have a team of say four or five writers, what specialties would you be looking for? What's your handful of writers?

Kim: I think if I'm assembling a narrative team, I'd be looking for diverse experiences. And I want to make sure that it's representative of the characters that we have, of the attitudes and ideas and cultures that we want to represent.

There's this idea that, like, we can cohese around our skill in writing.

Alex: "We're imaginative, we can write anything!"

Kim: But that's obviously insufficient.

It's important to me to have someone who can really get the systems and the mechanics working alongside the story, someone whose best form of expression of story is in the country of mechanics. I worked in the past with a narrative director who is by no means a writer. But his vision of story was so different from mine and allowed me to see a different perspective and really structure things differently.

Then I always want someone who's an expert in voice, in punch up, in cleverness on almost everything. Someone with a good sense of humor. Even if the game is not funny. The construction of a joke is very hard to do when it's a natural dialog.

Someone with a strong sense of place, of worldbuilding, someone who can really give a sense of lore. I don't like world bibles. I'd rather have people who can get across a sense of the economy of the world.

Then I also want someone who can take on a variety of different kinds of writing and who is really, really adept at it. Someone who can write a couple hundred lines of barks and enjoy that process. And who's going to be able to give quantity while maintaining quality. … But I do want someone [else] who's a little bit slower who can think about things.

Overall, team composition for me is just: generosity, collaboration, and free discussion in between people.

I think that if you could assemble a team that has those components, then, you know, one person might have a super full week while the other was supporting them. And someone else the next week is gonna take the lead. When the workhorse writer is through and just needs someone to punch it up.

Alex: Have you worked with videogame narrative editors?

Kim: I worked with a woman named Paula Rogers. She's also the lead writer on Goodbye Volcano High and was also, I think, head of story on Neo Cab. She has fantastic editing skills. I think that we don't use editors enough. Like we almost wait until QA gets a hold of it. Working with editors is really, really nice, especially when they're external and coming in on a project and saying, What do you need? What do you not?

We worked with a script coordinator on Suicide Squad and that is so helpful. Someone who's going to make sure that we're keeping the tone right, that we're staying consistent with what we've already said. Yeah, I would always advocate for editors.

Alex: Kim McCaskill was saying she's really good at continuity. Like, waitasecond, the character met that person last week and now she's saying she met that person two years ago.

Kim: Yes, exactly.

I know that if I'm on an open world game and I'm writing a cinematic and then a year later I'm writing a bunch of combat barks and one contradicts something I wrote a year ago, there's no one else to check on that until it hits QA. And then finally, when we play it, we go, oh, no. It's already been recorded.

Alex: So talking about toxic work environments, which is always fun. Obviously they suck and nobody should have to deal with them. What do they do to the game?

Kim:  We have this assumption that if it's toxic, it doesn't show up in the game.

But it does it in ways that we can't immediately quantify, even if the game is successful.

Because if I am in a toxic workspace where I don't feel I can express myself as a woman of color, then when I'm in a creative meeting and someone says, OK, well, this character is a woman of color, she does this thing. In an environment where I am being fostered, I might have the courage and the strength to say, hey, I don't think is a good idea. Let me explain to you why. But in an environment that's toxic, where I have been treated like I don't matter, where I've been desolate, where I've been made to feel small, I'm not going to say that. And so even if it's not something offensive, even if it's not something particularly awful, the reality is that if I had been empowered to say something, we could have had a better game. That works across the board. Anyone who is stuck, who is oppressed, is going to be limited in what they can express creatively.

And I think that we don't pay attention to that, because even with studios, if you have a studio where everyone's treated super, super well, but the game has like a deeply racist, sexist, homophobia, transphobia, whatever it is, someone at that studio now feels unsafe. Even if they're treated well, even if they're not, you know, being actively harmed or harassed. There's this now sense of microaggression. I was actually in a meeting earlier today talking about a similar thing. And I was saying that, if you go to a social worker, and they're really, really fantastic. And you walk in there and there's like, Playboy centerfolds. And maybe to that person, they're like, "no, I just like the art. This is not a problem." But I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to speak to this person without being objectified

So it's about creating a space where I feel comfortable enough to contribute to the game.

There's so many games that, they might not be offensive, they might not be obviously bad. But you can tell that no one said, what can we do to represent these people more? It's being additive, and that's what you lose out on.

Alex: On we happy few, we had a thing in the story where some of the women in the office said, "thaaat's a l'il rapey." So we changed it. And it wasn't obvious to me, as a guy, how it was rapey?

Kim: A lot of the time you will say something like, OK, well, in this scene we're going to really show how bad sexual assault is. We want to make sure that it's evil. But who are you showing that to?

Alex: You're putting your women players through that.

Kim: Yeah. Exactly. This is a thing that she has to think about when she walks home every day.

Alex: OK, so last question, how do you stay sane?

Kim: Oh. Who says I do?

I think that for me, it's always working with people who I like, which is what Sweet Baby allows.

If I end up on a project where I am encountering a problem, I can still go back to the same group of people who I trust and love. I'm kept sane by the people around me. If I'm in a meeting where someone treats me with some disrespect, I always have people around me to do a sanity check. Was I crazy? That is the biggest difference from working in a studio: you don't know.

Alex: Do you want people to hit you up like, Hey, I love the idea of Sweet Baby, can I get you a sample?

Kim: Yeah. Folks are welcome to. I'm always looking for, especially, marginalized developers from all disciplines. Obviously we're a narrative agency, but we often encounter projects that go, hey, we're looking for a programmer. Hey, we're looking for an artist. So just having a roster of people who we can offer up is nice. And frankly, we're also here for people who need to vent about something. It might take me longer to answer those emails, but I do want to hear what people are dealing with and help in whatever way I can.

So should people just e-mail you?

We actually have an email setup for that, talk@sweetbaby.com. And beyond that, I'm on Twitter and on everything as @bagelofdeath.

Alex: So why @bagelofdeath?

Kim: When I was 15 or 16 years old, I did a comic and the villain of the comic was threatening the hero with this thing that was going to absolutely kill him. And he holds up a bagel. And the protagonist is like, is that just a bagel?

And he's like, it's a Bagel of DEATH.

And he's like, OK. And so he takes a bite of it and goes like, are these raisins?

And he goes "raisins ... of DEATH!".

And then he's like, no, these are just raisins.

And so the villain goes like, wait, these ARE just raisins.

And then the last panel is like a Frenchman in a bistro about to bite into this bagel that's like glowing green, full of needles, broken glass and scorpions.

Kim Belair, Part Three

Alex: How do you explain the importance of what you're trying to do?

Kim: We're hitting, what, 40 years of video games. And I think people are starting to ask, why are we making very similar products? Why are a lot of our stories not resonating with the younger audiences? Why is our audience not growing? I like to say that representation is innovation. I think when people are asking for diverse stories, we're not asking for the same story with, you know, diverse characters.

We have to look at story and narrative as one of the things that we can innovate on. Like when you bring someone in from a different culture, from a different background, from a different gender, they’re going to create something that we haven't seen before.

The way that we look at demographics is that we go, OK, the majority of our player base is, let's say, a white male. So we're going to make stuff for white males.

But if you make something from the perspective of an Asian trans woman, and it’s really strong, then it will work for people. People crave new stories. If you want to innovate, even to stay current, it's not about graphics, it's not about hardware. It's about opening up new perspectives for people. So I explain it as, it’s important to game development to diversify. It's not just part of advocacy or activism. It is going to make your games better.

Alex: Also, of course gamers are mostly white guys: you’re making games for white guys! Try making games for somebody else, maybe they'll show up!

There’s an old story about Harry Cohn, the founder of Columbia Pictures, who everybody hated. But everybody went to his funeral. And someone said, “See? Give the people what they want, and they’ll show up.”

Kim: The market has always been frustrating to me because we make assumptions based on what we already have instead of what we could have. A couple of months ago we were talking a lot about player choice in Assassin's Creed. People were saying, well, no matter how good this female character is, a majority of players played as a male character. So therefore people prefer male characters.

And what I had to explain was, no, actually, from a marketing and a psychology perspective, most people are going to choose the gender that they most align with. It doesn’t mean that’s what they want. If you are male identified, it's not that you don't want to play as a woman. You're just going, oh, that one's for me. I’m a guy, I don’t go to the ladies’ room.

We look at the success of something like Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game led by a female character. If they had made it a choice, most players would have played as a male. But they didn’t, and it was a huge success.

Alex: On the flip side, even if you did believe that players will only play their own gender, which obviously I don’t, well, if 20 percent are playing a woman, you just increased your player base by 25 percent for almost no cost.

Kim: I think that the majority of the men, if you had Assassin's Creed starring a woman, they would play it anyway. Aside from a couple of trolls on Twitter, the odds are they're gonna go, oh, this is the brand that I like, I'm going to just play.

Alex: I would add that, not only can you tell more stories with diverse characters, you can explore more worlds. Our game Contrast was set in a shattered carnival world. What would it have meant to explore that as a typical 30-year-old white dude with a beard? But an eight-year-old girl and her seven-foot-tall circus girl invisible friend, that opens a door.

What is one of the most interesting narrative systems you have not been able to implement for whatever reason?

Kim: We were talking about how your choice of character has a profound effect on your experience. And I think one of the problems is that we only look at diverse characters in terms of what deficits that creates. Like if you decide to play a Black guy in Mafia 3, people are going to call him the N-word. OK, if I'm a White guy and I play as a Black man and someone is racist towards me, maybe that builds empathy. But all it says to me as a Black person, is that this game isn't for me. I already know that people are racists. This is not teaching me anything. This is just making me experience the worst of what I experienced in my life.

Alex: So for example, other Black characters might code switch...

Kim: Yeah, and be a little more forthcoming with you.

Alex: On a project I was on I worked with a Black consultant who asked if we would present Black characters as White people see them, or as they see themselves. So if I play a Black character, maybe I get a little peek behind the curtain.

Kim: That would be really, really cool. Something inviting.

We did a cultural assessment on a game project, and I employed this wonderful Cree woman named Sonia Valentine, and we asked her, what do you see too much of when you see indigenous characters? And she said, a lot of ceremonial garb, that is only meant to show non-indigenous people that this character is indigenous. And she was like, I don't go around in my daily life wearing ceremonial garb to show people how Cree I am.

And I said, What would you like to see? And she said, beads. She was in the process of making a bead work Superman logo. She's a huge DC Comics fan. And for her, beadwork is part of her culture. But the way that she uses it is to express who she is.

And if I saw a beadwork Superman logo, I wouldn't necessarily read it as, oh, yeah, that's an indigenous character. But she would.

Alex: Did you watch Mohawk Girls, the TV series, at all?

Kim: Not yet, no.

Alex: I think this is in the pilot, one of the characters meets a guy and it immediately becomes an issue of who are his parents, because the Mohawk community is so tightly intermarried, but you're not allowed to date cousins who are too close to you. And that's a problem that someone outside the Mohawk community wouldn’t necessarily know about. But Tracey Deer, who’s Mohawk, who created the show, did know it. It’s her reality. And if you're Mohawk, maybe you're like, “Exactly. Maybe I don't want to date a white guy, but how many Mohawk guys are there that I can actually date?” And I thought that was, you know, a look behind the curtain.

Kim: And that to me is so much more inclusive. Are you creating a Maori character for people to see that this game has diversity in it, or are you creating them for Maori people to see themselves?

Alex: Is there academic theory that you find useful?

Kim: My goal on every different project is to lead by lead by emotion and to make people care about what happens in the game. I don't necessarily subscribe to a school. But as a rule, when I draw inspiration, it's largely from action and blockbuster films. I use The Fast and the Furious a lot. I use Mission Impossible rather than dramatic films. Because we’re making action products. My job is to take this action thing and add character and world stories that are emotional, grounded and dramatic. Like, if I look at Mission Impossible, that movie makes you care about the folks in it. It's a lot healthier than if I look at a dramatic film and then try to add gameplay mechanics to that.

Alex: Have you ever seen Night of the Iguana? Elizabeth Taylor? 1964?

Kim: Yes.

Alex: A friend of mine saw that. And he thought it was Night of the Iguanas, with an ‘s,’ and he was waiting for the iguanas to show up. It was a perfect horror movie setup, you know, two people, cabin in the woods. You develop these great characters and you start to care about them, and then here come the iguanas.

Kim: I want to respect the medium. I want to be a writer who serves the greater project rather than someone who comes in and goes, I really want to tell this beautiful story, and I'm going to just cram in gameplay where I have to. Show me the thing that you're trying to build and I'm going to try to bring feeling and love to it.

Kim Belair, part two

Alex: What phase of game development are you in currently? What what do you actually do in a given day?

Kim Belair

Kim: At any given time, we're working on between eight and twelve projects, mostly for clients, some for ourselves. And the way that I work is every day is a couple projects.

For example, in the morning, I would log in and talk to the team at Rocksteady when we're working on Suicide Squad and that would be like a writers room, sit down, talk through a script. Talk about characters, write scenes or barks or whatever.

And then in the afternoon, now I'm going to work on Goodbye Volcano High. I've got a meeting with KO-OP.

And then I might have a meeting with Square Enix or Panic. And then I will end the day with a check in with everybody else, OK, what's tomorrow look like? What kind of deadlines do we have coming up? What's the most urgent need? Who's going to do what? So every day is a little bit different, but it's very rare for me at this point to have any full day that I work on one thing.

Alex: What are the hardest battles you fight?

Kim: I guess I can talk about this with Rocksteady. At the beginning, I was like, oh, there's some information that I'm missing, because, one, they're five hours ahead, they're in London. But two, they're in an office together. So they're having a lot of conversations I can't be a part of.

But now that most more people are working from home, everything has to be intentional. So I can be more part of the conversation.

Alex: Lisa remarked to me she is more aware of what's going on in the company since we started working remotely because absolutely everything's on Slack. She doesn't have to worry that somebody was in the break room with somebody else and had a conversation and decided something she doesn’t even know about. She just has to read Slack.

Kim: What really makes me happy about it is that we can now more freely hire people who don't live in the big cities, who might not be able to afford it, who might have life situations that don't allow them to work outside the home. It used to be more like, well, you can either take care of your kids or work. And obviously there are still immense challenges for any parent or any caregiver, but if there’s one thing to be grateful for about this terrible pandemic, it's that it's allowed people to work in a way that works for them.

Alex: So do you think that’s going to help the sort of bro culture that we are sometimes dealing with?

Kim: I think it is. I think that a lot of our culture needs to change because it has been, you know, granted to the most privileged people, to people who are creating these boys clubs that are inaccessible to other people. And, slowly but surely, we're untangling that. Both because of the ways that we work and because of the information that we're now sharing.

Alex: Now we don't have, “We're all gonna go to the bar and get drunk! Yeah!” I mean, I hope no one's going to the bar.

Kim: No bar. And the other thing, the pandemic created a situation where now if you're a victim of abuse, you no longer have to go into the office and have to avoid certain people. And I think that and the current push for like Black Lives Matter and equality and social justice, have turned this industry into something that realizes, no, we can be different.

Alex: Any guesses on where this is going to lead when, at some point in the 2030s, we can actually go back to the office?

Kim: I don't want that to happen. I don't want to just to be like, OK, pandemic's done, we have a vaccine, everybody get back to the office.

What I'd like to see is, OK, let's look at what worked here. What part of working from home was helpful? Did it improve the lifestyle for some people? For so long in games, we've been told, ‘No working from home, we can't manage that.’ And then all of a sudden the pandemic made it clear that we can. And I hope that we do become more open to saying, oh, this marginalized person from a small town who can't move here, we're gonna give them a job because it can be done remotely.

Alex: So how did you get into game writing? Your B.A. is in commerce?

Kim: Yes, I have a marketing degree. I ended up getting into games via community development at Ubisoft. I’d been doing branding for different companies and a lot of copywriting, for a company called Territorial.

And I was approached to help with media development on Far Cry 4. The community developer's job was to create content based on the world of the game. So everything from interviews with the developers and podcasts and stuff like that, to in-character interviews and blogs. I wrote this character called Divya Kandala, and she was a journalist going into the fictional world of Far Cry 4. And she eventually interviewed the game's villain.

And the narrative director, Mark Thompson was like, oh, you should put some of this into the game itself. And he connected me with the level designers. And we put in, just tiny details, little notes here and there. Like one house that had her suitcase in it.

And after that, he asked me, do you want to do this? Start doing narrative? And Lucien Soulban and Corey May had already encouraged me to get into that. Honestly, it was something that I hadn't really considered as a path. It wasn't necessarily where I saw myself.

I finally made the switch on to Assassin's Creed syndicate. And that was my first official writing gig.

And after that, I worked on For Honor and then two canceled projects. And then I got Brie Code who had left Ubisoft and started her own company, Tru Luv. [“We work with artists, psychologists, game designers and AI programmers to bring life to AI companions.”] She asked me if I wanted to do a little bit of contract work on the side. And then I started getting people more interested in working with me. Eventually it got to the point where I knew that Ubisoft wasn't going to allow me to just keep working on other stuff. So I said, OK, I'm going to go out and try my luck.

Alex: So they wouldn’t allow you to work on other stuff if you're working for them. But they will hire you if you’re a company!

Kim: Exactly. Yes.

Alex: It’s funny how just framing it differently makes it OK.

Kim: It is funny because I have now done more finalized, out-in-the-world writing for Ubisoft not as an employee than I ever did as an employee. My impact on Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is greater than my impact on Syndicate or Far Cry or For Honor.

Alex: How do you find writers for your company? What do you look for in a writer? How do you judge how good a writer is going to be? Because it sounds like the people you're talking to, they can't say, “Here's a stack of AAA games I’ve shipped.”

Kim: I don't look for experience. I look just for a sample. I don't really believe in writing tests. I want to see, what's your sensibility? I look for basic skills. Are you a competent and good writer? But then I want to sit down in a room and see, are you fun to work with? Are you engaging? Are you kind? Are you funny?

Because on a game project, I'm working with you for anywhere between a month and four years. So I want to really feel like we're going to vibe. I can teach you the skills, but I can't teach a really skilled jerk to be a nicer person. So I'm looking for a combination of talent and personality that is fun and compassionate.

Alex: Does the medium of the sample matter? Because when I was looking for a writer recently, I would get prose samples sometimes. And I have a lot of trouble guessing from a prose sample if you can write games. I can guess from a screenplay sample. But prose is like, well you know, these are a lot of words and they're great words and they're in the right order. In prose you can do all these things that you can’t do in a game or a screenplay. You can say what people are thinking. In most adventure games you’re mostly restricted to what people are saying and doing.

Kim: Yeah, I skip to dialog a lot when I read prose samples. One of the games that we're working on right now, Sable, is a little bit prose-ish. So those skills do apply. But more globally, I'm looking for how are you using the words? Is it fun to read? Is it taking me on a journey? And then I will usually look at the dialog to make sure it's natural and it's snappy and interesting.

Alex: But prose dialog is a different beast. It prose dialog has to make up for not having an actor there who can really think through what this line means and then inhabit that character. The text has to do all the heavy lifting.

Kim: Yes, but I think that if you can write a scene in prose that's really compelling, that translates well enough to a game later.

I used to write almost exclusively prose. And when I had to do screen writing for games, that process was just, how can I give the dialog a little bit more weight? It's a muscle. And if I think the person is really talented and willing to learn, engaged and interesting, I'm always willing to help develop that skill. Because writing in games means different things on every project. I’ve been on projects where writing meant only going over someone else’s dialog and making it shine. And I've also had game projects where, OK, we need you to give us a story on top of these five mechanics that we already have. So it’s not just dialog, there's a huge range of skills needed.

Alex: And there are games that are all prose. Mostly indie ones. Fallen London. 80 Days.

What I look for is voice. Do you have a voice? I can’t teach you to find your voice. I mean I could, but not on the schedule of a video game production.

You have to come to the party with an ability to put yourself in a fictional world. If you’re just writing the fictional world, that’s okay, but I’m looking for someone who can imagine themself into that world, and come out and show me what it means to them to live in it. If you have that, I can teach you tips and tricks to develop your voice.

Kim: We don't spend enough time on developing that kind of talent. There’s a lot of people that we don't see at first blush. When I look to women and other marginalized groups, screenplays are not where they begin. Especially for young writers, short stories and fan fiction is their place to shine. So I'm going to try to going to try to bend that by giving them training.

Alex: You’re a for-profit Pixelles!

Kim: Yes, exactly. And speaking of Pixelles, we have hired a couple of their people. Back in the day when events existed, we went to at least one showcase a month. And I read someone's stuff and I was like, oh, she's fantastic. I want her. And I kept it around for about a year. And then recently on Goodbye Volcano High, we hired them to write their first game. And it's going great so far.

Kim Belair, part one

I met Kim Belair, when she was a panelist on an intro game writing panel my wife, Lisa Hunter, set up. But I would surely have met her one way or the other, at MIGS, or GDC, say; she is the sort of person you might run into at a café in Malmö or Ulan Bator and not be the least surprised she is there to work on the project.

Kim is a writer, narrative designer and co-founder of Sweet Baby Inc, a narrative development company based here in Montreal. In the industry since 2013, she's worked with companies including Ubisoft, Rocksteady, Square Enix, KO_OP, Valve, and JuVee Productions to bring games and stories to life. Beyond narrative work, Kim is an advocate for representation and inclusion, and is currently leading an initiative aimed at supporting, training and empowering marginalized devs.

Alex: You started your own narrative services company. Why?

Kim: I’d worked for five years at Ubisoft, and at the time that I left, I had just rolled off a two year project, and I’d put a lot of time and effort into it, and it ended up getting canceled.

And I started to feel, as you might imagine from everything that's been revealed lately about Ubisoft, I had a tremendous amount of discomfort with the environment. I didn't feel there was a place for me move up the ranks. I just kind of didn't see a lot of people like myself in leadership, either in personality and demographic.

And so I left to go freelance. And within a couple of months, I got a callback from a company to help with this Afro-Futurist project. And I said, yeah, I'm happy to help. And I asked about the writing team, and it was an entirely white male writing team.

Alex: I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you!

Kim: And I was like, hold on: this is an Afro-Futurist project. Most of the characters in it are going to be people of color. And you don't have any on your team.

And they said, Well, you know, we tried, but everyone we found was too junior, and didn't have the experience. They basically described systemic racism.

And I was like -- OK, well, maybe what I can do is, if you trust me as a writer, as an experienced designer, maybe I can hire some junior folks, and I’ll train them. I'll get them to the point where you need them to be. And we can, you know, get a team of people that is diverse and also gets a bunch of people that first videogame credit.

The project ended up falling through for unrelated reasons, just like budget and marketing stuff. But what I took from that was, OK, if I have a company, I can create a sort of farm team for the games industry. We can find, you know, young, aspiring, marginalized or junior talent, and I can help them.

And so, Ari MacGillivray and I ended up creating Sweet Baby, just the two of us. And on one of my contract projects, we worked with David Bédard, who is also former Ubisoft. And he and I like really, really vibe. We have a very similar approach to a lot of things.

And it took a couple months for us to kind of figure out what the roles were going to be. And the next step was just taking on stuff.

And within the first year, we went from two people working on other games, industry jobs and doing a little bit of Sweet Baby stuff on the side, to all three of us now being full time, plus a contract project manager and a team of, I think, between twelve and fifteen contract writers, and designers and consultants, a programmer, artists.

And I think what we've been able to do is, one, increase our capacity, but also two, create a space where I feel like every day that I go into the office, I work with good people, no matter who the client is.

And at the same time, our moderate success right now has allowed us to do outreach programs. Like we do free Twine courses for marginalized and aspiring developers. We try to do portfolio reviews. We try to do placement. We try to do scouting. We try to do everything that uplifts people who deserve a chance in the industry. So we have a balance of, you know, practical work that is going to pay our bills, and we also have the ways that we give back, which are to me an equal portion of the company.

Alex: So tell me about teaching people to use Twine.

I wrote a game in Twine called Stories: the Path of Destinies for Spearhead Games. We had 31 endings. And kind of my take away from that was, oh, that's why we don't make branching stories.

We had to figure out how not to end up with a lot of unused content. So we figured out a way where you'd have to play through the game five or six or eight times before you can win.

At my current company, Compulsion Games, we really don't do narrative branching. We didn’t for Contrast or We Happy Few, except for two choices at the beginning and end. For production reasons, because it eats resources like nobody's business; but also because it’s hard to tell a good story when you don’t know the ending.

So, why teach Twine?

Kim: What I learned from Twine was, what's daunting for a lot of aspiring developers is, they look at these finished products and they have no idea how it got to get how it got there. They look at what a video game is and they see, you know, Gears of War. They see a Red Dead, an Assassin's Creed. It’s so very big and it seems so nebulous and challenging. And so a lot of people just kind of get discouraged.

And I think the struggle for a lot of aspiring developers is that, if they're artists, if they're programmers, or writers, whatever it is, a lot of the time they can only make a small part of something. And so Twine allows them to create something that's finished. Something that, when they put it out there, is complete.

And they can put that on Twitter and someone can see them. Like just before I spoke to you, I was speaking to this 21 year old woman and she tried Twine, she made something and she ended up putting it on the forums for Blaseball.

And my colleague David [Bédard] read it, brought it to me and was like, this person's really great. So I had a meeting with her because I'm absolutely going to hire her for one of our projects.

And that came from being able to see, not only is her writing good, but she has a sense of design. She has a sense of how to tell a story, how to engage a player. And now I want her to do that for us.

Because if you put out just a short story, you might say, yeah, you're really good at writing, but do you have the fundamentals of design? And it's just a boost to your portfolio to be able to take me on a little adventure.

We actually hired this wonderful lead writer from Eidos Montreal to teach us the foundations of Twine. Basically to teach us, here’s the quick way to do what you’ve been doing the long way around.

Kim MacAskill, Part Three

Alex:  How does game dialog have to be different from, say, TV or film dialog, in order to make up for the less-than-fully-expressive animated game character? What do you have to watch out for?

Kim: This is something I’ve been thinking about myself. We were trying to be funny. And if the animation doesn’t completely match the final voice recording, it can throw everything off. You can’t pull off a gag if things are splintered.

Alex: So you’re animating to placeholder voice?

Kim: Yes.

Alex: Oh God.

Kim: I think a lot of other studios do as well.

Yes, well, we’re working with a placeholder actor for two or three years, and then we cast someone like Mark Hamill to play the Joker. How are we going to match that up?

After that, we asked permission to start showing the animations to the actors. Because beforehand the actor has no idea what their character even looks like. So we started showing them concept art. I do think it helps. But the studio doesn’t like to have materials lying around some studio in LA.

[Ed. note: If you possibly can, record early enough that the animators can animate to the final voice recording.]

Alex: What is one of the most interesting narrative systems that you weren’t able to implement?

Kim: Interruption systems?

Alex: So an NPC’s talking to me, and I punch them in the face, how does the game handle that interruption?

Kim: Right, he’s going to have to repeat some lines, but it’s difficult to get those lines to sound natural coming after the interruption. Say a character is telling a story, and then combat interrupts you. Do you just repeat the line they were in the middle of? Do they say, “As I was saying,” or “Now that that’s done…”

We asked for a tool to implement that. But it was hard, and I don’t think that we really smashed it, because if you’ve got the exact same delivery of the line, it doesn’t sound entirely natural. We tried a number of different things but it never came out quite right. Some NPC will be saying, “As I was saying,” and then suddenly they’re shouting, which was where they left off. “As I was saying, THAT WAS THE BEST PARTY I EVER WENT TO!!”

Alex: Let’s talk about the pros and cons of different narrative delivery systems. What are you best at? What are the hardest to use in games? What do you enjoy writing the most?

Kim: Well don’t get me wrong, a good cinematic is always fun. You’ve got the character to that stage, and I’m going to destroy all the players with this, it’s gonna be great! Yes, that’s amazing.

But I think reactive dialog, dialog reacting to the player’s. For example, the game wouldn’t allow punching children. There’s no mechanic for punching children in the game. But what I can do is give the player character some sort of reaction line that takes the piss out of the player, like, if they try to punch a child, “What is wrong with you? This isn’t who we are.”

Alex: Especially when your player character is a conflicted character like Harley Quinn.

Kim: One of the things I really wanted to do, I don’t know if this went ahead, but every time a player tries to get a closeup of her arse, I just wanted the game to address it. Like, she farts. I like to think, what are the players going to do? Well they’re probably going to try to sexualize her. What can I write that will make fun of the player for doing that?

Alex: In a writing team, what specialties do you need?

Kim: On our writing team, we had a writer who was very good at forecasting what sort of dialog we’d need. Planning. I think my speciality is I was able to spot continuity issues. Some people are funny. Some are literate in writing tools.

Alex: Oh, sure. Some people have read more novels. I’ve probably read more history than is really useful or healthy, and I’m a font of useless trivia about the past, a lot of which made it into We Happy Few. The person we just brought in is more of a narrative designer than Lisa or myself.

Alex: Is there a difference between the org structure and who’s really in charge of what? What have you learned to watch out for?

Kim: I think the moment you don’t listen to someone that the org chart says you don't have to listen to, you’re doing the game a disservice. All feedback is coming from a place of truth. It may not be the right truth.

Alex: Neil Gaiman says that all feedback is true, it’s just the solutions people offer that are usually wrong.

You’ve recently blown the whistle on a pattern of harassment of women at Rocksteady. Obviously it’s horrible to work in a toxic work environment. How do toxic work environments affect the stories that are told? The work that is done?

Kim: You wind up with bad representations of characters. Silly things. There was a character who was wearing a dress, but she’s got a gun holster on her leg. Or there’s a piece of art that says that a character moved here five years ago, but the story is they just moved here. What happens is people aren’t talking or listening to each other.

Alex: So how do you stay sane?

Kim: Alcohol helps. (Laughs). I think it’s important to have someone you can talk to. You can find yourself wondering, “Am I okay?” It helps just to have someone resonate and understand, someone who can say, “you’re not alone, I’ve experienced that too.” You do form a family.

Kim MacAskill, Part Two

Alex:  What misconceptions did you have coming into game development?

Kim:  I suppose the biggest was thinking I was just going to write a script, just write some dialog. I had no idea how much humble pie I was about to eat. I like to say my first language is Scottish, my second is English, and my third is gaming. . I remember my first meeting, sitting down with designers -- there’s a whole language of design terminology.

And then there was trying to get my brain used to limitations and constraints. And I think, anyone who’s going down this path, please read up on design. I thought I was just going to tell a story, I didn’t think I was going to help design a game. I mean, I tried reading books—

Alex: --What books?

Kim: One I read was The Game Narrative Toolbox.

Alex: Oh, yes, my friend Ann Lemay is one of the writers.

Kim: It was really useful, really breaking it down, you know, this is what a “mechanic” is, this is what a “level” consists of. At the same time, I recently gave a talk for the writer’s guild, that while that book was so useful to me, the terminology gets used completely differently from company to company. So someone’s idea of a “bark” could be totally different.

Alex: When we hire new people, we right away have to clarify what they mean by, for example, a “level” or an “encounter” because we might use a word differently than, say, Ubisoft.

Kim: It took me until I was at a second studio to realize that my huge imposter syndrome coming from TV was completely unnecessary. Every studio is starting from scratch, and how they’re designing it, and how they’re describing how they’re designing it, are different. I thought, I’m not getting it, I’m going to get caught out, and it took me a couple of games to realize that if I’m not understanding, it’s not because I don’t deserve to be there, it’s because from studio to studio, words get used differently.

Alex: Have you been involved in hiring other writers?

Kim: Absolutely. Especially at Rocksteady, because we didn’t have a lead for the longest time, so I was hiring for my boss. You put out the call, and you immediately get a heap of CVs. Recruitment filters them, and then as a team we go through every CV; every member of the writing team has a say. We shortlist, send out the writing test, and give them a week. Meanwhile new CVs are coming in. It’s difficult because when you’re in game development your time is precious. To even make time for an interview, that’s like an hour out of your working day. You don’t have 10-15 hours free to schedule interviews.

Alex: The Catch-22 of hiring: when you desperately need to find someone to take some of the work off your hands, you don’t have any free time available to find someone.

Kim: And then the second round is even harder because that’s when we’re taking them to the Creative Director, and his time is even more precious. You could be waiting a month and a half for him to find the time to talk to someone.

Alex: So what do you look for in a writing applicant?

Kim: Most of the samples I was getting were twelve pages, sixteen pages. ? If I don’t like your writing by page eight, I’m not going to want to read another twenty. Try to grab me by page one.

[Ed. note: Kim’s writing sample grabs you on page one.]

Alex: There’s an old story about Frank Capra, the comedy director of the 30’s. He hires this famous comic playwright to write a screenplay for him. And after a month or so, the first act comes in, and it’s this achingly well observed act showing that this couple’s marriage has deteriorated.

And Capra says, this is what we’re going to do. The guy gets in an elevator with his wife. Leaves his hat on. Next floor, a pretty girl gets on. He takes his hat off.

That tells you what you need to know! You can start the story now.

Kim: That sample I was telling you about, with Harley Quinn, I wrote that in five pages, and I was trying to write it as short and punchy as possible. I need someone who from the get-go can sell me a character: what they sound like, what they’re about. And it has to serve the story; it’s not there to serve your cute lines.

So: someone who has an understanding of how a scene is structured, and who gets the voices to pop out, so I can hear them in my head as I’m reading. If I’m not hearing the voice in my head, there’s a problem. Why are my eyes are drifting away?

Alex: It’s interesting that you’re getting long samples, because when I was looking for someone, the samples tended to be really short, and not have any drama in them. My brief was, “Writing sample, 3-5 pages, two-hander, dramatic conflict.” [That means that each character wants something from the other, and they use words to try and get it, and by the end of the scene, either they get it, or it’s clear they’re not going to get it.]

And the number of people who didn’t have a dramatic sample! They had a couple of pages that told me everything I needed to know to go on a heist, and I’m like, “Okay, you have informed me of everything I need to know to play the level, thank you, but you don’t have any people in here.”

Kim: Right, the samples tend to give away the background of the writer. I’d give them a dramatic theme in the brief, and the die hard game writers would put in an objective that I didn’t even give them, but they don’t put in the drama all the time.

Alex: How do you explain the importance of what you’re doing to people who don’t necessarily understand storytelling?

Kim: My job is to allow people to connect with characters who are a vessel used to explore moral dilemmas, societal dilemmas, to get people to engage with that, so hopefully they can see things differently. Even for example God of War, I have no idea what it’s like to be a single Dad. Stories help people grow.

Alex: I have a theory that there are structures in the brain that interpret everything as a story. If someone tells you a story, you remember it a whole lot better than if someone just tells you a bunch of facts. You know how there’s a Broca’s region in the brain that allows you to interpret language, and if you don’t have that, or it’s damaged, you can’t interpret language? I think there’s also a storytelling and story-interpreting structure, hardwired in the brain. We interpret the world through stories. And tragically, that’s why it’s so hard to get people to confront, say, science, because a good story comes across more powerfully than a bunch of data.

Kim MacAskill Interview, Part One

I’m thinking about a third writing book, this one about game writing. I had a strange trajectory in game writing where my second job ever was Story Director of Contrast. So I didn’t come up through the game writing ranks; I came up through the TV and film writing ranks. I thought about titling my book CRAFTY GAME WRITING: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING BUT PEOPLE SEEM TO LIKE IT. But I also decided to do a bunch of interviews with skilled writers I like and respect.

I met Kim MacAskill (Twitter: @kimmacaskill1) at a game writing summit for first party Microsoft Studios companies. She started in games as Senior Scriptwriter at Rocksteady; when I met her, she was Senior Scriptwriter at Playground Games. She has since returned to her native Glasgow as Principal Narrative Designer at NaturalMotion. So please kindly read all of her responses in a Scottish accent.

Alex: What phase of game development are you in currently? What do you do in a typical day?

Kim: I’m in a strange place in between the ending of one game and the beginning of the other. Really we’re in pre-production on one game, and tying up the end of another.

What do I do? It really does vary. I’m not writing every single day. Most days it’s creating a high level presentations where I think we should go. As you know in game development there’s a lot of presenting. There are a lot of moving parts to a game. Often we have to scale back on the narrative aspect of a feature for easier design and coding. So I’m negotiating on that. I really only spend about one day a week writing dialog, if I’m lucky.

Alex: And the tying up of loose ends?

Kim: Oh, I’ll get a ping from someone, oh, UI needs this, can you tie this up? [UI is the user interface – what buttons do what.] There are last minute design decisions which need narrative support.

Alex: Have you ever heard of The Writer Will Do Something? It’s a Twine game about a bunch of game devs handing off all their design mistakes to the writer. Something’s broken? The writer will do something.

Kim (laughing): Oh, my God, that sounds like the best game. It sounds like therapy.

Alex: Therapy or horror, I’m not sure which.

Kim: Like you’ll get the designers saying, “Oh, this gun works under water,” and then there’s the question, well, why does the gun work underwater?” And, “Oh, the writers will fix it.”

Alex: Yeah, if you’ve designed the level properly, the player character doesn’t need to say much, but if you haven’t, then you have the player character saying, “Oh, I bet there’s a trapdoor somewhere around here.”

What are the hardest battles you fight?

Kim: My own preciousness. Sometimes they want to cut a design feature and there’s an impact on story flow. Or we have to cut something, and you have to ask yourself, am I upset because cutting this is not the best thing for the game, or am I just tired? I try not to be precious. Everything is discardable. You have to realize, when people change your story, they’re not necessarily ruining your story.

Alex: So you never find yourself going, okay, this is going to absolutely break the story?

Kim: Oh, absolutely. But when there are so many moving pieces at a time, it’s kind of choosing your battles. Sometimes, okay, that’s going to wreck that scene, and that’s going to wreck the story, and you sit down with yourself and go, Okay, is this when I fight the battle? Is this the day when I push back?

It can be hard, because when you’re so invested in your story, you have to ask, have they actually killed the story dead, or is it recoverable, or can I even make it better?

It’s a constant compromise. Really living and breathing your characters and caring about them and then someone telling you that you can’t tell the story that you intended. But am I really annoyed, or am I just tired? It’s a constant self-mental-assessment.

Alex: How did you get into game writing?

Kim: Total mistake, I think. It was because of the instability of the TV industry. You know this, when you have work, it’s great; when you don’t, you’re like, “When’s my next contract gonna be?” Contracts are anywhere from three months to a year, so you’re constantly always trying to find your next meal.

I was always a big, big comic book fan. I loved Batman. And I played games as well. And I saw that Rocksteady were looking for a senior scriptwriter. And I think at this time, I was sending out about 20 CV’s a day to anyone who would listen. I was just putting everything out everywhere, I was applying to Nickelodeon for a shitty TV show. And I was really surprised when Rocksteady got back to me.

And I told them, I’ve written for film, I’ve written for TV, I’ve even written for wrestling, but I’ve never written a game. But they didn’t necessarily need a game writer, they needed someone with a bit more experience creating strong narratives. And I came from a comedy background, that was useful given that we were writing for Suicide Squad. So they were happy to teach me about game writing as I brought things from my other skill set.

And they asked me to do a writing test. And that was, Harley Quinn, Penguin and Deathstroke wake up in a room. They have no memory of how they got there. How do they use their strengths and weaknesses to get out?

But from then to actually being employed was like three months. You know, in TV, it’s very fast. “I need a script editor, you’re a script editor, okay, here’s your money.” Recruitment in games can be a six month process from applying to actually arriving at the studio.

Alex: Yeah, back when I was in TV I got a call, “How would you like to write on a TV show in South Africa for four months?” “Interesting. When?” “How about Tuesday?” And it was Thursday.

So this is a question that I think no one else will be able to answer for me: what lessons did you take away from writing for wrestling? What’s it like?

Kim: It’s like a soap drama. This one’s going to betray, that one’s going to go away for a long long time and suddenly appear out of nowhere. Someone's having an affair, all kinds of twists and turns. That could be a soap drama. Maybe realism is more of a factor for soaps. But it’s the same sort of, we need the drama and we need it now. You can’t really go too long without something melodramatic happening.

Alex: My wife Lisa was once up for a gig at the WWF, but she didn’t want to move to Connecticut. I’ve always felt that was a missed opportunity.

Kim: It’s really fun. There are all sorts of people writing for wrestling. There was a writer from Family Guy.

Alex: But were there any lessons…

Kim: If I’m gonna be honest, no. I suppose the one thing I’m going to bring out is how are you going to embed heaps of combat in a story while making it engaging? How am I going to build important dramatic beats, and build relationships. It’s all very well and good telling a love story, but you still have to have people fighting each other.

Alex: Lisa has a theory that opera and kung fu movies are basically the same thing, you know, a bit of story, then there’s a fight, or an aria, then a bit more story, and a fight, or someone sings. “Two brothers separated at birth. One’s a cop, one’s a killer, and they’re in love with the same woman!” Is that a kung fu plot, or a Verdi opera? So I suppose it’s the same with wrestling.

More MacAskill Soon!

Outlines?

Whenever you start the heavy writing of your story, do you ever step off the outline you made? i'm currently writing a short story and as i write it i'm forming the story further and further in my head even though i've already wrote it all out. it almost makes it feel like the outline is useless. i mean yeah, it helped me get all my thoughts down into paper and it assisted me in putting the story in the right track but it makes me feel like i'm missing something crucial in writing. like a key point or backbone to keep this from happening. i don't wanna change the entire story or rewrite it fifty times, you know? i'm proud of the product i have and i feel like changing it all is going to mess it up. am i doing something wrong? is there anything you've done to combat this?

Field Marshall von Moltke, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, said, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." When you get to writing, you discover where the holes in your outline are. You may discover holes that can be fixed with a little surgery. You may discover structural mistakes.

You may realize you've started the story too late, or too early. You may discover you can merge two characters, or you really need someone for the protagonist to talk to. (I worked on the We Happy Few Victoria DLC for 18 months before I realized that.)

An outline is not a blueprint for a building. It's a chord progression for jazz. If you think of something better than what's in your outline, do that. Many mistakes (& opportunities) don't reveal themselves till you're writing pages.

That's not to say don't outline! (Another general, Dwight D. Eisenhower: "Plans are useless. Planning is essential.") If you just start writing pages, it's much too easy to get lost in the woods. When you *don't* know what else to do, write what's in the outline. One of the strengths of an outline is that it will get you through the points where you decide your whole idea sucks. You can just power through based on your outline, and read the thing later and see if it really does suck or if you were just second-guessing yourself.

However, we all go to pages too quickly. In CRAFTY SCREENWRITING, I say, pitch your story over and over, to anyone who will listen, before writing anything down. Stories get better every time you tell them. It is nerve-wracking to do this. But it exposes many of the flaws in your story. It also provokes better ideas than what you have. There's nothing like seeing your listener sort of drift off, and come up on the spot with something sticky that pulls them back in.

Again: tell your story again and again before you write it down. If this is too scary, write it down and then tell it without looking at what you wrote down. Nothing surfaces a logic flaw more effectively than when you can't remember what comes next.

If you repeatedly find big mistakes in your outlines when you sit down to write pages, maybe try thrashing them out more before committing them to the page.

Also: even when you've gone to pages, sometimes it's a good idea to go back to index cards. Many, many times I've started a rewrite by writing down the beats in the script I've already written. It's much easier to see the whole story when you've got 40-60 index cards on the kitchen table than when you've got a pages and pages of script. It's easy to move the beats around. It's easy to add beats. It's easy to throw out beats.

But, as always: whatever works for you. There is no one way to get to a polished draft. If sticking dogmatically to your outline helps, do that, then rewrite. If writing an outline, then throwing it away, and writing pages from memory works, do that.

Does that help?