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?

Tell, Don't Show

One of the classic bits of advice for writers in different media is "show, don't tell." Don't say the guy's rich and generous; have him flip a $20 to the delivery guy.

It is often good advice; I've given it lots of times as feedback.

It's not always good advice. Sometimes it is far more effective to tell than to show.

For example, in JAWS, Quint tells the story of the sinking of the Indianapolis:

... Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, chief? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know... was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it's... kinda like ol' squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he'd start poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got...lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin' and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin' they all come in and rip you to pieces.
Y'know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! I don't know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin' chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson's mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended. He'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us. He's a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

There are a bunch of reasons why you wouldn't want to, and couldn't, show this.

For one thing, sheer scope. JAWS was shot on a budget. Shooting a couple hundred guys in the water would be a massive endeavor.

Second, passage of time. Part of the horror of this story is imagining being stuck in the water for days and nights and days, not knowing if help was coming, not knowing if you were next. Film, in particular, is rubbish at communicating things changing over a period of time. You can show shadows moving. You can show seasons. You can show pages flying off a calendar (but who still has a calendar?). But how do you fast-forward on hundreds of guys in the water for a couple of days? A series of dissolves? Ugh.

Third, number. Stalin said, "One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic." (He murdered millions of people.) If you tried to show hundreds of deaths, all you'd do is inoculate the audience against feeling anything about the next person to die.

Fourth, extreme graphic violence. Except in a gore horror film, the audience generally does not want to see someone bitten in half. Rather than being horrified, a lot of people would feel nauseous.

Fifth, attitude. The point of the story is not that sharks eat people. We knew that. The point of the story is that Quint fucking hates sharks.

So, Spielberg and writers Benchley and Gottlieb have Quint tell the story. It's a hell of a speech.

So, yeah, sure, it is often much better to show than to tell. It's fair to say that before you give a character a big ole chunk of exposition to tell, you should consider how to show the same information. Expository dialog, like readables in games, can become a crutch.

But don't be afraid to have a character tell a story: if it's too big, or takes place over too much time, or is something so over the top the audience would really rather you didn't show them. Or if the point of the story is what it means to the story teller.

Satisfying Mysteries

I had a dream last night in which I had an epiphany about what makes a mystery satisfying. It has to do with cognitive science.

There are two kinds of satisfying mysteries in fiction. One is the mystery which is meant to be completely revealed. This is often a whodunnit, à la KNIVES OUT, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, CSI, etc., in which the revealing is an actual scene where someone explains. It could also be a story in which it is pretty clear by the end what the storyteller means to be the truth, whether the hero figures it out or not. E.g. "Is Deckard a replicant?" in the director's cut of BLADE RUNNER (but not, thankfully, in the theatrical cut). 

Then there are mysteries meant to be enjoyed as mysteries. At the end of a story, we're left with a question that is meant to be left unanswered. It could be something as simple as "what happened to the blonde?" in L'AVVENTURA or "what happened to the missing girls?" in PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. Or, "did Quaid ever go to Mars at all?" in TOTAL RECALL.

What makes a mystery satisfying? And what does it have to do with cognitive science?

The human brain is a powerful pattern-matching computer, so powerful that the biggest computers are only now nibbling around at the edges of human capacity. People can identify a dog by eye in dappled shade, no matter the breed, no matter the haircut. I remember going to a dog park in Venice Beach, seeing a dog for about five seconds, and realizing, "that's not a dog, that's a wolf." There was just a wildness in how it moved. Just a whiff of danger. (It was indeed a wolf.)

We could train a computer to distinguish a dog from a wolf these days, but it would still tell you half the time that you're looking at a hat.

Meanwhile, the brain is identifying patterns constantly, everywhere, trying to questions from "is that dress silk?" to "does she really love me, or does she just love having a boyfriend?"

The brain tries to make stories out of things that happen. Stories are how we make sense of the world. When we are trying to figure out what we need to do next, we try to figure out what story we're in. Should I flee to the country to avoid the plague? Well, it depends. Would I be in The Decameron, in which case, yeah, go!, or would I find myself in The Masque of the Red Death?

The brain is so hungry to match make stories out of things that happen around it that it is driven to make stories even when the events are completely random or have nothing to do with each other.
A large part of the gambling industry lives off people who see patterns in the random roll of the dice.

Overmatching is why cops will pick up a suspect, and then ignore evidence that they're not the perpetrator: they'd rather have a story than no story.

Overmatching is what scientists fight against every day, trying to make sure they're not seeing a pattern that isn't there.

Paranoia is what we call it when someone thinks that everything around them is about them. That guy isn't just walking in the same direction I am -- he's following me!

The brain evolved to over-interpret clues in the environment because it was adaptative. If you over-interpret some movement in the tall grass, or a sudden cessation of the birds calling, as a possible tiger, the penalty for being wrong is a few minutes. If you do that twenty times, it's still just a little bit of going out of your way. If you under-interpret a tiger to be just the wind on the grass even once, you're dinner.

What does this have to do with satisfying mysteries?

Most fiction tells us explicitly what we are meant to know.  If you are fortunate enough to have an editor for your novel, many of her comments will be, "this is confusing, please make clearer." Video game development involves a great deal of making as clear as possible to the player how they are meant to interpret the world. We highlight interactable objects. We put health bars over enemies.

But sometimes we put a mystery in there. We carefully build story events that raise a question for the audience to answer for themselves.

These could be philosophical questions. Is Don Quixote a delusional idiot, or is his struggle against a world lacking romance a meaningful one? In FRANKENSTEIN, who is the monster?

They could be questions of what to make of someone. The unreliable narrator, staple of 20th century novels, gives you an interpretation of events that you, the audience or player, are free to interpret another way. Humbert Humbert does not make himself out to be Lolita's rapist, but read the book now, and that's how you'll see him. What made the novel so outrageous at the time was that it does not explicitly condemn him. SPEC OPS: THE LINE has a main character who fails to understand until the end that they are not the hero, they are [redacted].

(Sometimes you only realize the narrator is unreliable with wisdom. Watch TOP GUN as an adult and see if you don't agree with Iceman 100%. Also, Ferris Bueller is a monster.)

The mystery might be a moral question. In WITCHER 2, the player can choose to regard the Scoia'tael as righteous guerrillas defending the rights of non-humans, or murderous bandits.

(Yes, I know I'm using "mystery" here, in my own tendentious way, to mean "an important question left unanswered by the storyteller.")

What makes a mystery satisfying is when the work of art throws out enough clues that the brain understands that there is a mystery to be solved, and then enough more clues that the brain engages with them, analyzing insufficient data to come up with a tentative conclusion that may change as more information comes in.

What makes a satisfying mystery is when the storyteller gives the audience enough hints that their brains engage with the mystery. If there is going to be a conclusion, the storyteller lets the audience come to that conclusion before the story does. If there isn't going to be one, the storyteller gives the audience enough to chew on that they can argue with each other over dinner.

Oddly, many whodunnits don't do this. The Sherlock Holmes stories aren't written so that the reader can draw conclusions; most of the evidence isn't even mentioned until Sherlock calls it out and interprets it.

That's okay. What makes a mystery story satisfying isn't necessarily the mystery. A lot of stories termed mysteries are really about the extraordinary characters. A lot are thrillers, and the fun is rooting for the hero to solve the mystery. We can't solve the conspiracy before Cary Grant does in NORTH BY NORTHWEST, but we're enjoying the suspense. The question isn't so much "what is the conspiracy?" The answer is kinda silly, anyway. The question is, "will Cary Grant uncover the conspiracy, and will he and his aplomb survive doing it?

Agatha Christie novels do give the clues before they're interpreted, but they tend to be arcane clues that only the cleverest and most careful of readers will put together before the detective does.
Nonetheless the characters are rich and fun, and we can interpret their behavior and guess who done it.

If you want your mystery to be satisfying as a mystery, then give your audience or player enough clues to chew on before it is (or isn't) resolved.

The Encyclopedia Brown books for kids, for example, give you all the clues you need to solve the mystery before Encyclopedia Brown announces the solution; they encourage you to read the stories verrrry carefully, because you know, for sure, the answer is in there.

Horror movies often have satisfying mysteries, at least until they break into thriller at the end. The protagonist is often clueless, or willfully blind, that they are dealing with a monster. In the classic werewolf story, the protagonist is all, "Every full moon, I have bad dreams, and also people in town are savaged by a large wild animal, what a world, huh?" In the classic poltergeist story, we guess that these aren't accidents, and the house is haunted, before the main characters come to terms with it. Part of the fun is yelling at the teenagers that going into the basement is a terrible idea. CABIN IN THE WOODS makes much of the tropes. There has to be a Harbinger, who warns the main characters not to do a thing, and we can guess that bad things will come of ignoring the warning of the crazy old man at the gas station. If only they knew they were in a horror movie, eh?

A key part of all storytelling is tracking what the audience knows, what they suspect, and what they expect. Without that, how can you make the ending surprising yet inevitable? To create a satisfying mystery, I think we have to make it clear that there is a mystery and it's important, and then give the player enough clues that they can attempt to solve it. There don't have to be many clues; your audience's brains are raring to make up a story behind the story. They just have to be compelling, salient, juicy clues.

Then the audience or players can say, "I knew it!" when the big reveal comes. Or, "how did I not see that???"

In our WE HAPPY FEW dlc, LIGHTBEARER, our hero, Nick, and the player, are confronted with quite a bit of evidence that he's murdering people during his drug blackouts. But maybe he isn't, and there are clues that point another way. 

I've noticed that game developers are fond of surprising the player. I sometimes bring up famous director and infamous sexual harasser Alfred Hitchcock's famous parable about surprise and suspense:

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

That's why it's important to make sure the audience or players know that there are clues. By now I hope everybody knows that THE SIXTH SENSE has a surprise twist at the end. All the clues are there, right in front of your face. But the movie does not call attention to them. So for all but the most clever audience members (i.e. not me), the ending was a surprise. Likewise, it's pretty obvious who Darth Vader is in the original Star Wars movie: for heaven's sake, what does the German word "vater" mean? But at no point does the movie really kick up the question, "who is Darth Vader exactly in relationship to Obi Wan Kenobi, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker?" So back in the day, that revelation came as something of a surprise in the next movie. In fact, it was a surprise to the cast during the shoot; they found out at the cast screening.

(I'm not saying there's anything wrong with these movies, which made a ton of simoleons, and became iconic. I'm saying that they were not satisfying as mysteries.)

So there you have it: my epiphany last night. You can use your audience's, or players', drive to interpret patterns to draw them into a compelling mystery. You just have to give them some juicy clues and make sure they know that they are clues and there is a mystery.

People love making up stories. They can't help doing it; their brains are on fire trying to make up stories all the time. That's why we talk about "push vs. pull" story telling. As much as possible, get the player or audience member or reader to ask a question before you answer it. As much as possible, get them rooting for something to happen or not happen before you make it happen. At the broadest possible level, all this is, is creating satisfying mysteries. 

Brilliantly Dumb Decisions

As you get older, you often get wiser, if you're paying attention. You've seen this happening before, or something like it. You know what's coming down the pike.

You start to find a lot of drama unsatisfying, because it's written by writers who haven't been around the block, who are making characters do things they really wouldn't do.

The flip side of this is that you start to understand not just how foolish people can be, but in what ways they tend to be foolish. You get to know what sort of blind spots people have.

For example, we're in the middle of a slow-motion train wreck that anyone reading the papers knew was coming, but most people did nothing about. I mean, I knew intellectually it was coming, but I did not e.g. make a killing on the stock market. (Though we did self-isolate a bit early.) We didn't act because other people weren't acting. We didn't act because we have never lived through a serious pandemic, so it all seemed a bit unreal. The last polio epidemic was in the 1950s. The last mass measles epidemic in North America was in the 1960s.

Writing screenplays, you will often need to have characters do something less than logical. Where would horror movies be if at the first sign of horror the main characters immediately left? Where would cops stories be if the cops waited for backup?

(Though one of the things I like about the unnecessarily well-written TREMORS is that the heroes spend no time at all trying to find out why people have disappeared; they immediately try to get out of the valley.)

So what's the difference between annoyingly dumb and brilliantly dumb decisions?

Character decisions are annoyingly dumb when it's obvious they happen because the writers need them to. They are driven by the plot. Hank Azaria calls it the "idiot ball": "who's carrying the idiot ball this week?"

Character decisions are brilliantly dumb when they happen because the characters are human. They make the kinds of dumb mistakes people make. Ideally they make dumb decisions that reveal what sort of people they are.

For JAWS to work, Peter Benchley needs Quint, Hooper and Brody to be isolated on the water. If they can call for help, then the drama is just "will they survive till the chopper arrives?" If they can't, it's "will they survive?"

So Quint smashes the radio. That's illogical, right? But his pride is at stake. He's got his back up against the smart-ass scientist and the bossy police chief. He does not want them to call for help; he's taking it as an insult that they want to call for help. If they get a bigger boat, which would obviously be the sensible thing to do, it won't be his boat. It will be someone else's.

So he smashes the radio. It's a great character moment. It is a brilliantly dumb thing for him to do.

If you've been following politics for the last three years, you've seen a lot of people making dumb decisions out of cowardice, or greed, or pride. You've seen people do things that no sensible, decent adult would do. But adults aren't sensible by virtue of being over 18 years old. Common sense is not common at all.

Tragedy starts with a tragic flaw. It's Odysseus's pride that leads him to tell the Cyclops who he really is after he's beaten him; when complications ensue, he spends twenty years trying to get home.

Hamlet is too smart for his own good. He spends the play trying to find out for sure if his uncle really murdered his father. Put Othello in that role, and he'd just up and kill Claudius on Day One, and take the throne for himself. Done.

Almost every romcom is about how adorable people who are obviously meant for each other fail to get together until they've exhausted all the other options.

In the past twenty years there's been a lot of cognitive science about our blind spots. We see patterns where there are none; hence all the gambler's fallacies. That's because in the wild, 95% of the time that odd thing in the grass is nothing, but 5% of the time it's a sabertooth, and the humans who see patterns where there are none survive, and the people who are too skeptic only have to be wrong once and it's all over.

Read the cognitive science. It's handy both as a writer and as a person to know all the different ways our human brains can screw us up.

So keep that in mind when you're making up your story. You totally can and should have your characters do dumb things. The best drama is about people who can't or won't do the smart, logical thing for human reasons.

Mistakes are what drama's all about; just make them convincing, compelling mistakes that reveal character.

On the merits of jumping out of a burning airplane

There's a lot of "don't worry, stick at it, your dream will come true" on Twitter. That's not wisdom. Not everyone's dream will come true. You absolutely should ask yourself if you're barking up the wrong tree. You absolutely should ask if you could be happy doing something else.

Those of us who made it can truthfully say that it took a lot of perseverance. That getting knocked down doesn't matter, what matters is that you get back up again. But there are also people who persevered, maybe as good as us, who didn't make it. Those are the breaks.

You are not a weak person if you decide, after getting kicked in the shins a thousand times, that you've had it with getting kicked in the shins. This is your life, and there are costs to fighting for your dream. The cheery advice givers will not bear those costs. You will.

I was not terribly successful in LA. I moved to Montreal. I was supposed to become a film director. People didn't think my short films were all that. I wrote Canadian film and tv until our little pond dried up. I went into games. And that's a successful trajectory.

I had a first marriage. Didn't work out. Second marriage is amazing. And that's a success story.

One of the worst relationships I ever had was after I did a "U can make anything happen if you rly mean it!!!" type life seminar. Oh, my God, were we bad for each other. I don't think she even liked me. At one point she told me she didn't like how I drank water.

But we stuck at it because we could make anything happen. Until we came to our senses.

Sticking to this notion of perseverance at all costs made us stay with a relationship that was fundamentally no good.

I knew an actress in Hollywood who was really terrific. She had a transparent quality; her emotions just popped. But it never happened for her. Maybe she didn't audition well?

She quit to go into raising money for playgrounds that are accessible for disabled kids. That is awesome. I know another good actress who quit to become a pastry chef. That is also awesome.

Point is: if your aircraft is burning, bail. Don't kick yourself for jumping out of a burning plane. If your only legacy is the kind things you do for other people, and the joy you took in sunsets and fresh bread, you will have lived a good life.