Complications Ensue

The talk was fun!

2026-03-06T14:04:00.000-05:00

I'm giving a talk!

2026-03-04T15:29:00.000-05:00

I'm giving a talk tomorrow at Cinesite in Montreal about "What Game Devs Should Know about Narrative." (You can still buy a ticket! 5 places left.) We're going to play a round of Ludonarrative Resonance. As I've mentioned before, this is a game where you draw cards for Player Character, Situation, Goal and Mechanic, and you have to make up a story that works within those parameters.

Tomorrow's cards are:

Player character

An apologetic Englishman
A beginning witch
A misunderstood monster
An addicted detective
An escaped android
A sulky teenager
A new vampire
An orphan girl

Situation

A building with a secret
Zombie apocalypse
A decayed city in a faithless empire
Paris in the 1920s, sort of
Alien invasion
A forgotten town
Renaissance Florence
Civil war

Goal

Escape
Break the cycle
Bring your beloved back
Bring back the Old Gods
Infiltrate the Organization
Get home in time
Reveal the Truth
Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, etc.

Mechanic

Deck Builder
Time Loop
Romance Sim
City Builder
Rhythm
Shmup
Metroidvania
Roguelike
Soulslike
Crafting

I did this a while ago with a large group, and one person kinda monopolized the conversation, so this time I'm making teams of four, and each team can pitch their idea.

Additional rules are:

you can interpret the words on your card however you like
if you absolutely hate your combination of cards, you may throw out ONE card and replace it with something better that you made up.

What do you think? What cards am I missing?

I didn't come here for an argument

2026-01-16T18:52:00.000-05:00

I was listening to Julius Kuschke's Narrascope 2019 talk about interactive dialogue systems, and it occurred to me that we don't see enough dialogue systems where you get at least one of the options almost as soon as the other person starts talking. Because, let's face it, people do not listen very well. Sometimes they're just waiting until the other person stops talking so they can say what they planned to say all along, and some don't wait.

Firewatch gives you dialogue options before your dispatcher is done talking. But the conversations are fairly slow and thoughtful. It's not really the cut and slash of repartee.

Obviously, this sort of system requires a bit more programming (gasp!) and the conversations have to be designed more carefully. But it does eliminate those dreadful pauses that kill the momentum in most conversations with NPCs.

I'd love to see a dialogue system where individual responses pop onscreen as the NPC's dialogue triggers them, so your "yeah yeah yeah whatever here's what I want" response might pop up immediately, while an emotional response to the NPC's heartbreaking dilemma might require listening to their whole speech.

What would be superfun would be the occasional dialogue option that the NPC interrupts, but that's probably too much to ask.

Conversational Combat?

2025-12-15T15:14:00.007-05:00

Dialogue is a core narrative delivery system in most narrative games. However, games rarely offer players dialogue choices that matter. Cutscenes can be lovely, but the player can’t interact with them, just watch and enjoy them. Branching dialogue is normally only informative – the player can find out various bits of information about the world and the characters if they are so inclined.

At a basic level, dialogue choices are expensive because you have to record and animate content that the player may never see. Producers hate that.

Game designers often want to minimize dialogue, especially cutscenes. After all, as you’ve probably heard before, “It’s not a movie, it’s a game.”

Early on in the development of South of Midnight, our creative director insisted that he only wanted 1% of the game to be cutscenes. (What he wanted those scenes to do seemed like it was going to take much more than 1% of the game, and in fact the game ended up more like 8%-10% cutscenes.)

Informative branching dialogue involves more button-pressing than cutscenes. But it usually requires no thought on the part of the player. You can just click through as many dialogue options as you like, and at the end of it, you’ll get a new objective in your journal.

If you’re lucky, you might be able to sell your colleagues on purely expressive choices, where you can choose what your character says, but only so long as it has no effect on anyone but the player. In Kentucky Route Zero, for example, dialogue choices are there solely to allow you to define your instance of the main character. You can pick any dialogue option, but only you will ever care about it. This can go awry. In a certain well-liked RPG, I picked all the nastiest responses. NPCs never reacted negatively to them. They certainly didn't tell me to eff off and come back when I had a better attitude. I felt betrayed and stopped playing the game.

(By the way, I'm not against purely expressive dialogue choices. I pitched an expressive dialogue system on a game I was narrative directing. The main character could say her dialogue angrily, sarcastically, or hurt. The next NPC line would respond to that emotion. The idea got cut for scope.)

The shame of it is that good dialogue is dramatic. My definition of a drama is that at least one, but hopefully both characters are asking the other for something, and aren't getting it, and don't want to give the other person what they are asking for. Dramatic dialogue is dialogue where someone is trying to get something from someone else by talking. The scene is over when they get it, or give up on getting it.

A dramatic scene is, therefore, a form of combat. Each character can win or lose the conversation.

But it is almost never a form of combat in games. Why? Because we feel that it’s too much to ask of the player to listen to the NPC and make their dialogue choices accordingly. I mean, what happens if they fail the conversation? No, no, better to put it in a cutscene or an in-game scene you can’t fail.

It’s possible to find examples of “conversational combat,” but they’re rare.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided gives you five conversations you can succeed or fail at. For example, you need to get into the morgue in the police station. You can talk a desk cop named Wayne Haas into letting you in there.

You succeed by realizing he’s motivated by guilt for killing a fifteen-year-old kid pursuant to an order that Adam Jensen, the hero, refused to do. But you can’t just take one consistent tack in the conversation. Depending on what he says, your best choice may be to absolve him of his guilt, confront him with it, or plead for him to cut you some slack.

The "social boss battles" in DE:MD aren't easy. I beat Wayne Haas, but there was at least one I did not beat. .

Deus Ex as a franchise is famous for giving players multiple ways to accomplish missions, so while you can fail the conversation with Wayne, it does not block your progression. You can still sneak into the morgue through the air vents, or, y'know, simply slaughter everyone.

But this is not an ideal model for games. Offering the player two separate ways to do something is expensive. It’s the sort of thing that will get cut when you inevitably scope the game down.

But if we adopt a different paradigm, it’s simple to provide dialogue choices that don’t require any branching narrative. That is to treat conversation as just another form of combat.

We expect combat sequences to challenge us. If there is no way to fail a combat mission, it’s not a game, it’s a walking simulator. What happens when you get killed in a combat mission? You go back to a checkpoint.

If we adopt this paradigm, then what happens when you fail a conversational combat? No problem. You go back to a checkpoint. You can try a slightly different or a very different strategy. You can avoid the dialogue choices that got you “killed.”

Obviously this is much, much cheaper than providing an alternate way to fulfill the mission.

In turn, this allows the conversational combat to have varying degrees of difficulty. We know the player is sooner or later going to make the right choices. So we don’t have to make it obvious which they are. To make it fair, we need to give the player enough information to make an intelligent choice.

But we don’t even need to make it fair. Combat in, say, Dark Souls isn’t fair. Some of the encounters are designed so that you will only know there’s a guy hiding behind that pillar with a crossbow once he kills you.

In conversational combat, that could mean introducing a ruthless, cold-hearted killer who, surprise!, gets very upset at the thought that you might have been mean to a puppy. How could you have known? You couldn’t. But now you do.

After all, real people are not logically consistent.

Making conversations into combat has some key benefits. It means that players will be more inclined to pay attention to who they’re talking to and what they’re saying. They can’t just wait for the recap in the journal. It also means that they can be longer and richer, because the player is playing them rather than watching them. It’s a game, you know, not a movie.

What are some other good examples of conversations you can fail?

The Dawn of Everything

2025-10-07T19:34:00.004-04:00

Normally I blog about creative writing, but this was a great book:

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that convincingly rejiggers your entire understanding of something.Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus convinced me that the Americas were heavily populated before diseases wiped out 95% of Native Americans. Back in the day, Robert T. Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies convinced me that dinosaurs were warm-blooded and had feathers.

Here, the authors take aim at the idea that human societies inexorably grow from small bands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers to grain-based dictatorial bureaucratic states. Turns out the archeological record is full of bureaucratic states like Ur that were egalitarian and not dictatorial. Living at the same time as the brutal, dictatorial Aztecs were the Tlaxcala, who had a form of repubic; the people of Teohuatican avoided building temples and instead built housing. Peoples at all levels of social organisation have rejected big men. Iroquois leaders had no power to compel their people to do anything. Some hunter-gatherer bands mock the best hunters. Other people, like the native peoples of Southern California, have gone to great lengths to avoid building up surpluses of resources, and so have made war useless. Many peoples avoided agriculture for thousands of years even though they knew perfectly well how to do it.

Turns out folks are pretty smart and self-aware, and Western civilization is not the culmination of knowledge, but merely one particular way of living that has its pros and cons.

If you're looking for another "big think book," this is it.

View all my reviews

Dansky's Book

2025-08-30T11:39:00.003-04:00

My dear friend, the legendary Richard Dansky, has published The Video Game Writer's Guide to Surviving an Industry That Hates You. Richard has been at this for two decades. If you're a videogame writer or (Lord help you) an aspiring videogame writer, you need this book!

Most of it is, like it says on the tin, about surviving as a video game writer. And you can tell from the title that he pulls no punches. But he has an interesting tool for finding a character's voice: write down ten words the character likes to say. Now write down ten words the character would never say. Let these guide you as you write the character.

I wrote a few hundred lines for a sound set for a new character. Our peerless editor and fellow writer Alexia pointed out that maybe 20% of those lines were generic. Any of our characters could say them.

In a shooter, that's inevitable to some extent. There are only so many ways someone can say "reloading!" But wherever possible, you want lines that only could come out of that character's mouth.

It is a very high standard, and it is a mostly thankless standard. Your game designers will not complain if all your lines are generic -- they'd be happy if the character said "reloading" only one way. The artists won't care. And most players won't notice.

But players will appreciate it, even if they don't notice it. The characters will sparkle a little more. They will enjoy playing them more.

And a few of them will make some fun YouTubes out of them.

And the challenge makes us better writers. I want my writers to treat the dialog as if we're shooting for Game of the Year. It will make the game a little better, but it will make their writing much better. It's the last few reps, when your muscles are burning, that build more strength.

Ludonarrative Resonance: The Game

2025-06-27T10:50:00.003-04:00

All the ganz mespuchah came to town for the office summer party, and we had narrative workshops. These were in no way silly fun games, they were Very Serious. Okay, they were silly and fun, but they were also serious.

One game we like to play I dubbed Ludonarrative Resonance. I don't claim it's original -- my friend Shelly made a similar game for movie pitches, and probably lots of people have something like it. It's a card game for breaking folks out of their familiar tropes.

What you do is you take index cards, or blank playing cards like these and separate them into four piles: Setting, Main Character, Goal, Mechanic.

You write a mess of cards with the word Settings on their backs, for example:

Paris, in the 20's, sort of
A city with a dark secret
Zombie apocalypse
The dreams of a dying scientist
A decayed city in a faithless empire
A forgotten town in the Deep South
Sparta!!!
Renaissance Florence
A volcano island

Then you write a bunch of cards with Main Character on the back:

An apologetic Englishman
Member of an arcane order of assassins
A mysterious circus girl of unknown age
A sly fox with poor impulse control
The Monkey King
A beginning witch
A not entirely harmless lamb

Next, Goals, for example:

Become a Real Boy
Bring back the Old Ones
Bring your beloved back
Get the MacGuffin
Survive
Heal the monsters
Go to there

Some of these are a bit specific; ideally the cards should be ideas you can interpret in different ways, but also evocative. By now you've probably recognized the games, movies and fairy tales I stole these from (some of which I wrote).

Finally, Mechanics:

Social stealth: pass as one of them
Deck builder
Walking simulator
Parcour
Battle Royale
Romance simulator
Enter dreams and alter them
Soulslike
Punch them in the face
Time loop

Now, the dealer deals three of each kind of card, and someone else picks one from each three. There shouldn't be two cards from the same source material.

Then everyone collaborates to pitch a game using the selected setting, main character, goal and mechanic.

Initially, this will seem ridiculous. But with a little thought, the ridiculous becomes plausible -- and original.

In our workshop, for example, we had:

A lamb

A volcano

Go to there

Puzzles

We ended up with the idea that The Lamb is solving puzzles to climb the volcano to get to Mary. The puzzles come from spectral lambs. Over the course of the puzzles we discover that Mary has been abusive towards the Lamb, and we're worried that we are in an allegory of someone returning to their abuser. But it turns out the Lamb is there to kill evil Mary and set the spectral lambs free.

We had:

An apologetic Englishman

A zombie apocalypse

Bring back his beloved

Social stealth

That turned into a game pitch where the apologetic Englishman has to rescue his beloved, who has become a zombie. That means he will have to infiltrate three groups: the zombies (to get to her), the lab guys (to get the cure) and the kill teams (to prevent them from killing her before she can be turned back). Being an apologetic Englishman is a nice impediment to passing as any of these groups, and failing to pass will result in him being eaten, killed, or used as an experimental subject.

Both of those are perfectly cromulent games, right? I would at a minimum watch the trailer for these games, and probably wishlist them on Steam.

Aside from exercising your ludonarrative muscles, which is always good, you quickly learn how many possibilities there are. When we were thinking about our next game after We Happy Few, we only seriously discussed two possibilities. We should have been discussing twenty! I mean, if you're planning to spend a couple of years making an indie game, or five or more making a AAA game, would it kill you to spend a month or two pitching crazy ideas? You don't want to be making a cookie-cutter fantasy game because that's what's at the front of your brain.

Make randomness your friend!

EDIT: This game is probably better with small teams. Some folks like to hear themselves talk, and in large groups people are inclined to let them talk. If you have twenty people, you might want five teams of four or four teams of five, and give each team five or six minutes to come up with a pitch and two minutes to pitch it to the other teams.

A Misconception or Two I Had About Escape Rooms

2025-06-12T16:58:00.004-04:00

For some time, I avoided playing escape rooms. Being trapped in a room with a limited time to escape seemed stressful, and I'm really good with the amount of stress I already have in my life.

I have since discovered that almost no escape rooms are about escaping. The genre is stuck with the name, though.

I just finished playing a baker's dozen of escape rooms here in Montreal, courtesy of a tour run by the fine folks of Room Escape Artist. (They also run the excellent Reality Escape Pod.) They also run tours of escape rooms in various cities that are hubs of escape rooms. Turns out Montreal is one of the top eight cities in the world for escape rooms. I did not know that.

I've been intrigued by immersive experiences, including escape rooms, for a little while. There are a bunch of ways in which they are not like video games. They are local -- if you want to play an escape room, or experience immersive theater, you have to go to where it is. You can't download it. They are tactile: you are physically in a space. There may be be actors who will improvise based on your responses.

There are of course many ways in which escape rooms are like video games. You are the hero of your own adventure. There is a mission that only you can accomplish. There are characters who are there to help. There are obstacles, and sometimes antagonists. You have to solve puzzles. You often have to platform. You can theoretically win or lose, but you really only lose if you are dead set on testing yourself in hard mode.

Some games are very heavy on the problem solving. Some make an effort to create a convincingly real environment that tells part of the story. Some are there more to tell an emotionally truthful story, and the puzzles are there more to engage you in the story than to present a difficult challenge.

Escape rooms have been flowering for only about the last ten years. Folks are still figuring out what the genre can do.

According to Morty, the Yelp of escape rooms, there are on the order of fifty thousand escape rooms.

In the past three days, I saved a magic forest, saved the world from vengeful Poseidon, released souls trapped by a witch, broken into my high school to get out of having to go to summer school, helped a Lego man succeed on his date, stopped a mad bomber, stopped a mad poisoner, helped an agent shut down a drug operation, saved another magic forest, rehabilitated myself after having been arrested for tampering with an android, and broken a curse.

Turns out, Montreal has the top-rated room in all the world, Magnifico, at Escaparium, itself probably the top escape room studio in the world. Magnifico is Not Cheap -- it's $200 Canadian, not $30-$40 Canadian like most other rooms. But it is a 2.5 hour masterpiece. The Cirque du Soleil of escape rooms. The Punchdrunk of escape rooms. It brings together stage magic, spectacular special effects, actors, puzzle-solving, wit, music and tragedy. It took me to another world, and got me in the feels.

Come on up to Montreal and check it out! We also have circuses.

Get'em While They're Hot!

2025-05-18T16:06:00.000-04:00

Lore Should Read Like Someone Wrote It

2025-05-08T13:07:00.005-04:00

We're working on lore for Fragpunk, and as we refine the lore pieces, one thing I keep asking the writers for is translucency. My book (now out from Routledge!) talks about "translucent liars," where you know an NPC is lying, and their lies tell you something about them. But they don't have to be lying. They can be telling the truth -- but telling it from their distinctive point of view.

That way, there's two layers of lore. One is the facts that they are presenting -- oh, there are lizard people in the hills, no one knows where they came from, don't go there or they'll eat you. The other is who the NPC is: a cranky old blacksmith who's a little hard of hearing, who isn't getting along with his second wife, and now you know that in this culture a man can have two wives.

(They say that France is the only country where you can complain to your wife that your mistress just doesn't understand you.)

Every bit of lore should have attitude. Even if it's meant to be from an encyclopedia, who wrote it? Who was the encyclopediarian? In Samuel Johnson's dictionary, you will find this definition:

Lexicographer. n. s. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge...

Which defines lexicographers, but also tells you what Samuel Johnson thought of himself.

Every bit of text in our world has an attitude. We are so used to some of them that we think they are "neutral," but the New York Times is not really neutral, and neither is the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

So give your lore attitude, and tell us who wrote it.

What's in the book?

2025-04-11T19:47:00.002-04:00

Look at all the stuff you get in my new book!
Coming April 28 -- you can preorder now!

South of Midnight, Fragpunk and my new book, Crafty Game Writing!

2025-04-05T19:21:00.005-04:00

Wow, it's been a little while since I posted last. And it's looking to be a busy Spring.

SOUTH OF MIDNIGHT dropped! It looks great:

I worked on South of Midnight for about three years as the first narrative director, before moving to Highdive (aka Netease) and FRAGPUNK. It was and is an extremely ambitious project: a Southern Gothic third-person adventure story set in the Deep South, about a young Black woman who discovers the creatures of Southern folklore, and her own magical powers. At one point I think I might have suggested that we were about to go running with scissors through a cultural minefield.

I'm excited to see if Compulsion pulled it off! You can check the game out on Xbox GamePass as of April 8th.

Oh, yeah, FRAGPUNK. FRAGPUNK dropped last month!

This is a multiplayer shooter I've been the Narrative Lead on since I left Compulsion. We have terrific gameplay, a fresh mechanic, and outrageous characters who are a hoot to write.

And... my book drops April 30. The best place to buy it seems to be the publisher's site, where it's about US $50 (minus 20% off through April!). It's about, what else, game writing. If you liked my books about TV writing and movie writing, you'll probably like this one, too. And if you haven't, you'll probably like it anyway! I mean, you're here, aren't you?

My name should also be on some indie games later this year, so watch this space...

A Stick of Time

2025-01-09T14:13:00.008-05:00

(Spoilers for Shogun)

Episode 7 of Shogun sees the wily central Japanese character Toronaga surrounded, defended only by a weakened garrison, at the mercy of his enemies. The Regency Council has summoned him to Osaka, where he will surely be commanded to commit seppuku. It appears he has no choice but to obey.

But the episode is called "A Stick of Time." That refers to the length of time requested by the madam of a high-class "tea house" (brothel), Gin, to talk to Toronaga: the time it takes for a stick of incense to burn down.

What is so important about this interview, that it gets the episode named after it?

Gin has a request. Toronaga is building a new city, Edo, in the Kanto Plain. She has a tea house in the woods. She wants permission to create an entire district of tea houses in Edo, to give her people a world to belong to.

"My hardships taught me ambition and guile,
and made me the most successful Lady in Izu,
just as your hardships made you into
the cunning man you are today."

Toronaga is dismissive. He does not expect to live long enough to give or deny her permission.

She says, in the nicest possible way, don't bullshit a bullshitter. How has the wily Toronaga been caught with his pants down. Did his scouts forget to tell him an army was surrounding him?

He says, you think I let this happen intentionally?

She says, oh, hey, what do I know, "I'm just an old whore."

One problem in dramatic writing is dealing with characters who have every reason to conceal what they are thinking. How does the audience know? In this case, how does the audience know to watch episode 8, given that it is presumably about Toronaga and all the characters we love being killed?

You can, of course, give the secretive character someone to unburden himself to. But in Toronaga's case, he is too wily to unburden himself to anybody, at least anyone we know well. It would not be in his interest to tell his butler what his plans are.

Instead we have this madam telling Toronaga, "You're up to something, aren't you?" so Toronaga can say "who, me? Never." Which tells the audience, Toronaga is up to something. They can safely watch episode 8 to see how he gets himself out of this one.

(Act 1: get your hero up a tree. Act 2: he tries to get down from the tree, but only ends up further up the tree. Act 3: he escapes the tree.)

When you have a secretive or dissembling character, consider having someone else say what is on his mind. The audience won't know if they are guessing correctly, which creates much more suspense than if the character reveals himself to someone trusted.

Of course, if you know a bit of Japanese history, you know that this district will be built. It will be called ukiyo-e "the floating world," and artists such as Hiroshige will make a zillion beautiful woodcuts of it. You may also have figured out by episode 7 that Toronaga is based heavily on Tokugawa Ieyasu, who outmaneuvered his enemies to make himself... Shogun. You know that Edo will later be named Tokyo (literally "Eastern Capital"). So his eventual success will not come as a complete surprise. But this is a fictionalization, and for all we know, Toronoga's end is not Tokugawa's end.

So the scriptwriters (and perhaps the novelist -- I haven't read the book in decades) trot out Madame Gin to pull the curtain back just a bit on Toronaga's machinations.

Nicely done!

Life and Trust

2024-12-27T12:49:00.004-05:00

We went to Life and Trust in New York. It's a wild Martha Graham-esque dance performance taking place simultaneously on five floors of a fabulous Financial District skyscraper. Like Sleep No More, which Emursive also produced, the actors/dancers do a scene and then scurry off to another floor to do another. You chase after them in a herd, or if you're quick, you chase after them and the herd chases after you. Or you wait around to see what else will happen in the space you're in.

There are zillions of characters and theoretically there are interlocking plots involving deals with devils and a suspiciously addicting syrup, all happening on the night of Wednesday, October 23, 1929. (Guess what happens on Thursday!) I had almost no idea what was happening in the plots, but the dancing is spectacular, and the site-specific set is, too. Go see it if you can get to New York. It may spoil you for proscenium theater, though. It's hard to get excited about theater you watch from a single chair for the whole performance, in a space that has nothing to do with the story.

(The set is ADA-compliant, but you can't chase after people on stairs if you're not very abled indeed. But you can guess where stuff is going to happen and they'll give you a guide, if you like, to make sure you're there when it happens.)

Oh, you! New York Times

2024-12-18T13:49:00.000-05:00

A civilian friend sent me an opinion piece about video games from the New York Times. It covers the move to live, free-to-play games over single-player games you play once and move on from. Which, predictably, it bewails.

Fair enough. Live games do make it harder to release a new game. The "next Fortnite" is probably also Fortnite.

On the other hand, I'm working on a live game that releases March 6, and I'm happy that I won't be unemployed on March 7 (inshallah). And if people didn't want live games, they wouldn't buy them.

The article is off base on two points. One, yes, some games do have a lot of sidequests that can come off as grindy chores, but then also, that's an issue that game devs have identified and rejected. We often have conversations like, "We're not going to ask the player to collect one thousand feathers."

The other is that it's ridiculous to say games used to be better. Of course the MOMA is collecting old games. Museums collect old things, after their worth has been proven. There are amazing new games all the time, just as there was filler and trash twenty years ago. Games like Disco Elysium, Balatro and Hades are future classics. The present always looks worse than the past, in any medium, because we only remember the good stuff from the past. Not all ancient Greek epics were Homer. It's just, most ancient Greek epics have gone the way of the ancient Greeks.

MEGO

2024-11-12T19:41:00.004-05:00

As I discussed in my first book (and maybe my second?) I think that the best way to develop a story, any story, is to tell it over and over, to different people, without notes. This gets you a bunch of things:

a. You can tell how it holds together. If you can't remember what comes next, then the story logic needs mending

b. You can immediately tell if your listener is bored. People who read your writing have time to prepare a lie, but if their eyes glaze over, they're bored

c. You may come up with something better as you tell your story on the fly. Writing a story down freezes it, but until then, it's a fluid, living, growing thing.

So here's Yannick Trapman-O'Brian, immersive experience-maker, on Reality Escape Pod S8E7:

"I wish upon everyone an intoxicated audience. The clarity it requires of you, someone just looking you full in the face as you do your beautiful dance piece and they go, 'Okay, this is boring, I'd rather go pee.' That is such good feedback."

See?

Odysseus is a comic hero:

2024-11-12T19:32:00.001-05:00

Odysseus is a comic hero:

It's Odysseus's fault he doesn't go straight home, because he just HAS to tell Polyphemus his name
After he ends the war by hiding in a fake horse
After he tries to duck the draft by pretending to be insane
Circe turns his men into pigs
He's captured by a nymph, Calypso, who keeps him as her boy toy. For, like, 7 years.
When he gets to Ithaca, he lies his head off to the first person he meets, a shepherd boy, telling him a cockamamie story about having been kidnapped by pirates...
...the boy turns out to be Athena in drag.
When he gets home, he doesn't tell anyone who he is, not even his wife, Penelope, who he tells that he "saw" Odysseus, in Egypt or something
Even after he kills all the suitors, Penelope still tries to trick him by asking him to move their bed, to his great irritation, because it's impossible
His final task is to appease Poseidon by carrying an oar inland so far that people have no idea what an oar is.

No Proscenium

2024-11-08T11:48:00.002-05:00

Another interesting thing about immersive, experiental theatre: it is local. So much of the world is now global. There is no proper city in the West without a sushi restaurant. You look at a new museum (probably by Frank Gehry) and you have no idea where it is without looking at the caption.

But immersive theatre? If you want to experience Phantom Peak, you have to go to London.

Ladders? Los Angeles.

Meow Wolf's Radio Tave? Houston.

Factory Obscura's Time Slip? Oklahoma City.

Moment Factory's Foresta Lumina? Parc de la Gorge de Coaticook, about two hours East of Montreal.

(I was commissioned to pitch a Moment Factory show for Jean Drapeau Park on Ile Ste-Hélène in the St. Lawrence River. That was super fun even just thinking about it.)

Wasteland Weekend? Neotropolis? Burning Man? The freakin' Mojave Desert.

(I'm not counting the projection shows where you pay $30 to look at Van Gogh screen savers projected on walls.)

Like, I'm seriously thinking, wouldn't it be nice to fly to London and go to Phantom Peak? I'm sure there's other things I could find to do over there.

And notice that it's not all cultural hotspots. There's a lot of theater you can only see in London or New York. But Oklahoma City?

(Check out Everything Immersive and No Proscenium if you want proof.)

I keep thinking: this is the exact opposite of video games. Each copy of a video game is identical. You can have different experiences, but you can't have an experience that isn't programmed into the game. You can have emergent gameplay -- the interaction of different mechanics producing unforeseen effects -- but true emergent storytelling is ... well, I've never seen it, and I've played a bunch of games that are supposed to have it.

You can buy any videogame almost anywhere. You can download anything on Steam in Hokkaido or Honolulu and (if you're clever) Hanoi.

Videogames scale. If one person can play it, a million people can play it (if you throw on enough servers and work out lag issues). Every immersive theatre show is artisanal.

As with theatre, each performance is unique. There's a script, usually, but you'll never see the same performance again exactly.

It's interesting to contemplate the other end of the spectrum from the art business I'm in.

Elan Lee

2024-10-24T14:04:00.004-04:00

I'm listening to Reality Escape Pod, a podcast about escape rooms. They interview Elan Lee, who co-invented Exploding Kittens, the card game and the animated Netflix series.

His rule for making games is, "Don't make games that are entertaining. Make games that make the people you're playing with entertaining."

Maybe doesn't apply entirely to video games (which had better be entertaining!), but it is an interesting filter to put on the user experience.

He also puts the game instructions through 100+ drafts, literally, and then starts them with, "Don't read these instructions. Watch our video about how to play."

Aaaaand he has a really interesting approach to testing his games. He asks his testers only one question: "Do you want to play again?" He doesn't trust anything they might say about what's fun or not fun. People tend to want to be helpful, so they come up with things to say that may be true or not.

What he does, instead, is records the player playing. It takes longer, but you can see what they're doing when they're frowning, or when they take out their phone to check messages.

This relates indirectly to my idea that the best way to refine your story is to tell it over and over again, without notes. When you tell your story to a live human being, you can tell when they're bored. Their eyes glaze over. You can tell when they're confused. If you hand someone a story on paper, they may tell you they're confused about Y, but the recording reveals that they were actually confused a minute beforehand.

For example, they find a scene confusing. But that's not the scene's fault. It's because they didn't understand who the character was when you introduced them. And maybe the introduction itself was okay, but you said something right before that introduction that bounced them out of the story, so they were still processing it when you did that introduction, so they didn't absorb the introduction.

I was a computer science major at university. When I wrote a program, I'd get a flock of bugs. I could eliminate 50% of them right away by checking the very beginning of the program and fixing the mistakes I made setting up variables.

And that is why you must take all feedback with a grain of salt. If someone says something is confusing, it is confusing, you can't tell them it's not. But they may not realize why they find it confusing. Figuring out where the glitch is, is part of the skill of writing.

Boldly to Go

2024-10-14T15:18:00.002-04:00

I am coming around to the notion that immersive experiences are the Wild West frontier of narrative. Video games have been telling stories since, what, the 1980s? While it seems like immersive theatre dates to the early 2000s, with Punchdrunk's Sleep No More.

I say "seems," because of course there have long been immersive theater experiences. Also in the 1980s I saw a production of The Remembrance of Things Past -- mostly the naughty bits -- in a house on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven that was due to be torn down. It was promenade theater, meaning you could wander around following one or another actor in one or another plotline. Arguably promenade theatre goes back to the Middle Ages, with Stations of the Cross installations. Arguably Colonial Williamsburg, Old Sturbridge Village and other living history centers are a form of promenade theater.

(I live in Old Montreal, where there are regular ghost tours where actors play ghosts in various alleys; it is also not at all uncommon to see British redcoats marching down the street with musket and bayonet.)

But definitely the current wave came into its own with Sleep No More. And now, escape rooms.

I've been listening to the No Proscenium podcast a lot lately. There are over 450 episodes -- I hadn't known there were that many immersive events to podcast about! There's a fascinating episode about Neotropolis, which is a descendant of Burning Man, but cyberpunk, and with a plot.

Various folk have been trying to sell us LLM's (large language models, a form of AI) by saying, "What if you could talk to NPC's, you know, really talk, about anything." Never mind that no one has made an LLM worth listening to; everything is just a prototype and the real deal is right around the corner.

But in many immersive situations, you really can talk to the NPCs, or the other player characters. They're human beings and they have a character and a backstory, and they can react to you accordingly.

That, I think, is a great development. Open-ended dialogue is not something video games are good at. AIs are a very long way from being about to tell a coherent story, let alone a good one. But check out No Proscenium -- there may be immersive events in your neck of the woods.

Clams

2024-10-04T11:59:00.006-04:00

Here is a fine list of clams, that is, turns of phrase that were once clever and now, not so much. (Not sure if "not so much" counts as a clam. Apparently Paul Reiser popularized it on Mad About You. I'm not ready to give it up, though.)

Of course, there is also Know Your Meme and TV Tropes. I am not responsible for your lost hours of work if you open up TV Tropes, though.

Another reason LLMs are not the future of dialog

2024-09-16T11:08:00.003-04:00

Executives have been trying to get rid of writers ever since moving pictures were a thing. Samuel Goldwyn allegedly threw a writer out of his office, and told his assistant, "I never want to see him again! Until we need him."

Many years ago, a Canadian network, probably the CBC, decided it could save a lot of money if it made a series about a bunch of commuters taking the train home. The actors would improvise their dialogue based on the day's headlines and whatever else came into their heads.

The show was a ratings disaster, but it was cheap to produce, so it stayed on the air longer than it should have.

The latest idea for getting rid of writers is large language models, aka generative AI. So far, the demos have not been promising. AI-scripted characters turn out to be boring and creepy.

Well, think about it. If a roomful of live actors can't keep your attention, how can autocomplete software do it, when it has no concept of what it's saying?

Think about improv. The audience for live improv is tiny. If The Groundlings weren't a farm team for Saturday Night Live, who knows if it would exist as a business? Why? Most improv is a stunt. It is like the dog who walks on his hind legs: it does not walk very well, but it is fascinating to watch it succeed at all.

It is hilarious to watch the actors interpolate truth based on "yes, and." But you can only watch so much of it. No one is binge-watching improv.

I don't doubt that there are sublime moments in improv here and there, but you don't see much live improv on TV. Saturday Night Live runs on cue cards. Paul Feig lets his actors improv, but he does dozens of takes and edits a performance together in post.

So if people are not, by and large, watching live human beings making stuff up on the spot, why would we watch autocomplete software do it?

It remains to be seen how long it takes Hasbro to realize that no one wants D&D scenarios based on autocomplete, either, but I figure we've got another year of this before LLMs implode like NFTs and Beanie Babies.

Delivering the Goods

2024-06-21T11:17:00.006-04:00

I'm watching GODZILLA MINUS ONE. You might think it is a movie about a giant undersea monster with nuclear abilities.

But it is actually a movie about survivor guilt in post-WW2 Japan. The hero is a kamikaze pilot who abandoned his suicide mission. He considers himself a coward. Other characters are struggling with having survived when so many of their family died.

If you deliver the goods in a movie or game, you can do whatever the hell else you want. THE L WORD had sexy lesbians. Lesbians, and lesbian-curious folk, were watching to see sexy lesbians. The writers got away with making their characters really flawed people, because they delivered on the sexy lesbians. Without the lesbian sexiness, network executives would probably have said, "These characters aren't likable, make them nicer." But no one was watching to see nice lesbians, they were watching to see sexy lesbians. So the execs left the writers alone.

Similarly, in GODZILLA MINUS ONE, there is all the nuclear monster spectacle you could ask for. Which means the filmmakers were able to tell a story about survivor guilt. I mean, maybe they started with Godzilla and thought "How can we make Godzilla fresh." But I suspect someone wanted to make a piece about survivor guilt, and then realized they could bring a bigger audience to it by doing it in a monster movie.

Survivor guilt, by itself, is pretty heavy. Who wants to see that? Some people, but maybe not many. But if there's a nuclear monster, then sure! Bring it. The best horror stories are really proxies for stories about theme that are too bitter to take on directly.

We're working on a war story right now. But we're turning it into a ghost story, because who wants to play a game about how war is horrible?

Deliver the goods, and you are free to do what you want!

Listen to the Fans!

2024-06-14T10:05:00.001-04:00

I’ve talked about how to use feedback: listen to the criticism, be wary of solutions other people offer. Until your game comes out, fan feedback is often particularly dubious. They only know the games they’ve already played. They’re making guesses about your game. If they criticize it, they’re only criticizing the version of your game that they have in their head.

(This is a little like when your fellow devs criticize an idea you have. Often they are criticizing what they think you want, when what you want is something else.)

At a certain point, though, your game gets an announcement trailer, and now they have some data to react to. Do they like what they see? And is what they saw the same as the game you’re making? Then you’re in great shape. You’re selling what they’re buying.

On Fragpunk, we did our best to make the game wackier than competing hero shooters; and we gave the game a novel mechanic, allowing players to change the rules of the game before each round. (For example, give their opponents Very Big Heads.) To our delight, when our announcement trailer came out during the Xbox Showcase, social media and critics were all talking about how our game was a “wacky answer to Valorant.”

What if they love what they see and it’s not the game you’re making?

In my book on writing movies, Crafty Screenwriting, I suggest pitching your screenplay before you write it. Rather than writing a whole script and then trying to sell it, pitch a bunch of ideas out to buyers and see which spark interest. Then write the script that got the best reaction.

Samuel Z. Arkoff used to take posters for movies to potential buyers. The movies that buyers wanted, he commissioned scripts for those movies and then shot them.

What if you try to make the game they want? Don’t do it if it will hurt the game, obviously. But maybe the game the fans want is a better game. Maybe lean into that.

We essentially did that on We Happy Few. It wasn’t an announcement trailer, it was demoing the game at PAX. As I discuss elsewhere, we were working on a procedurally generated game, but what fans most liked in our demo was the hand-crafted individual encounters. So we went back home and pivoted the game to focus on hand-crafted encounters.

Listen to the fans.

Naming Names

2024-06-12T15:00:00.001-04:00

At some point, you may be called upon to propose a title for a game. This generally won’t happen on a AAA game, where the title is the province of the marketing department, and is something like Assassin’s Creed: More Templar Shenanigans or Splinter Cell: Tracklist. But on smaller teams, writers are often involved. I’ve been part of the team coming up with names for We Happy Few, Stories: The Path of Destinies, South of Midnight, Biomorph and, as of yesterday, the company I work for, Netease, announced the game I'm working on, Fragpunk.

Developers usually give their game a working title or a code name to begin with. We Happy Few started as Glimpse. South of Midnight was once just Midnight. Some games only have a code number. The video game industry is secretive; most companies don’t like anyone to know what they’re working on until they're ready to start building awareness.

A working title can inspire people, and give them a sense of what sort of game they’re working on. Midnight is the witching hour, and the game is about a girl with witchy powers; if it had been a more humorous game set in the South, we might have codenamed it Moonshine. Glimpse referred to an early game mechanic where the procedurally generated world would regenerate whenever you weren’t looking. (We quickly realized that would just be annoying.)

The title needs to be something that players feel good about playing. I'm not sure I'd want "Alex is playing Shower With Your Dad Simulator" to come up on my friends' Steam feed, though obviously there are people who do.

It also can’t be too hard to type. I pushed for our game to be called I’m Afraid We’ve Come to the End of Our Time, but that was perceived as too long, in spite of What Remains of Edith Finch and Everyone's Gone to the Rapture. (We did eventually make a little spinoff VR game called We’ve Come to the End of Our Time.) Even Call of Duty gets abbreviated to COD because twelve letters are just too darn many to type.

But the main purpose of the title is to get people interested in finding out more about the game. It can do that in a few ways.

It can, first of all, just tell you what the game is about. Thief is about a thief. Portal is about making portals. Civilization is about building your civilization. Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego is about figuring out where Carmen Sandiego is. Unpacking is about unpacking. Guess what I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is about?

More often, the title hints at what the game is about without stating it so baldly. The Deus Ex games are about technologically enhanced human beings. Deus ex machina is a familiar Latin phrase meaning “god out of the machine.” The main character, Adam Jensen, is part man (made in God’s image) and part machine.

(In classic plays, the writer would sometimes get his characters in such a pickle that the only way he could bring it home was to have an actor fly in, supported by a crane (a machine), playing a god (deus, who would then sort things out. Deus ex machina refers to the writer resolving the plot arbitrarily rather than through the actions of the characters themselves. It's an implicit criticism, like "hat on a hat," although H.G. Wells got away with it in War of the Worlds.)

Kentucky Route Zero is about a road trip. But routes are never numbered zero; and are you really still in Kentucky? Mysterioso.

Call of Duty is a game about war. “Call of duty” is an old phrase referring to serving as a soldier.

All of these titles suggest rather than saying. A playing seeing “Kentucky Route Zero” will hopefully think, “Huh. What’s that about?”

How can you be South of a time of day? The rule in marketing is “sell the sizzle, not the steak.”

We Happy Few suggested that our few townspeople were happy, which indeed they are, but only because they're on happy drugs all the time. There are also fewer and fewer of them. Players could guess that the title was ironic. But how?

Biomorph is about a critter (a biological) who takes the shape (morph) of other critters.

What sort of a game are you trying to sell people? Is it quirky? Is it a survival game? Call it Don’t Starve. Is it about an octopus masquerading as a suburban dad? Octodad. Is it a dungeon crawler which is also a dating sim? Boyfriend Dungeon. A bureaucrat in a depressing Soviet-style transit office? Papers, Please.

Of course, a game title can just be plain mysterious. The Return of the Obra Dinn is pleasantly ominous.

But a completely obscure title may not help with marketing. Disco Elysium was a hit, but probably not for its title. Undertale? Sigma Theory? Umurangi Generation? Engare? Goragoa? Zoombinis? These titles are distinctive, and shoot right to the top of the Google search standings. So that's good. But they tell you very little about the game. It’s probably best when the title doesn’t just stand out, it gives you a hint at least of the tone of the game.

So, why is it called Fragpunk?

Play the game when it comes out, and find out!