The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First

Notes from a CGVW talk by Dave Kosak, a Blizzard quest designer, at UC Irvine on February 22nd 2012. Original talk called "The Beautiful Road: A Writer’s Guide to Putting Gameplay First" delivered at GDC Online 2011.
TLDR: When gameplay comes first, story-telling must make it beautiful, not suffocate it. There are different ways than text to convey story and characters.

The problem

Games can be story-driven (RPG or interactive fiction), gameplay-driven (Blizzard's "gameplay first"), technology-driven (early games on Kinect, or to show off a 3D engine like Crysis), or money-driven (Zynga). How can stories be included in gameplay-driven games?

Looking at other media, telling a story requires different amounts of time: books take 10 hours, movies 2 hours, sitcom episodes 20 min. Books are walls of text, movies have long scripts, and sitcon episodes have at most 3-page scripts.
In MMOs, it's hard to display walls of text: there's a limited amount of screen and UI real-estate, and players have a limited amount of attention. Players can pay attention to the story most in calm solo exploration, slightly less in group quests, even less in dungeon raids, and nearly not at all in intense PvP.

In Diablo, the core gameplay activity is kill -> loot -> sell -> repeat. Content designers should not obstruct the core activity, e.g. with cutscenes during game action. Instead, content designers should enhance the core gameplay activity. If gameplay is a road, content should be beautiful flowers on the side of the road.

Brevity is key. Example: the Red Dead Redemption mission called free the captured sheriff. When the player sees this line popping on the screen, and the minimap showing markers for sheriff, outlaws, and nearby weapons, she figures out herself what to do first: she could go save the sheriff, kill outlaws, or look for a powerful weapon. Moreover, the quest becomes an answer to the situation presented to the player: why has the sheriff been captured? Which kind of person is the sheriff?

Telling a story without a wall of text is possible through:

• dynamic level design
• dynamic environment aesthetics (changing to reflect quest progression/completion)
• events triggered when player arrives
• hints in NPC or enemy dialogues

Characters

Character geometry: balance between too few traits = cliche, and too many traits = too complicated + boring + harder to understand. Example: Sylvanas Windrunner is persistent, protective, and hard-hearted. When she becomes undead, all her traits are even more accentuated. Other example: Han Solo is cocky, scoundrel, and egocentric.

Interactions with other characters and the background of the character let us know, without the need for a wall of text, a character's traits. Ex: Han Solo leaves his friends when they need him, Luke meets him in a shady place, he owes money to Jabba.

Quirks are not traits: quirks are minor and only serve to further individualise a character. You can find a list of traits there.

• 1-dim characters: enemies or minor allies. Ex: Hungry ogre.
• 2-dim, with 1 expected and 1 unexpected = interesting: quest givers and companions. Ex: elf druid who is protective (expected) + violent (unexpected).
• 3-dim: franchise characters such as Arthas = cocky + practical + naive. Only and exactly those 3 traits make him pick Frostmourne. When he turns undead, naive becomes power-hungry.
• 4-dim: Freeman's character diamond. Often leads to contradictions between traits, also called masks, which can either be total pretense (clown pretends he's happy but is actually depressed), partially revealing, or representing a character's aspirations. Used in marketing personas and novels.

How to compel people to a character: Cf Writing screenplays that sell:

• sympathy
• jeopardy (we want Indiana Jones to survive)
• talent/good at what they're doing
• funny
• heroic/noble
• independent/do their own thing/own quirks
• artistic/admires beauty (ex: Sherlock Holmes plays the violin)

Cliches can be used as a shortcut to establish a character. When established, take the cliche, and throw it away: Her eyes were as blue as the sky can become Her eyes sparkled like saphires on black velvet (jewels give a refined connotation) or Her eyes were the same milky blue as my mother's eyes were before I killed her (surprise and suspense!).

Social status shows differences between high-class people (smooth movement, complete sentences, slow speech, direct eye contact) and lower-class people. Body language also works. Cf the movie 300. Changing status generates interesting dramatic situations. Ex: the boss has high status at work, but when he's back home, he's low status obeying his wife.

Comparing video games to films - 4/4

You can read the first, second, third and fourth parts of this article.

TL;DR. There is no sense pursuing the Citizen Kane of games. Video games are a promising medium as diverse as films. Like other recent entertainments/media/arts/disciplines, it is trying to find its place in society.

The CKoG Chimera

A gamer wrote that no game deserves a comparison to any movie any more than any movie deserves a comparison to any game. Leigh Alexander wanted the comparison with Citizen Kane to stop. So did game publisher Boesky when he wondered how long a medium can survive if it measures its success primarily against another media.

One can not ask a whole industry (and many of its consumers) to stop talking about "the Citizen Kane of games". The game industry, gamer culture, and society more broadly, are more or less unconsciously waiting for the perfect artistic game example that will legitimize the medium. Let us call this game CKoG and suppose it could exist. Before CKoG, video games were basic geek hacks, just "for fun". In the popular mind, CKoG would demarcate the "art" era from the "hack" era.

But legitimacy has become distributed... So maybe we should stop pursuing the CKoG chimera. Maybe video games should not "compare to" films, but rather simply "look at" them. I explain below why it should be done, and how.

A promising medium as diverse as films

In comparing their stories to film or book stories, video games set the highest possible standard. Lafarge already believed in 2000 that the stories found in games were evolving: the fact that games are moving beyond simple happy endings is another signal of emerging maturity in the form. Lafarge actually stated that the stories found in Myst or Dungeons and Dragons are as complex and detailed as the book or film stories. Borut Pfeifer, a game developer, mentioned in February 2008 that games still have much more to achieve as a medium.

How emotions are conveyed in games could be improved in looking at how movies do it. Game publisher Boesky noted that The Citizen Kane reference is interpreted to apply only to emotional aspects, and not the unique attributes of our medium. Obviously, games are not movies, and trying the exact same approach as movies does not always work. I rather suggest comparing games to movies at least for the way movies convey emotions. Many other aspects of video games could be improved when put in parallel with proven film techniques such as lightings, shots and special effects. Copying movies for what they are only leads to interactive movies, which is not what video games want to be.

Jane Pinckard, a game businesswoman, said in April 2010 that other movies than Citizen Kane convey emotions better: I really don’t care about the Citizen Kane of games I want the Pride and Prejudice of games!. A blogger (gamer?) posted: Citizen Kane [...] is by no means the most important movie to define cinema. Birth of a Nation defined the epic. Metropolis might be the first sci-fi/dystopian vision. Safety Last could be the first high-concept comedy. Seeking the “Citizen Kane” of games is a silly endeavor because you should be seeking not one but several video games that redefined the genre in some manner.

There are maybe as many video game genres as film genres. Action, adventure and sport are genres shared by the two media, but certainly horror movies have been inspiring survival/horror games. Certainly interesting new game genres could emerge from film genres, and vice-versa. Can you imagine strategy movies? If yes, then Seven Samurai by Kurosawa might be a precursor. Were they inspired by the family film genre, game designers could open up a huge casual game market.

Trying to find its place in society

Game designer Steve Gaynor wrote in September 2008 that great games are almost always hidden under the juvenile veneer of big guns, tanks, zombies, robots and so forth. He stated that games and comics both remain marginalized, infantilized media and he bet that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today (that is to say, not much). Iroquois Pliskin considered this to be the Nightmare scenario: Games are a young medium with a lot of potential-- maybe even a greater porential [sic] than comics-- but they've been shoehorned into catering into the narrative and experiential needs of the teenage male. But like many gamers of my age and tastes, I hope for a future where video games break out of the historical path laid out by comics. Chris Hecker's talk at MIGS in November 2009 relayed this issue to the industry when he envisioned three futures to games: respected like movies, "ghettoized" like comics, or "something different" that the industry still has to determine/build.

Games are not the only discipline looking for its place in society. Software engineering researchers are also trying to define what "designing software" exactly means. In The once and future focus of software engineering (2007), Taylor and Van der Hoek compared software design to civil engineering: Bridge design as it is today would not be as advanced without the careful study of past structural failures [...] How do we perform in software in this regard?. See also the whole section titled Directions From Looking Outside of CS. In A Future for Software Engineering? (2007), Osterweil stated The future of software engineering is in our hands, advocating for curiosity-driven rather than problem-solving-oriented software engineering research. As a game developer, are you being curious or are you just following trends? Are you innovative, or are you copying designs who have been proven to work? Do you want to increase your market share, gain public recognition or advance the state of the art?

Meshing?

For video games to become recognized in our society as art pieces, they need to be related (and compared) to other artistic media. Bogost went in this direction: video games will only be important when — and if — others can point to our medium — to particular examples of it — and locate moments of individual insight that mattered in their lives. Even Boesky recognized that: Rather than asking our students [in game developer school] whether the Citizen of Kane has been created, let's see the film school ask whether the Mario of film has been achieved.

The previous paragraph reveals how efficient Ebert's strategy can (involuntary?) be. In rejecting video games as less artistic than films, the famous film critique reduces their integration in society. Stating video games are not art is more efficient to limit their recognition than just not mentioning them. However, some game critiques are actually going in the opposite direction: they compare games to movies. Eric Swain identified that the story of Brutal Legend lacked one part (the Return) of the traditional three-part hero's journey.

Finally, gamers are also changing society from the inside. The former generation Y kids are now grown-ups. Some WoW players such as Larisa or Tobold recognized in April 2010 that middle-aged geeks are an increasingly important demographic for MMORPGs. Obviously, not everyone plays video games. But with gaming becoming more and more casual, an increasingly broader audience is being reached every day. Five years ago, I could find at least one person in any friend party who was playing video games. Nowadays, it is hard for me to find friends who do not play any video game. What will it be in 20 years?

Comparing video games to films - 3/4

You can read the first, second, third and fourth parts of this article.

Findings

During my research on the respective histories of early Gothic horror movies and early video games, I have noted several similarities and differences between the two media.

The earliest film of Human history was Roundhay Garden Scene in 1888. The earliest video game was the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device in 1947. Both have the same nanoscopic size in today's cultural literacy: aside from field experts or historians, no one knows about them. In 1902, ie 14 years after the first movie, Le Voyage dans la Lune was realized by Méliès. The movie stays notable and even praised in our modern society. More than a century after its release, Ebert even wrote the movie had artistry and imagination. Surprisingly, the video game released fourteen year after the first video game was ... Spacewar!. Some mention modern video games owe a lot to Spacewar!.

However, Steve Russell is much less famous than Georges Méliès. Ebert considers games are not art because Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control. Could video games be more artistic if their authorial intentionality was stronger and more obvious? The Civilization series have not (yet) been considered artistic by Ebert, although the name of their designer, Sid Meier, is clearly associated to the title. The same way James Cameron (and not the actors) is mentioned on Avatar's poster.

The early video game industry seems to have been much more competitive and business-oriented than the film industry. For example, Atari and other companies were "inspired" by the Odissey to make their own home console. Hence in 1975, Magnavox started filling lawsuits against everyone. I do not think such a hard competition happened between early film makers.

Moreover, while the first movies were not much more than recorded theater plays, the first video games were geeky electronic hacks. Tennis for two had been created to attract people to the exposition. It seems many console companies jumped at the chance of copying Odissey just to make money. Moreover, computer game developers of the 1970's such as Don Daglow were just writing games for each other for fun. These approaches differed a lot from the clearly artistic approaches taken by the early movies of the 10's or 20's.

Video games are seeking legitimacy

In September 2008, Steve Gaynor, a game designer, formulated what legitimacy was: a broad cultural relevance to the lives of the general population. In other words, it is not exactly whether video games as a whole have an impact on society at large (financially and so forth) but whether content of the medium itself is relevant to, say, your grandmother. Did Battlezone or Centipede speak to her personal experience?. He gave another illustration when he mentioned that a senator villifying [sic] video games to get his name on people's lips means that the medium is divisive. It also means that the works themselves are completely irrelevant to the senator as pieces of entertainment or expression, or else he'd be enjoying and defending them.

Leigh Alexander asked in April 2009: aren't the cultural and practical differences between film and games so broad that it's useless to analogize? Later in November, she detailed her point: repeatedly raising Kane is amateurish and useless. It's self-defeating shorthand for what Bogost and Wasteland correctly identify as the real desire: legitimacy for games. Matthew Wasteland (a gamer/game critique) formulated the real issue behind the Citizen Kane effigy: people want games that will artistically legitimize them to everyone who doesn’t play them. Eric Swain paraphrased that the "Citizen Kane of games" buzz is about gamer's insecurities and wanting a title to point to that everyone [society] will recognize, though may not have played, as art like Citizen Kane. They [gamers] want that so they wont feel insecure when they talk about thier [sic] hobby. The whole question has nothing to do with intellectual stimulation.

Bogost argued that the artistry of a media can not be established as it used to be half a century ago: Legitimacy has become distributed, a mesh. Indeed, video games are not movies, and the social context has changed a lot between the establishment of film legitimacy and video games birth. With the recent social changes in mind, Lafarge gave in the second paragraph of WINSIDE OUT several areas of change that she thought made games metamorphosing into a richly expressive medium:

• the convergence of games with fiction and art
• shifts in representation and the deployment of information in games
• the assimilation of a filmic first-person point of view
• the growth of a culture of cheating and hacking
• rethinking of the win-lose dichotomy
• the development of immersive role-playing and emergence of cooperative relationships as central to game play

Read the fourth part.

Comparing video games to films - 2/4

You can read the first, second, third and fourth parts of this article.

The game industry has been buzzing a lot about the Citizen Kane of games. Because Citizen Kane was released in 1941, the history given here stops in 1941. Although Citizen Kane is a drama film, I have chosen to study the gothic horror genre history. I simply enjoy more watching old monster movies than old drama movies. I think the technical and conceptual improvements observed in the monster movie genre can be generalized to the overall film industry.

Silent films

Silent films (as art pieces and not simply proof-of-concepts) emerged in the 1890's. 1890's movies lasted in general less than 3 minutes (although Jeanne d'Arc by Méliès in 1899 was 10-minute long). Monster movies of the early 20th century were often inspired by novels. Translated into today's game jargon, this means they did not create any original IP. But there were several smart features and prowesses. To my mind, these early prowesses are characteristic of art. For instance, silent films had no spoken dialogs or sound effects but only a background music. The stories featured young heroes in love, a main bad guy, suspense, fear and even an awareness of the audience: the dialog slides stay long enough for everyone to have enough time to read them.

Frankenstein in 1910 lasted approximately 12 minutes and was shot in three days, which was a little longer than usual. Interesting techniques are already used. Around 7:40, for example, the scene takes place in the room of Frankenstein. On the left, a chair and a table where Frankenstein sits. On the right, a mirror pointing towards the entrance of the room. Thanks to the mirror, the spectator is the first to see the monster entering the room. This scene is also the time when the monster sees himself in a mirror and despises his creator for his ugliness. Positioning the mirror this way (presumably tried to) put the spectator in the place of the monster. This mirror play is actually repeated later in the movie (11:20) to bring dramatic effects. When looking in the mirror, Frankenstein sees his evil creation instead of his own image. Interestingly, this mirror effect is often used in Citizen Kane ...

Nosferatu was realized in 1922 and lasts 94 minutes. Some kind of special effects happen, such as around 1:01 when Nosferatu disappears inside the barn, the shadow projection of Nosferatu at 1:19, or Nosferatu's death at 1:22. The film conveys an atmosphere. One could argue that Frankenstein (1910) mentioned above was a simple theater play recorded thanks to a film camera. Nosferatu is unarguably a movie, and it represents well the Gothic horror movie genre.

Sound films

Sound films were invented in 1900, but they started to be seen commercially only in the late 1920's. Thanks to sound films, musical films could emerge as a movie genre. Sound films also gave voice to actors. This additional task meant actors could be in trouble if they could not perform well vocally. I could not check the source personally, but actors such as Anny Ondra in Blackmail (1929) have experienced contrasting consequences of these technologies. She had a lot of success in the Hollywood silent movies, but her Czech accent was felt unsuitable for the film. But let us go back to Gothic horror movies...

Unlike the 1910 Frankenstein, the 1931 Frankenstein's story did not follow the original novel. In the novel, the monster is smart, able to speak and only starts to be violent when his creator refuses to create a wife for him. Frankenstein is a student and has worked alone on his creature. How Frankenstein makes his creature is not mentioned explicitly. In the 1931 movie, a limping assistant helps Frankenstein, now professor, to make his creature. The spectator watches Frankenstein collecting dead flesh from graves and giving birth to the monster electrically using thunder. The monster is completely mute except for grunts and growls and his violence comes from the "criminal brain" that was used to make him. Undoubtedly, the 1931 Frankenstein sound movie convey the creature growls more efficiently than the 1910 version. However, the actor roles have been oversimplified, maybe to reach a more mainstream audience?

Dracula (1931) is considered as a classic of the era and of its genre. Bela Lugosi, playing Dracula, seems to have been instrumental in the film success. Although the audience can hear the actors' voices and sound effects, there is no background music (except during the credits). Other films of 1931 such as the Bollywood Alam Ara used songs extensively. Hence, it becomes clear that not all technical features available at the time were being used in Dracula. Hence, the movie's success had, apparently, not much to do with technological improvements. The special effects stay relatively minor. For instance, the transformation of Dracula into a bat is always done off screen, there is no smoke effect. Considering Nosferatu had special effects a decade before, this lack of special effects in Dracula might have been disappointing for the audience.

Read the third part.

Comparing video games to films - 1/4

You can read the first, second, third and fourth parts of this article.

Roger Ebert

In November 2005, Roger Ebert, a movie critique, wrote: I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control. several reations of video games websites followed.

During a conference in late June 2007, Clive Barker, an English artist criticized Ebert's position of 2005. Ebert answered to Barker in July 2007. More reactions of video games websites and journalists followed.

Some days ago, in a response to a TED talk by Kellee Santiago, Ebert defended his point again: Video games can never be art. Very very many reactions followed on video games news websites and blogs (see also this google search). [Certainly off-topic, but worthy of interest: these different reaction magnitudes (2005 < 2007 << 2010) show how much video games communities have sprouted in the last few years.]

Citizen Kane

According to Keith Boesky, the "Citizen Kane of games" buzz started when Trip Hawkins first ran EA ads asking whether a computer can make you cry. This morphed into the question of when we would see the "Citizen Kane" of games. I could not find any source confirming that the actual source of the buzz was Trip Hawkins or EA. No date either. Anyway, Citizen Kane has been mentioned regularly since 2004.

• January 2004: Shayne Guiliano, a video game industry member, first mentioned Citizen Kane in a response to Ernest Adams about the visual impacts of video games.It is a misconception to say that visuals are not an excellent way of illustrating the internal states on mind. This problem was first solved in the film "Citizen Kane".
• October 2006: John Gaeta, a visual effects designer mentioned the Citizen Kane of gaming.
• March 2005: Warren Spector wondered how the video game industry could implement better stories: Citizen Kane was not a particularly successful movie… but RKO was willing to take a chance. We need to get to that point.

In February 2009, Boesky wrote that the "Citizen Kane of games" idea is poisoning young developers' minds. In April 2009, the topic was discussed between Bogost and Alexander, and some game critique reactions followed. Guillermo del Toro said in May 2009: In the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Kane of games.

In October 2009, Michael Thomsen, an IGN video game expert, mentioned during an ABC podcast that Citizen Kane has been hailed by film critics for decades as one of the best movies in history. And if Kane had a symbiotic partner in the world of video games, it would be the Metroid Prime trilogy. Eric Swain, a game critique, objected: Saying that this movie revolutionized the populous into thinking films were important, saying that before it they weren’t thought of as art and afterwards they were, well there’s no other way to put it, it is a lie. It is an artificial pinpoint created by its almost universal placement on top 10 lists and because of it has had its own mythos inflated beyond the reality of the film. Others have also reacted.

Nowadays, many critics, game journalists and developers use the reference recurrently.

Stating the problem

Given their very different histories, how can these two media/domains/arts be compared? (this is not a rhetorical question!) Clive Barker said in June 2007 that video games is a medium that’s barely 2 decades old, and he (Ebert) is saying oh, there’s no 'War And Peace' yet – of course there isn’t! When asked by Alexander about Why Raising 'Kane' Won't Help Games' Legitimacy, Bogost explained: It's a red herring, because we think that having a Citizen Kane will prove our artistic legitimacy, but masterworks are not how artistic legitimacy is proven anymore. This series of posts (kind of) aims at contributing to Bogost's point in comparing the early history of films and games.

While I am not a film expert/critique and I do not know anything about film theory, I can read wikipedia: the first movie was realized in the late 1880s. Judging from the content, it was more a technological proof of concept than anything art-related. I give a short history of cinema as an art, focusing arbitrarily on (vampire/zombie) gothic horror movies. Focusing on a particular genre makes it shorter and easier to analyze unknown materials, and I guess the same conclusions apply for other film genres as well (eg epic, adventure or Westerns).

Read the second part.