Quests - Howard 2008

Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives by Jeff Howard, in 2008.

History of quest games

Year	Game	Innovations
1974	DnD	GM as referee, quests taken from Celtic, Norse, and Arthurian mythologies.
1976	Adventure	on computer, first RPG, network play
1983	King's Quest series	cut scenes, music, multiple endings, optional puzzles, and side-quests.
1985	Ultima IV series	virtues, colors, and classes are related
1986	Zelda series	quest status screen shows the player's progress, first action-adventure game.
1999	EQ	proliferating tasks rather than a single main quest
2004	WoW	lore quests, the never-ending war theme is a bleak scenario not particularly conductive to meaningful gameplay: failing a quest is not problematic.

Intro

Campbell's "Hero's Journey" consists of separation, initiation, and return. The individual builds himself, as found in medieval romances. In games, the initiation phase is lengthened and repeated, since it has most action.

A quest is an action that is meaningful to a player. It's also called a "mission" in games with a modern setting.

Ludologically, a quest has goals and consists of searching a functional meaning: a key opens a door, therefore the player should look for a door. A sword kills monsters, therefore the player is expecting to encounter enemies soon. Once meaning is found, the quest is over.

Narratologically, a quest has a story. The story and the lore motivate and immerse the player in the task.

But actually, meaningful quests come from striking a balance between too much action and too much narrative, while keeping in mind the big picture of the game's meaning. Except for XP and loot, why is that quest important to the player? What satisfaction does the player get by doing that quest? Here are some clues:

• Impact on the world: achievement, gaining power, learning about the lore, altering political or moral balance, or changing relationships with NPCs
• Back story: motivation to learn what happened before or what is going to happen after the quest is over.
• Lore: themes and ideas encoded within the world, such as religion, politics, landscape, objects, or challenges. "The world itself is the puzzle", and the player shows his opinions by playing the game.

Symbols should be tied to game mechanics. For example, in Ultima, completing a quest requires understanding the world's allegorical meanings: some colors are associated to a class and a quality (red = warrior = valor). Obtaining a part of a relic should open a door or provide a new power

In the end, the player may quest to make the plot progress, improve his avatar, or to try out fun gameplay. Ideally, a quest should combine the three, but it gets tricky in games where the player is allowed to pursue quests in the order he wants.

Spaces

Both macro and micro levels should guide the player towards the general direction to go to. Both should create a sense of progression and convey a meaning by their layout.

Micro level: balancing exploration and challenge. Tiered spaces such as towers or crypts are easy to navigate: traveling towards the highest or lowest level ensures challenges and rewards. Mazes with a sort of structure also work. There should also be disorientation elements such as traps, secret doors, or dead-ends, as well as obstacles standing between the player and his goal.

Macro level: quest hubs. Hubs are known and relatively safe places such as cities or campgrounds where the player is given quests and has to return to complete them. Hubs are surrounded by several quest locations. WoW has breadcrumb quests to encourage exploration, but no main quest; that makes the world seem disconnected and episodic. See the Morrowind map: the player starts on the periphery of the world, and travels clockwise from hub to hub until Ghostgate at the center of the map for the final encounter.

Dreams within games create initiatory spaces: the avatar can be changed into an animal, a ghost, or an older self, but remains controlled by the player, increasing the sense of immersion in the non-dream game world.

Characters

Cf Propp's dramatis personae at the beginning of theater scripts: characters are not defined by their traits, but by their actions: villain, donor, helper, or hero.

Dialog: keep it short, and let players have choices. yes/no selections are too simple: add a reason to add meaning. Example: NPC says "Take this money as a reward to save my kids". Player should not simply be given "OK", or "accept"/"refuse", but rather "I don't need money to save kids" (which shifts the player's alignment to lawful good) or "You don't have to give me the money - I'm going to kill you myself" (evil, and eventually summons the guards).

One quest per NPC is rare in modern RPGs.

Quest types

Name	Description
fetch	find an object and return it to an NPC
delivery	give an object to an NPC
dungeon crawl	go to certain points of a dungeon - and get loot on the way
escort/protect	usually an NPC, but could be a fellow player too
kill/combat	the most loaded with meaning: killing a peasant is very different from killing a demon. Opponents have to be obstacles to the plot

Objects

Most objects that the player collects are useless (sold to NPCs for money) or functional (healing potion, armor). But certain objects can motivate quests if they are:

• needed but missing,
• loaded with symbols,
• relatively powerful,
• fun to use (eg cast a random skill),
• with a distinct appearance (eg the Tatoos of Planescape Torment)

Sometimes, these objects only are MacGuffins: they are unimportant in themselves but motivate and unfold the plot.

The rod of seven parts: make a story from the whole and powerful artifact, break it apart, and spread the pieces around the world. The story follows naturally, and the players discover the meaning of the quest gradually. It also encourages exploration. Micro-level example: the 3-headed flail from the De'Arnise Hold in Baldur's Gate 2 requires the player to fully investigate the whole castle, and not just go directly to the boss.

There are varieties of ways the player can get an object: looted, forged, stolen, summoned by a sacrifice, or found in a chest at the bottom of a cave. But the way the player gets in possession of an object should give clues about using that object. Examples: a mace loot from a giant should require lots of strength. Frostmourne, given by the Lich King to trick Arthas the paladin, is obviously cursed.

Challenges

Tie the quest presentation to the world map and the log book. The logs of completed quests must give clues about the next quests or where to find them.

Conflicting goals make interesting choices. For example, in Ultima IV, the avatar gains compassion points by not killing 'good' characters, and gain valor points by never backing down from a fight. Interesting choice arises when the player is attacked by a 'good' character. [But what the player chooses (ie the player's opinion) differs from why he was given the choice in the first place (ie the meaning of the game).]

See also: hero's journey.

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.

FDG 2011 comments

A few comments from FDG 2011. My points are [inside brackets], the rest comes from their respective authors.

In the last Madden NFL game, people tended to play the same kinds of games and rarely changed to different types/modes.

[The Player Experience workshop had roughly 5/15 papers accepted. 3/5 accepted paper authors were not here. What's the goal of a workshop then?]

Secondary game objectives should support the primary objectives, otherwise they distract, frustrate or make the player lose. Mario side-scrollers coins sometimes make the player go off-path, but the player always has to go from left to right. Player should be told when an objective is secondary.

Minimalist game design (from one of the designers of Osmos): few rules, few mechanics, few choices, deep (combinatorial) complexity (eg NP complete), simple controls, abstract, tightly-coupled systems.

CRPG guidelines: balance should be based on player expertise or avatar skills, not on character level or XP. Avatar background should affect the game. If the avatar is supposed to have lived in the game world for years, then the game should not remind the player of the avatar background, and NPC should not meet the avatar for the first time. [Possible solution: player's avatar could start as a toddler and ages as the player spends more time IG]

Weak ties make social storytelling. [Add to this that being socially active means connecting your weak ties together (you play the go-between). Therefore, in a distant future, there should not be any social storytelling anymore because everybody will be friend (ie strong tie) with everybody. In fact, Dunbar's number says you can't be friend with more than 120 people (the other people are just contacts, not actual friends). Hence, people will keep trying to (re)connect their weak ties together! Cf also Harris and Nardi's paper on collaborative play in WoW]

Mateas: computational media is a research field in which computer science is seen as a tool for expression.

If you want a domain to progress, and the industry does not care about that domain to progress, then you have to go try academia. [Maybe a good approach in many domains, but it does not work in MMOG because building one requires hundreds of man-years]

Frustration arises when player fails to overcome a challenge. Frustration makes players impatient.

[Literature] A qualitative study of Ragnarök Online private server in-game sociological issues

Back in November 2009, I mentioned the multiplayer game design issues impacting social life inside RO. The paper has been accepted at FDG2010. You can read the final version.

I conducted interviews and observed players' behaviors in an official server (2000 users at peak time) and two private servers (200 and 2000 users at peak time). On the examined private servers, the social environment and some of the game mechanics were more adapted to players' needs. Examples are:

• a broader choice in avatar customization
• the ability to observe parts of the game world while not being logged-in (the Control Panel)
• less constrained groups
• events and GM taking the player community more into account
• easier XPing (leveling in RO is the main activity, and it's a lot of grinding) thanks to rates and the Warpra+Healer combo
• @commands enabled to players so that they can see who is online, sell merchandises with a character while playing with another and compare prices

Clearly, the Warpra+Healer totally changed the game. Champions could camp the respawn of MVP (boss monsters) and kill them relatively quickly with Asura Strike. This left virtually no end-game challenge for guilds other than the bi-weekly War of Emperium (battles between guilds in castles lasting between two to three hours).

[Literature] Fundamentals of Game Design, ch6: Character Development

Even though characters should have a clear role to the player, they must not be too stereotypical (if they are, they should have a little something that differentiates them from the standard stereotype). Characters should be credible. Even if they can be complex, they must stay consistent. Like in movies, a game's IP and marketing often rely on the main character. Games often use the main character's name for the game title to make consumers associate the IP with the character. Examples are Super Mario Bros, Duke Nukem or Sonic the Hedgehog. In short, characters should be appealing, believable, and the players should be able to identify with them. Incongruity and Disharmonious elements can be introduced for humor's sake.

Relationship between player and avatar

In RPGs where the player avatar is designed by the player, the avatar has no personality other than what the player chooses to create. In old textual adventure games (or Half Life), avatars (like Gordon Freeman) are nonspecific: the game designer does not need to specify or ask anything to the player about the avatar because the player never sees it. But computer graphics improved. It became awkward to write more and more complex stories about empty avatars.

Avatars became specific. Depending on how the player controls the avatar, he/she will not identify with it the same way. Some avatars such as Mario or Lara Croft remain puppets inside the hands of the player. Others such as April Ryan from The Longest Journey have their own will (she refuses to act too dangerously when the player asks her to). The avatar utterances can also be very important to the player. April Ryan speaks a lot (and sometimes gives clues to the player when she talks) while Gordon Freeman from Half-Life does not speak at all. The player can be directly inside the avatar (Half-Life) or just suggesting where it could move (The Longest Journey). Semispecific avatars are between nonspecific and specific avatars: the player does not know enough about them to form an opinion, but these avatars have a decent background (like Link in Zelda or Mario).

Men can identify with female avatars as long as the character is acting in a role that men are comfortable with such as exploration or adventure. However, women can be disgusted by hyper-sexualized female avatars. While men tend to simply use an avatar as a puppet, women care more about it and may appreciate to be able to customize it as they wish. The more details given by the designer about an avatar, the more independent it will be.

Personality

Three factors help show a character's personality: its appearance, behavior and language.

Visual appearances: art-driven character design

Art-driven character design consists of thinking about characters' appearance first. It is usually employed for quite shallow and straightforward characters that can also be used in other media like TV or comics. Characters can be humanoid (2 legs, 2 arms and a head), non-humanoid (vehicles, machines, animals or monsters) or hybrids , robots like C-3POr cyborgs). Cartoon appearances can provide 4 stereotypes to characters:

• cool (detached but focused, clever and often rebellious to authority) like Ratchet or Otcho
• tough (aggressive, strong, often hyper-sexualized) like Duke Nukem or Lara Croft,
• cute (large eyes and heads, round body, innocent look but sometimes handle weapons bigger than themselves), like Mario, Sonic or Pikachu
• goofy (funny, comedic), typically like Goofy from Disney

Representations of stereotypes may vary depending on the culture (cute in a manga is not the same as cute in Tintin or Marvels) and age (cute or scary is differently represented for 5-year-old girls or 30-year-old men). Although kids love cartoonish characters, they hate goody-two-shoes ones.

Clothes and weapons suggest a lot about a character: see Darth Vader's helmet or Indiana Jones' hat and whip. A rapier suggests elegance, while a meat cleaver suggests blood and violence. Jewelry and accessories such as crowns, bracelets or rings also help a lot to recognize a character's role. They can also act as containers of skills or powers that can be transfered between characters. Names (Bugs Bunny), nicknames (Snake), clothes color palette (blue, red and yellow for Superman versus plain black for Batman) or sidekicks (Tails for Sonic or Watson for Holmes) also help define the characters. Sidekicks can also sometimes help the player (the fairy Navy in Zelda) or provide an additional perspective of the hero to the player.

Concept art is done early in the design process and should not consists of too elaborated drawings. The concept arts are to be used by the marketing and programmer teams to get a rough idea of the game.

Behaviors: story-driven character design

Story-driven character design consists of thinking about the character's role, personality and behavior rather than its appearance. Artists come after the designer has decided how the avatar interacts with the game mechanics. Even though the interactions were not really complex, SSX Tricky gained a lot in including meaningful character rivalries in a snowboard game.

When characters appear for the first time to the player, there is a minimum of information about them to give to the player: where does the new character come from? Why does the avatar meet him/her? Also, character traits should be shown/seen/experienced rather than directly mentioned in the game handbook. Behaviors convey more depth about character's personalities than their appearances, providing the player has opportunities to observe these behaviors.

A character can be described by its attributes. Status attributes such as Health Points change frequently while characterization attributes such as age or gender (nearly) never change in the game. Emotional states and relationships like in the Sims are another very recent kind of attributes that describe characters' behaviors.

Dimensionality can give a more realistic perception of a character. The table nearby, deeply inspired by figures 6.9 to 6.12 of the book, illustrates the possible dimensions of characters found in the Lord of the Rings. Zero-dimensional characters have binary emotional states with no mixed feelings. They may have more than two emotional states, though. One-dimensional characters only have one emotion that can change during the game. Two-dimensional characters have multiple non-conflicting impulses, they face no ambiguity, while three-dimensional characters can have contradictory and conflicting emotions producing inconsistent behaviors. Three-dimensional characters can do things they do not really want to, reluctantly, or even sabotage their own efforts subconsciously.

Number of character dimensions	Lord of The Rings example	Figure
0 dim	Orcs
1 dim	Gimli and his attitude towards elves change over time
2 dim	Denethor never faces any moral dilemma... until the end
3 dim	Gollum towards the Ring

Characters, especially the hero, can grow while the player progresses through the game. They can grow physically, intellectually, morally or emotionally. RPGs often feature a rich and complex growth of the hero and other characters in the game. The stats of the character, its appearance, skills, language, interactions with other characters or even the plot can evolve to show various types of evolution (more power, more knowledge, etc.). Some character archetypes such as the mentor or the rival have proven they were instrumental in the success of a story, but they should be used wisely.

Language: audio design

Characters can also be recognized to their notorious sound (Darth Vader's breath) or phrases ("What's up doc?" from Bugs Bunny). Much of sound design involves psychological expectations: "glug glug glug" for a drowning person or metallic sound when metallic-looking objects are touched. Sounds must also fit the movements of the character.

Accent or vocabulary specific of a time-period, social class or country helps setting the context of the game. Bad grammar reveals bad schooling or Master Yoda. Speed of speech can indicate excitement, boredom, anxiety or suspicion. The tone of the speaker and vocal quirks such as slutter also convey a lot about the character.

Test your skills

• Think about a human two-dimensional character as a child, teenager and adult. Give several attributes giving clues about the age and maturity of the character at each stage.
• Imagine two characters whose strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Show how they seem unalike but nevertheless complement each other quite well. Show how they are weak when they are alone.

NPC and virtual society

Think inside or outside the box?

In order to immerse the player, game designers build what is called a magic circle. In games, NPC are instrumental in the setting up of the magic circle. Their dialogs set the tone of the world. Their quests teach the player which basic avatar actions (walk, talk, attack, buy) can be used to achieve higher-level goals (leveling, getting appropriate equipments or traveling). Such NPC somehow teach which actions can be done in the society.

A society can be described (maybe not entirely, though) by what it contains or what it supports. In Western societies for example, charity or monogamy are seen positively. But a society could also be described by what it does not support (selfishness and polygamy). In fact, immersing a player in a world with original social rules could be done more easily in showing the player the few "bad" NPC rather than the anonymous crowd of "good" NPC. For example, Jon Irenicus in the beginning of chapter 2 of Baldur's Gate II is being apprehended by the Cowled Wizards. His casting spells and killing people inside the city clearly defines him as an outlaw because of the Wizards trying to arrest him. With this only one cinematic sequence, the player understands his acts will have consequences. The message is understood more directly, meaningfully and intuitively than if it was done by several "good" NPC (eg a tutorial character mentioning in a dialog that "every act has its consequences" or even city Guards saying "I keep an eye on you"). Illustration nearby: covering the entire (white) box surface needs more crosses than marking the (red) box boundary.

A sense of belonging

As seen before, NPC can help the player know the rules of the virtual society. But they also can strengthen the magic circle in giving the player a sense of belonging to this virtual world.

Robert Hercz, a Canadian journalist from the Saturday Night wrote that Psychopaths are not like the rest of us. In his psychopath examples, he includes the con man, whose real-self is manipulative, lying, parasitic, and irresponsible. Success psychopath movies such as The Silence of the Lambs or Dexter (TV series) insist on the differences between "them" (psychopaths) and "us" (normal people): they can kill people in cold blood (pun?), they manipulate people without remorse, etc. These differences make us remember that we are not psychopath. Hence they comfort us in our belonging to society.

Similarly, Bergson in Laughter explains that we laugh mainly to compensate for a "bug" in a situation. He gives the example of people not paying attention: stumbling on the sidewalk curb, colliding with a streetlight or falling from a chair one just tried to sit on. The lack of attention is the bug, transforming the attentive humans into stupid and blind machines. Laughter is a social protection.

In video games, NPC designs are most of the time based on the function they provide to the player (quests are used to earn XP, merchants to make money and monsters to complete quests or earn XP) and not on the experience provided. Designing flat true NPC does not strengthen the magic circle. One could argue that in movies, kicking the dog, You have failed me or You have outlived your usefulness followed by the horrified faces of the "normal" people go in this way. To my mind, they are just clichés used to show how really bad the Big Bad is; their goal is not the magic circle. So for games, simple NPC dialogs or actions could easily convey the sense of belonging to the society. Why not seeing a NPC spontaneously laughing at another during an embarrassing situation? If having a lot of money should not be a symbol of success in your favorite MMOG, then why not thinking of NPC who criticize rich players?

[Conf] Creative Writing in Video Games

Here are the notes I took at the last OC IGDA chapter. The title of this panel discussion was "Creative writing in video games". First, Steven-Elliot Altman from Acclaim introduced himself. Then the panel discussion started. In the panel were Chris Avellone, John Gonzalez, Anne Toole, Leonard Boyarsky, Dan Arey, Cameron Dayton and Steven-Elliot Altman. My comments stay in [brackets].

9 Dragons anecdotes by Altman

In 9 Dragons, the first authentic martial arts massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Altman created and animated The Hermit, a character in charge of many events in the game. Altman explained that The Hermit is like a rock star, but in real life I'm Steven! You have to reconnect to reality sometimes. Altman mentioned that 9 Dragons is F2P and that 6% of the players use the item mall (a RMT system - virtual items can be purchased for real money). Altman told the audience that The Hermit is the most powerful character in the game and can beat any others. [Interesting idea in a PvP game?] Altman decided to organize an event that would lead a player able to control a Dark Hermit, the ultimate killing Mob of The Land. Wielding a Sabre, he has all the power of The Hermit but will be bent on destruction. [On each of the 3 servers worldwide, the winner of a month-long rush-for-XP event in September won the Dark Hermit in January.] Following this rise of an extremely powerful player, other players feared to die and loose XP for nothing. So Acclaim decided to enable the Dark Hermit only between 4pm and 7pm (for instance) and increase the XP rate by 5 times during this period of the day. [Risky XP daily event.]

Random notes

[These notes are sometimes exact quotes from the panelists, sometimes a summary of what they actually said. I only kept the parts I found the most interesting.]

• You have to be creative on demand.
• Everyone, players or in the industry, share a common knowledge/common references about games.
• Nearly all the panelists read comics and novel books.
• But if you read the same thing and regurgitate the same thing all the time ... That's why you have so many Space Marines at the moment.
• Be able to sit and daydream, ignite ideas.
• You need to practice daydreaming.
• Geek culture is a shorthand in discussions.
• Game design and game writing were often put together in the discussion, people did not really make any difference between the two.
• In a game, everything tells a story. Music, textures, level design and even game mechanics are telling a story.
• Games are mimicking film conventions.
• Kratos fights against himself to save his wife and daughter in the last level of God of War. So this game is actually not totally for 9-year-old skater kids who only want to bash and slash. [But we had a discussion about that after the panel. In Ico as well, the player protects a weak person that the hero cherishes. But in Ico, it is all the time, this entire innovative game is "poetic"/"artful". I argued that in God of War, the wife and daughter scene where Kratos has to take them in his arms to heal them was only a pretext for "kids" to slash, because in the end, which game sold more copies? 3.21M for God of War and apparently between 650K (original sources are dead ...) or 900K]. Die Hard was also mentioned as a true love story [but it is yet another pretext for action to happen.]
• Writers have first to spend 10,000 hours before reaching a decent level and be recognized for their good work. [I hope this is a big exageration.]
• I use Excel cells for 3x5 cards. I write molecule stories in them and I can move them where I want. [this reminds me of post-its used in affinity diagrams in HCI.]
• [The panel consisted of 6 men and 1 woman but in college classes, I think there are usually more girls than boys in writing classes. So why are there more males than females writers in the game industry? I was told by a woman at this conference that the writing area has more girls in proportion than other areas of the game industry. But there are not many because group meetings look like fraternity meetings when you collaborate with a male development team. Hence, when you are a woman, you do not always grasp all the references, but you have to compensate with your own ideas.]
• Merchants NPC should not have too much story/background because the player wants to talk to them quickly. [generally true, but I think including merchants in stories, or unlocking them through the story could be interesting]
• If the player does not read the text, he/she looks at NPC faces
• ["Video games as art forms" is a cliché I can not hear anymore. SOME video games are TRULY art, and not presumably and vague "art forms".]
• Take a step back, think what a player expects at that moment
• If there is one NPC that is permanently (verbally or any other way) agressive to the player, the player should always have the last word. [wrong in Pokémon Red/Blue with the repeated Rival encounters: even though he always loses the fight, he says he was not really trained, that is the reason why the player has beaten him, and the player is just weak, and bye looser]
• [no game remembers the whole dialog tree to establish a psychological trend of the player and adapt the game possibilities to him/her. Crazy idea to use logging to anticipate people's behaviors ...]
• You do not want people to hate a NPC because he speaks too much [I find it depends on the situation. I found Jaheira in Baldur's Gate II spoke really a lot, especially during her romance with the player's avatar. At first, reading the dialog is bearable. But being interrupted in a crucial room of a dungeon, about a random discussion topic such as the divine origins of the player's avatar or the good old time with Elminster, is the best way to make the player hate the character AI. But this same situation in a tavern would be fine. The Team Rocket always speaks too much, and I find that gives them a small humorous role when they lose the fight.]
• You do not want the player to follow a weird track, you have to keep the control of the story [instead, why not having meta-stories that do not define the perimeter, but rather the types of possible interactions, stories being generated on top of the meta-story rules?]
• Watching a powerful NPC fighting at your side is much more impressive than any dialog
• Even evil choices should be satisfying for the players [Black and White!]
• The illusion of choice: do not let the player think "what does the developer want me to do now?"
• In 9 Dragons, some people did not want to join any clan. We did not expect that. So we started developing content for them, because after all, they pay for that!