Tuesday, September 29, 2020 Richard Dansky, Part Three

...Did I mention RPGs? Richard Dansky also writes RPGs. ...Did I mention RPGs? Richard Dansky also writes RPGs.

Alex: You have an M.A. in English. Richard: I'm one degree away from being completely unemployable, so... Alex: How has that informed your work? Is there an academic theory you find useful? Richard: In terms of theory... just the notion of literary analysis and being able to deconstruct story structures and narrative structures. The training that I got as a graduate student, the analysis of those narrative structures, is something that served me very well. Alex: So the ability to see the hidden structures in stories. Richard: Yeah. And I could start rambling on about [Russian philosopher Mikhail] Bakhtin and all that, but... Alex: Oh, please do. "What can Bakhtin do for you?" Richard: Bakhtin actually helped me write a thesis on H.P. Lovecraft as an undergraduate at Wesleyan. Alex: And what what was your Bakhtinian take on Lovecraft? Richard: This was before Lovecraft was cool and long before everybody figured out he was a howling racist. But I was talking about spheres of influence and transgression between those spheres of influence. The idea that Lovecraft's horror comes from the trespass, one into the other, human into the monstrous and the monstrous into the human. I could go into a great deal more detail if I could find in the damn thing somewhere in my office. Alex: Does that work in games as well, this sense of transgression? Or are we just always in a very carefully defined, consistent fantasy world? Richard: Our worlds are so carefully crafted that it's hard to be allowed to transgress against them. The worlds generally don't allow for a sense of transgression against the story they want to tell. Every so often you get a game that tries to go there. And sometimes the results are fantastic. Alex: What's one that's fantastic? Richard: I would say The Last of Us transgresses. And sometimes it doesn't work so well. Where it comes across as crude or the player does not enjoy the feeling of transgression. Alex: In what way does The Last of Us transgress? Richard: Well, the standard ending would have ended with the delivery of Ellie to the doctors, happy ending, OK, they're going to save the world now. Alex: You're a hero. Richard: And the fact that it doesn't stop there, the fact that we find out more and we act against what was seen as our heroic goal all the way through the game... I think that's a moment of transgression. And an excellent one. Alex: It is certainly one of the most earned unexpected endings. You're going, oh, my God, that's horrifying. And then you go, but everything that has happened has led up to this. And there is no way he could have made a different decision. Richard: It feels a piece of the world and it feels like something that character would rationally do. That feels righteous to do. And even though it's going against the proposed heroic ideal of the first 90 percent of the game. Alex: I think that's probably why it was so memorable. If it had had the standard ending, I don't think people would have been over the moon about it. Richard: Well, and the giraffes. I love the moment with the giraffes. It's the moment of, This is what you are fighting for. That quiet moment. When the shouting stops and the shooting stops and you're not running, you take a deep breath and say, OK, these are real people, these are people who I can care about because they have this humanity to them. Alex: They have an ability to experience the quiet moments. Richard: Yeah. Alex: I think that's right. Richard: And you contrast that to games where everybody is always shouting all the time. You don't get an impression of characters, because after a while you tune it out. It's just another order, another description, another bit of pipe being laid. Alex: What question would you most want answered by this book I'm writing? Richard: What comes next? Alex: In terms of ... theory? AI? Richard: Storytelling. We still don't even have a common vocabulary for video game storytelling. Alex: What would we be looking for in a vocabulary? Richard: A common language, a formalization of the role, and a professional jargon that could be respected outside of the club. Alex: Like in show business with your turning points. Act outs. Teasers. Ghosts. Richard: I mean, we have barks and that's about it. And I think we need our own language to differentiate ourselves from cinema, from television. Now, obviously, there's a lot of overlap, but there's also a lot of space that's ours alone. And trying to cram us into their boxes has, I think in some cases set video game storytelling back. Alex: Each medium has things that it does well. A novel can slow down or speed up time in a way that a movie or a TV show can't, because everything has to happen in real time. You can jump between times, but you can't speed up time, except for the occasional slow-mo or time lapse shot. You can't show, say, "over the course the next few months, she began to wonder if her marriage was working..." -- you can't show that. What do you think in that sense the medium of videogames is able to do that you can't do in, say, film and television? Richard: The cheap answer is, interactivity. But the phrase that I've always used is the "player shaped hole." There is a player shaped hole in the center of every videogame story. And as creators, we write to the possibility space of what the player might do. We don't dictate every moment. We prepare for the eventuality of what the player might choose to do at any given moment. Alex: I think it has parallels to theater. The thing that theater does is you are physically in the same space with the actors. And that gives you something that film doesn't do, even though, you know, a stage set is so much more artificial than what you see in the film. The fact that you're actually physically there, breathing the same air as the actor, that creates a sort of ritual space. And when a player does a thing, especially when a player gets to choose a thing, they own it in a way that they can't own it as a passive consumer. As you were saying that, you know, "I did this. I decided to save Ellie." That can be quite powerful. Alex: Well, I have run out of questions, sir. OK. Thank you for talking to me. Richard: Sure. Labels: making games, videogames, writing games 0 comments Sunday, September 27, 2020 Richard "Safety" Dansky, Part Two

Richard Dansky is a veteran game writer and horror novelist. Among his many novels, Vaporware is the horrifying tale of a game project that refuses to allow herself to be killed off. There is a monster in it, but not the one you think.



Alex: How would you define a narrative designer versus a writer? How would you define a narrative designer versus a writer? Richard: I would say that the two jobs can overlap, but the narrative designer is responsible for the systems for delivering narrative to the player while the writers are responsible for the content that gets delivered. Alex: And why do you think it's valuable to separate those job descriptions? Richard: Because it's…. how can I put this delicately?-- Alex: --Some people can't write, and some writers can't program, is that it? Richard: Some writers can't program, some writers can't design. As games get more sophisticated, you need more and more sophisticated ways of telling stories, you need more intricate artificial intelligence structures to call on for systemic dialog, you need better environmental storytelling. You need somebody to keep track of all of that, and somebody whose primary skill is writing may not have those skills. At the same time, someone whose primary skill is writing should be able to go ahead and write. Maximize the resources, make sure that you're getting people in a position to succeed. But.it's not just writing, it has to be a way of delivering the story as well as the story itself. Alex: So talking about narrative delivery systems: what's a narrative delivery system that you really thought worked? Something that you thought, This is cool, this is doing a new thing. This is something movies don't do. Richard: I thought that the narrative delivery in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was fantastic. Really brought you into that world. Alex: How so? Richard: For the first time in that series, you really got a sense of who the people in that world were. And it was deeper immersion. The sense that their lives have been going on before you got there and will continue to go on after you left. Alex: I was talking with Anna Megill and she was saying that's apparently called "negative capability." Was that a term you've heard? Richard: It's not a term I've heard, but I'm happy to steal it. Alex: What was happening in the game that was new that was making you feel like these people had lives? Richard: Part of it was the content, what they were talking about, what they were asking the player to do. The language that was used felt realistic and personable. And part of it was the structure of the conversations. There wasn't a character standing around waiting for you to interact with them, in a way that was obvious that they were just tools in the delivery of narrative. They felt like characters. They did not feel like signposts on the way to the story. Alex: So were these were these branching conversations? Was there AI going on, do you think? Richard: Yes. And I fully imagine that QA spent many hours screaming into the night testing that because branching dialog is hell. But they did a wonderful job of it. Alex: What is an interesting narrative delivery system that you maybe weren't able to implement, that you wanted to. Richard: Well, the early days of the Clancy franchise we basically had no narrative implementation except for a giant wall of text at the beginning of the missions. And with pressure from production and management to fill in every last detail of the mission, those walls got pretty tall indeed. Alex: I feel like games had way more dialog in the 90s, and then there was a big step back. Because in the 90s it was all just text, so you could write as much as you like. Like Planescape: Torment, there has to be several novels worth of dialogue in there. And then once we started voicing lines and animating characters, then it's like, oh, my God, we can't do that anymore. And we're only now getting back to where we were in the 90s when it was just texts. Does that feel right? Richard: I think so. But I would say you look even at a game as venerable as Knights of the Old Republic, that had a metric fuckton of dialog. The revolution happened a while ago, to get us back to more and more dialog. Planescape: Torment, I used to know the word count on that. But if you looked at Old Republic, that must be 26 times as large. Just the blossoming of how much is in there. Part of it is the game types that are available now. Part of it is the idea of games as a service so you can keep extending the life of the game and keep on telling more story with that one game. And part of it, like you said, is the advanced technology and the ability to record more easily and more cheaply. Alex: The mocap, the cost has come down. We're putting more of those dots on people. They can capture more expressions. People don't have to go to a mocap studio anymore, they can have a mocap room in their studio. Richard: Yeah, ours is in the break room at Red Storm. So when the animation team is at work, everybody clears out, nobody's getting any snacks. Alex: Oh noes! Richard: They all deny that. They will say, “You can walk around the edges.” But you don't want to go in there. Alex: What can you do in non-linear narrative that you can't do in linear narrative? Richard: We can do a lot of things with messing with the players expectation. One of the nonlinear narratives that I wrote was Splinter Cell: Conviction. That starts with Grimsdottir shooting him. And then the entire game is a flashback leading up to that moment. It tells you how you got there and why that's actually a perfectly rational thing for her to do. Except there's also a flashback within the flashback. Alex: OK, but to me that's telling a linear story, just not chronologically. I'm talking about, in games, you can have the player discover narrative bits in different orders. Richard: Sure, that's something that's more prevalent with open world now. Yeah, games like The Division. You still have a lot of short, overlapping stretches of linear narrative. It's a question of what order of the player encounters them. And whether they're gated by difficulty for the player to only run across some of the easy stuff early on. Alex: Do you think that that is more fun for the player? Does that create verisimilitude? Is that more powerful emotionally? Does it immerse the player more? Richard: It certainly gives the player more feeling of authorship of their experience. If you talk to somebody who's played a video game, they're going to say, "I did this." Not, "The main character did this." And by letting them choose, you're increasing the amount of authorship that they can have. They'll even say, "I did this" on something that's a roller coaster ride straight rail shooter. Because they will have a better feeling of ownership of their actions, I think, when they have an open world to play with and they can go in any direction. Richard Dansky is a veteran game writer and horror novelist. Among his many novels,is the horrifying tale of a game project that refuses to allow herself to be killed off. There is a monster in it, but not the one you think. 0 comments Saturday, September 26, 2020 Richard Dansky, Part One

I met Richard Dansky when he kindly invited me to give a talk at the East Coast Game Conference, down in the wilds of North Carolina where you're not sure if the "check all weapons" sign at the entrance to the con refers to twelve foot foam swords or firearms. There was fine dining, and there may possibly have been some drinking of whisky. I met Richard Dansky when he kindly invited me to give a talk at the East Coast Game Conference, down in the wilds of North Carolina where you're not sure if the "check all weapons" sign at the entrance to the con refers to twelve foot foam swords or firearms. There was fine dining, and there may possibly have been some drinking of whisky. Richard is a seriously veteran game writer, as well as a horror novelist . This is the first part of my interview with him.

Alex: You've worked at Red Storm for 21 years. That's some serious sitzfleisch. You've worked at Red Storm for 21 years. That's some serious Richard: Well, I’ve worked with Red Storm, but I've been essentially an internal freelancer for Ubisoft most of the time. So I've been based out of Red Storm, but I've worked with Toronto, with Massive in Sweden, with Shanghai, with all sorts of studios all over the world. And so I've gotten the best of both worlds, the stability of having a home base and the chance to work on different projects and go different places, work with different teams. Alex: So does that mean you spend a year in Malmö or that you fly into Malmö and tell them a few things and then fly back or... Richard: It depends. I did four months of Malmö for The Division 2. But generally, I fly in for a couple weeks, get in good with the team, figure out what I need to do, and then go back home and write. Alex: And as Central Clancy writer, what is it you do in a day? Richard: You know, that's an excellent question, and if I find out, I'll tell you. Alex: I've had days at work like that. Richard: The title "Central Clancy Writer" is kind of an old one. The role was defined as being a resource for all things Clancy and narrative. So it could be anything from writing the scripts for a game to serving as a gut check for how Clancy a story was, to saying, No, you can't set a mission in Rio de Janeiro because we blew up a parade there in the last game. Alex: So you are the lore-brarian, among other things. Richard: These days I'm doing less of that more work on non-Clancy projects. But for a while, I was the resource. Alex: How important is it that everything be as Clancy as possible? And what does that mean? Richard: There's pillars of Tom Clancy's writing that you want to stick to to make sure the games have that authentic feel. You want that techno thriller feel. You want, "It's tomorrow, it's not the day after tomorrow." You want a clear and present danger and you want the righteous use of force to solve a problem. Those are the guideposts of the brand. Alex: And have you worked a lot with him? Richard: He worked closely with Red Storm on the original Rainbow 6. After that, he sort of drifted away. And I did a lot of the original story writing. Brian Upton came up with Ghost Recon. J.T. Petty came up with Splinter Cell. A slew of writers and designers came up with the games that were Tom Clancy, and I shepherded some of those brands through various incarnations storywise. Alex: So how do you keep the franchise fresh? Or does history do that for you? Richard: History does that for us. The world is so different from when I started working on Clancy games. I remember walking into the office on the morning of 9/11 and going into my boss's office and saying, OK, we need to rewrite everything now because the world's changed. And it has and it keeps on changing and that provides... endless opportunities for storytelling. On the one hand, you wish the world would be a little more peaceable place. Alex: Do you know the spec fiction writer Charles Stross? Richard: Yes. Yes. Alex: He writes novels about bureaucrats fighting Lovecraftian elder gods. And he's been complaining that 2020 just keeps getting ahead of him. He's just throwing out shovelfuls of plot that can no longer be put in a spec fiction novel because it's not speculative any more, it's just real life. Richard: I've read The Laundry Files novels and enjoyed them. Alex: I would think they'd be up your alley. You also write horror stories. Richard: Yes. Alex: And so is that to stay fresh creatively, to stay sane? Richard: That's where my voice is as a writer. I can write video games ecstatically. And do whatever voices are needed for a game. But when it's my own genuine voice, it's in the horror field. And so those are the ones where the story won't leave me alone until I put it on paper. Alex: What are the hardest battles that you fight? Richard: The hardest battles. In a bunch of different arenas they can be anything from fighting for soft, quiet moments in the story when all everybody wants to do is shooting. Bang bang pow pow. They can be fighting for line counts. They can be fighting for the story. And holding the story up against real life and seeing whether something really is appropriate for us to make a game out of. Alex: When you say fighting for line counts, for more lines or fewer lines? Richard: Sometimes for more lines, sometimes for fewer. When you're talking about systemic dialog, sometimes less is more. And people want to have every single possible edge case taken care of, and you're like, no, we only have so much footprint on a disk. Alex: When you say fighting for soft, quiet moments, I think we both know why those are so important. But how do you articulate that? What do you tell people? Richard: I tell people that if the volume's at ten the whole time, then it's going to turn into white noise. We need contrast. You need those human moments to show why the characters are sympathetic, why you should care about what they're doing as anything other than a walking gun rack. And to have that change of dramatic pace that allows the story to breathe. And it works better when you're dealing with folks who can see the games as a gestalt and see the whole story. You see every mission at once; where you get into trouble is when you're doing one mission at a time or one chapter at a time. And every chapter has to be the greatest and the best chapter. Alex: I guess that's the creative director whose job is to see the whole vision. Richard: Which is why I keep mine plentifully supplied with Scotch. -- I didn't mean it, that is not true! [Note: For what it’s worth, Richard has the best single malt Scotch collection I’ve ever drunk from or even seen.] Alex: As you say, you wrote some of the stories for some of these games. What goes into deciding what the story of a game should be? How do you think about it? Richard: That process has evolved tremendously over the years. From being told, right, OK, we want a game set here, come up with a plot line, to where we are now, which is brainstorming with creative directors and game directors and thinking about the features that we want to show off... all these things that were not on my plate when I first started doing this,. Alex: Do you think that's because story has become more important and therefore people really want to be involved in it, whereas previously they didn't care? Richard: I think story’s become more important. I think people figured out the narrative as a place where we can make big gains without spending huge dollars. Sorry, cynical there... Alex: No, but that's a perfectly valid thing. I mean, there's only so many polygons you can add. People are paying 80 bucks, they want everything to be great. It's not just the polygon count, not just better AIs, or the tightness of the gameplay. Everything has to be better. So that means the stories have to get better. The characters have to get better. The acting has to get better. The character models have to be capable of communicating more. Richard: Yes, absolutely. And it's funny. When I first started doing the game writers roundtables at GDC, we had this wish list of things we wanted, you know, getting involved in stories sooner, having narrative design taken seriously, all these things that have come true. You know, the pie in the sky wishlist from those early days is now standard operating procedure. And that's good to see it because it makes for a better story and makes for a better player immersion, makes for a better player experience. 0 comments Thursday, September 10, 2020 Kim Belair, Part Four Alex: If you have a team of say four or five writers, what specialties would you be looking for? What's your handful of writers? Alex: If you have a team of say four or five writers, what specialties would you be looking for? What's your handful of writers?

Kim: I think if I'm assembling a narrative team, I'd be looking for diverse experiences. And I want to make sure that it's representative of the characters that we have, of the attitudes and ideas and cultures that we want to represent. Kim: I think if I'm assembling a narrative team, I'd be looking for diverse experiences. And I want to make sure that it's representative of the characters that we have, of the attitudes and ideas and cultures that we want to represent. Kim: There's this idea that, like, we can cohese around our skill in writing. Alex: "We're imaginative, we can write anything!" Kim: But that's obviously insufficient. It's important to me to have someone who can really get the systems and the mechanics working alongside the story, someone whose best form of expression of story is in the country of mechanics. I worked in the past with a narrative director who is by no means a writer. But his vision of story was so different from mine and allowed me to see a different perspective and really structure things differently. Then I always want someone who's an expert in voice, in punch up, in cleverness on almost everything. Someone with a good sense of humor. Even if the game is not funny. The construction of a joke is very hard to do when it's a natural dialog. Someone with a strong sense of place, of worldbuilding, someone who can really give a sense of lore. I don't like world bibles. I'd rather have people who can get across a sense of the economy of the world. Then I also want someone who can take on a variety of different kinds of writing and who is really, really adept at it. Someone who can write a couple hundred lines of barks and enjoy that process. And who's going to be able to give quantity while maintaining quality. … But I do want someone [else] who's a little bit slower who can think about things. Overall, team composition for me is just: generosity, collaboration, and free discussion in between people. I think that if you could assemble a team that has those components, then, you know, one person might have a super full week while the other was supporting them. And someone else the next week is gonna take the lead. When the workhorse writer is through and just needs someone to punch it up. Alex: Have you worked with videogame narrative editors? Kim: I worked with a woman named Paula Rogers. She's also the lead writer on Goodbye Volcano High and was also, I think, head of story on Neo Cab. She has fantastic editing skills. I think that we don't use editors enough. Like we almost wait until QA gets a hold of it. Working with editors is really, really nice, especially when they're external and coming in on a project and saying, What do you need? What do you not? We worked with a script coordinator on Suicide Squad and that is so helpful. Someone who's going to make sure that we're keeping the tone right, that we're staying consistent with what we've already said. Yeah, I would always advocate for editors. Alex: Kim McCaskill was saying she's really good at continuity. Like, waitasecond, the character met that person last week and now she's saying she met that person two years ago. Kim: Yes, exactly. I know that if I'm on an open world game and I'm writing a cinematic and then a year later I'm writing a bunch of combat barks and one contradicts something I wrote a year ago, there's no one else to check on that until it hits QA. And then finally, when we play it, we go, oh, no. It's already been recorded. Alex: So talking about toxic work environments, which is always fun. Obviously they suck and nobody should have to deal with them. What do they do to the game? We have this assumption that if it's toxic, it doesn't show up in the game. But it does it in ways that we can't immediately quantify, even if the game is successful. Because if I am in a toxic workspace where I don't feel I can express myself as a woman of color, then when I'm in a creative meeting and someone says, OK, well, this character is a woman of color, she does this thing. In an environment where I am being fostered, I might have the courage and the strength to say, hey, I don't think is a good idea. Let me explain to you why. But in an environment that's toxic, where I have been treated like I don't matter, where I've been desolate, where I've been made to feel small, I'm not going to say that. And so even if it's not something offensive, even if it's not something particularly awful, the reality is that if I had been empowered to say something, we could have had a better game. That works across the board. Anyone who is stuck, who is oppressed, is going to be limited in what they can express creatively. And I think that we don't pay attention to that, because even with studios, if you have a studio where everyone's treated super, super well, but the game has like a deeply racist, sexist, homophobia, transphobia, whatever it is, someone at that studio now feels unsafe. Even if they're treated well, even if they're not, you know, being actively harmed or harassed. There's this now sense of microaggression. I was actually in a meeting earlier today talking about a similar thing. And I was saying that, if you go to a social worker, and they're really, really fantastic. And you walk in there and there's like, , Playboy centerfolds. And maybe to that person, they're like, no, I just like the art. This is not a problem. But it's going to set a tone where I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to speak to this person without being objectified So it's about creating a space where I feel comfortable enough to contribute to the game. Like there's so many games that, they might not be offensive, they might not be obviously bad. But you can tell that no one said, what can we do to represent these people more? It's being additive, and that's what you lose out on. Alex: On we happy few, we had a thing in the story where some of the women in the office said, "thaaat's a l'il rapey." So we changed it. And it wasn't obvious to me, as a guy, how it was rapey? Kim: A lot of the time you will say something like, OK, well, in this scene we're going to really show how bad sexual assault is. We want to make sure that it's evil. But who are you showing that to? Alex: You're putting your women players through that. Kim: Yeah. Exactly. This is a thing that she has to think about when she walks home every day. Alex: OK, so last question, how do you stay sane? Kim: Oh. Who says I do? I think that for me, it's always working with people who I like, which is what Sweet Baby allows. If I end up on a project where I am encountering a problem, I can still go back to the same group of people who I trust and love. I'm kept sane by the people around me. If I'm in a meeting where someone treats me with some disrespect, I always have people around me to do a sanity check. Was I crazy? That is the biggest difference from working in a studio: you don't know. Alex: Do you want people to hit you up like, Hey, I love the idea of Sweet Baby, can I get you a sample? Kim: Yeah. Folks are welcome to. I'm always looking for, especially, marginalized developers from all disciplines. Obviously we're a narrative agency, but we often encounter projects that go, hey, we're looking for a programmer. Hey, we're looking for an artist. So just having a roster of people who we can offer up is nice. And frankly, we're also here for people who need to vent about something. It might take me longer to answer those emails, but I do want to hear what people are dealing with and help in whatever way I can. So should people just e-mail you? We actually have an email setup for that, talk@sweetbaby.com. And beyond that, I'm on Twitter and on everything as @bagelofdeath. Alex: So why @bagelofdeath? Kim: When I was 15 or 16 years old, I did a comic and the villain of the comic was threatening the hero with this thing that was going to absolutely kill him. And he holds up a bagel. And the protagonist is like, is that just a bagel? And he's like, it's a Bagel of DEATH. And he's like, OK. And so he takes a bite of it and goes like, are these raisins? And he goes "raisins ... of DEATH!". And then he's like, no, these are just raisins. And so the villain goes like, wait, these ARE just raisins. And then the last panel is like a Frenchman in a bistro about to bite into this bagel that's like glowing green, full of needles, broken glass and scorpions. Labels: interviews, making games, writing games 0 comments Monday, September 07, 2020 Kim Belair, Part Three Alex: How do you explain the importance of what you're trying to do? Kim: We're hitting, what, 40 years of video games. And I think people are starting to ask, why are we making very similar products? Why are a lot of our stories not resonating with the younger audiences? Why is our audience not growing? I like to say that representation is innovation. I think when people are asking for diverse stories, we're not asking for the same story with, you know, diverse characters. Alex: How do you explain the importance of what you're trying to do? We have to look at story and narrative as one of the things that we can innovate on. Like when you bring someone in from a different culture, from a different background, from a different gender, they’re going to create something that we haven't seen before. The way that we look at demographics is that we go, OK, the majority of our player base is, let's say, a white male. So we're going to make stuff for white males. But if you make something from the perspective of an Asian trans woman, and it’s really strong, then it will work for people. People crave new stories. If you want to innovate, even to stay current, it's not about graphics, it's not about hardware. It's about opening up new perspectives for people. So I explain it as, it’s important to game development to diversify. It's not just part of advocacy or activism. It is going to make your games better. Alex: Also, of course gamers are mostly white guys: you’re making games for white guys! Try making games for somebody else, maybe they'll show up! There’s an old story about Harry Cohn, the founder of Columbia Pictures, who everybody hated. But everybody went to his funeral. And someone said, “See? Give people what they want, and they’ll show up.” Kim: The market has always been frustrating to me because we make assumptions based on what we already have instead of what we could have. A couple of months ago we were talking a lot about player choice in Assassin's Creed. People were saying, well, no matter how good this female character is, a majority of players played as a male character. So therefore people prefer male characters. And what I had to explain was, no, actually, from a marketing and a psychology perspective, most people are going to choose the gender that they most align with. It doesn’t mean that’s what they want. If you are male identified, it's not that you don't want to play as a woman. You're just going, oh, that one's for me. I’m a guy, I don’t go to the ladies’ room. We look at the success of something like Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game led by a female character. If they had made it a choice, most players would have played as a male. But they didn’t, and it was a huge success. Alex: On the flip side, even if you did believe that players will only play their own gender, which obviously I don’t, well, if 20 percent are playing a woman, you just increased your player base by 25 percent for almost no cost. Kim: I think that the majority of the men, if you had Assassin's Creed starring a woman, they would play it anyway. Aside from a couple of trolls on Twitter, the odds are they're gonna go, oh, this is the brand that I like, I'm going to just play. Alex: I would add that, not only can you tell more stories with diverse characters, you can explore more worlds. Our game Contrast was set in a shattered carnival world. What would it have meant to explore that as a typical 30-year-old white dude with a beard? But an eight-year-old girl and her seven-foot-tall circus girl invisible friend, that opens a door. What is one of the most interesting narrative systems you have not been able to implement for whatever reason? Kim: We were talking about how your choice of character has a profound effect on your experience. And I think one of the problems is that we only look at diverse characters in terms of what deficits that creates. Like if you decide to play a Black guy in Mafia 3, people are going to call him the N-word. OK, if I'm a White guy and I play as a Black man and someone is racist towards me, maybe that builds empathy. But all it says to me as a Black person, is that this game isn't for me. I already know that people are racists. This is not teaching me anything. This is just making me experience the worst of what I experienced in my life. Alex: So for example, other Black characters might code switch... Kim: Yeah, and be a little more forthcoming with you. Alex: On a project I was on I worked with a Black consultant who asked if we would present Black characters as White people see them, or as they see themselves. So if I play a Black character, maybe I get a little peek behind the curtain. Kim: That would be really, really cool. Something inviting. We did a cultural assessment on a game project, and I employed this wonderful Cree woman named Sonia Valentine, and we asked her, what do you see too much of when you see indigenous characters? And she said, a lot of ceremonial garb, that is only meant to show non-indigenous people that this character is indigenous. And she was like, I don't go around in my daily life wearing ceremonial garb to show people how Cree I am. And I said, What would you like to see? And she said, beads. She was in the process of making a bead work Superman logo. She's a huge DC Comics fan. And for her, beadwork is part of her culture. But the way that she uses it is to express who she is. And if I saw a beadwork Superman logo, I wouldn't necessarily read it as, oh, yeah, that's an indigenous character. But she would. Alex: Did you watch Mohawk Girls, the TV series, at all? Kim: Not yet, no. Alex: I think this is in the pilot, one of the characters meets a guy and it immediately becomes an issue of who are his parents, because the Mohawk community is so tightly intermarried, but you're not allowed to date cousins who are too close to you. And that's a problem that someone outside the Mohawk community wouldn’t necessarily know about. But Tracey Deer, who’s Mohawk, who created the show, did know it. It’s her reality. And if you're Mohawk, maybe you're like, “Oh, God, yes, thank you. Maybe I don't want to date a white guy for reasons, but how many Mohawk guys are there that I can actually date?” And I thought that was, you know, a look behind the curtain. Kim: And that to me is so much more inclusive. Are you creating a Maori character for people to see that this game has diversity in it, or are you creating them for Maori people to see themselves? Alex: Is there academic theory that you find useful? Kim: My goal on every different project is to lead by lead by emotion and to make people care about what happens in the game. I don't necessarily subscribe to a school. But as a rule, when I draw inspiration, it's largely from action and blockbuster films. I use The Fast and the Furious a lot. I use Mission Impossible rather than dramatic films. Because we’re making action products. My job is to take this action thing and add character and world stories that are emotional, grounded and dramatic. Like, if I look at Mission Impossible, that movie makes you care about the folks in it. It's a lot healthier than if I look at a dramatic film and then try to add gameplay mechanics to that. Alex: Have you ever seen Night of the Iguana? Elizabeth Taylor? 1964? Kim: Yes. Alex: A friend of mine saw that. And he thought it was Night of the Iguanas, with an ‘s,’ and he was waiting for the iguanas to show up. It was a perfect horror movie setup, you know, two people, cabin in the woods. You develop these great characters and you start to care about them, and then here come the iguanas. Kim: I want to respect the medium. I want to be a writer who serves the greater project rather than someone who comes in and goes, I really want to tell this beautiful story, and I'm going to just cram in gameplay where I have to. Show me the thing that you're trying to build and I'm going to try to bring feeling and love to it. Labels: interviews, making games, writing games 0 comments Sunday, September 06, 2020 Kim Belair, part two Alex: What phase of game development are you in currently? What what do you actually do in a given day? Alex: What phase of game development are you in currently? What what do you actually do in a given day? Kim Belair



Kim: So at any given time, we're working on between eight and twelve projects, mostly for clients, some for ourselves. And the way that I work is every day is a couple projects. Kim: So at any given time, we're working on between eight and twelve projects, mostly for clients, some for ourselves. And the way that I work is every day is a couple projects. For example, in the morning, I would log in and talk to the team at Rocksteady when we're working on Suicide Squad and that would be like a writers room, sit down, talk through a script. Talk about characters, write scenes or barks or whatever. And then in the afternoon, now I'm going to work on Goodbye Volcano High. I've got a meeting with KO-OP. And then I might have a meeting with Square Enix or Panic. And then I will end the day with a check in with everybody else, OK, what's tomorrow look like? What kind of deadlines do we have coming up? What's the most urgent need? Who's going to do what? So every day is a little bit different, but it's very rare for me at this point to have any full day that I work on one thing. Alex: What are the hardest battles you fight? Kim: I guess I can talk about this with Rocksteady. At the beginning, I was like, oh, there's some information that I'm missing, because, one, they're five hours ahead, they're in London. But two, they're in an office together. So they're having a lot of conversations I can't be a part of. But now that most more people are working from home, everything has to be intentional. So I can be more part of the conversation. Alex: Lisa remarked to me she is more aware of what's going on in the company since we started working remotely because absolutely everything's on Slack. She doesn't have to worry that somebody was in the break room with somebody else and had a conversation and decided something she doesn’t even know about. She just has to read Slack. Kim: What really makes me happy about it is that we can now more freely hire people who don't live in the big cities, who might not be able to afford it, who might have life situations that don't allow them to work outside the home. It used to be more like, well, you can either take care of your kids or work. And obviously there are still immense challenges for any parent or any caregiver, but if there’s one thing to be grateful for about this terrible pandemic, it's that it's allowed people to work in a way that works for them. Alex: So do you think that’s going to help the sort of bro culture that we are sometimes dealing with? Kim: I think it is. I think that a lot of our culture needs to change because it has been, you know, granted to the most privileged people, to people who are creating these boys clubs that are inaccessible to other people. And, slowly but surely, we're untangling that. Both because of the ways that we work and because of the information that we're now sharing. Alex: Now we don't have, “We're all gonna go to the bar and get drunk! Yeah!” Nobody’s going to the bar. I hope. Kim: No bar. And the other thing, the pandemic created a situation where now if you're a victim of abuse, you no longer have to go into the office and have to avoid certain people. And I think that and the current push for like Black Lives Matter and equality and social justice, have turned this industry into something that realizes, no, we can be different. Alex: Any guesses on where this is going to lead when, at some point in the 2030s, we can actually go back to the office? Kim: I don't want that to happen. I don't want to just to be like, OK, pandemic's done, we have a vaccine, everybody get back to the office. What I'd like to see is, OK, let's look at what worked here. What part of working from home was helpful? Did it improve the lifestyle for some people? For so long in games, we've been told, ‘No working from home, we can't manage that.’ And then all of a sudden the pandemic made it clear that we can. And I hope that we do become more open to saying, oh, this marginalized person from a small town who can't move here, we're gonna give them a job because it can be done remotely. Alex: So how did you get into game writing? Your B.A. is in commerce? Kim: Yes, I have a marketing degree. I ended up getting into games via community development at Ubisoft. I’d been doing branding for different companies and a lot of copywriting, for a company called Territorial. And I was approached to help with media development on Far Cry 4. The community developer's job was to create content based on the world of the game. So everything from interviews with the developers and podcasts and stuff like that, to in-character interviews and blogs. I wrote this character called Divya Kandala, and she was a journalist going into the fictional world of Far Cry 4. And she eventually interviewed the game's villain. And the narrative director, Mark Thompson was like, oh, you should put some of this into the game itself. And he connected me with the level designers. And we put in, just tiny details, little notes here and there. Like one house that had her suitcase in it. And after that, he asked me, do you want to do this? Start doing narrative? And Lucien Soulban and Corey May had already encouraged me to get into that. Honestly, it was something that I hadn't really considered as a path. It wasn't necessarily where I saw myself. I finally made the switch on to Assassin's Creed syndicate. And that was my first official writing gig. And after that, I worked on For Honor and then two canceled projects. And then I got Brie Code who had left Ubisoft and started her own company, Tru Luv. [“We work with artists, psychologists, game designers and AI programmers to bring life to AI companions.”] She asked me if I wanted to do a little bit of contract work on the side. And then I started getting people more interested in working with me. Eventually it got to the point where I knew that Ubisoft wasn't going to allow me to just keep working on other stuff. So I said, OK, I'm going to go out and try my luck. Alex: So they wouldn’t allow you to work on other stuff if you're working for them. But they will hire you if you’re a company! Kim: Exactly. Yes. Alex: It’s funny how just framing it differently makes it OK. Kim: It is funny because I have now done more finalized, out-in-the-world writing for Ubisoft not as an employee than I ever did as an employee. My impact on Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is greater than my impact on Syndicate or Far Cry or For Honor. Alex: How do you find writers for your company? What do you look for in a writer? How do you judge how good a writer is going to be? Because it sounds like the people you're talking to, they can't say, “Here's a stack of AAA games I’ve shipped.” Kim: I don't look for experience. I look just for a sample. I don't really believe in writing tests. I want to see, what's your sensibility? I look for basic skills. Are you a competent and good writer? But then I want to sit down in a room and see, are you fun to work with? Are you engaging? Are you kind? Are you funny? Because on a game project, I'm working with you for anywhere between a month and four years. So I want to really feel like we're going to vibe. I can teach you the skills, but I can't teach a really skilled jerk to be a nicer person. So I'm looking for a combination of talent and personality that is fun and compassionate. Alex: Does the medium of the sample matter? Because when I was looking for a writer recently, I would get prose samples sometimes. And I have a lot of trouble guessing from a prose sample if you can write games. I can guess from a screenplay sample. But prose is like, well you know, these are a lot of words and they're great words and they're in the right order. In prose you can do all these things that you can’t do in a game or a screenplay. You can say what people are thinking. In most adventure games you’re mostly restricted to what people are saying and doing. Kim: Yeah, I skip to dialog a lot when I read prose samples. One of the games that we're working on right now, Sable, is a little bit prose-ish. So those skills do apply. But more globally, I'm looking for how are you using the words? Is it fun to read? Is it taking me on a journey? And then I will usually look at the dialog to make sure it's natural and it's snappy and interesting. Alex: But prose dialog is a different beast. It prose dialog has to make up for not having an actor there who can really think through what this line means and then inhabit that character. The text has to do all the heavy lifting by itself. Kim: Yes, but I think that if you can write a scene in prose that's really compelling, that translates well enough to a game later. I used to write almost exclusively prose. And when I had to do screen writing for games, that process was just, how can I give the dialog a little bit more weight? It's a muscle. And if I think the person is really talented and willing to learn, engaged and interesting, I'm always willing to help develop that skill. Because writing in games means different things on every project. I’ve been on projects where writing meant only going over someone else’s dialog and making it shine. And I've also had game projects where, OK, we need you to give us a story on top of these five mechanics that we already have. So it’s not just dialog, there's a huge range of skills needed. Alex: And there are games that are all prose. Mostly indie ones. Fallen London. 84 Days. What I look for is voice. Do you have a voice? I can’t teach you to find your voice. I mean I could, but not on the schedule of a video game production. You have to come to the party with an ability to put yourself in a fictional world. If you’re just writing the fictional world, that’s okay, but I’m looking for someone who can imagine themself into that world, and come out and show me what it means to them to live in it. If you have that, I can teach you tips and tricks to develop your voice. Kim: We don't spend enough time on developing that kind of talent. There’s a lot of people that we don't see at first blush. When I look to women and other marginalized groups, screenplays are not where they begin. Especially for young writers, short stories and fan fiction is their place to shine. So I'm going to try to going to try to bend that by giving them training. Alex: You’re a for-profit Pixelles! Kim: Yes, exactly. And speaking of Pixelles, we have hired a couple of their people. Back in the day when events existed, we went to at least one showcase a month. And I read someone's stuff and I was like, oh, she's fantastic. I want her. And I kept it around for about a year. And then recently on Goodbye Volcano High, we hired them to write their first game. And it's going great so far. Labels: interviews, making games, writing games 0 comments Thursday, September 03, 2020 Kim Belair, part one I met Kim Belair, I think, when she was a panelist on an intro game writing panel my wife, Lisa Hunter, set up. But I would surely have met her one way or the other, at MIGS, or GDC, say; she is the sort of person you might run into at a café in Malmö or Ulan Bator and not be the least surprised she is there to work on the same project. She is a writer, narrative designer and co-founder of Sweet Baby Inc, a narrative development company based in Montreal. In the industry since 2013, she's worked with companies including Ubisoft, Rocksteady, Square Enix, KO_OP, Valve, and JuVee Productions to bring games and stories to life. Beyond narrative work, Kim is an advocate for representation and inclusion, and is currently leading an initiative aimed at supporting, training and empowering marginalized devs. Alex: You started your own narrative services company. Why? Kim: I’d worked for five years at Ubisoft, and at the time that I left, I had just rolled off a two year project, and I’d put a lot of time and effort into it, and it ended up getting canceled. And I started to feel, as you might imagine from everything that's been revealed lately about Ubisoft, I had a tremendous amount of discomfort with the environment. I didn't feel there was a place for me move up the ranks. I just kind of didn't see a lot of people like myself in leadership, either in personality and demographic. And so I left to go freelance. And within a couple of months, I got a callback from a company to help with this Afro-Futurist project. And I said, yeah, I'm happy to help. And I asked about the writing team, and it was an entirely white male writing team. Alex: I am shocked. Shocked! Kim: And I was like, hold on: this is an Afro-Futurist project. Most of the characters in it are going to be people of color. And you don't have any on your team. And they said, Well, you know, we tried, but everyone we found was too junior, and didn't have the experience. They basically described systemic racism. And I was like -- OK, well, maybe what I can do is, if you trust me as a writer, as an experienced designer, maybe I can hire some junior folks, and I’ll train them. I'll get them to the point where you need them to be. And we can, you know, get a team of people that is diverse and also gets a bunch of people that first videogame credit. The project ended up falling through for unrelated reasons, just like budget and marketing stuff. But what I took from that was, OK, if I have a company, I can create a sort of farm team for the games industry. We can find, you know, young, aspiring, marginalized or junior talent, and I can help them. And so, Ari MacGillivray and I ended up creating Sweet Baby, just the two of us. And on one of my contract projects, we worked with David Bédard, who is also former Ubisoft. And he and I like really, really vibe. We have a very similar approach to a lot of things. And it took a couple months for us to kind of figure out what the roles were going to be. And the next step was just taking on stuff. And within the first year, we went from two people working on other games, industry jobs and doing a little bit of Sweet Baby stuff on the side, to all three of us now being full time, plus a contract project manager and a team of, I think, between twelve and fifteen contract writers, and designers and consultants, a programmer, artists. And I think what we've been able to do is, one, increase our capacity, but also two, create a space where I feel like every day that I go into the office, I work with good people, no matter who the client is. And at the same time, our moderate success right now has allowed us to do outreach programs. Like we do free Twine courses for marginalized and aspiring developers. We try to do portfolio reviews. We try to do placement. We try to do scouting. We try to do everything that uplifts people who deserve a chance in the industry. So we have a balance of, you know, practical work that is going to pay our bills, and we also have the ways that we give back, which are to me an equal portion of the company. Alex: So tell me about teaching people to use Twine. I wrote a game in Twine called Stories: the Path of Destinies for Spearhead Games. We had 31 endings. And kind of my take away from that was, oh, that's why we don't make branching stories. We had to figure out how not to end up with a lot of unused content. So we figured out a way where you'd have to play through the game five or six or eight times before you can win. So at our company [Compulsion Games], we really don't do narrative branching. We didn’t for Contrast or We Happy Few, except for two choices at the beginning and end. For production reasons, because it eats resources like nobody's business; but also because it’s hard to tell a good story when you don’t know the ending. So, why teach Twine? Kim: What I learned from Twine was, what's daunting for a lot of aspiring developers is, they look at these finished products and they have no idea how it got to get how it got there. They look at what a video game is and they see, you know, Gears of War. They see a Red Dead, an Assassin's Creed. It’s so very big and it seems so nebulous and challenging. And so a lot of people just kind of get discouraged. And I think the struggle for a lot of aspiring developers is that, if they're artists, if they're programmers, or writers, whatever it is, a lot of the time they can only make a small part of something. And so what Twine allows is for them to create something that's finished. Something that, when they put it out there, is complete. And they can put that on Twitter and someone can see them. Like just before I spoke to you, I was speaking to this 21 year old woman and she tried Twine, she made something and she ended up putting it on the forums for Blaseball. And my colleague David [Bédard] read it, brought it to me and was like, this person's really great. So I had a meeting with her because I'm absolutely going to hire her for one of our projects. And that came from being able to see, not only is her writing good, but she has a sense of design. She has a sense of how to tell a story, how to engage a player. And now I want her to do that for us. Because if you put out just a short story, you might say, yeah, you're really good at writing, but do you have the fundamentals of design? And it's just a boost to your portfolio to be able to take me on a little adventure. We actually hired this wonderful lead writer from Eidos Montreal to teach us the foundations of Twine. Basically to teach us, here’s the quick way to do what you’ve been doing the long way around. Labels: interviews, making games, writing games 0 comments Friday, August 28, 2020 Kim MacAskill, Part Three How does game dialog have to be different from, say, TV or film dialog, in order to make up for the less-than-fully-expressive animated game character? What do you have to watch out for? Kim: This is something I’ve been thinking about myself. We were trying to be funny. And if the animation doesn’t completely match the final voice recording, it can throw everything off. You can’t pull off a gag if things are splintered. Alex: So you’re animating to placeholder voice? Kim: Yes. Alex: Oh God. Kim: I think a lot of other studios do as well. Yes, well, we’re working with a placeholder actor for two or three years, and then we cast someone like Mark Hamill to play the Joker. How are we going to match that up? After that, we asked permission to start showing the animations to the actors. Because beforehand the actor has no idea what their character even looks like. So we started showing them concept art. I do think it helps. But the studio doesn’t like to have materials lying around some studio in LA. [Ed. note: If you possibly can record early enough so the animators can animate to the final voice recording.] Alex: What is one of the most interesting narrative systems that you weren’t able to implement? Kim: Interruption systems? Alex: So an NPC’s talking to me, and I punch them in the face, how does the game handle that interruption? Kim: Right, he’s going to have to repeat some lines, but it’s difficult to get those lines to sound natural coming after the interruption. Say a character is telling a story, and then combat interrupts you. Do you just repeat the line they were in the middle of? Do they say, “As I was saying,” or “Now that that’s done…” We asked for a tool to implement that. But it was hard, and I don’t think that we really smashed it, because if you’ve got the exact same delivery of the line, it doesn’t sound entirely natural. We tried a number of different things but it never came out quite right. Some NPC will be saying, “As I was saying,” and then suddenly they’re shouting, which was where they left off. “As I was saying, THAT WAS THE BEST PARTY I EVER WENT TO!!” Alex: Let’s talk about the pros and cons of different narrative delivery systems. What are you best at? What are the hardest to use in games? What do you enjoy writing the most? Kim: Well don’t get me wrong, a good cinematic is always fun. You’ve got the character to that stage, and I’m going to destroy all the players with this, it’s gonna be great! Yes, that’s amazing. But I think reactive dialog, dialog reacting to the player’s. For example, the game wouldn’t allow punching children. There’s no mechanic for punching children in the game. But what I can do is give the player character some sort of reaction line that takes the piss out of the player, like, if they try to punch a child, “What is wrong with you? This isn’t who we are.” Alex: Especially when your player character is a conflicted character like Harley Quinn. Kim: One of the things I really wanted to do, I don’t know if this went ahead, but every time a player tries to get a closeup of her arse, I just wanted the game to address it. Like, she farts. I like to think, what are the players going to do? Well they’re probably going to try to sexualize her. What can I write that will make fun of the player for doing that? Alex: In a writing team, what specialties do you need? Kim: On our writing team, we had a writer who was very good at forecasting what sort of dialog we’d need. Planning. I think my speciality is I was able to spot continuity issues. Some people are funny. Some are literate in writing tools. Alex: Oh, sure. Some people have read more novels. I’ve probably read more history than is really useful or healthy, and I’m a font of useless trivia about the past, a lot of which made it into We Happy Few. The person we just brought in is more of a narrative designer than Lisa or myself. Alex: Is there a difference between the org structure and who’s really in charge of what? What have you learned to watch out for? Kim: I think the moment you don’t listen to someone that the org chart says you don't have to listen to, you’re doing the game a disservice. All feedback is coming from a place of truth. It may not be the right truth. Alex: Neil Gaiman says that all feedback is true, it’s just the solutions people offer that are usually wrong. You’ve recently blown the whistle on a pattern of harassment of women at Rocksteady. Obviously it’s horrible to work in a toxic work environment. How do toxic work environments affect the stories that are told? The work that is done? Kim: You wind up with bad representations of characters. Silly things. There was a character who was wearing a dress, but she’s got a gun holster on her leg. Or there’s a piece of art that says that a character moved here five years ago, but the story is they just moved here. What happens is people aren’t talking or listening to each other. Alex: So how do you stay sane?

Kim: Alcohol helps. (Laughs). I think it’s important to have someone you can talk to. You can find yourself wondering, “Am I okay?” It helps just to have someone resonate and understand, someone who can say, “you’re not alone, I’ve experienced that too.” You do form a family. Kim: Alcohol helps. (Laughs). I think it’s important to have someone you can talk to. You can find yourself wondering, “Am I okay?” It helps just to have someone resonate and understand, someone who can say, “you’re not alone, I’ve experienced that too.” You do form a family. Labels: games, making games, writing games 0 comments Thursday, August 27, 2020 Kim MacAskill, Part Two Alex: What misconceptions did you have coming into game development?

Kim: I suppose the biggest was thinking I was just going to write a script, just write some dialog. I had no idea how much humble pie I was about to eat. I like to say my first language is Scottish, my second is English, and my third is gaming. . I remember my first meeting, sitting down with designers -- there’s a whole language of design terminology. Kim: I suppose the biggest was thinking I was just going to write a script, just write some dialog. I had no idea how much humble pie I was about to eat. I like to say my first language is Scottish, my second is English, and my third is gaming. . I remember my first meeting, sitting down with designers -- there’s a whole language of design terminology. And then there was trying to get my brain used to limitations and constraints. And I think, anyone who’s going down this path, please read up on design. I thought I was just going to tell a story, I didn’t think I was going to help design a game. I mean, I tried reading books— Alex: --What books? Kim: One I read was The Game Narrative Toolbox. Alex: Oh, yes, my friend Ann Lemay is one of the writers on that. Kim: It was really useful, really breaking it down, you know, this is what a “mechanic” is, this is what a “level” consists of. At the same time, I recently gave a talk for the writer’s guild, that while that book was so useful to me, the terminology gets used completely differently from company to company. So someone’s idea of a “bark” could be totally different. Alex: When we hire new people, we right away have to clarify what they mean by, for example, a “level” or an “encounter” because we might use a word differently than, say, Ubisoft. Kim: It took me until I was at a second studio to realize that my huge imposter syndrome coming from TV was completely unnecessary. Every studio is starting from scratch, and how they’re designing it, and how they’re describing how they’re designing it, are different. I thought, I’m not getting it, I’m going to get caught out, and it took me a couple of games to realize that if I’m not understanding, it’s not because I don’t deserve to be there, it’s because from studio to studio, words get used differently. Alex: Have you been involved in hiring other writers? Kim: Absolutely. Especially at Rocksteady, because we didn’t have a lead for the longest time, so I was hiring for my boss. You put out the call, and you immediately get a heap of CVs. Recruitment filters them, and then as a team we go through every CV; every member of the writing team has a say. We shortlist, send out the writing test, and give them a week. Meanwhile new CVs are coming in. It’s difficult because when you’re in game development your time is precious. To even make time for an interview, that’s like an hour out of your working day. You don’t have 10-15 hours free to schedule interviews. Alex: The Catch-22 of hiring: when you desperately need to find someone to take some of the work off your hands, you don’t have any free time available to find someone. Kim: And then the second round is even harder because that’s when we’re taking them to the Creative Director, and his time is even more precious. You could be waiting a month and a half for him to find the time to talk to someone. Alex: So what do you look for in a writing applicant? Kim: Most of the samples I was getting were twelve pages, sixteen pages. ? If I don’t like your writing by page eight, I’m not going to want to read another twenty. Try to grab me by page one. [Ed. note: Kim’s writing sample, grabs you on page one.] Alex: There’s an old story about Frank Capra, the comedy director of the 30’s. He hires this famous comic playwright to write a screenplay for him. And after a month or so, the first act comes in, and it’s this achingly well observed act showing that this couple’s marriage has deteriorated. And Capra says, this is what we’re going to do. The guy gets in an elevator with his wife. Leaves his hat on. Next floor, a pretty girl gets on. He takes his hat off. That tells you what you need to know! You can start the story now. Kim: That sample I was telling you about, with Harley Quinn, I wrote that in five pages, and I was trying to write it as short and punchy as possible. I need someone who from the get-go can sell me a character: what they sound like, what they’re about. And it has to serve the story; it’s not there to serve your cute lines. So: someone who has an understanding of how a scene is structured, and who gets the voices to pop out, so I can hear them in my head as I’m reading. If I’m not hearing the voice in my head, there’s a problem. Why are my eyes are drifting away? Alex: It’s interesting that you’re getting long samples, because when I was looking for someone, the samples tended to be really short, and not have any drama in them. My brief was, “Writing sample, 3-5 pages, two-hander, dramatic conflict.” [That means that each character wants something from the other, and they use words to try and get it, and by the end of the scene, either they get it, or it’s clear they’re not going to get it.] And the number of people who didn’t have a dramatic sample! They had a couple of pages that told me everything I needed to know to go on a heist, and I’m like, “Okay, you have informed me of everything I need to know to play the level, thank you, but you don’t have any people in here.” Kim: Right, the samples tend to give away the background of the writer. I’d give them a dramatic theme in the brief, and the die hard game writers would put in an objective that I didn’t even give them, but they don’t put in the drama all the time. Alex: How do you explain the importance of what you’re doing to people who don’t necessarily understand storytelling? Kim: My job is to allow people to connect with characters who are a vessel used to explore moral dilemmas, societal dilemmas, to get people to engage with that, so hopefully they can see things differently. Even for example God of War, I have no idea what it’s like to be a single Dad. Stories help people grow. Alex: I have a theory that there are structures in the brain that interpret everything as a story. If someone tells you a story, you remember it a whole lot better than if someone just tells you a bunch of facts. You know how there’s a Broca’s region in the brain that allows you to interpret language, and if you don’t have that, or it’s damaged, you can’t interpret language? I think there’s also a storytelling and story-interpreting structure, hardwired in the brain. We interpret the world through stories. And tragically, that’s why it’s so hard to get people to confront, say, science, because a good story comes across more powerfully than a bunch of data. Labels: game, making games, videogames, writing games 0 comments Wednesday, August 26, 2020 Kim MacAskill Interview, Part One I’m thinking about a third writing book, this one about game writing. I had a strange trajectory in game writing where my second job ever was Narrative Director of Contrast. So I didn’t come up through the game writing ranks; I came up through the TV and film writing ranks. I thought about titling my book CRAFTY GAME WRITING: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING BUT PEOPLE SEEM TO LIKE IT. But instead I decided to do a bunch of interviews with skilled writers I like and respect.

I met Kim MacAskill (Twitter: @kimmacaskill1) at a game writing summit for first party Microsoft Studios companies. She started in games as Senior Scriptwriter at Rocksteady; when I met her, she was Senior Scriptwriter at Playground Games. She has since returned to her native Glasgow as Principal Narrative Designer at NaturalMotion. So please kindly read all of her responses in a Scottish accent. I met Kim MacAskill (Twitter: @kimmacaskill1) at a game writing summit for first party Microsoft Studios companies. She started in games as Senior Scriptwriter at Rocksteady; when I met her, she was Senior Scriptwriter at Playground Games. She has since returned to her native Glasgow as Principal Narrative Designer at NaturalMotion. So please kindly read all of her responses in a Scottish accent. Alex: So, what phase of game development are you in currently? What do you do in a typical day? Kim: I’m in a strange place in between the ending of one game and the beginning of the other. Really we’re in pre-production on one game, and tying up the end of another. What do I do? It really does vary. I’m not writing every single day. Most days it’s creating a high level presentations where I think we should go. As you know in game development there’s a lot of presenting. There are a lot of moving parts to a game. Often we have to scale back on the narrative aspect of a feature for easier design and coding. So I’m negotiating on that. I really only spend about one day a week writing dialog, if I’m lucky. Alex: And the tying up of loose ends? Kim: Oh, I’ll get a ping from someone, oh, UI needs this, can you tie this up? [UI is the user interface – what buttons do what.] There are last minute design decisions which need narrative support. Alex: Have you ever heard of The Writer Will Do Something? It’s a Twine game about a bunch of game devs handing off all their design mistakes to the writer. Something’s broken? The writer will do something. Kim (laughing): Oh, my God, that sounds like the best game. It sounds like therapy. Alex: Yeah, therapy or horror, I’m not sure which. Kim: Like you’ll get the designers saying, “Oh, this gun works under water,” and then there’s the question, well, why does the gun work underwater?” And, “Oh, the writers will fix it.” Alex: Yeah, if you’ve designed the level properly, the player character doesn’t need to say much, but if you haven’t, then you have the player character saying, “Oh, I bet there’s a trapdoor somewhere around here.” What are the hardest battles you fight? Kim: My own preciousness. Sometimes they want to cut a design feature and there’s an impact on story flow. Or we have to cut something, and you have to ask yourself, am I upset because cutting this is not the best thing for the game, or am I just tired? I try not to be precious. Everything is discardable. You have to realize, when people change your story, they’re not necessarily ruining your story. Alex: So you never find yourself going, okay, this is going to absolutely break the story? Kim: Oh, absolutely. But when there are so many moving pieces at a time, it’s kind of choosing your battles. Sometimes, okay, that’s going to wreck that scene, and that’s going to wreck the story, and you sit down with yourself and go, Okay, is this when I fight the battle? Or, is this the day when I push back. It can be hard, because when you’re so invested in your story, you have to ask, have they actually killed the story dead, or is it recoverable, or can I even make it better? It’s a constant compromise. Really living and breathing your characters and caring about them and then someone telling you that you can’t tell the story that you intended. But am I really annoyed, or am I just tired? It’s a constant self-mental-assessment. Alex: How did you get into game writing? Kim: Total mistake, I think. It was because of the instability of the TV industry. You know this, when you have work, it’s great; when you don’t, you’re like, “When’s my next contract gonna be?” Contracts are anywhere from three months to a year, so you’re constantly always trying to find your next meal. I was always a big, big comic book fan. I loved Batman. And I played games as well. And I saw that Rocksteady were looking for a senior scriptwriter. And I think at this time, I was sending out about 20 CV’s a day to anyone who would listen. I was just putting everything out everywhere, I was applying to Nickelodeon for a shitty TV show. And I was really surprised when Rocksteady got back to me. And I told them, I’ve written for film, I’ve written for TV, I’ve even written for wrestling, but I’ve never written a game. But they didn’t necessarily need a game writer, they needed someone with a bit more experience creating strong narratives. And I came from a comedy background, that was useful given that we were writing for Suicide Squad. So they were happy to teach me about game writing as I brought things from my other skill set. And they asked me to do a writing test. And that was, Harley Quinn, Penguin and Deathstroke wake up in a room. They have no memory of how they got there. How do they use their strengths and weaknesses to get out? But from then to actually being employed was like three months. You know, in TV, it’s very fast. “I need a script editor, you’re a script editor, okay, here’s your money.” Recruitment in games can be a six month process from applying to actually arriving at the studio. Alex: Yeah, back when I was in TV I got a call, “How would you like to write on a TV show in South Africa for four months?” “Interesting. When?” “You fly Tuesday.” And it was Thursday. So this is a question that I think no one else will be able to answer for me: what lessons did you take away from writing for wrestling? What’s it like? Kim: It’s like a soap drama. This one’s going to betray, that one’s going to go away for a long long time and suddenly appear out of nowhere. Someone's having an affair, all kinds of twists and turns. That could be a soap drama. Maybe realism is more of a factor for soaps. But it’s the same sort of, we need the drama and we need it now. You can’t really go too long without something melodramatic happening. Alex: My wife Lisa was once up for a gig at the WWF, but she didn’t want to move to Connecticut. I’ve always felt that was a missed opportunity. Kim: It’s really fun. There are all sorts of people writing for wrestling. There was a writer from Family Guy. Alex: But were there any lessons… Kim: If I’m gonna be honest, no. I suppose the one thing I’m going to bring out is how are you going to embed heaps of combat in a story while making it engaging? How am I going to build important dramatic beats, and build relationships. It’s all very well and good telling a love story, but you still have to have people fighting each other. Alex: Lisa has a theory that opera and kung fu movies are basically the same thing, you know, a bit of story, then there’s a fight, or an aria, then a bit more story, and a fight, or someone sings. “Two brothers separated at birth. One’s a cop, one’s a killer, and they’re in love with the same woman!” Is that a kung fu plot, or a Verdi opera? So I suppose it’s the same with wrestling. More MacAskill Soon! Labels: games, making games, writing games 0 comments Sunday, May 24, 2020 Outlines? Whenever you start the heavy writing of your story, do you ever step off the outline you made? i'm currently writing a short story and as i write it i'm forming the story further and further in my head even though i've already wrote it all out. it almost makes it feel like the outline is useless. i mean yeah, it helped me get all my thoughts down into paper and it assisted me in putting the story in the right track but it makes me feel like i'm missing something crucial in writing. like a key point or backbone to keep this from happening. i don't wanna change the entire story or rewrite it fifty times, you know? i'm proud of the product i have and i feel like changing it all is going to mess it up. am i doing something wrong? is there anything you've done to combat this?

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Does that help?



Field Marshall von Moltke, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, said, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." When you get to writing, you discover where the holes in your outline are. You may discover holes that can be fixed with a little surgery. You may discover structural mistakes.You may realize you've started the story too late, or too early. You may discover you can merge two characters, or you really need someone for the protagonist to talk to. (I worked on the We Happy Few Victoria DLC for 18 months before I realized that.)An outline is not a blueprint for a building. It's a chord progression for jazz. If you think of something better than what's in your outline, do that. Many mistakes (& opportunities) don't reveal themselves till you're writing pages.That's not to say don't outline! (Another general, Dwight D. Eisenhower: "Plans are useless. Planning is essential.") If you just start writing pages, it's much too easy to get lost in the woods. When you *don't* know what else to do, write what's in the outline. One of the strengths of an outline is that it will get you through the points where you decide your whole idea sucks. You can just power through based on your outline, and read the thing later and see if it really does suck or if you were just second-guessing yourself.However, we all go to pages too quickly. In CRAFTY SCREENWRITING, I say, pitch your story over and over, to anyone who will listen, before writing anything down. Stories get better every time you tell them. It isto do this. But it exposes many of the flaws in your story. It also provokes better ideas than what you have. There's nothing like seeing your listener sort of drift off, and come up on the spot with something sticky that pulls them back in.Again: tell your story again and againyou write it down. If this is too scary, write it down and then tell it without looking at what you wrote down. Nothing surfaces a logic flaw more effectively than when you can't remember what comes next.If you repeatedly find big mistakes in your outlines when you sit down to write pages, maybe try thrashing them out more before committing them to the page.Also: even when you've gone to pages, sometimes it's a good idea to go back to index cards. Many, many times I've started a rewrite by writing down the beats in the script I've already written. It's much easier to see the whole story when you've got 40-60 index cards on the kitchen table than when you've got a pages and pages of script. It's easy to move the beats around. It's easy to add beats. It's easy to throw out beats.But, as always: whatever works for you. There is no one way to get to a polished draft. If sticking dogmatically to your outline helps, do that, then rewrite. If writing an outline, then throwing it away, and writing pages from memory works, do that.Does that help? 0 comments Thursday, April 09, 2020 Tell, Don't Show



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



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



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

... Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, chief? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know... was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it's... kinda like ol' squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he'd start poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got...lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin' and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin' they all come in and rip you to pieces.

Y'know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! I don't know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin' chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson's mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended. He'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us. He's a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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







One of the classic bits of advice for writers in different media is "show, don't tell." Don't say the guy's rich and generous; have him flip a $20 to the delivery guy.It is often good advice; I've given it lots of times as feedback.It's notgood advice. Sometimes it is far more effective to tell than to show.For example, in JAWS, Quint tells the story of the sinking of theThere are a bunch of reasons why you wouldn't want to, and couldn't, show this.For one thing, sheer scope. JAWS was shot on a budget. Shooting a couple hundred guys in the water would be a massive endeavor.Second, passage of time. Part of the horror of this story is imagining being stuck in the water for days and nights and days, not knowing if help was coming, not knowing if you were next. Film, in particular, is rubbish at communicating things changing over a period of time. You can show shadows moving. You can show seasons. You can show pages flying off a calendar (but who still has a calendar?). But how do you fast-forward on hundreds of guys in the water for a couple of days? A series of dissolves? Ugh.Third, number. Stalin said, "One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic." (He murdered millions of people.) If you tried to show hundreds of deaths, all you'd do is inoculate the audience against feeling anything about the next person to die.Fourth, extreme graphic violence. Except in a gore horror film, the audience generally does not want to see someone bitten in half. Rather than being horrified, a lot of people would feel nauseous.Fifth, attitude. The point of the story is not that sharks eat people. We knew that. The point of the story is that Quint fucking hates sharks.So, Spielberg and writers Benchley and Gottlieb have Quint tell the story. It's a hell of a speech.So, yeah, sure, it is often much better to show than to tell. It's fair to say that before you give a character a big ole chunk of exposition to tell, you should consider how to show the same information. Expository dialog, like readables in games, can become a crutch.But don't be afraid to have a character tell a story: if it's too big, or takes place over too much time, or is something so over the top the audience would really rather you didn't show them. Or if the point of the story is what it means to the story teller. 2 comments Sunday, March 29, 2020 Satisfying Mysteries



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



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



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



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



Possibly we could train a computer to distinguish a dog from a wolf these days, but it would be a project costing north of $20M, I'd guess, and it would still tell you half the time that you're looking at a hat.



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



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



The brain is so hungry to match make stories out of things that happen around it that it is driven to make stories even when the events are completely random or have nothing to do with each other.

A large part of the gambling industry lives off people who see patterns in the random roll of the dice.



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



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



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



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



What does this have to do with satisfying mysteries?



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Agatha Christie novels do give the clues before they're interpreted, but they tend to be arcane clues that only the cleverest and most careful of readers will put together before the detective does.

Nonetheless the characters are rich and fun, and we can interpret their behavior and guess who done it.



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



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



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



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



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



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



I've noticed that game developers are fond of surprising the player.