John Wick: What We Don't Say

I'm going to take a quick detour from the land of gaming and tread into the realm of cinema. The lessons learned from John Wick, however, apply just as easily to game writing, so we can pretend we're talking about games if you'd like.

Minor John Wick spoilers ahead.

When Adam and Eve ate from the tree, that was considered the first sin. That was the big one. That's the sin that we can all point to and say, "You messed up." For me, there is just an easy a sin to recognize and point to in writing, and it goes by many names,

Over-explanation. Too much exposition. Beating your player over the head. Treating your player like they're dumb. Treating your game like a book rather than an interactive experience.

This is all the same way of saying that we shouldn't have to write everything we want to say. We are developers of a medium in which we have myriad ways of saying what we want to say and only a few of those ways actually involve dialogue. We have tools and some of those tools are on loan from movies.

In John Wick, we see a style of movie that doesn't apologize. It's an amazing action movie and I want to focus on the ways it achieves its action accolades. It can keep the viewer engrossed in the gunplay and martial arts because it doesn't take time out to explain its world. Rather, the movie allows the viewer to understand the world through the experience.

The Continental Hotel is the example I want to talk about.

This place is great. It's a haven for the criminal underworld in which assassins and hitwomen can come to relax, enjoy a little down time, and not have to worry about people killing them all the time. The staff is knowing, has an unspoken understanding with their guests, and we don't get a single word of that told to us through dialogue or voice over.

What the Continental brings to the table in terms of narrative design is an interactive space that shows us what it is about rather than tells us. There is no character who tells John that he should head to the hotel because it will be safe. In fact, we're never told that's why the hotel exists. We just understand that as the characters interact and the environment unfolds as a character itself. 

We don't have to be told because we see and understand. I'm sure there was talk during production of letting the viewers know what this place was, but the creators rightly trusted their audience to be able to figure these things out for themselves. It has a rich history; a history we get small glimpses of through John's interactions with its guests and staff. It's giving us John's backstory piece by piece without ever telling us about a single thing that happened to him.

That's another place where John Wick shines: the characterization of its protagonist through second-hand reference, but that's a post for another day.

The lesson here is that we don't have to explain everything in our story for the player to understand it. Allow your locations to become characters themselves. Give them mystery and intrigue. In the same way you'd want to communicate a character is a surgeon by having them operate instead of proclaiming it out loud, allow your setting to speak for itself.