The Forgotten Art of Blockbuster Cinema - Mike Hill

This talk from Mike Hill is a wonderful piece on dissecting story and cinematic choices to produce visual storytelling.

VR Storytelling

As we move closer to having incredible narrative experiences in virtual reality, the ways in which people interact with the VR platform will drive and affect those stories. It's important to understand the platform of any experience you're building, but with VR it's imperative. It's such different beast that taming it has taken decades, and we're still not at the pinnacle of our experience building.

This article gets us a little closer to that milestone.

DICE 2016: Competency

The discussion between Todd Howard and Pete Holmes this year at DICE was interesting for the most part, but a juicy reminder about how people interact with story is embedded right at 3:02:53 (in case the link isn't taking you directly to that spot).

Todd and Pete discuss how people like to experience jokes and the "comeback" element of storytelling. Pete points out a joke's setup and punchline need a distinct amount of time between them in order to have the maximum effect, and the same is true of the payoff of a story. Pete explains how people don't want the home team of a given sport to dominate -- people want to see the team they're rooting for come back from the precipice of disaster, a near loss, and grasp victory from the jaws of defeat. It's an important lesson to keep in mind when pacing the journey of your characters. No one wants to be perfect. They want to overcome imperfection.

Brandon Sanderson talks about the three knobs you can adjust on a character to change how they are perceived by an audience. Sympathy, Proactivity, and Competency. If your characters are too competent, if that knob is turned up too high, the player never has to overcome adversity. If there is no adversity to overcome, the conflict is meaningless.

Undertale: Narrative in Mechanics

When it comes to making meaningful decisions and creating impact, you can't get much better than Undertale. A game built around utilizing preconceptions about traditional RPG's to produce emotional response, Undertale instills humor and fun to keep you entertained throughout. It does the unexpected better than any other game I've played, and brings gameplay and narrative together in a way that epitomizes the term "narrative design." I want to talk about one aspect of the game that really shows off that synergy. WARNING: Minor Spoilers Ahead.

The Undyne fight is a fantastic example of using your game mechanics to tell a story. Undyne is a villain who has been harassing you for a good portion of the game up to the point you fight her, so we already see the great narrative practices of recurrence and comparable strength being used.

(Note: there are many ways to play through the game. This is one of many different approaches.)

As you progress in the fight, Undyne begins to weaken. Normally, a weakened state is communicated to the player through a low health bar, bloodied visuals, or, in the case of my favorite X-Men game, a flashing red overlay on the enemy. In this fight, however, the visuals are limited. And while a health bar exists, Undertale likes to make it somewhat meaningless when it comes to determining where you are in the course of a fight.

As Undyne weakens, she begins to test her resolve by promising to never give up. As she attempts to stay in the fight, her attacks come more slowly. They become increasingly easier to dodge. As she takes hit after hit, as she struggles to fight back against what she knows is defeat, her attacks become almost pathetic in their simplicity. You easily swat aside blows with the block mechanic for this specific battle, and hit back hard. Watching her attacks slowly crawl across the screen toward my waiting block made me feel a sincere sympathy for Undyne. She knew she was defeated, but she kept fighting. I felt this because the mechanics were communicating an enemy who had nothing left. The text didn't tell me. The ways in which the battle mechanics changed told me.

Using mechanics to communicate sentiment is a difficult practice as there is only so much you can do. But I encourage you to explore every action your mechanics afford you and ask how you can tell a story with those actions.

Life is Strange: Utilizing the Mundane

One of the greatest triumphs of Life is Strange is its ability to take the everyday life of a student and create from it an immersive environment. Now, things get non-everyday pretty quickly but the success of the game is based in its relatability. We see ourselves in the struggles represented in the game. Being able to place ourselves in those situations is paramount to successful immersion. Minor Life is Strange spoilers to follow.

There is one situation in particular which takes place in Episode 2: Out of Time. It has become somewhat of a joke online due do just how mundane this portion of the game is. Your task is to find bottles in a junkyard so Chloe can line them up and gun them down. Games will often struggle to find something meaningful for the player to do during downtime and this is a product of needing to build sisterhood between Max and Chloe without having a hair-raising, pulse-pounding action sequence. So they fall back on the old collection quest. Not the greatest choice but also not the worst.

What I want to talk about here is how Dontnod utilizes this time to infuse information and story into the game. Though the actual task of finding bottles is pretty boring, the places in which you look are loaded with environmental storytelling.



First off, we wander this junkyard that is an obvious hangout for the youth of the area. We get a small insight into the culture of the kids who live in this town -- at least those who hang out here. They're destructive, they need an outlet, and they need to do these things in a safe, private sanctuary.

Second, we get insight into the relationship between Chloe and Rachel. This is their place and Max is something of an intruder here, which is a mirror for the relationship established thus far. This point is further driven home when we stumble upon Rachel and Chloe's sanctuary. It is filled with fashion magazines with scantily clad women, hinting at the nature of their relationship, stolen traffic sings and beer bottles, showing their rebellious nature and no-care attitude, and graffiti indicating their philosophies on life.

During the relatively mundane task of finding bottles, we are given an environment which continues to tell a story even when the dialogue has stopped. This is more than a lesson in environmental storytelling; this is a lesson in how to never stop the narrative. Every moment can be a moment used to communicate to the player.

Fallout 4: Context of Character

I want to start off by immediately calling out that this post is not about gender discrimination. I'm not going to be addressing any issue that may or may not be surrounding women and men in Fallout 4 (I haven't encountered any). Rather this post is all about the interesting, compelling, and unique way Fallout 4 handled gender choice and how it plays a part in the way in which I immerse myself in the narrative.

Minor Fallout 4 spoilers for the first 20 minutes of the game

Bethesda did something during character creation that I absolutely love. The first few minutes of any western RPG are usually spent sculpting the bridge of a nose, lengthening the jaw line, or just quickly grabbing a preset and getting to the action. I love taking my time with this process. A lot of people do. Seeing Nigel Thornberry created in every character creator in existence is a special kind of treat for me.

During my character creation for Fallout 4, I allowed my four-year-old daughter to make most of the major decisions for me. She decided I'd be playing a woman named Rainbow Star, who I promptly renamed to Eliza because what she can't know won't hurt her.

When I changed the gender, this miraculous thing happened.

The developers made the gender swap into a functional element of the story. When you choose to play as a woman, you aren't switching genders. You're switching characters. That was unexpected. It's not unprecedented though. Other games have done this before, but this is a first for Fallout. It's also a bit of a problem.

The intro of the game establishes that the man speaking is a war veteran. He's been through enough to know that war never changes. His words, not mine. So we know this dude knows his stuff. He is apparently giving a speech about war later in the evening we pick up the game. Good stuff.

But then we switch to his wife. This is a narrative device. We are no longer a war veteran. We are now the wife of a war veteran. She doesn't have the background we just received from the man. Maybe she was also a part of the war. It's possible, maybe even likely if you want to role play that way. But it's not called out.

The problem emerges when we think about the context of the story after the vault. When you escape from the vault, your character has a working knowledge of how to use a variety of weapons on a variety of very dangerous individuals. That makes total sense. Your dude is a veteran. He knows how to rock a rifle with the best of them. But if you're playing his wife, we don't have that context. In fact, I feel a little out of place being a badass out in the Commonwealth when my character had previously lead a pretty pedestrian life, as far as I know.

This isn't a big problem. I simply tell myself, "I bet they met during the war and they're both badass retired soldiers." But when the effort was placed to provide context for one of the characters, it seemed odd that it was not for the other. If they had been the same character with a simple gender swap, it would have made sense. But they are explicitly different people.

It's something to think about when drawing up your own story. How does your character fit into this world? Why can they do what they do? What makes them capable of being the hero? Sometimes the answer to that question is "nothing special." Most times it's not.

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.