Game writers on writing games

BioWare's Drew Karpyshyn and Ubisoft's Clint Hocking talk craft. Originally appeared in the Toronto Star

When the Writers' Guild of America, the trade union representing TV and film writers in the U.S., announced at the end of September that video game writing would be honoured at their 2008 awards ceremony, it was a bit of an "arrival" moment for games. Granted, the recognition might have something to do with the WGA's desire to organize the caffeine-fuelled legions putting words in the mouths of countless ninjas, wizards and lone-wolf Marines, but still. The award is acknowledgement of games as a form on par with movies and TV, and of writing as an integral part of their creation.

We've come a long way from the days when "INSERT COIN" and "GAME OVER" might comprise a game's entire script; even today's most button-mashy of action games are expected to offer something resembling a compelling storyline. The poster-genre for the game writer's task is the role-playing game, in which players must inhabit a character and make story decisions that branch the plot along multiple lines. Dialogue is king ... and there's plenty of it.

"We have 20,000 lines of dialogue," says senior designer Drew Karpyshyn of Edmonton game developer BioWare, describing science-fiction RPG Mass Effect, set for release Nov. 20. That's the equivalent of 15 to 20 movie screenplays, created by Karpyshyn and five other writers, working with the rest of the creative team. (The new Simpsons Game enlisted the TV show's writers to come up with 8,000 lines – a full season's worth.)

Amazingly, Mass Effect is, says Karpyshyn, "far and away our smallest game, in terms of BioWare standards. Because of advances in digital acting and the cinematic feel of the game, we can now tell more by saying less.

"We do try to follow a lot of cinematic rules. But we have to be careful; (games) are very different from a movie. The player isn't passively watching, they're actively involved and they can steer it in a number of different directions."

Writing for those directions bulks up an RPG's script; characters may need several sets of dialogue to accommodate the role a player has chosen. A simple example is in the Knights of the Old Republic, BioWare's 2003 Star Wars title, where the fundamental choice is between Dark and Light sides of the Force. Through their choices, the player character will become either a Jedi saint or a Vaderesque paragon of bastardry, and non-player-character attitudes will vary accordingly.

The contingencies multiply fast; as Karpyshyn puts it, "How can I let the player make significant choices, steer the conversation as they want, but still manage to control the amount of content so that every time they make a choice it doesn't double the amount of work?"

Mass Effect's answer has been to offer the freedom of multiple side quests while keeping the plot's "critical path" within a matrix of four possible endings. "This was a difficult lesson to learn," Karpyshyn says, "but we (had) to come to the realization that spamming the player with options is not something they're necessarily going to enjoy."

Clint Hocking, creative director at Montreal's Ubisoft, comes at the problem from a different direction. His current project, the first-person shooter Far Cry 2, is more action-oriented than an RPG like Mass Effect, but has the same requirements for managing player choice.

"The most important thing for me is to stop thinking of story as something that we write and then integrate and the player then experiences," he says. "Game stories in general are going to evolve to a point where the player is playing the story the same way you'd play Tetris."

Hocking's approach to realizing this in Far Cry 2 is to develop a style of game writing that takes those player statements and retroactively justifies them. "The player is making statements about what he's interested in by the actions he takes," Hocking explains.

"Instead of providing the content that tells the story that we've written, we provide an encyclopedia of content that the game calls on to provide the meaning, rationale and background for the decisions the player has made. We detect who you shoot and when and then we provide the `why.'"

For Hocking, any comparison between games and film breaks down, as players given real choice will naturally act to defuse the situations ("Don't go in there!") that, in traditional narrative, create drama.

"A lot of the most powerful tools of filmmaking need to be abandoned in order to make a game that equals or surpasses a film. When people say, `You need to make your game more cinematic,' what they're really saying is, "You need to make your game better.'

"It's not the `how' that we need (from film)," says Hocking, "it's the result. We need to be targeting the same emotional results. The `more like movies' that people are asking for is the hard decision that makes you tremble and weep, and I think we have the ability to do that now."

01-29-2007 – the Edutorium

Man… other than the brief moments of democracy that’ve taken me back into the power-polished wood, multi-sport courtlines and tempera-painted paper banners of various gymnasia, it’s been years since I’ve been in such a schooly place. Edmonton Public Schools’ education centre on Kingsway, Temple of Teaching, high-water mark of pre-Klein institutional investment. Nowadays, this would all be ATCO portables… or a million twenty-dollar cheques… or a Ski-Doo dealership…

Wah! See how quickly the teacher-vibe kicks in? The cast-concrete of the Centre’s atrium plaza has been steeped in a decade-and-a-half of cutback frustration and tooth-and-claw Unionism. I’ve only been in the place for one day, four hours of light classtime teaching Grade 5 & 6 kids the basics of ghost-story writing (three pulp paperbacks hacked out on contract make me the expert, right?), and already I’m burnt out and identity-confused, jittered with caffeine and post-performance adrenaline, wondering how my little honorarium will affect my pension profile…

Teachers, with shaking hands I salute you! I’d always known – well, accepted the received knowledge -- that teaching was “a hard job” but never really had a taste of it until today. How do you do it? What does it take to get through period after period, day after day, year after year of looking out at those terrifying little faces in all their confounding variety: the slackjawed little drones, the razor-sharp keeners, the daydreamers, the superstars, the friendless, the insufferable shits you’d want to strangle if they weren’t so goddamn funny, the lost ones hiding miles behind eyes full of enough trouble to sink a heart?

You do it with coffee and cigarettes, from what I remember and what I’ve seen today – though there seems to be a lot less tobacco use now than when I was rocking the post-boom portables and Mrs. Trout would come back from her prep period with breath like mentholized dogshit. Also, there’s the rapturous golden vision of Retirement Day to keep a teacher going; lunchtime is still animated by pension conversations, brag/bitching on the possibilities and pitfalls of maximizing the material comforts of a well-earned permanent vaction.

And, yeah, I see how the kids are motivators in themselves. Granted, my sessions today have been the Disney Experience of teaching, “Pirates of the Caribbean” to twenty years under Captain Morgan, but I can glimpse the reality. The shit these kids come up with, in just half an hour of longhand burst-writing -- just amazing! Our topic was “Writing Ghost Stories," so I expected some of the mildly macabre schoolyard spookiness – it’s heartnening to know that, after all these years, every single schoolkid knows the legend of Bloody Mary – but the Craven-on-acid outlines these kids were dropping were something else.

“The Chainsaw Manicure”: A guy goes for a haircut, but he’s drunk and goes into a nail parlor by mistake and gets the full treatment. Driven mad by his accidental feminization, he swears chainsaw revenge on all estheticians and ladies with acrylic gels.

“Untiltled”: A necromancer creates a half-zombie, half-vampire, half-werewolf creature (it’s so weird it defies mathematical laws) to guard his money. When he goes to get some of his money (to pay back the fellow necromancer who taught him how to make the zomvamwolf) his own creature kills him and drains his spirit and uses that power to escape into outer space.

“A Night in the School”: M’kaela, Jason, Mercedes, Kayeley, Heather, Jesika, Tyler, Michael D. and Michael R. decide to spend the night in the school. The rest is a mystery; the session ended before the author could get past introducing her characters.

“The FART!!!!”: A guy calls his wife over and (“Beware,” the author interjects, “the next is cotent not sutable for chidren!”) FAAAARRRRTs! on her. So she kills him with a butcher knife and he comes back as a farting ghost. FARRRRT!

And so on. Today was such a blur of dark basements, insane asylums, evil prisons (lots of evil prisons), cursed sombreros, soul-sucking, ritual murder, torture, demonic possession, satan-worshipping, crying little girls in white gowns, knives, swords, power tools, power failures, super powers and characters with all the terrible names with which parents these days are saddling their kids that I can’t keep it all straight. Pretty much every kid there had seen every SAW movie, and one session got derailed for ten minutes in a heated discussion over who would win in a fight between Freddy and Jason.

I hate to say it, but that was a high point for me, getting the chance to moderate a modern revisitation of a discussion my friends and I originated when we were in Grade 5 ourselves. It made me think that if I were to change careers, maybe I’d go back to school and…

…and, what am I thinking? No way! Not for all the job security and summer vacation in the world. I’m a coffee-drenched, trembling wreck, spiritually drained, craving a smoke, a nap and a drink, in whatever order I happen to stumble into them. I’ll leave the work of civilizing this horror-soaked generation of hellraisers to the halitotic hard-cases who can handle it.