Imagine that you are reading a book. You are a few dozen pages into the story when suddenly the book flips back a couple of pages and you are forced to re-read the last chapter.

Imagine watching a movie in a theatre. It is a tense thriller and you are totally immersed in the story. Suddenly the movie stops, rewinds and you have to see the last fifteen minutes again.

Rewinding Stories

Now imagine this happening all the time, with all the books you read and films you see. A couple of times an hour, the story rewinds by itself and you will have to get through that part again. A bummer, right? Bigtime. When you sit down to enjoy a story, you are expecting it to be presented continuously. Sure, there is a difference between books and films. I sometimes have to step back in a book and re-read passages that I kind of “slumped” through. So book reading is perhaps not that a continuous process. Still, we would probably be extremely annoyed if we tied the “rewinding” of books and films to a set of rules which caused them to happen at somewhat regular intervals. Say, for example, that someone installed a loudspeaker in your home. Whenever that loudspeaker sounded (with a beep, for instance), you would have to clap your hands ten times before the next sound beeps three seconds later. The beep may go off at anytime when you are reading or watching a movie, and the penalty for not clapping your hands ten times within that three second timeframe is a rewind of the current story. Five pages if it’s a book, ten minutes if it is a film you are enjoying.

Does it sound like much fun? Nah, not really. But now let’s look at how “rewinding storylines” relates to dying in videogames.

Dying in Videogames

Games that tell stories come in many different flavors and I have previously written (here and here) about different approaches to game storytelling. So, let’s look at how dying in a game affects the storytelling. The extreme book and film analogy given in the beginning of this article may be contrived, but it shows an interesting property of stories: When we experience a story, we internally fit that story to a timeline; and whatever drives the narrative (a game or a DVD for instance) cannot tamper with that timeline without consequences. For example, we expect movies to tell the events that will fit our internal timeline sequencially (in some cases we get it in pieces that we along the way fit together in our heads. “Memento” is a good example). If we push rewind on the DVD remote control, the timeline is instantly disrupted and the experience is ruined. Try for yourself. You will most certainly lose immersion and it will take some time to get back into the story.

Dying in many games disrupts the timeline in just this way. The reason for having the player character vulnerable and lethal is obvious – it makes the game challenging which is a good thing. However, when designing a game that kills players that are not good enough, you have to realize that the storyline is in danger. One common design is that upon death, the player is thrown back a bit on the timeline and he/she has to progress through the same part of the story timeline again. This has effect on the immersion and the experience of the story content. Suddenly an in-game event, a dialog with an NPC or cinematic becomes a mechanical obstacle, something you most probably want to get past as soon as possible. Personally, I tend to ignore the content of the storytelling if I am exposed to it a second, third or fourth time.

A game that follows this design is “Tomb Raider: Legends”. Before some of the boss fights there is a cinematic sequence that is part of the story. However, if you die during the battle, you have to watch that sequence again. In that particular game, it would probably be possible to make those cinematics cleanly separated from the gameplay and add checkpoints around them to prevent the problem. However, many games suffer from this problem.

Another approach is to alter the save system so that instead of rewinding the story timeline, the game sends the player back to a previous location, but the story progress is still intact. “Jak & Daxter” is such a game. This solution is not without problems though. The player is sent back physically, but the timeline is still moving on so the player has to run through a level that is “cleaned” up to the point of the latest death. This is confusing since it says two different things at the same time. First, the timeline is intact, secondly it cannot be since you are moved back in the world instantly.

Checkpoint-wrapping the Story

It might seem that the optimal solution is to do the “Tomb Raider: Legends” thing and just add checkpoints that solves the repeating cinematics problem. But I strongly believe that games should try to tell the story in-game. Without cinematics you tend to resolve to in-game events, scenarios and NPC conversations for storytelling. One can wrap all such elements in checkpoints, but the problem is still there – at least partially. In a well designed in-game event or scenario, the player can die in the middle of the event. You can of course bring back the player after a death to the very spot and time where he died (to prevent repeating story), but that is in effect the same as saying that the player is unable to die. The challenge of staying alive is removed since there is no penalty for dying. To solve that, you could introduce another kind of penalty. You could, for example, remove pieces of the inventory or revive the player with limited health, but that is a truly horrifying way to go. Suddenly you will run into a scenario where players can get truly stuck. The QA department will kill you for it and real life is not wrapped in checkpoints, remember?

So, do we have any other options?

You cannot Die!

The most drastic solution is to prevent the player from dying altogether. This was done very successfully in “Myst” and there are other games that take a similar approach. However, the true “you cannot die” solution seems to be limited to adventure games where the challenge is not to stay alive, but to solve the next puzzle. So if we are making an action game, we have to come up with something better.

“Grand Theft Auto” has a semi “cannot die” solution where the player respawns outside the hospital. You lose some of your progress and have to start over again with current mission, which means that time is turned back nevertheless and story elements are repeated.

Damage Control

“Prince of Persia” provides an interesting take on the problem. Whenever the player dies, a narrator voice says “But this is not how it happened…” and time is rewound to a previous location. So that game makes the problem part of the narrative which is quite clever. They even go as far as making the rewinding of time a gameplay element. However, the narrator voice quickly becomes tiresome and the storyline is equally disrupted and immersion breaks nevertheless.

There are most certainly other ways of doing damage control to cover the problems and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are examples of games that does it with better results than “Prince of Persia”, but I believe that the problem is rooted deep in a discrepancy between gameplay (interactivity) and how we experience and relate to stories. Perhaps the optimal solution is not to design gameplay mechanics that serves the storyline, but to alter the way the game narrates.

The Game World as the Story

One game with a fundamentally different approach to story is “Metroid Prime”. The game features cinematics that provide the setup for the game, and that provides presentation and closure at certain points in the game (before a boss-battle, for example). But those cinematics have little to do with the narrative. Instead, it is the game world that provides the story.

In “Metroid Prime”, the player can dig deep into the story of the planet the game is set on by investigating the environments and by “scanning” certain objects to collect pieces of story information. This part of the game is purely optional, but it deepens the world and the interested player can use those pieces of information and build a story timeline for him- or herself.

There are other games that take a similar approach (“ICO” shares some of those traits, but has more of a storyline than “Metroid Prime”) and to me, those games make a more profound story experience since I, as a player, is unfolding the story from within the world. But while those games can avoid the rewinding timeline altogether they have problems telling the same kinds of stories as games like “Tomb Raider: Legends”. Whereas most games that contain a story tries hard to be a movie, games such as “Metroid” makes no such effort. In effect, this means that the cinematic game uses the language of the cinema to convey story. Cinematic events and dramatic conflict pile up in the player’s face and it works – sort of. But shifting the perspective and allowing the player to unfold, experience and build the story for him- or herself has profound effects on how the story can be presented. The story of “Metroid Prime”, for example, is “passive” in the sence that you experience the story elements second hand – through the pieces of information you gather. Very little “active” storytelling goes of in that game, whereas in “Tomb Raider: Legends”, almost all the storytelling is active, and told through cinematics.

The Essence of the Medium

So, which is the technique most true to the medium? The question is largely irrelevant since the storytelling potential of games makes anything that people enjoy and get rewarded by true and worthwhile. There are innumerable ways of telling a story – just look at the many ways books and movies tell theirs. Still, I believe that we need to understand our medium in order to be able to go further and evolve. Cinema was nothing more than “filmed theatre” in the beginning and one might argue that most games today are little more than “pieces of cinema stitched together by passages of gameplay”. But as cinema has moved way beyond filmed theatre, I believe that game storytelling will move way beyond cinema

An interesting thought experiment is to look at various media and search for story-containing works that could not ever work in another medium. In literature, a candidate might be “Finnegan’s Wake”, by James Joyce and in cinema “Koyaanisqatsi”, by Godfrey Reggio. (One could argue that the same “essential story” can be told in another medium, but the effect on the audience will probably be very different.)

Now, do you know a game that tells a story that cannot be told in another medium?

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Gears of War, the upcoming Xbox 360 flagship game has a few new trailers out and I was truly amazed. First of all, this is a huge game project, possibly costing more than 10 million dollars to produce, and sure do it look neat. The graphics are at the very frontier (technically) and animations and sound effects seems to be good.

But there are problems here. Huge ones! Just see for yourself. Let’s start with the first one. And concentrate on the dialog:

Trailer with opening cinematic

Wow! I can’t believe that a huge project like Gears of War seems to have spent less than $10 on the script. The dialog is reeking of clichés, the direction is bad – the whole thing is just painful to watch. Cynics might say that this does not matter – most gamers won’t notice anyways. Perhaps they are right (the comments on the Gametrailers site certainly indicates so), but it beats me that there seems to be no effort spent with the writing quality – no effort at all.

I won’t dig anymore into that first trailer since it makes me depressed. So let’s move over to trailer number 2:

Trailer with Tears for Fears cover

Jeeeeeeziz! Here they cross every single line of decency. In a few seconds, the trailer tips over from “just tasteless” to “sickenly hilarious”… And it tips bigtime… Titanic-style!

So, the first trailer made me weep and the second made me laugh.

Status Quo. Thanks Epic!

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Ernest Adams has collected a quite comprehensive list of books “from which everyone in the game industry could learn something.” I have read a few of them, some are still on my shelf, unread and I have some other books I think should be on that list.

My own advice on where on that list to start reading is with “The Design of Everyday Things”, by Donald Norman. It’s not about games, but definitely a must-read for anyone who does any kind of design-work – be it game design, graphic design, industrial design, programming or whatever.

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“It’s hard to look at what the hard-core gamer asks for from the world and not come to the conclusion that if indeed they are being oppressed, it’s because they were asking for it.“

It’s rare to see people make reasonable arguments about gaming and the gamer community at large. Just type Jack Thompson into Google and you will be flooded with, shall we say “heated”, stuff.

But a few days ago, I read an interesting piece on the subject.

The author starts out by stating that if you pick any of the current questions of the time (in this case the “problem of games and gamers”) and listen to the debate and arguments. You will eventually reach the conclusion that everyone is stupid.

It’s a fun conclusion that I can see the point in making. However, I’m not entirely sure it’s true. The article itself kind of invalidates that statement. But it is otherwise a well thought out piece that and makes a good argument about the gamer community.

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Some of you might say that the videogame industry is really starting to mature. The signs can be seen all over. Game production budgets are sky-rocketing, Hollywood is looking into the games industry with hungry eyes, script writers line up to get a share of the work and money. Today you have guys like Dave Freeman riding along and (probably) making a good living out of regurgitating really old truths about scriptwriting, selling them as his own ideas (and yet adding very little about “gameplay” integration to his theories.) Furthermore, Peter Jackson recently stated that he want to develop games and is said to have described the Xbox 360 and Live as “an amazing living canvas … which allows the storytellers of our time to express themselves in a new medium.”

And while the money starts to roll and the industry grows and develops (in an unhealthy way, some say) one must stop and wonder if this is really a maturing industry. Is Peter Jackson right? Do we really know more about game-storytelling than we did 10 or 20 years ago?

If you remember Lucasarts, Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls and other high quality writing developers, you might dismiss the question immediately and say that games like “Planetfall” and “Monkey Island II” offered a deeper interactive experience than anything we have seen on the shelves since then. In some ways I agree with that statement. The interactive storytelling of the classical adventure game is hard to surpass, and evidently some of the most interesting interactive storytelling of today is done within the small but healthy “int-fiction” community. Look at the brilliant The Edifice for instance. It contains one of the most innovative and well integrated puzzles I have seen in any game.

And yet there are games like “Shadow of the Colossus” which uses minimalistic storytelling (just like “ICO”), but still manages to enchant and captivate much more than other, more story-intense, games. The FPS is also being overhauled over and over again since “Half Life”, “Deus Ex” and “System Shock II”, with each iteration doing a better job of telling a thrilling story, largely in-game. Just look at “Bioshock”, “Prey”, “F.E.A.R” – and our own “Riddick” and upcoming “Darkness” games.

There’s much more to the picture than this, of course, but the question of the state of the industry, and the maturity of the game medium is a complex one. Just consider the following…

Writing tools

What tools are writers using when writing for games? Well, I don’t have a definite answer, but I have made some observations that point in a rather disturbing direction. In some of the on-line forums where game developers hang around, I have seen the following question being asked: “I am an aspiring game writer and I am wondering if you guys write in Final Draft or some other tool?”

Final Draft seems like a reasonable suggestion, given that it is a well used and quite good tool for writing screenplays (but stay away from version 7 until they have fixed it). However, Final Draft is tailor-made for screenwriting and helps you write in a format that is developed for movie scripts. However, you should know that there are differences between games and movies that make the use of the movie-script format for games cumbersome and ill-fitting. Just consider multiple choice dialog, for example – or any non-linear gameflow.

So, back to the question from the forums… What tools are people using and suggesting? Well, you could never guess… It’s “Microsoft Excel”!

Wow! If any game-writer who actually works through Excel reads this you are more than welcome to tell me about your workflow, because I can only imagine it working like this: Excel is great for structuring table-like information and I use it a great deal when producing voice-sheets for voice-recording, and also for typing up AI dialog. But that’s about it. An Excel game-script can hardly be more than sheets of AI dialog. There’s probably directions to where the dialog should appear, about who is speaking, about the dialog context and so on – but tables nonetheless. (I may have totally missed something here so please tell me if you know or catch something I don’t)

Storytelling versus Cinematics

If your game is focused on gameplay and you then stitch the parts together with storytelling cinematics, then the “Excel”-way works fine. The game writing and the story writing becomes two different processes. It is not uncommon that the job of doing the in-game stuff is given to someone internally, and then you hire a professional writer to do the cinematics. That approach has the advantage that the design is more likey to be focused on gameplay and not the story. It’s also easier to cope with production-wise since the cinematics can be pre-rendered and produced by an external company. But it definitely ain’t “allowing the storytellers of our time to express themselves in a new medium.” Cinematics is cinema. Moving pictures and sound. Period. The “new medium” part of games is about player participation and interaction. It is about using gameplay and storytelling to provoke feelings and ideas. For me, it is very much about the integration of game and story. Cinema was not cinema in the beginning. It was “filmed theatre” where the camera was totally crippled. Similarly I do believe that interactive storytelling in games is not about the separation of story and gameplay, but the integration of them.

There are people who seriously consider these things and bring those ideas into their work, but the “Excel” situation makes me wonder how many they really are. It is not only Excel. We have had several publishers and others visiting us who has remarked on the fact that we have in-house writers (we are two nowadays). It seems like it is still quite rare even though it is becoming more common. And when more people work with similar things, it is a good thing if they share knowledge and tools…

Game scripts and Walkthroughs

When designing games, you need to be able to describe gameplay properly. For that, you can write “Walkthrough” documents. These are descriptions of what the player encounters and is supposed to do. They could contain some level of detail regarding the level layout and they could describe NPC interactions somehow. In parallel to that, the story is often laid out as a series of background documents (written in Word, for example) with story synopsis, character bios and whatnot. The actual story, if told by a series of cinematics, is probably written in Final Draft or Word. These document often contain detailed scene-setups and some camera directions. They also contain the dialog. Besides those documents, there are often numerous amounts of documents and databases that specify and manage everything else for the game.

So if we aim to bring story and gameplay together we should probably start by extending (or modifying) the gameplay Walkthrough documents to incorporate the actual storytelling as well. If we manage to do that properly we could end up with one type of document that serves the following purposes:

• It sets some constraints for level design.
• It serves as a base for planning (just like a movie script is used for planning.) All important assets should therefore be named and described.
• It serves as reference for implementation of gameplay, sound, effects etc.
• It provides the data for voice-recording.
• It provides in-game data for voice subtitling.
• It is the script used when animating and recording events.
• It is the script used for any cinematic production.

A well thought out framework for Walkthrough writing can thus help us keep things together. It does not invalidate the need for all kinds of separate asset-management processes and tools. Walkthroughs in this manner should be kept quite concise and not overloaded with detail since the more detail, the harder it is to keep documents updated – and they tend to get harder to grasp and work with as well.

Now, the sad news is that I don’t know of any accepted standard for Walkthrough documents that can be used – nor any good tools (or any tools at all for that mattet). However, I suspect that there are candidates out there, in-house stuff that has been used for all kinds of projects. For the production of the “Riddick” project, for exampple, I designed such a documentation model and also developed a number of tools that all has been redesigned and iterated through the years. I use the same foundation for “The Darkness” right now.

In the end I think that we need to consider the production process seriously. If we want to move away from the “stich those levels into a story” approach that still seems to be quite widely used, we need to alter our way of thinking. And we need to be able to express our ideas in a workable format.

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