For GDC 2007, Writers Cabal publicly launched our partnership with the Writers Cabal Giveaway Conspiracy. Sande had a panel session, Pirates of the Caribbean: Writing Across Game Platforms, with Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Ted Elliott and other notables in the writing field. Here is a short blog about our experiences at GDC 2007.
Sande: I spent the entire week of GDC pursuing my interest in storytelling and game design, especially in regards to MMO’s. Each day, I continued the conversation with others. Although I was busy preparing for my session, it was enriching to have these conversations with industry peers.
Anne: I spent GDC intent on attending as many parties as possible! Okay, maybe I was more interested in learning about game design and storytelling in games. Like Sande, I found many times that conversations with peers were just as helpful as the panels I attended.
MONDAY
Sande: On the way to somewhere, near the escalators, my friends and I chat with Raph Koster. All I’ve heard about his newest project are murmurs about an emphasis on user-created content. I tell him that he’ll need designers and writers to create good examples for users. He says that he’s a writer and he hasn’t forgotten about the writers…
At the Serious Games Summit Reception, Anne and I run into old friends: Noah Falstein, from The Inspiracy, who’s on the advisory board for Serious Games Summit, and Ricardo Rademacher, of Futur-E-Scape. Ricardo is developing a MMO on physics and through prior conversations with Anne, who worked on Stargate Worlds, now reveals that he’s convinced that story and learning goals in physics can merge.
Anne: I attended part of the Interactive Storytelling Bootcamp. After listening to Hal Barwood on narrative design, I learned Daniel Erickson hates it when screenwriters come to games with no clue on how to write them and view it as slumming. Could not agree more! Oh, he also offered some great advice about writing when your main character is the player. After the Serious Games event, we went to Telltale Games to wish Dan Connors a happy birthday. The opportunity to eat cake had nothing to do with it.
TUESDAY
Sande: My friend Dave Gilbert, from Wadjet Eye Games, is presenting a session on his game, The Shivah, at the Serious Games Summit. Wadjet Eye Games has been noted for its strong storytelling in its games. I am familiar with the company and I even participated in the making of his second game, The Blackwell Legacy. It’s been an exciting few months for Dave Gilbert and his company. We’re looking forward to the Choice Awards since Wadjet Eye Games was nominated for Best New Game Studio.
Anne: I schlepped off to EARS, or EA Redwood Shores for those who think excessive use of acronyms is, well, excessive. I wondered if the lunchtime soccer game took place as a cunning ruse to convince visitors that EA is a nice place to work. If so, I was convinced. I listened to Women in Games International presentation on marketing to women. I agreed with some of it, but not all of it. I sat in on a roundtable for producers, and gathered many words of wisdom on working with contract writers. Back in San Francisco, I attended the Foundation 9 and Second Life parties. I was pleased to run into Bioware’s Damion Schubert and Linden’s Jake Simpson while there.
WEDNESDAY
Sande: I am able to catch 30 minutes of the Mark Stephen Meadows’ session, “The Emotion Machine called NPC.” Mark Stephen Meadows wrote the book, Pause and Effect: The Art of Interactive Narrative. As an artist, writer, and observant technologist, Meadows commented on how NPCs, or virtual humans, could affect player experiences. Virtual humans surround us, even if it’s only the canned speech on the other side of IVR (Interactive Voice Response). How would it be different if we had an emotional connection to virtual humans? He mentioned that some say that we can invoke an emotional response through architecture (think the Vietnam Memorial or perhaps your childhood home), but for him, emotion is very much tied to conversation and people.
Anne: I attended Warren Spector’s discussion of the future of Storytelling. Like many at the conference, he emphasized shared authorship with the player. He especially wanted choices in games to have real consequences. He quoted Susan Sontag, which already gives him an A in my book, saying that the writer is actually a moral agent. He didn’t say it explicitly, but I’m sure he meant to say that this does not mean a writer/designer should be preachy when designing possible consequences. We certainly don’t want to have a choice that so obviously leads to negative consequences that no one would ever choose it. After the conference, I attended the Canadian Games party as well as the IGDA Online Games party. I was blown away by the diversity of (unannounced) MMOs in the pipeline. Now, if only they’ll ship…
THURSDAY
Sande: I attend the highly anticipated Shigeru Miyamoto Keynote. At one point, Miyamoto introduces the Wife-O-Meter, which measures the interest of his own wife in his games. The Wife-O-Meter showed graphically how a non-gamer turned into a “hardcore” gamer that can’t live without games. It also showed Nintendo’s strategy to expand the market and bring games to the mainstream. But I also see lessons about inspiration – that like writers, game designers are inspired about a wide range of regular life events and activities, like the home garden (Pikmin), the family dog (Nintendogs), and the desire to include family in your own interests (Wii Sports)…
Because I’ve missed the panel, “MMO’s: Past, Present, and Future,” I stop by the Red 5 Studios Expo booth to talk to Mark Kern, CEO of Red 5 Studios. Mark Kern worked on World of Warcraft before co-founding Red 5 Studios. Storytelling in MMO’s is something on Kern’s mind. He spoke of “synthesized content,” as opposed to user-created content or company-created assets. In synthesized content, the system (or world) would generate story events when needed. For example, if there were a group of users not doing much and it was a PvP world, a message could be sent to their mortal enemies in the game directing them towards the idle group.
Anne: I exposed myself (get your mind out of the gutter) to some of the drama engines out there: Drama Princess, StoryTron, Rocket Heart, and Façade. So far the jury’s still out on whether which, if any, of these systems provide what you need to tell interactive stories. I also attended a workshop by pen-and-paper designer Robert Guschera from Wizards of the Coast on balancing game objects. I found this session incredibly useful and practical, and somewhat suprising that it didn’t come from the a computer game designer. Thursday outdid itself for parties, with White Wolf and 3Rings weighing in as the most fun, because people actually danced. Plus 3Rings had Guitar Hero on tap, so you know it’s got to be good.
FRIDAY
Sande: After my panel, Anne and I spent some time chatting with Ted Elliott about storytelling and structure. Coming from USC film school, I am a strong believer in story structure, but I also feel that it can lead to formulaic cookie cutter work. There are theories one learns in school, but if you break the rules and it’s a success, how can you argue that you must follow the theory?
In my panel, the film serves as inspiration for all the other Pirates of the Caribbean products. I did not want to present film as the ‘normative’ opposed to the other media. What I have disliked at GDC in the past is how the Hero’s Journey and 3-Act structure are hailed as rulesets to impose upon games. They are valid theories and frameworks, but we are working in a different medium. Elliott pointed out that the 3-Act structure is arbitrary even in films. Anne gave an illustrative example of how the medium of photography was interpreted by critics from its predecessor, painting. Are critics and academics interpreting games and interactive media through the viewpoint of film criticism?
I do believe that the study of cinematography and screenwriting is useful for game writing, but I am cognizant that what we aspire towards should be medium-specific. Random snatches of film theory or screenwriting tips are a useful start, but not the final word. Anne said, maybe instead of always discussing what we can learn from films, we should be thinking, what is it about games that can enrich the film tradition? Elliott mentioned that he and his writing partner, Terry Rossio, wrote the Pirates of the Caribbean films to encourage repeated viewing. Such repeatability is a goal in game writing...
During the lunch hour, I had the pleasure of chatting with Hermann Petersheck and Keith Baker from NetDevil. I mention Mark Kern’s future of synthesized content and Petersheck remarked that maybe it would be less expensive to hire content designers than to build the system for synthesized content. Baker said, Hmm, synthesized content -- cool but sad -- because all the designers would be unemployed!
We talked about the NPCs and quest system in World of Warcraft. Since players tended to scroll through the story bits to get to the quest, Kern had previously mentioned the addition of teletyping. Before the toggle was added to make teletyping optional, Petersheck still observed the tendency of players to try to get through it as quick as possible, especially if there were 8 members of one’s party waiting to go on the quest. It’s a matter of incentives, I said, and Baker added, Anytime we’re forcing players to do something that they don’t want to do naturally is a failure in a way…
Ernest Adams’ session touched upon storytelling, championing the cause of using structure based on one’s needs, rather than blindly following someone else’s rules…
GDC ended for me with the AI Dinner. I spoke with Christian Baekkelund, a game designer from 38 Studios. Baekkelund mentioned that once he stopped messing around and trying to break the system in the game, Façade, it worked fairly well. Josh Levenberg, a software engineer from Google, said that sometimes it worked well and sometime it didn’t, leading one to believe that the whole thing might be a random occurrence. I said, the fun in Facade is in messing around and trying to break the system…
Anne: After attending Sande’s panel and speaking with Ted Elliot, I finished off my GDC with Damion Schubert’s entertaining “Writing Great Design Documents.” He highlighted the difference between what a programmer wants – bullet points – and what a producer may prefer – in-game examples. As in all writing, the first step is to know your audience, and Damion clearly knew his. After a rousing dinner involving more discussion of story in MMOs, I went to sleep, at long last, at a reasonable hour.
Southwest Gaming Expo
