So there's this Space Marine
We explore the gaming creative process and its difficulties evolving compared to literature, TV and film.
That’s one element. Another one is (after you care about what they say or do) the pacing of scenes in relation to what’s happening. I have been in games where you were escaping from some crumbling tower but decide to have a big discussion about what’s happening instead of getting the hell out of there. It’s frustrating and causes me to launch the pad at the TV. If you’re hyped up you’re not going to want to pause events at some monumental moment, you want to keep the tension rolling. That’s only lightly touching on setting and pathos though. Moving swiftly on...
Secondly, we have the game design process I touched on earlier. For those of you who are unaware a company or development team will sit around one and one bright spark will have an idea. Let us say we set this a couple of years ago for easy reference. John (that’s his name) will say ‘Hey guys what about a space marine fighting aliens?’ From a creative point of view John is a dick, from a marketing point of view the man has picked up on the burgeoning trend and the commissioning and funding parent companies pants have tightened considerably.
As long as it looks cool
The designers will sit around their table and shout out things that would be awesome in the game, all ideas are welcome. Hey, we’re all friends here. ‘How about he can stop time?’, ‘Great idea, write it down.’ Other very original ideas are wailed out and John dutifully writes them down and ends up going through so many pens he has to use his bloodied fingers as an ad hoc fountain pen. So with this moronic consensus made of what would be cool they take all these notes on time stopping, monster trucks, cool levels, bad ass marines and a loose story of something coming to destroy the human race.
If you’re lucky the studio will hire a technical writer to sift through post-it notes, sketches and bloodied full stops and turn it into something verging on coherent. Maybe he’ll have some input about how a mechanic might work with the story or how some elements may not make sense but as far as the people are concerned he can go and jump up his own ass. That’s if he’s there, sometimes a studio will leave it up to the staff to construct the technical documentation, but they always used to have a guy for that. Oh well, how hard can it be? It turns out to be hard.
Someone in the team does have some crystallising moment of clarity and decides that all this swaggering bad-assery needs to be held together with a story. Worst case scenario is they write it themselves and it turns out to have clunky dialogue, terrible exposition and is filled with plot holes and characters with the personality of a door. A boring door. A boring door who, when at your party, tells you the hilarious anecdote of when he lost his glasses and, whadda ya know, they were on his head all along. Damn you door. A story so flimsy it would have been stronger if it had been made out of soggy spaghetti, but they think it’s Shakespeare.
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