So there’s this Space Marine
Posted by
Nechrol
on
What’s strange about the games industry is that unlike any other media that has reached the mass populous, its creative process has had a hard time evolving compared to literature, TV and film. We had silence to speech and black and white to colour but that’s in regards to technology. As far as the production process goes, you have to have a premise, treatment, sample script, or novel extract. All these elements give a taste of the show, film or book you’re putting into production. With that, companies and agents can assess whether it’s worth giving the go ahead to. This is pretty fair, that is when you don’t factor in all the reality and creativity bullsh*t companies are more willing to commission these days.
For an enthralling novel or film, being able to write is essential; it’s what keeps you turning the page (unless it’s sex, action or violence where people tend to switch off). Writing is at its purest form in literature because there are no moving images, boobs or other bright shiny things to distract your attention. You’re brain is more introverted while reading then when you watch a film or play a game. With films you have an out of body experience because you sit there and become a motionless sack of flesh while your mind runs around la-la land. With games your brain is focused on playing the damn thing and channeling it from the pad to the screen. You’re multitasking in a sense, like juggling while riding a unicycle.
How does this relate to writing you may think? It’s coming, I promise. I believe there are two fundamentals when analyzing games writing.
A game writers panel at ComicCon.Let me start by talking about the state of mind you’re in while playing a game. At the beginning of a game I can’t wait to see the movie at the start, setting the scene, plot and meeting characters. It’s a new adventure. It lasts about five minutes and you want the thing to start already. But it’s a tutorial, which takes a further ten minutes and treating the player like they just arrived on the planet. This is needed though so you bear it. Finally you get in there and can play. Story comes up through the game, you get to know your characters and decide after not so long if you care about what happens and what they have to say. So you either tune in or tune out.
I’ll use two examples of big games released in the past six months. If you look at Bayonetta, the plot comes across as somewhat original (a reverse of Devil May Cry if you think about it). The dialogue is extremely clunky sometimes and caused me to cringe, especially when discussing the protagonists past. The characters were heavily stereotyped but that was part of its charm and action sequences were beautifully choreographed; the gaming equivalent of a popcorn movie. I didn’t really care about the characters that much, finding myself just wanting to get into the action. If we then look at Dragon Age which had a very archetypal plot but more than made up with it by having well developed characters that I was actually interested in, thus propelling me to keep playing the game. They both have their faults, but you could clearly tell which one had the better writing team and what precedence it took in relation to design.
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.
This isn’t entirely their fault though, they’re not writers and their only frame of reference are films and TV which isn’t where you should be learning to write from because there is a lot of crap out there. They’re a good source of inspiration and such but literature is the better source, save a few TV shows and films…let’s say the West Wing or something.
Other scenario is they actually get someone in to write the script after they have their plot and characters and the writer is charged with making sense of the thing. They are constrained by game mechanics, what the team want and where the plot has to go. This could turn out positively or negatively, only time will tell.
Is he the real deal?
In a perfect world we want the writing and plot to be an integral part of the game design process and cater for everyone. Difficult as that may be, people like Fable’s Peter Molyneux and Heavy Rain’s David Cage are at least raising the bar in their games, even though it may have its flaws. But hey, that’s part of the process. In time we can at least pray that studios will see the light and attempt to remedy these problems by hiring professional writers and having their roles be just as important as the level designers.
So, back to our game; the dialogue is written, the scenes animated and all other elements of the process are complete such as voice acting and scripting. Everyone is happy and collectively skip through a meadow. The game is made and released. The game however is crap, unoriginal mechanics, characters, plot, setting and everything else; a carbon copy of a more popular game. Then you have someone picking holes with your story and dialogue and the company wondered where it all went wrong. If you were one of the design team you tell yourself it’s OK because you’re not a writer, and if you’re a professional you blame the constraints. Don’t worry, you’ll get it right next time.