Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

I Can’t Shoot Him, He’s From New Jersey

by Richard Dansky

 

E3 (or “The Electronic Entertainment Exposition”, as absolutely nobody other than the show’s laywers call it) is the biggest video game show on the North American continent, and possibly the world. It sucks up all of the Los Angeles Convention Center – yes, even the morlock-haunted caverns of Kentia Hall and the meeting rooms up in the aeries where nobody ever goes. Well, nobody below management level, anyway. The show floors are a thundering carnival of 60 foot television screens, noise, and scantily clad women enticing journalists to come check out video games that neither party has ever heard of. It’s Las Vegas for nerds, when the video game companies roll out their brightest and shiniest toys for the media in hopes of building that ever-elusive buzz among the pwnz0rati.

There’s a programming track, too, what feels like a little slice of GDC tucked in amongst the marketing-driven madness. It’s small, and the speaker list is generally limited to those who can be considered “names” of one sort or another. For my part, I’d been going to E3 for years before I even knew the programming track existed, and so it was an immense surprise to me when I ended up seated on a panel.

The one I was selected for was lengthy in title and heavy in star power. David Jaffe, the lead designer on God of War and the man of the hour at GDC, was on board. So was Marc Laidlaw, IHG winner for The 37^th Mandala but now better known as the man behind the best-selling Half-Life games. Neil Young, head of EA Los Angeles. David Cage, the driving force on critical darling Indigo Prophecy. And oh yeah, me. Shepherded along by Dr. Ian Davis of Mad Doc Software, the panel was compared to (and I’m paraphrasing here, so bear with me) “the Justice League of game designers” or some such. But instead of being gathered from the cosmic reaches of the universe to fight evil, we were there to talk about creativity, immersion, and story, and how the heck to get it into video games.

As panels go, it was a good one. Ian did a fantastic job of moderating the ebb and flow, building up conversations between the panelists and generally not letting anyone ride their particular hobby horse over a cliff. If you were there in the audience, you learned that Jaffe is disillusioned with story in games at this point, and that Cage is trying to push the boundaries even further. I’m sure someone, somewhere has done a better online writeup than I can, seeing as I spent much of the panel praying that I wouldn’t sound like an idiot when my turn came to speak, and the rest of it wondering if I’d done so.

My own contributions were, I think, relatively well received. If there’s a banner that I wave in the discussion of game story, it’s that the unique difference between video games and other narratives is the identity of the protagonist. In a novel or a movie, it’s the hero. In a game, it’s the player, who uses the hero character to explore the world and thus create story out of the game’s implicit narrative. In other words, once I hand you the DualShock, the exact details of your game experience are up to you. As a game writer, I can provide the high points along the way and the shape of the narrative, the lines of dialogue and the setups for the fight scenes. What I can’t do is say exactly what will happen, because the very nature of the game means that you control the action. And slowly but surely, you’re seeing more and more games take advantage of this.

It’s an exciting thing to think, that we’re just on the edge of figuring out how to take advantage of this difference. The first video games were structured on novels, or more accurately, on choose-your-own adventures. Hell, I worked on a phone game not so long ago that literally was a choose-your-own – it’s the natural shape that text-only seems to fall into. Since the advent of graphics (and more importantly, game genres), we’ve been drawn to the Hollywood model, trying to make games more and more like movies. It seems to me, that we’re on the verge of moving past that, too, into a realm of unreliable narrators and immersive metagames and all sorts of other funky stuff that truly takes advantage of the fact that these are games.

And if I wanted proof, I ran into it in the form of some students from Camden County Community College.

During the panel, I was asked about techniques for applying personality to supporting characters in video games. My feeling was that you had to give them enough personality traits to make them seem like unique individuals, rather than walking gun platforms, while at the same time not giving them so much personality that it overwhelmed what they were supposed to do. This is a nice way of saying that the members of your Rainbow counter-terror squad should give you information in distinct voice but without asking for your advice on their love lives.

And then I brought up my favorite low-comedy characters, the guards from Far Cry. Far Cry, if you haven’t played it, is a first person shooter that can best be described as “The Island of Dr. Moreau with high-caliber rifles”, and part of the action involves lurking in various bits of underbrush and eavesdropping on the mad scientist’s evil guards. Now those guards had three purposes in the game. One was to shoot or be shot. Two was to provide useful information that the player could acquire via eavesdropping. And three was to be amusing enough that the player would want to keep eavesdropping long enough to get the useful info before blowing everybody’s brains out.

So I gave these guys what I hoped was funny dialogue, spicing it up with little personality quirks so that each guard seemed like a person, not “Guard #3”. That’s why the folks from CCCC found me.

One of the guards, you see, had been written to mention that he liked sand. Why? Well, for gameplay purposes he was patrolling a beach, and I figured what the heck, let’s say he’s from somewhere with a beach. My personal past supplied one – Ocean City, New Jersey. I spent a summer there once as a live-in mother’s helper (not that I was terribly helpful) and I just dunked it in to the dialogue without a second thought. It made the guy stand out, it gave him a little personality, and nothing more was needed because the player would inevitably shoot the guy before he got around to comparing the merits of various salt water taffy joints. That was it, just one line about Jersey. He didn’t need anything else.

It’s customary after panels for folks to approach the bench, as it were, with questions. One of the students caught me, and he mentioned the mook from Ocean City. His words were, I believe, “I know that guy.” He’d grown up in Ocean City, and had been about to pull the trigger when he heard the magic words. After that, he couldn’t shoot the guy. It was a neighbor, after all. There was a connection there. He told his friends about it, and lo and behold, they wouldn’t pull the trigger, either. They weren’t going to rub out the guy from Jersey.

Was it what the game designer intended? Probably not. Was it what I intended when I wrote the line? Definitely not. But it made perfect sense to these players, and because of it, the story of their gameplay experience became different and uniquely their own.

The mook wasn’t “really” from Jersey, of course. He had the same AI as all of the other guards, the same gun, the same set of pre-programmed instructions and animations and statistics that let him serve as one in an army of several zillion bad guys lurking across the various maps. There was no backstory detailing his misspent youth hustling quarters out of video arcade change machines in Brigantine ever written, no deeper intent other than “let’s give this guy a hint of personality”. He never even had a full name.

That’s one way of looking at it. The other is that there was enough there to hang a hook of imagination on, and that as far as those players were concerned, the story they made up for him was the real one.

One throwaway line. One big impression. There’s a lesson there, I think.

Related posts:

1. READING BETWEEN THE LINES
2. Mixing business and pleasure for fun and profit (hopefully)
3. "Wow, but What About Me?"
4. A Writing Experience that Didn’t Involve Writing
5. Plumbing the Genealogy Pool

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