Specificity and Privacy

The expression "there is nothing new under the sun" is so old, it's from the Bible. It's something I happen to believe; the expression I mean. Having worked on games for a number of years now I'm surprised-but-not-really how often the Quest for Originality rears its head in everything from design discussions to publisher evaluations to marketing meetings and so on. I think this quest is as pointless as Don Quixote's tilting at windmills.

Here is a formula for originality: To make something original,
1) Choose a concept at random.
2) Repeat step 1 and mix, or stop.

That's it. Try it! as a fun thought experiment almost guaranteeing a "not been done before" result, fast. Puzzle game about a love triangle between triangles? Shooter about extraterrestrial dolphins harpooning humans? Why not? Original ideas are as easy as Mad Libs, and like Mad Libs they can be funny. But like anything that can be reduced to a formula (not even chemicals, as Breaking Bad attests), this type of originality feels cheap. It is original in the negative sense -- gimmicky, novel for its own sake, contrived, and so on.

I think when we speak of originality what we're really searching for, what we really want, is specificity. Specificity is a form of depth, and all games want depth. Specificity is depth of subject matter. A game that explores a particular subject in detail comes across as original in the positive sense. Rich, imaginative, a labor of love, and so on.

* * *

Specificity is inherently challenging because it means you have to explore a topic to a level of detail that is not obvious, and it's difficult to know more about a topic than anybody else.

I just finished reading Journey to the Centre of the Earth to one of my kids and was struck by the specificity of the story. Towns and mountains in Iceland, ancient scientists, types of rocks and minerals, all named and described in detail, lending the book an air of authority as well as its distinct tone. The science may be total nonsense, but you wouldn't know it just from reading, and it doesn't even matter either way because it's a work of fiction. Unless you're Neil deGrass Tyson or whatever you're probably not going to have trouble suspending your disbelief as you read, because the specificity of the work is thorough and convincing.

I think this year's critically acclaimed Gone Home is successful in a similar way, by telling a specific story in a specific time and place. The details are well-grounded, giving the game a sense of richness, and making the environment feel convincing. If you played it I bet you spent a while scanning the VHS tape library as I did. Specific names of things are so valuable! Everything needs a name and a little story. Gone Home is arguably not an original game in the conventional sense, in that the core play experience -- everything from the setting (an old house) to what you do in the game (walk around examining things from a first-person viewpoint) are not out of the ordinary. However, the degree to which the game is invested in its specific ideas is unusual, so even though there are dozens of first-person games with terrific exploration sequences, Gone Home is one of very few where that is the entire focus.

To give a real-world example, an old friend of mine knows in intricate detail the history and all the routes of the MUNI bus system in San Francisco. It's a set of knowledge that seems very bland on the surface but I envy it because it's so specific. If Teddy made games he could probably make an amazing game about managing a municipal bus system (he and I played tons of SimCity and Aerobiz back in the day, besides). A game about managing a municipal bus system sounds pretty awful at face value, but then, so does a game about being a customs officer stamping passports, and yet Papers, Please was one of the best, most interesting games of this past year.

Games made by fewer people I think can have a higher chance of being more specific because there are fewer people on the team to challenge the specificity, to rationalize it out of existence. I'm talking about the little things like Journey to the Centre of the Earth's Icelandic locales. What if the reader doesn't know how to pronounce Snæfellsjökull...? Jules Verne decided to give his reader the benefit of the doubt on dealing with that one. But on larger teams, or teams of any size where this there's creative conflict, there's always going to be the temptation to omit, to compromise, to concede, when it comes to the specific details, to file down all those sharp edges. This may be better for a smooth and pleasant development process but it may be worse for the sake of the game's specificity, and therefore for the sake of the game.

Specificity typically requires research, the more the better (and preferably not limited to Wikipedia because everyone uses Wikipedia). The research can be of a real-world subject or in service of a fictional one. Game of Thrones is a work of fantasy fiction, but its level of detail, from superficial things like clothes and food to subdermal things like character motivations, makes it feel fresh and distinct. It takes place in its own made-up world yet it feels very well researched.

The only other good source of specificity is personal experience. To me the emphasis here is on the personal, or in other words, the private. There are some rare cases like the game Papo and Yo, in which a team can rally around one individual's personal experience and make an interesting game about it. But I also think some of the most interesting aspects of personal experience are unrelatable and truly private, and that this is often why art gets made. If I were to just tell you about the most meaningful experiences of my life, or if I tried to make a game unambiguously and autobiographically about it, it would be the worst, just the most banal cliché bullshit, and you would rightfully think less of me as a person for it. My personal experience is not more significant than yours, and does not warrant sharing.

At the same time, that personal experience is all I have. I remember moments from it constantly despite having almost never documented them and almost never told any of them to anyone including my closest family, friends, and colleagues. I channel those moments in the games I work on, channel them so much and so consciously like you wouldn't believe, and you'd never know it because none of the games I've ever worked on seem to have anything to do with me. The key for me is that I keep it to myself. The only way I can make my work personal is to keep private what's personal about it. We relinquish so much privacy these days that I think there is a sense of strength to be gained from consciously holding onto some, only ever hinting at it. Put another way, the less you know about me, the more interesting I am, the more interesting my stories. This of course is not true of everyone. There is no formula, and this is not advice.

Writing Bastion

On September 2, I officially joined the small team at Supergiant Games as their creative director, and together we showed our game Bastion for the first time at PAX in Seattle. The response was almost overwhelming, and on a personal level it was one of the most rewarding moments of my professional career. Part of the reason for this is that Bastion is a pure expression of many ideas that are close to my heart – ideas about games, stories, and other things that matter to me – so the enthusiastic response really meant a lot. In the game you'll find a lot of the stuff I've been writing about on this blog put into practice. Granted, my contributions to the project are only just beginning in earnest, but because I was involved in developing the original concept back when my colleagues and I parted ways with Electronic Arts in August of last year, I feel much closer to this game than any other thing I've worked on. Moving forward, I'd like to use this space from time to time to talk more about my thought process while developing Bastion, and to begin with I wanted to explain how we're approaching the game's use of storytelling through narration. But first...

GDC Online Lecture: Delivering Exposition in Games
All this is tangentially related to my GDC Online presentation I gave on Tuesday, October 5. I've posted the slides here and invite you to take a look: I Don't Want to Know: Delivering Exposition in Games. The slides are fully annotated so just by flipping through the slides you'll get a feel for the substance of the talk. If you have a chance to look it over, let me know what you think.

Narration in Bastion
In film, narration is one of the most misused and mood-killing techniques out there, for its unique ability to eliminate the type of ambiguity that adds richness to scenes and characters. While I've often fantasized about being able to read people's minds as a superpower, if movies have taught me anything it's that knowing people's inner monologue would make life far less interesting for someone as neurotic as me.

Nevertheless, Bastion uses real-time narration extensively. Its purpose is to deliver story and exposition, and to build atmosphere, investment, and immersion in close partnership with the gameplay. The narration wasn't part of the original game concept. It was born in a flash of inspiration (through a development process that enables such happy accidents to occur), stemming from a couple of self-imposed constraints. The first constraint was to never interrupt the play experience for the sake of story or for any reason, which meant no cutscenes, no dialogue trees, no pressing the A button to advance through dialogue, and none of the other such trappings that tended to slow the pace of other RPGs. I love many games that do these things, but Bastion just isn't this kind of game. One of the things I miss about games in general is that sense of immediacy that console games used to have (before disc-based media ushered in a new era of loading times and cutscenes), where you'd hit Start and, indeed, start the game. Bastion is meant to be that kind of game. Text-based dialogue wasn't going to work. The team's suspicions about how it would negatively affect the pace of the game turned out to be accurate.

From the outset, before the company was even formed, I wanted to work on a game with some narrative substance and emotional depth, to create an original world with its own characters. We would have these long late-night conversations about how to deliver story in ways only possible through the medium of gaming, because why not? Games should aspire to be games. Cinematics interrupt the play experience no matter how well crafted they are. And as much as I love stepping through dialogue in games like Fire Emblem or Torment, I had to agree that reading lots of text in a game usually isn't a good feeling. All the theorizing needed to be grounded in reality due to the would-be team's small size and limited bandwidth in art and animation. This other constraint meant no elaborate scripted scenes or silent emotive storytelling as in games like Ico or Limbo, where nuanced animation is essential to mood-setting and atmosphere.

Eventually through prototyping and experimentation all this led to the idea of real-time narration, having a narrator who responds to the player's input. From the outset I was interested in having the story begin with a young man rising as if from sleep or from death, to discover a world changed around him in some profound way. The story would start on a mysterious but emotionally low point and expand from there. The intent was to provoke questions for the player immediately, and allow the game to reveal two worlds in parallel: the way things are, and the way things used to be. At any rate, in that waking-up moment, it turns out that just by adding the spoken line "He rose" to coincide with the player's input, it got a lot stronger. (This later changed to the current "He gets up" after further exploration of the narrative style.) This was one of an initial set of lines that our studio co-founder Amir recorded with our audio director Darren and their childhood friend Logan, a theatrical actor who provides the narrator's voice, after Amir suspected that adding narration may bring something positive to the experience. I remember when I first heard it, not knowing what quality it would have, never even having heard Logan's voice before. It felt powerful even inside a low-fidelity prototype. Players don't normally expect this type of output from a game, so it immediately speaks to some of the qualities that are specific to Bastion. The narrator's voice alone says a lot about the game.

The other reason, probably the main reason, Bastion is using narration is because of Logan. In addition to being perfect for the part, Logan offers us one other great advantage: We have access to him. Some people mistook his voice for Ron Perlman's. Let's say we could afford Ron Perlman, lost our minds, and decided he'd be better than Logan for the part. We'd have maybe two or three recording sessions with him for the lifetime of the game. With Logan we can iterate rapidly, and we need to in order to get the narration in the game to feel as closely connected as possible to the moment-to-moment play.

Logan's natural speaking voice is quite different from that of the narrator, though we were always interested in a fantasy-frontier aesthetic, something with some the beautiful-melancholy tone of some of Cormac McCarthy's novels. I also take inspiration from the late William Gaddis, whose novels have characters with such distinctive voices. And so we developed a character who embodies the tone we were interested in. And Logan nailed it.

Bastion's narrator is designed to support our game on a fundamental level. He's a man of few words not only for fictional reasons but also, conveniently, to support a design constraint that we simply can't have him talking a lot during gameplay. Bastion has a very fast feel to it, closer to an action game than a typical action role-playing game. Our narrator needs to be very concise to keep up with the pace.

Five Rules for Writing Bastion
Logan can probably make the stupidest combination of words sound awesome. Even still I'm attempting to write good material for him, in the spirit of not wasting the player's time with bloated unnecessary prose. By exploring the character and which types of narration work best for the game, we gain a low-level understanding of the narration in addition to our high-level goals for it. As such, here are the factors I bear in mind when writing for the game:

1. Dialogue is for subtext. The player's actions in the game are the "text", the surface-level things that happen. When the player explores, builds things, attacks things, or acquires items, these are all clear and affordant actions. There was initially a temptation and a novelty in having the narrator declare these actions along the way. But this would mean missing the point of why we have the narrator in the game. This would have resulted in that brand of movie-style narration I dislike so much.

Our narrator deepens the player's interactions by saying something about them that the player could not have known. He provides character intent, subplot, and backstory through his comments. The ultimate goal with every line is for it to tell you something about the player character, the narrator, the way the world is, and the way the world used to be. For example, the first item you find in the game is a large sledgehammer, to which the narrator says, "Kid finds his lifelong friend." You can see that it's a hammer so you don't need the narrator to point that out, but through the narration you can deduce that the protagonist has history with this hammer and that the narrator knows it. Further, through the narrator's particular delivery you sense that this history has had its ups and downs. Using this type of narration, we gradually build the backstory in the context of the player's immediate actions and surroundings – I would never expect you to care about something that wasn't onscreen. Following the points in my GDC presentation, I mean to deliver on the major questions raised in the game, but moment-to-moment this type of narration should give a sense of a detailed world that existed before you started playing the game.

2. Keep it short. Our narrator is a storyteller but a terse man. Unlike me he doesn't waste his breath, and that's fortunate because our environments are packed with detail and leave no room for long speeches. In order to achieve the moment-to-moment reactive feel we want from the narration, the lines have to be short. Our narrator has a flair for the dramatic and speaks in a low flat voice, so tonally the lines tend to fit well together even if there's a lot of silence in between statements. These were factors in the character design.

3. No breaking the fourth wall. One of the most exciting aspects of having a narrator in our game are all the opportunities to break from player expectations, and raise a lot of interesting questions over time. A temptation in all this is to have the narrator address the player directly or step out of the story and break into metafiction, maybe tutorialize the game by telling you when to press and hold the X button and so forth. But it didn't take long to realize this wasn't going to work. As mentioned earlier on, our high-level goals include building immersion and investment. If the narrator were to break the fourth wall, we might get a momentary gag out of it but we'd be undermining the experience we want to achieve by violating the player's expectations around the game's own logic. We have a cleaner way of training players, and as with everything else, the narrator is there to reinforce those moments without stepping on them.

4. Reward experimentation and playing with finesse. Our narrator provides a great reward system, provided players like what he does for the game. I want players to develop a relationship with him as a character and to feel like they can provoke certain types of comments out of him. This happens to be well in line with the type of play experience we want to deliver, one where players feel like they can do whatever they want in the world, experiment with all the different systems and weapons, explore a bit off the beaten path, and so on. Having the narrator specifically acknowledge these moments tends to provide positive reinforcement in a natural way. We realized the closest thing to what we were going for were some of our favorite announcers in games from completely different genres, from the announcer screaming "BOOM-SHAKALAKA" after an awesome dunk in NBA JAM to Shao Khan saying "Excellent" after a ferocious uppercut in Mortal Kombat (both games were done by Midway in their glory days). The key difference is our narrator isn't quipping, he's telling a contiguous story for the most part. Having him sneak in a few incidental remarks based on the player's choices or performance helps make the whole thing feel personal and specific.

5. No repeats. When done properly, our real-time narration starts to take on the quality of a story unfolding, and starts to get at those high-level goals we want to achieve. But nothing sucks the momentum out of the game's narrative like a repeated line. Almost every game uses repetitious dialogue even if it's got tens of thousands of lines of dialogue in it; combat encounters will repurpose enemy battle chatter and so on. With Bastion we realized that the moment any line repeated itself – for example, our narrator has different things to say if the player falls off a ledge – immersion is broken. You realize in that moment that you're playing a game where the narrator might loop through a host of different lines after a specific event, as in a real-time strategy game where your units will cycle through several responses whenever you issue an order. So we drew a line in the sand: No repeats in the game, not unless you replay the game from the start or restart a scenario from scratch (and even then we mix up the narration). This posed certain design challenges, such as what happens if a player revisits certain areas, but we're happily taking those on in the spirit of maintaining the feel we're going for.

Conclusion
If there's one main underlying point in all this, it's that everything we're doing with the narration in Bastion is there only to support the specific type of play experience we're making. Everything from how the narrator character sounds and how he talks came about purposefully as part of the exploration around gameplay concepts and game themes. Bastion is hardly the first game to use narration to deliver story, so we never set out to pursue the idea of having a narrator purely for the sake of being different. Instead, we're pursuing it because we realized it worked well for the game we wanted to make and for the process we're using to make it.

You Don't Have to Say It

I felt very fortunate to have attended the Electronic Entertainment Expo last week, same as I've felt every single other year at the show since it started in 1995. The main difference in my experience this year was that I really only saw just the one game I came there to demonstrate, so I spent mornings and nights catching up online on everything I missed. And looking back on all those many great-looking games that were shown, the one I wish I could have seen if I could pick just one is Journey, from the makers of Flower -- primarily because that game is pursuing a goal I happen to care about very much, which, as creative director Jenova Chen puts it, is to "tell a story without using any language" (source). Wordless storytelling is a minimal and powerful technique that's well explored and understood in other media, ranging from all-ages movies like WALL-E to blood-soaked manga like Lone Wolf and Cub, yet in mainstream games it's gone out of vogue due to our industry's focus on technology and content storage. After all, why would we remove words from our games when our storage media let us cram in more words than ever? Jenova Chen and team at least recognize that this isn't a rhetorical question. Wordless storytelling won't be a first for Journey (Chen's already done it very well with Flower), so I'd like to talk about other cases where this has worked well in the past, and why. I'm not advocating for it as a path most games should take, but then again if more games would just shut up, it wouldn't be the worst thing.

When I think of great wordless stories in games, the first example I think of is the 1987 arcade classic, Double Dragon. On the surface its story seems like the worst kind of gaming cliché: a pretty girl is kidnapped, so her boyfriend takes matters into his own hands by beating to blink-away-death everyone who stands between him and her (video). The difference with Double Dragon, as in all great things, is in the details: One of the thugs in the opening scene is wearing a yellow jump suit and carrying a machine gun; there's a tricked-out Trans Am in the protagonist's garage, and the building he emerges from bears the name "English Tear". These details gave the world a sense of depth for its time, inviting interesting questions. Double Dragon is one of many games where you're supposed to save the girl. But it's the first such game that made me wonder why she got kidnapped in the first place. It's the first action game I ever read anything into. These guys didn't kidnap this girl because she was pretty. They did it to get back at you for something.

There's more to Double Dragon. You can play the game simultaneously with another player, and if the two of you survive to the end, the grand twist is that the two of you must end up fighting each other to win the heart of the girl you were working together to rescue. There are no words used to express any of this (except a poorly translated you-win screen at the very end), yet it conveyed a complex relationship -- a good old fashioned love triangle, in an action game whose story was delivered without any language. The mechanics of Double Dragon were incredibly satisfying to me in their day, but it was the story, with its perfect expository scene and great endgame sequence, that makes the experience of it unforgettable for me. I've appreciated the power of wordless storytelling in games ever since then.

Other games even before Double Dragon's time were doing similar stuff. Several years prior, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner created an amazing computer game in Karateka, considered the first game with cutscenes in it. Karateka has a similar rescue-the-girl premise as Double Dragon, and likewise went to surprising lengths at building up its characters in what was a relatively simple game. The difference for me was that Double Dragon's story connected the player to the inciting incident of the story -- we see a girl take a hard hit and get hauled off moments before our character emerges, whereas in Karateka, our hero shows up in a separate scene after we see the fair princess get locked up in a cell. We don't empathize with the Karateka protagonist as quickly as we do in Double Dragon because there's less of an implied connection between the player character and the girl, and less of a sense of urgency to get her before something terrible happens. Nevertheless, Karateka and Double Dragon were the '80s equivalent of blockbuster action games, and they pushed the envelope in terms of cinematic storytelling in the medium. The reason they didn't rely on words, I guess, must be at least partly due to the technical constraint that there was no easy way they could have. But by having to give exposition and establish a setting and a mission without being able to use any words, these games delivered story in a far more elegant way than most modern games do. I think those techniques absolutely are extensible to today's games and could be used to tell the sorts of deeper, longer stories that today's players expect.

Elegant storytelling is conservative storytelling. Scenes should be enriched with as much subtextual meaning as possible before words are used to give any of it away. The more space and time needed to establish characters, places, and motives, the more the story runs the risk of becoming bloated and getting in the way of the gameplay. I don't mean to overgeneralize, mind you, since some of my favorite narrative experiences in games -- from Ultima V to Metal Gear Solid to Planescape: Torment to Fire Emblem -- happen to be very, very wordy. But I have a deep respect for games that can immerse me into the experience without having to talk me into why I should care.

For example, that game Journey evidently takes inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus, which is a relatively more recent example of a game that delivered most of its story, including its own very strong expository scene, using very little language at all (video). And somewhere in between these two cases was Super Metroid, one of my favorite 16-bit games, which features an amazing endgame sequence that's rich with action and emotion yet goes over without so much as a word (video).

I happen to think players generally deserve more credit than most games give them, both in their capacity to learn and use complex overlapping systems and in their capacity to infer meaning. Occasionally there's a game like Braid or like Myst that invites players to explore with barely a word of explanation, and such games have a way of capturing fiercely loyal audiences. Because absolutely everyone, young and old, likes to feel smart. Conversely, absolutely no one, young or old, likes feeling condescended to. And so, games that express silent confidence in the player's ability to pull details out of the scene pay their players a great compliment by giving them the benefit of the doubt that they'll understand what's going on even though there isn't on-the-nose dialogue there to explain everything away.

Of my written work that's been published, most has been published online, with too little regard for length. Having hard constraints -- whether it's for an author working in print or a game developer limited by time or technology -- can bring about good practices that come undone when those same constraints disappear. Then it takes years for games like Journey to come around to reintroduce old ideas for a new generation. But you know? Works for me.

The Gift of Torment

Released with no fanfare in December 1999, Planescape: Torment was one of the best games of the year largely on the strength of its one-of-a-kind story about immortality and human nature. Even though it wasn't a commercial success, I believe it's one of the most influential role-playing games of the last decade and ideas it pioneered have since found their way into much better-known games (mostly from BioWare), such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Dragon Age: Origins. Apart from the overall quality, size, and depth of the game's ambitious story, on the surface Torment was basically just another Infinity Engine game, a "total conversion" of Baldur's Gate with a weird cast of characters and an awesome voice cast. But even though Torment relied on the conventional mechanics of the time, I believe it introduced a radical idea that's had a profound influence on story in Western RPGs: player dialogue with subtext.

In other words, Torment is the first RPG to introduce player intent into dialogue, which may be contradictory to the substance of the dialogue -- it's a game in which you can say one thing and mean another, and use this to deliberately lie at times, by means of the authored choices presented to you.

In a typical RPG, you might be asked by a character to retrieve an item, and tell that person "Yes, I'll do it" even if you as a player don't really know if you're going to do it or not -- probably you just want the quest logged in case you stumble upon it. You don't think about these types of interactions, and, as evidenced by the completely disposable text content for quests in games like World of Warcraft, they do little to build a meaningful connection between you, your character, or the gameworld. But in this same type of situation, Torment typically would give you at least two options: "Yes, I'll do it" (Truth) and "Yes, I'll do it" (Lie). And it would fully support these choices -- lying would affect your character's moral alignment, leading to other changes in gameplay. But even when it didn't really matter whether you told the truth or not, the game made you stop and think about what you were saying.

I remember encountering this type of choice in the game for the first time and feeling frozen in my seat -- never before had I considered my options so carefully around a straightforward dialogue choice. Some previous RPGs, such as Fallout, might have let me play as a smartass, who might make a sarcastic quip instead of answering a question directly. But no game prior to Torment made me feel like I could, if I so chose, look another person in the eye and lie to him with a straight face.

Plenty of RPGs before and after let you play as morally evil characters, letting you randomly kill people if you want, usually just after saying something terrible to them. But this type of psychopathic villainy, while potentially exciting for a little while, tends to feel hollow because your ability to empathize with your character rapidly breaks down as you start massacring entire towns and looting people's corpses for their boots and gold. It's out-of-character and not the "right" way to play, even if it doesn't outright break the game. On the other hand, in Torment you could do some really deceptive, scheming stuff simply through talking to people -- and it made you feel connected and close to that evil, because everyone knows what it feels like to lie, and in Torment you have reasons not to be up front with everyone you meet. As well, the option of lying made the default act of telling the truth feel more consequential. By letting you get inside your character's head as well as your own head, Torment created such a strong connection with players like me.

It took years for anyone to improve on Torment's basic idea of letting you determine your character's intent and not just the content of his speech, but the Mass Effect games finally took this a step further through their system of subtext-driven dialogue. In those games, it's genuinely exciting to see the protagonist act out your dialogue choices, because you don't know exactly what Shepard is going to say or do -- you tend to just pick the emotion or intent behind the outcome you want, and your reward is seeing Shepard act it out faithfully, in most cases. The basic consequence of this is that dialogue sequences tend to be worth watching and listening to, something that's rather important for a game that's bothering to have tons of story content.