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.

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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.

The Stitching Process

Wouldn't it be nice if all games formed around some strong, clear, inspired thematic core -- a Vision, with a capital V! -- and the great ideas kept sprouting from that seed. I think there's a misconception among some game players that games are made this way. I think they rarely are, not even the good ones.

Game development feels more to me like an archeological dig where all you've got to go on is a hunch. You start digging and maybe you find something, but you probably won't, not at first. You start to second-guess what it is you're even looking for. Maybe you find something exciting along the way, but it's only exciting to you, and you're part of a team looking for something else. Maybe you're hell bent on finding this one specific thing to the detriment of other valuable discoveries along the way. In time, what you find down there probably isn't as perfect as the image you had in your head, but it's something.

Games, I think, are often put together from a bunch of dusty old pieces, not all of which fit. You probably find too many pieces in your search. Apart from all the skill and craft involved in unearthing the pieces without ruining them, there is art in identifying which pieces are the ones that can form a whole, and in connecting them with care.

Part of the reason an archaeological analogy works for me is I don't believe in new ideas. Everything has been done, done well, better than I (at least) could ever do it. Thankfully, though, memories are short and tastes change with time. Synthesize some good old ideas at the right time and people call you original. The paradox is that in uncovering old things, you discover new things.

When I work on a game I always think I know what I'm looking for. Accepting that what I'm looking for may not be the right thing, may not be what we find, may not even be what we end up looking for, is a nonstop process.

In time, if you're lucky, you get to the point where you've unearthed most of the pieces and what remains is putting them together. Finally, you're getting somewhere. The work is cut out and just needs to get done. But it's here, relatively late in development, when some of the most important creative decisions get made, through synthesis, through omission, and through connection.

To convolute my archeological analogy: You're not just unearthing something, you're not just piecing it together. You're bringing it to life. It's a Frankenstein's Monster type of process. So then, once the pieces are splayed out, there's still a need for some good stitching to tie it all together into something recognizable as a distinct entity, preferably one that isn't an abomination but rather something that seems like it ought to belong in this world.

I find that writing provides one of the lowest-cost, highest-efficiency forms of stitching together disparate game elements.

In a simple mathematical model, you can form a line between any two points in space. In real-world situations, writing I think is the key to linking any two otherwise-unrelated things. I practiced this in college. Taking English lit classes, I faced the same challenge as every other student: What could I possibly say about this book that my professor (rather, the teacher's assistant) hadn't heard before a thousand times? A solution I eventually discovered consists of three steps:

1. Open assigned reading to one page at random, and note the first passage that catches your eye.
2. Open assigned reading to another page at random, and note the next such passage.
3. Write essay arguing there exists a meaningful connection between those two passages.

I tried this several times as an experiment when I was concerned that I had no original ideas about what to write. I felt cynical and like a total hack when I did it, all the more so when the work inevitably yielded better grades than essays I put a lot more thought and effort into. But then I thought about it more.

Meaning does not inherently exist. Meaning is manufactured, produced, contrived, any number of ugly words. There are nicer words. Meaning is felt, experienced, inferred. But deep down at the heart of it that shit is made up. Fiction. Narrative. In the case of media, the meaning of a work may initially be created by the author, but in the end it is shaped by the audience. As audiences, we have a strong capacity to sense when a work is cohesive and when a meaning can be found in it, and we like to experience that discovery through passive participation in the work if not through active exploration. Our brains do their pattern-matching thing and we take pleasure from finding hidden connections, from realizing the greater scheme of the work, the grander more intricate design. Meaningful work is impressive work.

So to tie this back to game development: To me it is often not sufficient for a game mechanic to be fun or interesting in itself. It needs to be meaningful somehow -- I want to be able to find meaning in it, to connect it to some aspect of my own life experience (or someone else's), to see why it exists as an abstraction of some deeper truth, and to really understand why it's part of the game I'm playing. And so, when dealing with a bunch of disparate mechanics or ideas, all of which are no doubt cool yet not all of which are cohesively connected or inherently meaningful, I believe there's still a chance to integrate them meaningfully -- to stitch them together -- using words, if only as a starting point.

To give you an example from Bastion, that game has a system called the Shrine, in which you can modify the game difficulty to suit your preference. This system was not the Shrine until rather late in development (for a long time it was the Bestiary) but the underlying idea was always that we wanted a difficulty system that didn't put a blind choice before the player at the start of the game, and instead let you tune the game's challenge in a granular way, beyond the opaque and judgmental easy/normal/hard choice given by many games. So, after much wracking of minds, from a writing perspective we found that a promising angle on it was to structure it around religion. After all, the difficulty effects were global, somewhat magical, and somewhat strange. To engage with our difficulty system was to test one's faith in one's abilities, so a religious metaphor just made sense. What's more, it served to deepen an aspect of the world's backstory (involving a cultural dispute between neighboring nations), which in turn deepened the plot.

I think everyone on the team was happy with how this system came together, and it's one of the best specific examples we have to show for when our collaborative process goes well. More personally, I like what the Shrine system did for the game, and not just mechanically. I like how we were able to make it fit. And I appreciate that, if not for the Shrine system, Bastion would not have broached the subject of religion at all, which I know was a meaningful part of the game for some people (at least some of whom have written to me or talked to me about it). The desire to include a difficulty system created an opportunity to instill meaning into the system, by stitching it onto the rest of the game.

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You're probably familiar with the term "to retcon". It's a pejorative term, frowned on by audiences, referring to the act of retroactively creating continuity where none existed. We see retconning as a sort of public embarrassment, a collapse of the fourth fall, as with the infamous midichlorians example from the Star Wars prequel. However, much like how I came to accept that my college English tactics were effective, I've come to accept retconning as an important part of game development. As much as I'd love for all meaning in a work to flourish from some pure and artful place, from some never-changing point of origin, I'll take it where I can get it. That means always searching for opportunities to create continuity where none exists, or strengthen continuity where a hint of it is detected if only by coincidence.

Ideally all this is done behind a curtain, so that when the finished work is presented, it feels like it has Vision. There is no hint of retconning from the audience's point of view, and indeed, no retconning could have possibly occurred with Vision such as this! So, I'm all about retconning, because I want everything to fit and that's only possible once all the pieces are there, late in development. Retconning is a way of executing on ideas, and early on in a project when all you have are ideas, they can be more frustrating than anything else. All throughout development I like looking for those vestigial little pieces of game, whether it's a conspicuous art asset or a design contrivance or a limitation of the engine or a story trope or anything really, and I'll try to connect them to the game's center of gravity, so that in the end, the finished work gives the impression that it knew what it wanted to be all along.

Developing Themes in Games

I don't know how people come up with their stories but I can tell you how I come up with mine. I don't start with scenes or characters or settings or genres. I start with a tone and a theme, because those two things provide the guiding light as I try and uncover everything else.

When applied responsibly, a theme can give a work of fiction its center of gravity, and can make the experience feel meaningful and open to interpretation in a pleasing or thought-provoking way. When applied irresponsibly, a theme can make a work of fiction feel condescending or didactic, like you got tricked into taking a call from a telemarketer.

A theme ought to be omnipresent but subtle. If the audience can identify the theme easily then it's too over-the-top. If there's unanimous consensus about the theme then it's also over-the-top. A theme is like the body language of the work. It should give a strong impression to those paying close attention while operating on a subconscious level in most cases.

A theme is not a moral. It's an open question, not a conclusion. It needs to be an open question because an entire work of fiction needs to be created in its service. In thinking about new stories, I like to think of themes in a journalistic way. My responsibility as the writer is to fully explore a given theme, to provide the audience with a wide breadth of relevant information which can be used to draw various conclusions.

The tone of the work may inform the theme, or vice versa. The combination of the two create the identity of the work, a subject I'll explore in more detail in my upcoming GDC 2012 talk about creating atmosphere in games. (EDIT: The slides for this talk are available here.)

The story I wanted to write for Bastion was intended to explore the theme of overcoming regret. The tone I wanted for it was bittersweet but not sentimental, cautiously optimistic and ultimately hopeful but still melancholy at times, something that felt real rather than sappy but still could be suitable for almost all ages. The characters, events, places, and various little details all came about in support of these ideas. The theme ended up serving as my map. The tone served as the directions from the starting point on that map to the end point. I knew the starting point and end point early on. Plotting the course is what took the longest amount of time, mainly because I didn't write any in-game content before we had playable levels that needed to be written.

I don't like spelling out the theme like this but the game's been out long enough, and besides, it's a broad enough theme to where spelling it out doesn't really matter. The theme in and of itself is too broad to be susceptible to judgment. I think that's the mark of a theme worth exploring.

You'll notice that the theme I chose is simply "overcoming regret", just two words, as opposed to something like "in life we all need to learn how to let go." One is a theme, the other is asinine. Because I'm not Aesop, I will never, so long as I'm blessed with the opportunity to continue to create games, ever inflict my morals on you. I have my kids for that. Besides, if the theme I chose could be reduced to a fortune cookie sentiment then it isn't strong enough to bear the weight of a story worth telling.

The theme of a game's story ought to be the theme of the entire work, or vice versa, however it all comes together. If a game's story has a theme that's not supported by the play experience itself, the game threatens to feel disjointed and leave a sour taste with the player. In Bastion's case, the game was always going to be about building the world around you, an aesthetic idea and a design idea that naturally extended to a theme. The idea of building gave rise to the idea of rebuilding, which gave rise to the idea of overcoming regret and this post-disaster story about a few survivors (and other creatures) dealing with what happened in their own way.

All of the different game systems ideally should support the theme. With this in mind, in Bastion we tried to solve for some problems that can induce a sense of regret in other role-playing games, such as when you get the sinking feeling that you chose poorly when developing your character. In many RPGs, you're asked to make half-blind choices about character class or perks and stats. Halfway through the game you find yourself wishing that you chose differently. This can create incentive to replay the game but it can come from a negative place. In Bastion, we offer the player complete freedom to customize their character all the way through. Our difficulty system, via the Shrine, works in a similar way. We don't make you choose the game's difficulty before you've had a chance to play it and get a feel for it.

There are other smaller examples. When you run out of health and get defeated, you have the opportunity to "carry on", get back up at least one time and keep fighting. It's just a system of extra lives, superficially no different from the convention used by countless old games, but in Bastion I think it takes on a different connotation for some players as they see the protagonist character struggling through one situation after another.

Then, when we present players with the game's climactic, expressive choices, those are the only moments where there's no turning back. I think this is self-evident in the choices themselves, and thankfully we got a lot of good feedback from players saying they gave pause in those situations for quite a while, deciding what to do. I'd like to think that almost everybody who reaches those moments in the game ultimately makes a firm decision, not the wishy-washy I-don't-know kind but the kind that feels satisfying and cathartic even if not exactly good.

So, why would I want to write a story about an unpleasant subject like regret anyway, especially for a game that seems to have the trappings of a hack-and-slash action RPG romp? One reason is because I don't want to waste people's time with meaningless game experiences. Another reason is that this theme is important to me for a bunch of reasons I could only articulate through the story itself. I think regret is a universal feeling experienced by almost everyone from a young age. The depths of that regret vary from one individual to the next in a profound way, but on some level there is a shared experience, even among those who've suffered no real losses, who've had it pretty good overall. Me, I'm the sort of person who's spent (or wasted, depending on how you look at it) a lot of time re-playing various scenes from my life in my head, wondering about alternative outcomes. This is typical but I think I have an acute case of it. Setting aside whether it's healthy or not, I accept that it's a part of me, and it's the reason Bastion's story is what it is.

Thanks for reading, and may things turn out all right for all of us in the new year.

Unveiling the Possibility Space

Revealing the scope of a game should be, I think, a seductive act by the game for the player. Not that I know anything about seduction, but I think I've seen it done properly in movies at least, and read a thing or two about it. Seduction means leaving a lot to the imagination while drip-feeding reality in tantalizing doses. There is a sexuality there usually but it doesn't need to be there. A car can be seductive. So can a game. Even an E-rated game, get your mind out of the gutter.

The game I've been working on is now out there, most of the reviews are in, the first-week sales have happened, all that. I can talk about it freely, though if you haven't played it yet, please don't read on unless you're OK with having aspects of it spoiled. Thankfully the game got a generally good response from players, and I'd like to talk here about one of the major reasons why I think it worked for those people. Sure, we worked to craft the discrete elements of the game to a good level of quality, everything from the tuning of the game systems to the art and music and writing and so forth. But I think the essential structure of Bastion is very important to its potential to have an impact on the player.

We said during development that we wanted for the game to present to the player an ever-growing series of gameplay-expanding choices. Part of this involved keeping the player in the dark about the extents of the scope of those choices, culminating in a series of climactic narrative choices designed to feed back on the entirety of the player's experience up to that point. We had to not only continue introducing new elements of play from beginning to end, we also had to do it at slightly irregular intervals such that the structure itself resisted becoming predictable in a negative way. The desired effect is for the player to feel a sense of wonder and intrigue. When you fully understand something, you cannot wonder about it or feel intrigued by it any longer.

Concluding the game with a pair of purely expressive choices, whose gameplay impact was implicit but not overt, was to me the ultimate way of subverting – in a hopefully interesting way – all the gameplay choices that had come before. Up until that point, you'd been deciding what to build, which Spirits to drink, which weapons to use, which upgrades to buy, whether to invoke any of the Shrine idols, and so on. Hopefully, then, the last thing you'd come to expect at the end of the game – especially in a game that appeared to be driving toward one specific outcome – is to have to make an expressive choice about what to do with the world you've been playing in. It's a world you've either grown attached to or haven't grown attached to, and the choices at stake are meant to encompass that entire range of experience.

Bastion is built on this idea of the gameworld slowly unraveling. Every aspect of it. The world unravels almost literally. The story unravels. The game systems come online one by one. There's no telling how many game systems there are in total when you begin play, and in fact, we deliberately mislead you several times about the extent of the game's scope. We make you think you're almost done with the story after several hours, then we introduce another system around upgrading. And when you're almost done with that, we introduce the endgame act. Only when you're about to reach the endgame do we explicitly tell you that, yes, you're about to go into the final area. But even there, the final area is substantially larger than previous areas and has several new kinds of gameplay beats in store. To top it off, once you've finished the game, then we unlock a whole second play-through with more new content. We structured the game this way to keep the experience feeling fresh within the constraints of our scope.

While I think this type of slow-and-steady-burn worked for us, I'm not about to suggest it's beyond reproach. A game needs to prove to its player as quickly as possible why it's worth playing. One way to go about this is to reveal great depth straightaway, such as by rapidly exposing complex game systems. A classic example of this is the character creation screen in a role-playing game. In Icewind Dale, an excellent old computer RPG, I spent probably a good two hours just making my party of characters before ever beginning play. The character creation system was just so rich with possibility. These days I think it's more fashionable to keep stuff hidden and not scare away the player with too much information up front. That's fine, but finding the right pace at which to reveal new elements of play becomes all the more important in those cases. I'm not sure that proper pacing can be taught, because it's resistant by its own nature to being reduced to a formula.

So then, if you're a game, keeping some of your best ideas hidden away for your later stages is arguably a risky proposition. In fact, by doing so you are implicitly accepting that some probably rather large percentage of your players will never see that content. In Bastion's case, we invested heavily in the ending, by scheduling a bunch of time for a bunch of unscheduled stuff, because we wanted to do everything possible to make sure players who finished the game felt rewarded for their time and effort. From a clinical production perspective maybe this was a bad decision. One could argue that we should have disproportionately focused on only the early levels in this fashion, because more players would see them. The reason this mindset is wrong, to me, is because it ignores who the game's audience really is.

Say you're an author writing a novel. The idea that you'd short-change the ending because not many readers would get that far is deplorable. You need to have faith that your readers will get there, ought to be focused on providing every reason for them to get there. Then you save the best for last for these people, because you owe them. They're the ones you're writing for. As for the ones who don't make it, sure it's probably your fault they gave up, but you can't just go in assuming they won't stay interested because that would make you a hack.

Not Dead Yet

I've been working on Bastion all this year. I'm only taking a break now because I'm building a bunch more audio, but at this point we think we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Our path is set and we've been in execution mode these past months. For me personally it's involved a good deal of level design work and a lot of writing. It's been the most rewarding work I've done since I got started working in the game industry.

That said I don't want to say too much more about what I've been up to with the game since it's close to being finished and I don't want to give anything else away at this point. If people find the result of the work to be interesting then I'd love to talk more about the goals and process behind it after it's had a little time to settle.

One thing's for sure -- the response the game's been getting based on the 20-minute prologue has been everything I could have hoped for and more. The game is a summation of many key elements and the integral contributions of each individual on the team, though given the narrative focus of this blog and my own focus on that work, it's been great seeing the positive reactions to how we approach story, exposition, and writing in games.

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 Story So Far

I have a lot to say about games. But I started bottling it up a few years ago when I left my position as Editor-in-Chief of GameSpot to become a producer at Electronic Arts. At the time, I felt I had given up my right and authority as a critic of the game industry, because I'd accepted a job at one of the biggest publishers in the business, and -- on the surface at least -- that meant I had a vested interest in the success of my new employer. In August 2009, I left Electronic Arts behind, moved back home to the Bay Area, and took a job in the publishing division of 2K Games. For whatever reason, I'm less concerned now than I used to be that my words may be misconstrued. So I've resolved to use this space to write about the subject that interests me most, irrespective of my current job. That subject is the idea of games as stories.

As a producer on the Command & Conquer series, I started keeping a blog under pseudonym, which served as a sort of diary of my journey into game development. I maintained it for about two years but deleted it shortly after finishing my first full project, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3. I'd grown sick of the sound of my own voice in that blog, which threatened to become a list of predictable disappointments -- self-indulgent Internet tripe. The difference this time is that I have the guts to use my own name and have the focus to meditate on a specific topic and its far-reaching implications. This is a topic I like so much that there's no room for complaint.

There are a lot of very smart people writing about game narrative. This made me reluctant to weigh in, especially since many of them have achieved much more than I have. However, I've decided that I have a unique-enough perspective on the subject that my thoughts and views on games-as-story may not be so redundant or unnecessary, that they may be worth writing and sharing. You can be the judge of that, but either way, the act of writing critically on this subject helps me to better understand it on my slow pursuit of mastery over it -- a journey that, thankfully, I'll never get to the end of, for if I did, I'd surely find a great emptiness waiting for me there.

What makes me think I have something worth saying about game storytelling or narrative? This was a scary question. But I decided I have some legitimate qualifications, not the least of which is my background as the chief editor of a popular gaming publication that contributed to collective consciousness about what constitutes a good game story in the first place. There I presided over our reviews of games in general and authored many hundreds of them myself. I reviewed many kinds of games but my specialty was around narrative-driven games, including Western and Japanese role-playing games, action adventure games, certain shooters, and so on. In addition to my background as an editor and game critic, I studied English literature in college while working at GameSpot. And prior to getting into game development, I wrote game stories extracurricularly, while studying story structure and the way narrative works. I've since done uncredited game writing on a number of projects, especially Red Alert 3 where I designed many of the characters and unit personalities in that game, and wrote much of their dialogue. So I've had a chance to apply some of my thinking and the results were encouraging and enlightening.

The name of this blog is a reference to the classic Ultima series of role-playing games, and its three core moral principles, which are central to the stories of the best games in that series. Ultima IV and V are two of the most important games I've ever played, and that series is fundamental to my understanding of the potential of game narrative, so it's only fitting that I refer to it here. Besides, I think those three principles are essential to crafting any game narrative of sufficient quality.

I will always be a student of games. I'm just old enough now to where I feel embarrassed at not trying to share some of what I think I might know. Thanks for reading and I look forward to our conversation.