Live To Write Another Day

by Dean Orion

  For these and many other reasons, the subject of interactive writing really merits a much lengthier, in-depth discussion in its own right; however my intention here is to give you a relatively high-level treatment that focuses more on the impact interactive technology has had (and will continue to have) on us as writers, as well as on the entertainment world as a whole.

  Emotions and Games

  For as long as I can remember the most hotly debated topic in the gaming world has revolved around the question of whether or not you can experience genuine emotion while playing a video game. Naturally, like everyone else I have a theory about this, though mine is a very nuanced one.

  Yes, I think you can experience genuine emotion while playing a video game, but it’s not the same kind of emotion that you experience while consuming a traditional narrative.

  Remember in Chapter 2 when I said writing involves both passively listening while at the same time actively composing? I believe a similar thing happens when you’re button mashing some hideous mythological monster to death. You’re passively receiving the cues that the game is constantly giving you and at the same time actively trying to beat the stuffing out of that thing. When you write, you don’t typically get emotional about what you’re doing (though I’m sure every writer has their moments). You’re focused on accomplishing something. The same thing is true when you’re playing a game. Even if there are some deeper emotional elements to the experience, you’re only partially engaged with them because you’re driven by a different kind of emotion, something I describe as an intense need to achieve.

  On the other hand, when you watch a movie or a TV show or read a novel, you can easily become deeply emotional. That’s because the experience is entirely passive. You’re focused on receiving information, with no need to achieve anything. The dominant feeling is one of empathy for the characters you see on the screen or for whom you’re reading about. This reaction is utterly visceral because storytelling is an archetypal ritual, one our ancestors have engaged in for thousands of years, predisposing us to respond in this way.

  So, if the two experiences do indeed affect us in fundamentally different physiological ways, then how could we possibly expect them to elicit similar feelings or emotions? And should they? Do video games really need to be more like movies, and do all stories need to be deeply emotional in order to be good? I don’t think so. You don’t have to look any further than the perennial success of high-tech spy novels, like those popularized by Tom Clancy, and procedural TV crime dramas, like CSI and Law & Order, to answer that question.

  Now, could I be convinced otherwise that playing a video game can be a deeply empathic and emotional experience? Given the rapid advancement of technology, and the possibilities that will undoubtedly emerge in the future, absolutely. I believe anything is possible.

  Narrative and Interactive Design

  When it comes to narrative storytelling, there’s no question a prominent seat at the table exists not just for video games, but for many other types of interactive experiences as well. The challenge is that virtually all of our previous narrative formats have evolved out of the oral tradition. While a narrative wants to be linear and set in stone, interactive design is pretty much the opposite. It wants to be non-linear and allow the user some degree of autonomy as to how they consume the experience.

  What you have in many video games is a lot of narrative delivered through backstory. In other words, you’re free to explore the world the game designers have created, solve puzzles, and/or perform missions that can be completed in multiple ways. As a result, you uncover the story of events that happened in the past. I really like games that do this effectively, where the more you play, the more you learn and understand about how this particular world came to be.

  Most video games also deliver narrative through the use of what are commonly called cutscenes or cinematics, which are essentially a sequence of movie scenes shoe-horned between the missions. When the game is completed, these scenes collectively tell the entire story. Personally, I have never found this method to be very satisfying because it usually takes control away from the player (i.e., stops the game) so that (A) the scenes can play at a higher resolution, and/or (B) the player is less likely to miss critical parts of the narrative. If cinematics are part of the design, I prefer them to run in game, which means the narrative is delivered on the fly during play. You may have to sacrifice a bit of the visual aesthetic, and you do risk having some story beats go unseen, but some of that can be made up for with clever design. At least this way the story feels more organic, since the active part of the experience isn’t interrupted for the sake of delivering the passive part, which can be frustrating at times.

  Another approach to creating interactive narrative that I have always been a big fan of involves the use of “branching” story architecture. This means multiple versions of a single over-arching story can be experienced by presenting the player with a number of different story pathways, each of which is determined, at least in part, by the choices the player makes along the way. In some cases, all paths lead to the same conclusion. In other cases, the structure provides for more than one possible outcome, which then allows players to replay the game and have a different experience.

  On a practical level, creating something of this breadth is clearly an enormous amount of work. It’s also an incredible writing and interactive design challenge, because not only do you have to structure and execute a single linear story (which is tough enough to do well), you also have to create a tremendous number of alternative scenes as well as somehow find a way to bring each story path to its logical and inevitable conclusion.

  How About a Little More Character?

  One area of narrative game design that presents a wealth of potential opportunities is the area of character. As we discussed earlier, characters and their motivations are the fundamental drivers of stories. Yet in most narrative-based games, the wants and desires of characters are often incidental to the actions that the player is required to make in order to progress through the experience. So the question that I’ve been asking for years is:

  Why can’t character motivation be more of an integral part of gameplay?

  Here’s an example. I’m a big World War II buff, so the early Call of Duty games were among my favorites, Call of Duty 2: Big Red One in particular. This type of game is generally called a “first-person shooter” because you see everything from the point of view of the character you’re playing as you run around shooting things. In this case, you’re a soldier in the thick of the European theater of battle, and there’s a platoon of other GIs who accompany you throughout the entire experience. As with most games in this genre, the missions are very repetitive puzzle-solving activities in which you have to navigate a maze-like battlefield, fight your way through a horde of relentless Nazis, and ultimately complete a climactic task (like blow up a trio of anti-aircraft guns, capture a farmhouse, get to the top of a hill, etc.).

  One of the many things I liked about Big Red One was that the NPCs (non-playing characters) in the platoon stay with you from mission to mission, shouting random commentary for the duration of the game. You also get to know a little about each one of them from brief cutscenes that take place before and after each mission, though all of this is just filler and has no impact on the actual gameplay itself.

  Then, at a certain point in the middle of the game, an interesting thing happens: One of the NPC characters suddenly dies, and before you even realize what’s going on, this very somber moment occurs in which a couple of the other NPCs grieve the loss of their fallen comrade. The game then quickly transitions to the next mission without skipping a beat, and there is no mention of the event again.

  I’ll never forget the feeling I had at that moment. Up until then I had been mindlessly blowing away all those Nazis for the pure pleasure of it, but now suddenly my writer gene had awoken and my thoughts were racing. What if we really got to know these guys in this platoon? What if instead o
f running around mission after mission doing variations of the same thing, the missions were about accomplishing objectives that mattered to your platoon mates? What if they also involved interacting with the enemy soldiers? What if you actually got to know who those guys were and all these interactions mattered? And what if there were consequences that would determine the course of the story depending on what you did and when you did it?

  You see where I’m going with this? Granted, this is a shooter game, and its designers never intended for it to be about all these character-based motivations, but if you’re going to introduce characters and try to tell a story, why not make that story a sincere part of the entire experience? Why not try to fuse the interactive design as much as you possibly can with the narrative?

  Even if the creators of Big Red One only went a step or two in the direction that I’m suggesting, I’m sure they could have constructed a very interesting interactive story, making what was already a very well-designed game even better.

  Being a Designer/Writer

  Achieving this kind of seamless marriage of gameplay and narrative requires two things. First, there needs to be a willingness on the part of game development companies to allow the stories of their narrative-based games to be created concurrently with gameplay and level design. Typically, this isn’t the case. Story details are often added much later on in the process. Second, it requires that these companies have writers working on their projects that are also skilled interactive designers. What I’m talking about now are people who not only have the writer gene, but who have the interactive gene as well.

  You don’t have to be a software engineer to be a designer/writer of interactive games, but you do have to have a fundamental understanding of how games are programmed. Obviously this is a topic that is far too complex for me to go into in great detail, but I will give you a basic introduction.

  The underlying principle of all interactive design is what is commonly known as the if/then scenario. In other words, if Action A occurs, then Result A happens. But if Action B occurs, then Result B happens. And from there a myriad of mind-twisting possibilities ensues.

  Let’s say we’re making my version of that character-driven WWII game. One tiny slice of what would potentially be a very extensive interactive design document for that game might go something like this:

  INT. BARN – DAY OR NIGHT

  IF the player enters the barn, THEN they encounter STAFF SERGEANT JOHNANNES SCHMIDT.

  IF the player shoots at Schmidt, THEN Schmidt yells a battle cry and engages the player in a firefight.

  IF the player kills Schmidt, THEN they will find a codebook on him. But it is written in German and they must find a way to crack the code.

  IF the player gets close enough to Schmidt during the encounter and hits him with the butt of their rifle, THEN Schmidt falls to the floor unconscious and they have captured him.

  IF the player captures Schmidt, THEN they will find a codebook on him. The “Interrogation Interface” now appears, allowing the player to engage in conversation with Schmidt.

  By opening up a series of dialogue options, the player would then unlock various elements of the meta-plot of the story, allowing them to take further actions. This could involve cracking the code in the codebook, wiping out the remaining Germans in the town, acquiring valuable intelligence critical to the larger war effort, or perhaps even forming an unexpected bond with Sergeant Schmidt that could complicate things later with the player’s platoon mates.

  On the other hand, if the player kills Sergeant Schmidt, a whole other set of options and potential story paths could be opened up. Maybe there’s a revenge plot that could play out involving one of Schmidt’s comrades. Or maybe Schmidt’s uniform becomes wearable so the player can now attempt a clandestine mission behind enemy lines that they would not have been able to engage in otherwise.

  You get the idea? The possibilities are endless. This is what makes designing and writing interactive games both incredibly challenging and a lot of fun. If your brain is wired to think in terms of stories that can be told on multiple levels, like mine is, then you probably have the interactive gene as well as the writer gene—and a potential future telling these exciting new kinds of stories.

  Theme Park Experiences

  In recent years I have spent a great deal of time working for Walt Disney Imagineering, creating interactive experiences for Disney’s theme parks and cruise ships. One of the most interesting things about WDI is that it actually started as WED, Walter Elias Disney Enterprises and, as the story goes, was the passion project in the back of Walt’s shop, the shop in this case being Walt Disney Studios and the passion project, Disneyland.

  Walt’s vision of building the “happiest place on earth” obviously turned out pretty well, but it’s the creative spirit of Imagineering that I think is his real legacy, his dedication to give artists of all different stripes, from illustrators to ride engineers to rock sculptors, the freedom to dream big and believe there’s no limit to what they’re capable of, which is why I have always felt right at home there.

  The nice thing about working for any part of the Walt Disney Company is that you never have to look too far to find great storytelling. When you’re talking about theme parks, however, you’re talking about storytelling of a slightly different nature. This is thematic storytelling through the creative use of a wide variety of different disciplines: architecture, engineering, and advanced technologies, as well as set design, signage, sound, music, live performances, and all different kinds of interactions with walk-around characters and park operators, or as Disney prefers to call them, “cast members.”

  Every ride experience also tells its own unique story—a story that has been thoughtfully conceived throughout the development process and informs every aspect of the finished product. My favorite example of this is Expedition Everest, a phenomenal rollercoaster at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida. The ride features a monstrous Himalayan peak that can be seen from almost anywhere in the park, and casts the legendary yeti of Asian folklore as the star of the show. Everything about the experience, from the museum-type artifacts and discarded mountain gear in the queue, to the railroad-themed ride cars, to the appearance of the abominable snow beast himself, is meticulously structured and designed to tell a satisfying story.

  Ride queues in particular present interesting opportunities for storytelling. One of the many projects that I’ve done for WDI, Soarin’—Living Landscapes, an interactive experience located at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center (also in Orlando), presented just such an opportunity.

  If you’ve ever had the pleasure of waiting in a long line to enjoy a ride at a theme park, I’m sure you would appreciate the work that we did with this one, because at the height of summer this particular wait could be as long as two hours. So the challenge here was to turn part of the queue, which sits in a 150-foot hallway, into an entertainment venue, thereby turning the time spent by the waiting crowd into something fun and memorable.

  After a fairly extensive technology exploration, we decided the most effective approach would be to use “computer vision,” which is the same technology now used in the Microsoft Kinect video-game console. Using cameras to sense the body movements of our guests, we would then be able to create a series of short, three- to five-minute, graphical video-game-type experiences (projected onto movie-theater-sized screens) that they could engage in using only their bodies as an interface. The difference between our project and what Kinect would do some three years later is that we would use five cameras, each of which would capture up to fifty people, while the Kinect would use only one camera and would be able to look at only one person at a time. Our goal was to create a mass audience gaming system in which up to two hundred fifty people could participate at once!

  As the creative director, writer, and producer of the project, I led a team of engineers, artists, and interactive designers through a series of brainstorming sessions. Over a number of months I would cont
inually write and rewrite draft outlines detailing the proposed guest interaction of the five experiences that we would eventually produce and install at Epcot. Our most ambitious effort, called Balloon Odyssey, is perhaps the best example of how we were able to tell an interactive story using this very unique venue.

  When the game begins, a hot air balloon sits atop a beautiful vista next to a shining castle, adorned with sparkling jewels. All is well in paradise. The kingdom is peaceful and serene. But then suddenly, ominous music rises, as a “bandit balloon” enters the frame, steals the jewels by sucking them up with a giant vacuum, and makes off with the loot (Act One). Following this, the “hero balloon” is launched, sailing after the bandit in hot pursuit. It’s now up to the fifty guests standing in front of each screen to steer their hero balloon through a series of obstacles (by controlling it with their collective body movements) in order to recover the stolen treasure (Act Two). Mythological creatures, craggy rock formations, and fierce weather threaten the hero balloon every step of the way, until the guests eventually bring it in for a safe landing back at the castle, after which each team receives a final score based on how many jewels they were able to recover (Act Three).