Which brings us to Firefly.
As it happens, movie director James Cameron (Titanic, Terminator, T2, Aliens, et cetera) and his Oscar-winning producer Jon Landau are on the Multiverse board of advisors. They introduced us to FOX, who wanted to learn more about these MMOG things the hip kids are into. Multiverse CEO Bill Turpin and I were happy to meet with FOX and share our thoughts. At one point, they gave us a list of properties they own, and asked which of them would make for great MMOGs. I sort of pretended to look at the list-“Sure, sure. Great properties, fantastic. What about Firefly? Do you still have those rights?” Sure enough, they did, and from that point on, it wasn’t about two companies searching for a way to work together. Suddenly, we all had a specific mission. Turns out FOX is full of Browncoats. (Who knew?) They loved the idea of a Firefly MMOG, and put major effort into getting buyoff from the powers-that-be to make it happen. There were many superstars, but the two gentlemen who had the vision to champion this from the very beginning were Elie Dekel and Luke Letizia. A huge Firefly fan named Adam Kline joined FOX mid-process and helped work through some remaining roadblocks, making the final deal happen.
And the deal is this: Multiverse has “optioned” the Firefly property, which we will give to an independent game development team, who will build the game on the Multiverse platform. Multiverse doesn’t make games ourselves-we just want to choose the team who is worthy of making a Firefly game. A game that, we’re convinced, could be the best. MMOG. Ever.
Now, why is that? What makes Firefly a great property to build an MMOG around? Let me count the ways.
First up, visuals. Mainstream MMOGs do well when they have a wide range of wild-looking locations and inhabitants. Firefly covers that nicely. The settings we’ve seen in just fourteen episodes include areas that could pass for the American Old West, rural China, Victorian Europe, wild mash-ups of countless cultures in crazy bazaars (such as on Persephone), and shiny high-tech sci-fi cities. And who knows what’s on the planets we didn’t see? Plus, let’s not forget the whole spaceship thing. Grimy spaceships, sterile spaceships, cockpits, kitchens, cargo holds, space malls-even exteriors for the EVA-minded among us.
In addition to varied locales, most MMOGs offer a wide range of professions for the players to choose from. Firefly showed us captains, engineers, mercenaries, bounty hunters, preachers, soldiers, police, and let’s not forget space hookers. (Y’know, it behooves me to say at this juncture that all these aspects are what makes the prospect of a Firefly MMOG exciting. I’m not saying they’ll necessarily all be in the game. That’s for the design and development team to determine. Me, though, I’m going on record here as wanting to play as a Companion.)
A common element of MMOGs is quests. These provide a bit of structured gameplay for players who don’t want to explore the world randomly, running into happenstance adventures. The quests in MMOGs are usually pretty straightforward-take this package from here to there, kill the monsters threatening this town, and so on. But call ’em missions, and you’ve got the underlying structure of the show itself-a crew that smuggles goods from sellers to buyers. Most MMOGs these days tend to offer static, pre-written quests, but what if a Firefly game had a more dynamic universe, where the quests that are available to you are generated based on your history or the worlds around you? And what if they included their own complications? Say you’ve stolen some cargo from a well-guarded train, just like Niska hired you to. But then you learnoops-that you’ve just taken medical supplies from a town that really needs them. What do you do? Complete the mission at the cost of your soul? Or return the goods to the town, causing Niska to be . . . very disappointed in you? Suddenly you’ve got bounty hunters-perhaps even other players on their own missions-looking to haul your well-meaning butt in to him. That’s good gameplay.
The show is largely about consequences, and the game would do well to reflect that. Make whatever choices you want, but be warned that they stay with you. They determine how other people-whether players or non-player characters-treat you.
Like stories, MMOGs need conflict. It’s a shame that there’s none in the Firefly ’verse. No, wait-that’s the one resource they do have in abundance. There’s large conflict, whether hot wars (Alliance versus Independents, if the game is set during the Unification War) or cold (tyranny of the Alliance over the Outer Rim worlds, if the game is set contemporary to the show). And of course, there’s smaller conflict, where one crew’s goals are at odds with another group’s. In the show, we even see conflict within one group (why does Jayne figure so prominently in most of the examples that come to mind?). In the show, the conflict can be violent, or it can be much more subtle: jockeying for social status or negotiating against someone else for economic benefit.
For game purposes, having at least a couple of those arenas of conflict-say, physical and economic-would make for very interesting play. And having that conflict pit you against real humans (as opposed to computerized opponents) could be more interesting still. By the way, games that have a player-versus-player (PVP) element can be very exciting, but can also become really overwhelming or annoying if you’re not in the mood for it. Many successful MMOGs make PVP play consensual. For example, in many fantasy games, another player can’t attack you unless you’re in PVP mode, or unless you explicitly accept a challenge to dual. Something like that might work in the Firefly MMOG. It’ll be a tough balancing act for the game designer; I’ve spoken to hundreds of Browncoats since we announced the MMOG, and they’re roughly split on the contentious question of PVP.
As important as competition is, it’s actually competition’s flip-side-cooperation-that ultimately provides the fuel that drives MMOGs. Case in point: fantasy MMOGs usually let you form groups and guilds. A group is a temporary collection of people that you can join for a session of gameplay-sort of like a pickup basketball game, but without all that bothersome, shweaty exercise. A guild is a larger and more persistent player-created group that provides certain benefits for members-from special titles, to free items, to a private “club” of friends you can call on for special epic missions. Guilds and groups are player-run, so every one of them is different, but well-constructed MMOGs promote guilds and groups through special game features. Guilds can easily take on major out-of-game significance as they become social hubs for many players’ lives. Many veteran MMOG players swear that cooperative play is the most compelling and addictive aspect of MMOGs.
I think that Browncoats will get behind that-after all, who wouldn’t want to assemble their own crew to undertake missions together, to build a life for themselves around their ship? Or what about other scenarios that are only glimpsed in the show? Why not try your hand as a settler, and work with your friends to tame a land and bring your brand of civilization to some outer-rim planet? Or how about you and your cohorts create a criminal syndicate, planning and doling out nefarious tasks to your minions? The structure for gameplay is provided by the game, but the negotiating, the planning, and the implementation, that comes from other humans.
This integration of the human factor into a video game gives rise to that holy grail of gameplay: emergent behavior. Players of an MMOG usually develop not only their own customs-like don’t use ALL-CAPS to talk, because it’s like yelling, and no one will want to group with you-but also their own cultures. Shared experiences and citizenship (even in a synthetic land) give rise to specialized communication, in-jokes, even values and beliefs. Such culture-such community-rises from and in turn supports the experience of the MMOG itself.
Let’s take a step back for a minute and think about that. The thing most responsible for keeping MMOGs alive is community. Now let’s see . . . what else has community kept alive? Maybe a TV show that became a movie? Wait, wait, don’t tell me. . . . That’s right-Police Squad. Oh, wait-the Leslie Nielson anthology is next month. I should probably just stick with Firefly. The little show that could. The show that refused to stay dead. Firefly gave rise to the fans, and the fans returned the favor by resurrecting
the show. As comics, as a movie, as a culture. And now, as a virtual world. The object lesson of Firefly is that community can do the impossible. Without the incredible phenomenon of the Browncoats, the FOX execs might not have signed off on the Firefly MMOG.
In return, I’d like the Firefly MMOG to integrate, support, and build on that existing community. For example, I think a great element of a Firefly MMOG could be “shindigs.” If you’ve never been to a Browncoat shindig in the real world, you’re missing out. Nominally, it’s any gathering of Browncoats, but at the more extravagant ones, guests dress up all fancy-like, in their ball gowns or Victorian-era tuxedos or even their dusters. So far, shindigs have mostly been confined to the real world. But I think it would be a gracious “thank you” to the Browncoat community if the Firefly MMOG could enable hundreds or thousands of Browncoats to log in, don their digital finery, and party the night away with their friends from all around the world.
I think shindigs give us a clue why the Firefly MMOG news was so well-received: people want to be there, in the ’verse. They want to tell-to live-their own stories.
Which brings us to what the Firefly MMOG won’t be. Firefly was a TV show about specific people. A fantastically well-written, compelling crew of people, played by the most perfectly cast actors ever. We all love them and want to see more of them, but an MMOG would be an awkward medium to advance the stories of the crew members of Serenity. That’s not what MMOGs do well yet. MMOGs are places, not narratives. Perhaps you’ll be able to run into Mal and crew (or Badger, or Niska, or Saffron, for that matter) from time to time in the virtual ’verse, and get missions from them, or work with them. But when you play the MMOG, it’s got to be your story. Your journey.
Happily, it’s a fun ’verse for a journey. It’s no accident that Joss Whedon built Firefly with the elements of a great MMOG. After all, what is storytelling, if not the process of building a virtual world? When you make a TV show, there are at least two things you need to nail: compelling characters and (especially for sci-fi) a compelling, internally consistent universe. Joss didn’t just create the backgrounds of his characters, he also filled out a whole solar system of interlocking cultures, and created a 500-year backstory to explain how we got there from here. And the show gives us only a glimpse of that. The ’verse has depth and breadth yet unexplored, and that is where an MMOG shines.
So that’s chapter one of the story of the Firefly MMOG. It’s been great for Multiverse to get the attention, and it’s good to be working with FOX, but honestly-we just wanted to play a Firefly MMOG, and this seemed like the best way to make that happen. We’re selfish that way, but we didn’t think other Browncoats would mind.
And here, since it’s just us Browncoats, lean closer. I’ll tell you the real secret of the Firefly MMOG. We want the game to be such a big damn success that studio execs will be tripping over themselves to make more TV shows or movies.
A pipe-dream? An impossibility? Pfah. We’re Browncoats. We do the impossible before breakfast.
COREY BRIDGES is co-founder and executive producer of Multiverse.
An episode of television grows and evolves during the planning of it. And then again during writing and rewriting. What emerges often seems miraculous the way the product of any evolutionary process seems miraculous. The resultant structure has that kind of completeness, almost inevitability, that seems to deny any sort of gradual development. It seems to have fallen, full-formed, to Earth. The episode described here has that feeling. But it’s not a miracle, it’s the endpoint of a process, and as such it’s worthwhile to cut into it and look at it, because it’s a beautiful object, and its architecture is beautiful.
Keep in mind, however, that the structure might not tell you anything about how to create such an object, any more than looking at the body of any one dead finch teaches us how to make one ourselves. (Although you’re welcome to try. Start with a bunch of feathers. . . .)
Firefly and Story Structure, Advanced
GEOFF KLOCK
Matt Fraction and Gabriel Bá’s Casanova is one of the most striking and original comic books to emerge in the last twenty years. Ironically, the book’s originality derives from its total willingness to absorb any and all possible influences for its pulpsci-fi-meets-James-Bond insanity. In the free-form essay in the back of the third issue, Fraction discusses his planning process for Casanova #3: “Mission to Yerba Muerta!”-a story that jumps around three different time periods. It owes a lot, he says, to his “favourite episode of the late, lamented FIREFLY”:There’s an episode called OUT OF GAS. In it, a thing on the titular spaceship our intrepid heroes travel on breaks, leaving them more or less OUT OF GAS.
And it opens with our main intrepid hero bleeding to death in a de-powered, dark, and otherwise abandoned ship. Then the credits come up.
BEST! OPEN! EVER!
What follows is a story that’s fractured into three timelines, each one feeding into and informing the next. It’s a bit of narrative bravura, a piece of writing that’s pure art for art’s sake and I know that, as a novice, I learned a hell of a lot from studying it some. So we interwove between Cass’ three faces in some kind of . . . retardedly obscure tribute to OUT OF GAS.15
That alone should make us want to take a closer look at the thing. What I want to do here is “study it some” in order to better appreciate its narrative bravura. After breaking it down into component scenes, labelled to make clear how the episode shifts between time frames, I will examine how all these transitions deftly work to make the episode a masterpiece. The typical aim of an academic essay is to help in the understanding of something essentially complex and difficult. What is so amazing about “Out of Gas” is that, though it is complex, it needs no explanation because its complexity is rendered so simply and effectively. It can be more fully appreciated, however, and that is my purpose here.
In “Out of Gas,” three distinct time periods are braided together: the origin of the Firefly crew, the disaster the crew must deal with, and Mal left alone and wounded (which leads into the episode’s ending). For easy reference I will label these time periods 1, 2, and 3, respectively. After these numbers I put together a probable chronological order (2.1, 2.2, and so on). With one exception (scene 1.1), within periods 1, 2, or 3, scenes are in chronological order. I have also marked what person, action, or place marks the transition between the distinct time periods (what is continuous in both the new and the old time period), since those transitions are the centerpiece of my essay. For reference, I have included schematics of the ship, and labelled where each scene takes place.
FIREFLY’S “OUT OF GAS” ACT AND SCENE BREAKDOWN
TEASER
(3.1) “Out of Gas” opens with shots of the empty and dark Firefly ship-the ship itself in space, the bridge, the hallway out of the bridge, the kitchen, the hallway to the engine room, the infirmary, the cargo bay. Suddenly Mal collapses on screen. Transition: a beam of light hits his face and he hears voices, but the beam is a memory of the light that entered the ship when he first showed it to Zoe, and the voices are only memories as well.
(1.2) Zoe is not impressed and calls the ship a death-trap. Mal tells her she has no imagination and that she should try and see past “what she [the ship] is” to “what she can be.” Zoe deflates his ideals by pointing to something (off camera) dead or dying on the cargo bay floor, right where Mal is in Time 3. Mal wants to hire people to run the ship so he can be free; they walk out the inside cargo bay door. Transition: the door in the cargo bay.
(3.2) We return to the collapsed Mal in the darkened ship (the door in the cargo bay is behind him) and discover he is bleeding.
ACT ONE
(3.3) In the darkened cargo bay Mal struggles to lift a piece of equipment. Transition: the camera pans upward, through the floor, to the kitchen (located above the cargo bay); when we reach the kitchen it is Time 2.
(2.1) We flashback to the assembled crew laughing in the kitchen. We learn that the ship will be travelling through a de
solate area. It is Simon’s birthday, and Kaylee has made him a cake. As he goes to blow out the candles the lights flicker. River says, “Fire,” and a fire rips through the ship. The crew scrambles into action. Zoe is hurt, much of the ship is sealed off, and the fire is ejected through the cargo bay doors. Transition: the cargo bay.
(3.4) From the cargo bay Mal continues to carry the piece of equipment. His bloody hands reach the infirmary doors. Transition: the infirmary.
(2.2) We flashback to Zoe being brought into the infirmary, in shock. Mal instructs Kaylee to figure out what went wrong. Kaylee says, “She ain’t movin’,” and we think she is referring to Zoe until she continues, “Serenity ain’t movin’.” Kaylee leaves.
(2.3) Wash wants to stay with Zoe but Mal insists that he go to the bridge so that they can figure out how bad the situation is. Mal commands and intimidates him until he goes. Transition: Wash.
(1.3) We flashback to Wash inspecting the ship for the first time, as Mal attempts to hire him. Wash has a ridiculous moustache, dating him horribly (even in a story that takes place in the future). Zoe, his future wife, insists that some unidentifiable thing about him bothers her. In their conversation Mal mentions their “genius” mechanic; we expect to see Kaylee but it is just a ditzy-looking guy named Bester. Transition: Zoe (who again says Wash bothers her).
Serenity Found Page 18