Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  Fair enough. I took a long walk around the hangar and circled back to Gage’s desk.

  “Look, I know you’re busy, but could you please just write a one-paragraph summary of the story and email it to me? Nothing longer than what we’d put on the back of the box.” I was haughty and full of myself. If I’d been capable of ditching my bullshit pride, I’d have added something like, “I hate bugging you for this stuff, but I’ve backed myself into a corner here. I know we fight about literally everything, but I have to be honest—I’m out of my depth. No one’s ever given me this much responsibility before. There’s a lot of pressure on you and the team to make a great game; I get that. But now that I’m on this project, I have to prove I can work with a developer to get them to deliver whatever publishing needs. Right now, I need a summary. So, please, can you just help me out?”

  We’re always so afraid to be vulnerable, as if admitting our fear and uncertainty will somehow prove us to be unworthy. Instead, we puff out our chests and put on a show, because God forbid we admit to one another that we’re all making this up as we go along.

  Thirty minutes later, Gage emailed me a short story summary. It was heady, with a lot of big words, but I wasn’t angry about it. He delivered what I asked. That was a big deal. In the moment, it felt like we had crossed a bridge.

  I shot back an email: “Thanks. Can we get a version anyone can understand?”

  You’d think a writer would be better at wording his emails. In my head, what I wrote read as, “Thank you very much. Can we get a version that uses more plainspoken language?” Everyone else read, “Thanks for nothing. Now, can you do one that’s legible?”

  Multiple people came to my desk, demanding to know why I sent that email. Once I realized how it had been received, I was beyond apologetic. It was too late, though. I had become disruptive to the process. After a discussion with the Fox, it was decided I would no longer be included in the BioShock 2 story meetings.

  * * *

  “YOU’RE LIKE CANCER,” SAID Lily.

  “Explain.” I lifted my head off the desk where her dog, Crepe Suzette, had been licking my hair in moral support. Crepe Suzette was a long-haired dachshund, small enough to lie on Lily’s desk without getting in the way.

  “You find something you don’t like and you let it eat at you until there’s nothing left. Then you find anyone who’s happy and you whisper your problems in their ear until they end up as miserable as you.”

  I smiled. “That’s true. I do enjoy watching happy people fall apart.”

  Lily Rose Flowers was our community manager, which made her the liaison between our developers and gamers. It was her job to facilitate dialogue between company and customer, usually involving special events, promotions, and ARGs—alternate reality games—that helped players feel meaningfully involved with the franchises they loved.

  For some reason they had never been able to articulate, Lily’s parents had saddled her with a full bouquet of a name. She never forgave them for it. To their credit, her parents understood completely. Going through life as Lily Rose had whittled her attitude down to a finely-pointed shiv. She was my sister in hate. If ever I needed to rant or rave, she had always been ready to dive into whichever sea of shit I was currently swimming in.

  This time, however, she’d had enough. “You’re being extra cancer right now. I hope you realize that.”

  I shrugged. “Gage is a narrative tyrant who can’t handle how valid my feedback is. Now, I’m just worried the game will ship and be a huge success.”

  “That is the dream.”

  “Is it, though? I mean, of course we all want the game to be a success, but if that happens, what does that say about me? Am I so far off the mark I can’t even recognize a good game? It’s like, I don’t want the game to fail, but at the same time, I kind of do.”

  Lily gave me the side-eye and shook her head. “You need to let it go. Stop being cancer.”

  * * *

  THAT FRIDAY, I WALKED into the Fox’s office and dropped a script on his desk.

  “I rewrote the entire script for BioShock 2. That’s all the feedback I’ve got; use it if you want. I’m done.”

  I let it go like a fucking hand grenade.

  * * *

  A WEEK LATER, THE Fox called me into his office.

  “I think it’s important for people to be validated, under the right circumstances.” He pulled my script out of his desk and flipped through the pages. “Your script was very good. There was never a chance we would have used it, but I still thought you should know.”

  “What’s the fucking point, man?” I was full of myself, still riding the wave of my own righteous indignation.

  He threw the script back into his desk and slammed the drawer. “Why are you like this? I give you a compliment, and you instantly become combative.”

  “That’s not a compliment. ‘Hey, your story is so good we threw it in the garbage.’ ”

  “You get this way with every game,” he said. “You think you should be the writer, but it’s not your job to tell developers what to do. A studio needs ownership over its game.”

  “What about my ownership? If you tell me to edit a script and that script turns out badly, it’s my fault. If I have to shoulder the responsibility, I should have a say in how it turns out.”

  “These aren’t your games.”

  “Maybe they should be. Did you ever think of that?”

  “Yes!”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I called you in here so I could tell you your script was good and that I think we should find a project for you to write, but you didn’t give me a chance.”

  “You’re going to let me write a game?”

  “I was thinking about it. Is that okay, or would you like to yell at me some more?”

  “No, I think I’m done.”

  “Great. I’m glad we had this talk. Now, get the hell out of my office.”

  * * *

  HAVING THE FOX RECOGNIZE my talent was apparently all the validation I needed. There was nothing left for me to prove. The development of BioShock 2 went on without me. My bitterness softened, guilt crept into my bones, and slowly I began to understand I’d been a real shitheel.

  Let me be clear: I’m ashamed of how I acted toward Gage, Jordan, and everyone else at 2K Marin. Rewriting the script was wrong and way outside the bounds of my job. Sure, it worked out in my favor; the Fox decided to let me write a game. But I can’t count this as a personal victory. I mean, holy shit; an associate producer has no business rewriting a developer’s script without their knowledge or permission. If my script had ended up being used, it would have set a precedent so stupid and irresponsible, it would have transformed our entire development process into something like Game of Thrones. What a tire fire of a legacy that would have been.

  The week BioShock 2 shipped, I sent Gage an email. “Hey. I know we never saw eye to eye during production, but I wanted to say congratulations on shipping a great game. You should be proud.”

  Like with the email that started it all, I received no response. This time, I wasn’t upset. Gage had good reason to ignore me. I had stood in direct opposition to everything he tried to accomplish, for no better reason than my own pettiness and egoism. No response was better than I deserved.

  When I played the final game, I was blown away. BioShock 2 was a master class on how to write and design a compelling sequel. The original BioShock’s story was about great men and women whose hubris destroyed the lives of everyone around them. By the end of the game, those great minds had died, along with their city. Many felt that Rapture had no more stories to tell, but they were wrong. Jordan, Gage, and the rest of 2K Marin cut deep into BioShock’s world to tell a heartbreaking story of what happens to the lowly and the ruined once the great men and women are finally gone.

  You play as Subject Delta, an outsider who accidently found his way to Rapture in the city’s early days. Sent to prison, you eventually become a Big Daddy, horribly
mutated and trapped inside an iron diving suit. You awaken in Rapture after the events of the first BioShock, separated from your Little Sister, the genetically manipulated girl you are programmed to protect. Her name is Eleanor Lamb, and she has been taken by her mother, Dr. Sofia Lamb, who now controls Rapture. Dr. Lamb wants to use Eleanor as a vessel that will contain the collected minds of everyone in Rapture. Subject Delta wants to rescue her and, in so doing, save himself. Delta’s biological programming requires he find his Little Sister, or else he will fall into a coma and die. It’s an exploration of how far some will go to leave their mark, regardless of whether they have any right to do so. Needless to say, it put me in my place.

  The next time I saw Gage was at the launch party.

  When playing the final game, I noticed certain story elements had been cut. It wouldn’t be right for me to go into details; that’s not my story to tell. But I will say they were things Gage had championed during development and that I agreed were fantastic. I don’t know why they were cut, and was disappointed they weren’t in the final game. I can only guess how Gage felt. Watching him from across the room, I imagined this celebration probably felt different for him. Maybe I was projecting, but something about the way he was standing—alone in a crowd—made me think he wasn’t very happy.

  “Hey,” I said, as I sidled up beside him.

  Gage spared me a glance. “Oh. Hey.” He turned away and kept his eyes locked on the crowd. I could tell he didn’t want to talk to me, but fuck it. I had something to say.

  “The game turned out really good. It sucks that you had to cut stuff.”

  Gage kind of grunted and nodded. The way he was holding his drink, I started to think he might throw it at me.

  “For what it’s worth, an old teacher of mine used to say, ‘A story is only as good as what you cut out of it,’ and a lot of great stuff got taken out.”

  Something about that must have struck a chord, because Gage finally turned and looked me in the eyes. He didn’t say thanks or anything like that; he just nodded his head like he was mulling over my words. “I guess that’s true.”

  I should have apologized, should have said, “I know things didn’t fully pan out the way you wanted, but you got close. You tried to make something amazing, and people fought you. I’m sorry I was one of them. I see now what you were trying to do. It was smart. It was good.”

  That’s what I should have said.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to say congrats.”

  “Thanks.”

  We didn’t speak again for a very long time.

  9

  * * *

  SIGNIFICANT ZERO

  I was visiting family a few years back. I can’t remember why. Christmas, funeral; one of those events that brings the whole clan together. Work was draining the life out of me. I needed an escape. This trip home was the closest I was going to get.

  My cousin Doug was in the living room, playing Grand Theft Auto V on the big screen. Since he was occupied by the game, I knew he wouldn’t want to talk, which was a good thing. He was playing as Franklin, one of the game’s main characters. As Franklin, Doug drove a Nagasaki Blazer around the desert town of Sandy Shores. This is the place, I thought. This is where I can let go. I sat on the couch, not to watch but to listen. I closed my eyes and drifted off to the sound of a four-wheeler ramping off sand dunes.

  The first time I visited Sandy Shores, I was Michael De Santa, another one of GTA V’s main characters. Michael and I were both in crisis. He was an aging criminal who hated his life; I was a video-game writer who would rather gouge out my eyes than make another game. I wanted to run away—a recurring theme at the time—but it wasn’t an option. So, I took control of Michael and made him run away instead. Together, we stole a car and headed north, toward that squalid paradise on the south shore of the Alamo Sea.

  Sandy Shores is a malignant tumor in the armpit of a desiccated corpse. The land is dead and dry. You can practically feel the heat radiating off of your television screen. Nothing can take root except dollar stores, trailer parks, and bars where you’re more likely to get stabbed than served. Sandy Shores is not a place people choose to live; it’s just where they end up. It might be my favorite town in video-game history.

  Standing on the side of the road, Michael and I shared a moment of beautiful synchronicity. We both wore a T-shirt and shorts, our faces covered in unkempt beards. I felt numb, as if my emotions had been boiled away by the desert sun. If Michael had been a real person capable of thought, something tells me he’d have felt the same way.

  “How long would it take your sister to make a game like this?”

  The question came from my dad. He’d wandered into the room while I dozed. Apparently Doug had given him the full Los Santos tour, strip clubs and all.

  I honestly wasn’t sure how to answer him. The question bordered on nonsensical. My sister is smart; far smarter than me. She already had something like four bachelor’s and two master’s degrees. Unsatisfied with that level of accomplishment, she’d recently reenrolled to learn programming. My dad understood programming was key to game development. But he might as well have been asking how long it would take for a kid with finger paints to establish Christianity, build Vatican City, and construct the Sistine Chapel, all for the purpose of painting a masterpiece on its ceiling.

  I said, “You have to understand, just because she’s learning to code doesn’t mean she’s learning to program games. There are different programming languages, all of which are used for different things.”

  “Hold on a minute. What is a programming language?”

  “Beyond a series of numbers and commands, I don’t know.”

  “So, a programmer types numbers into a computer and it makes pictures in the game?”

  “Yes and no. The pictures are called graphics. A programmer writes the code that makes graphics visible in the game. At least, I think that’s how it works. Honestly, this is kind of outside my wheelhouse.

  “The graphics are made by artists. Literally everything you see in a game—the car, the road, the dust kicked up by the tires—it’s all made from scratch by an artist. That’s why we have artists for everything: characters, environments, lighting, visual effects, indoor stuff, outdoor stuff; it’s crazy. And before they can make anything, we hire concept artists to produce reference art so the other artists can remake it in the game.

  “Outside of artists and programmers, we have different types of animators, audio people who record sounds and music, different audio people who put the sound and music into the game, designers who stitch all the pieces together into something coherent and playable, producers who are basically professional cat herders, testers who are just kids chained to a radiator forced to play a game over and over trying to break it, and probably a whole mess of others I’m forgetting or just don’t know about.”

  “That many people?” My dad raised his eyebrows and stuck out his lips. When surprised or impressed, he pulls a duckface, not that he knows it. “Of all the stuff you just listed off, what do you do?”

  “Oh, I don’t do any of that. I’m a writer.”

  Imagine you’re a Hollywood screenwriter and a director calls you up to say, “I want you to write a movie for me. The story can be whatever you want, so long as it’s about soldiers fighting terrorists in a posh Monaco hotel and is tonally similar to the first season of True Detective, only with less talking and more explosive headshots. We’ve been filming for six months and will wrap in two weeks. When can you start?”

  That’s what it’s like to write video games.

  Unlike film, where a script is usually written before a single frame is shot, most video-game stories are written during production, when the major details have already been defined. It is writing in reverse; a reactionary process driven by design and gameplay rather than story or reason. There are times when you walk onto a project to find something that looks less like a game and more like the contents of someone’s junk drawer, held together by chewing
gum and duct tape. Some of the pieces might fit; many of them won’t. It’s the writer’s job to contextualize these disparate pieces in a way that makes the game seem like a cohesive, consciously designed piece of entertainment—preferably using nothing but words. Words are cheap; changing the game is not.

  John Carmack, first-person shooter pioneer and lead programmer on games like Doom and Quake, famously said, “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.” He’s technically right. We are willing to forgive a game’s badly written and forgettable story if the game itself is fun to play. What Carmack gets wrong is his assertion that story is nothing more than plot and dialogue.

  Video games are like rock bands. They have three key parts: art, design, and programming. All parts are essential, but they are not equal.

  Art is the lead vocalist. It embodies the theme and tone of your game. That first sight tells players exactly what to expect without ever having to play the game. That’s why art will always be the band’s front person. Their name, voice, and sexy face are what sells out stadiums.

  Design is on guitar. System designers create tools and content. They design weapons, player abilities, progression systems, even AI, the artificial intelligence that determines how enemies react in-game. Level designers use these tools to create a game’s moment-to-moment experience, weaving gameplay scenarios like song structure. Exploring an environment is the verse. Fighting enemies is the chorus. The weapons you use, and how they make you feel, is the hook. Design is the music that keeps your audience coming back after the superficial attraction of art has worn off.

  Programming plays bass. Computers are only good for executing instructions. Those instructions, known as code, are written by programmers. Artists can create 3-D models, designers can build environments and rules, but without code, it all amounts to nothing but noise. Code is the rhythm and root chords everything else is built upon. It tells the computer how to use data created by the dev team and organizes it into an actual video game.