“Cheers.”
Back in my room, I’d eat half the candy and chips and then crawl into bed, where I’d lie awake for hours, trying to ignore the people fucking upstairs. There is nothing worse than the sound of people having sex when you are not. I know this because whoever lived above me had a libido so insatiable that it had to be fed at least once every two hours. Every squeak, gasp, and cry made me an unwitting participant in their coupling and only served to amplify my loneliness. When it got to be too much, I’d walk—night after night, for hours at a time, until my body felt tired enough to fall asleep and stay asleep no matter how loud they were.
Somehow, my dreams were always worse.
I remember dreaming of fire. My apartment burned and I ran into the street, where a crowd had gathered. I watched the crowd. They watched the fire. One man in the crowd watched me. He walked across the street to reach me and then stabbed me in the neck.
I awoke in Berlin, pain in my neck. I checked for blood, but my throat was unmarred. Was it scissors, a pen, what? I couldn’t remember. Either it had happened too fast for me to see or the dream was already fading. Only the sensation remained. I tried to rub it away, but my left hand was numb. I’d heard your left arm goes numb right before a heart attack. I knew from experience that it also goes numb if you sleep on it or if you have a pinched nerve. I felt a slight pain in my chest. Was it real, or was I imagining it into existence? It occurred to me that I might be dying.
I had two choices: I could get out of bed, put on pants, and go outside. If I were about to have a heart attack, someone would see me and be able to help. Or, I could stay in bed. Not move. With cardiac arrest, I’d be dead within minutes. All of this would finally be over.
I stayed in bed for half an hour. Still not dead, I got up and went to work.
* * *
“YOU LOOK TERRIBLE,” SAID the Fox. “Like you’ve been covering an actual war from the front lines.”
I said, “I’m not sleeping very well,” as if that would explain my appearance.
I leaned against the wall in the Fox’s office in Novato. My eyes had sunk into deep, dark circles. I hadn’t shaved or cut my hair in months. Some dev teams do this as a sign of solidarity—no one shaves until the game ships. My unkempt appearance was born from a complete disregard for my physical well-being that went beyond overgrown hair. What had started as a sore neck a few weeks prior had spread down to my hands. Once it reached my fingers, I lost all feeling in my extremities; the only sensation was a vague numbness, like I’d fallen asleep on my arms. When not writing, my hands would make fists, trying to feel something.
“How’s the game going?” he asked.
My response was involuntary: a short, shrill laugh that made the Fox pull back.
“Sorry. It’s going. The game is going. It goes.”
I saw the Fox’s eyes light up, the way they did when he thought of something clever. “You might be the first writer to have PTSD without ever having gone to war. Pre-traumatic stress disorder!”
Instead of a laugh, this got a blank stare. He seemed disappointed. “Anyway . . . I’ve been playing this week’s build, and the game isn’t where I expected it to be. What do you say to another six months?”
I didn’t say anything; I just walked out. I’d reached the far side of a crowded room before the Fox called after me.
“Where are you going?”
“Home. Call me when you decide you want to make a fucking game.”
It was only 10:00 a.m. I’d been at work all of forty-five minutes. The Fox did not fire me.
Out of options, I persevered. I convinced myself that this was it. This time we would get it right. Finish the game. Win my freedom.
“If you delay it again, I’m done.” I swear, I meant it every time I said it.
* * *
SPEND ENOUGH TIME WORKING on a game, and you begin second-guessing yourself. An idea that seemed great at the beginning will grow old and stale as time goes on. It feels boring to you, so you convince yourself that the player will feel the same. This happens on every game. If you’re not careful, it can lead you to question your entire design, down to the smallest detail. By Spec Ops’s third year of development, we’d fallen into this trap a few times, and it was beginning to wear on the team.
Back in Berlin, I was having lunch with Xander, one of Yager’s visual-effects designers.
“I’ve been thinking of making a comic strip about game development,” he said. “I’d call it ‘What if We Made Airplanes?’ Every strip would be a single panel of people gathered around a whiteboard, trying to design an airplane the way we design video games.
“ ‘There’s nothing special about flying. Any plane can do that. What if—just hear me out—what if we put the wings on the inside?’
“ ‘I’m telling you, once passengers see how much work we put into our tray tables, they won’t care that the plane doesn’t have any seats.’
“ ‘Of course they’re going to crash. These things are really hard to build.’ ”
Every joke was spot-on, but I was finding it hard to laugh. My arms had been numb for weeks. I was starting to get worried. Xander believed the numbness was probably due to stress and tight muscles. It seemed plausible; I hadn’t taken a day off since I started living there.
“Everyone needs to rest sometime,” he said. “And you’ll be no good to us if you’re dead.”
On Xander’s advice, I scheduled a massage for that Saturday. It worked, to an extent. Afterward, my arms were still numb, but feeling was beginning to return to my hands. Maybe my friend had been right about the tight muscles.
The sky that day was overcast. As I walked home to my apartment, the clouds finally opened and began to rain. Having left my umbrella at home, I ducked into an archway to wait it out. From there, I watched rain fall on an empty street and felt more alone than I ever had. I began to cry so hard, I had to sit down. As I bawled into my hands, I realized that that massage had been my first physical contact with another person in almost three months.
* * *
“MAYBE I’M DEAD.”
I was back in California, catching up with my normal coworkers, who I hadn’t seen in months. Some of them, I’d never seen at all. “My plane probably crashed in the ocean, or maybe my heart gave out. Whatever happened, I’m dead, this is hell, and you’re all a bunch of fucking demons.”
Everyone laughed, like I knew they would.
“It’s the only explanation I can think of for this endless string of delays. I am Sisyphus, and Spec Ops is the stone I’ll be rolling uphill for all eternity, six months at a time. Hell isn’t war or pain or other people. Hell is hope. Everything exists in a perpetual state of decay, and yet we honestly believe things will get better? That’s not denial; it’s insanity.
“I’m worried that since I’ve figured it out, hell will have to change. If I know Spec Ops will never ship, then hope dies, and my punishment becomes ineffective. Hell will have to convince me I’m still alive, which means now the game will ship. Then I’ll go about my life thinking everything is fine, until someday I’m dying in a hospital bed and someone shows up—maybe a janitor or a nurse—and as the light fades from my eyes, they’ll lean in and whisper in my ear, ‘You were right.’ Then it’ll start all over again.”
I’d told the story just right; smiled and winked in the appropriate places. You can’t tell a story like that if it’s not funny, and this one needed telling. It had gripped my mind, and I could feel its words on my tongue.
There is something about the tangible nature of speech that makes even the darkest thoughts manageable. Once spoken, they lose power. Not all of it, but enough that you want to keep repeating it, chipping away with every repetition until the words no longer hold sway.
“Maybe I’m dead, and this is all a lie.”
* * *
ONE MONDAY, IN OCTOBER of 2011, something clicked inside my head. Being in Berlin wasn’t helping. Nothing I did would ship the game any faster. I
don’t know if it was true or if the thought just made me feel better, but I decided to act on it. I sent an email to my travel agent, requesting a one-way ticket home. The next day, I went around to the team and said, “If there’s anything you need from me by the end of the week, let me know, because I’m leaving and I will not be returning.” By Thursday, I was gone.
By December, I was back.
In the time between, the Fox had called me into his office to discuss the game’s story.
“It’s good,” he said. “Honestly, it’s very good. It’s just not good enough.” He was concerned the game had missed its window. Had it been released in 2009, as originally planned, Spec Ops would have been cutting-edge. However, since then, military shooters had embraced the dark tone and morally gray narrative we believed would set us apart. For the project to succeed, we needed something new. It couldn’t be related to gameplay; production was too far along for us to innovate and include a show-stopping feature. Story was the only avenue left.
“I need you to rework your story so that it can carry an entire AAA game.” He didn’t ask if I was willing to do six more months. It was understood. “Can you do that?”
“Give me a week, and I’ll come up with some ideas.”
* * *
THE FIRST DRAFT OF a story is like a new relationship. If you keep things moving and focus on emotions rather than details, then a first draft can be a fun, exciting experience. A rewrite is like a marriage on the rocks. It’s a long, seemingly endless slog. The initial rush is long gone. Every fault of the other party is magnified, leaving you to wonder how you were drawn here in the first place. Part of you blames the “other,” but deep down, you know the flaws you see are your own, reflected back at you. Your instincts tell you to run, to leave it all behind and start over. Or, you could stick it out, put in the time and effort necessary to make it work. That’s rewriting.
This is important, so grab a penknife and carve it into the back of your hand—your first idea is your worst idea. Just because you had it, liked it, and wrote it down doesn’t mean it’s good. Real writing happens in the rewrite.
Every writer has his or her own method of dealing with a rewrite. Some rewrite constantly. Others procrastinate, waiting until the last minute to start working. With a deadline looming, your body kicks into overdrive. Adrenaline pumps through your veins, causing your neurons to fire more quickly and make more cognitive leaps. A similar effect can be achieved through the use of numerous chemicals, some less legal than others. However, none of these “supplements” can provide you with the main benefit of procrastination—a lack of time. Writing at the eleventh hour leaves no time for self-doubt. Is the writing good, or do you just not have time to care? There’s no way of knowing. It’s probably good, and that’s what matters. At the last minute, probably good is good enough. To work this way, you must be profoundly confident and equally stupid.
I use both methods. Throughout a project, I will rewrite constantly, often from scratch. The goal is to immerse myself completely in the story while giving myself as many options as possible. This is not so much a method as it is a result of my most stringent belief:
Everything I write is garbage.
This is the guiding principal and North Star of all my work. For me, a completed draft is not something to be edited. It is an expanded outline for the next draft, which I will write from scratch. There are no breaks in my process, no time to think and debate with myself. If I finish a draft on Tuesday, I start the next on Wednesday. Any hesitation is an opportunity to do something—literally anything—else. Writing does not happen in outlines or summaries or group discussions. It happens when you sit your ass in a chair and put letters in order. That’s where the real decisions are made. You can’t know if a story is worth telling until you start telling it.
I may rewrite constantly, but I do not start a final draft until the last possible minute. Procrastination galvanizes my mind, causing it to see the work in a new light, specifically through a lens of terror brought on by looming deadlines. Like plunging hot iron into cold water, my ideas coalesce into whatever shape will be their last.
I’d already gone through this process multiple times on Spec Ops. Now, the Fox was asking me to wind it back to the brainstorming phase.
Upstairs in my office, I shut the door and moved a cabinet in front of the window. I could neither see nor be seen. There was a whiteboard on the wall. I grabbed a dry-erase marker and drew fifteen columns, one for each chapter. At the top, I wrote the location. In the column, I wrote two to three key words representing that chapter’s events. Once that was done, I sat down in my chair and stared at it. This is how I brainstorm. That’s all there is to it.
It sounds like bullshit, but ask any writer how they come up with their ideas, and they’ll feed you a similar load. They take a shower, walk through the woods, or look out the window of a moving train. If you’re looking for a concrete answer, you won’t find one. To find the answer, you have to look for the pattern.
People get bored. When bored, people think about things to help pass the time. Sometimes, they will daydream. For creative people, daydreaming is research and development.
This is where my blackboard comes into play. By writing down key words and staring at them in silence, I focus my boredom on the task at hand. The words influence my dreaming. As ideas occur to me, I add them to the whiteboard, and the influence grows. All I need is one idea. I can grow an entire story from a single idea, simply by following the path of action and reaction. But I have to be honest with the progression of events. Sometimes I have a few ideas but can see no narrative line that pierces them all. This means some of the ideas aren’t good for the story. If I refuse to let them go, then I’m being dishonest about the story’s progression. This is where I can get hung up, because I like my bad ideas. I gave birth to them, and it was really exciting when I did. And, oh, I know they don’t work right now, but they’re going to be so good in the end, you just have to wait and see!
That’s not writing a story—that’s forcing a plot point. It is bad and it is wrong.
Kill the bad ideas. Burn them. Let them bleed out in a ditch. This is better than the alternative of locking them away in a notebook and promising you’ll visit them, and when you do, telling them you’re looking for a better story where they can live out their lives not feeling unloved and abandoned. That’s a lie, the same one your children will one day tell you when they put you away in a nursing home. They say they’ll visit, but deep down, you know you won’t see them as much as you’d like. And when they do show up, they’ll always be checking their phones to see what time it is. They still have a life to live, while you’re just hanging on.
Sometimes, you just have to let go.
In Spec Ops, Walker’s problem was that he couldn’t let go. Instead of cutting his losses, he kept doubling down, hoping the risk would pay off. Our current story—the one the Fox wanted me to rewrite—played out in the most obvious way. The further the player progressed in his or her quest to find Konrad, the more damage Walker caused to the world and people around him. At the end, Walker confronts Konrad atop the tallest skyscraper in Dubai. As a final statement on his own brutality, the villain throws himself off the building. Walker wins, but only technically. There is no satisfaction, no joy in his victory. He is a broken man whose sacrifices didn’t even earn him the chance to put a bullet between Konrad’s eyes.
Staring at that board, I began to wonder if it was worth the effort. We’d gone back and forth on the game so many times, and here we were doing it all again. Maybe rewriting the story would finally move things forward, but there was no way to know.
What if we were doomed to fail and we just refused to let it go?
Forty-five minutes after telling the Fox I’d need a week to come up with a new story, I walked back into his office and presented the final version of Spec Ops: The Line.
“Konrad is dead.”
The Fox sat up straight in his chair. “What do yo
u mean he’s dead?” I could see in his eyes the idea was already resonating before I even had the chance to explain it. It was the same reaction I had had when the idea first hit me.
“Walker fights his way across Dubai in search of Konrad. He tears the city apart, tears his men apart, all so he can find Konrad. And when he does, Konrad is dead. Everything Walker went through was for nothing.”
“So Konrad kills himself before Walker reaches the top of his tower?”
“Uh-uh. Konrad killed himself before you even started the game.”
The Fox sighed. “When I said change the story, I didn’t mean rewrite the entire thing. Konrad is a major presence for half of the game. He’s constantly talking to Walker over the radio. And now you want to cut all that out?”
The wickedest of grins spread across my face. “No. I want to keep it all in.”
“Then who’s Walker talking to?”
“Nobody. Walker is fucking crazy.”
Ding! The lights clicked on behind the Fox’s eyes. This was what we’d been looking for.
If this was going to work, Walker couldn’t start off unstable. That would be cheating. When a player starts a game, they become their character. At that moment, they need to understand the character’s state of mind. You don’t need to tell the player much—who they are, why they’re here, and what they’re doing—but it’s still vital information. Anything that doesn’t relate to the character’s immediate motivation is irrelevant. For example, is Walker married? I don’t know, and neither does the player, because it doesn’t matter. Walker being married has no bearing on him or the game; therefore it has nothing to do with his state of mind.
Mental instability is different, because it is a literal state of mind. When the player inhabits Walker, they step into his head. At that moment, they would need to be told of Walker’s instability; otherwise they are playing the character under false pretense. Basically, they’d be living a lie. A lie we forced upon them for the sake of a surprising twist.
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