Here I am at GDC, back after a hiatus of a few years. I'll be posting my session notes during the conference. As I mentioned from the DICE notes, these are just more or less my raw train-of-though transcription of my takeaway from people's talks. So I apologize if they aren't very coherent, but since I was writing them up for my own benefit anyways I figured I'd post them. Sadly I can't post them in realtime throughout the day like I could at DICE because GDC is too chintzy to provide wireless coverage.
Seeing Ken's talk this morning really made me want to go back and play Bioshock again. Maybe I'll try it with the new "no vita chamber" option and make a run on all the Achievements...
Storytelling in Bioshock: Empowering Players to Care about your Stupid Story
Ken Levine, Boston 2K
Bad news is: nobody cares about that story you’ve been working on since 5th grade. But the audience is not your mom. They have no reason to be predisposed to your work.
So how do we do it? Details may seem like the important part but they are not your friend. Details suck, and more details suck more.
The world is the best narrator! It’s the thing we render best. Starting to get there with character but still a long way off, world is nearly 100% authentic. What is the player engaged in, and engaged in at his own pace? The world.
Most games: warehouses & sewers. So many missed opportunities to give player narrative.
In world story: didn’t happen overnight. Vision demo from ’05, reasonably detailed but not telling much. What is it saying about the world of Rapture? Not very much. Prototype is a good way to make the team hate you – making a judgment on what everyone poured their hearts and souls into. Decided to scrap it and start again.
As time went on, we made our story simpler. Counterintuitive? Compared to job of a sculptor? Problem with our job is first we have to make the giant stone in the first place. After so much work it is painful to chip away. Started with dozens of characters, 70 years, love triangles, civil wars. It was a mess. Maybe it could have been a (bad) novel but your tools for communicating in a game are actually quite limited. So: who are your main characters and what do they want? Storytelling 101.
“Character Massacre of 2006”. Combined / wiped major characters. 1 character = 1 idea. Diane McClintock – not her story, but a tool to tell the gamer what happened in the civil war. She’s the only one who tells that story. Other character / ideas: Ryan’s Conscience, Impact on the Little People.
Push vs Pull: What is the purpose of a cutscene? To push information to a player and you want them to see all of it. Same about other linear media like movies. That’s not our advantage, not our strengths. We have the ability to let people pull information to them. Why is this better? Aren’t they going to miss that? Yeah. They may miss it, even a lot of it. You have to accept that. That’s ok: the people who engage will be passionate about that stuff because they were engaged in the decision. Player has the option to “opt out” – not interested, we aren’t going to force it on them.
“3 levels of story”: Most of us devs are so far away from the experience that average players have. “Spring Oreos” – not our space. A lot of people just aren’t going to care. 3 levels: what do I basically need to do / kill / go. Most basic level. Sales numbers reflect hitting those people. Otherwise you make those “beloved” games that don’t move more than 150k units. Second level – basic information about characters, vaguely follow along. The final level is the really hardcore fan who is into it, the game equivalent of writing the Nirvana lyrics in your notebook in 5th grade. We want to support that, it’s there, but it can’t get in the way of the guy who just wants to play Madden and Halo.
Narrative Vehicles exclusive to games. Aren’t cutscenes good? Yes, but where are going, towards more cutscenes or more interactivity? Future is clear, interactivity. Audio logs: good opt in / out tools. Sounds of rapture: the PSAs.
Don’t Do What You Can’t Do: System Shock 2 – constrained to a spaceship. Games have limitations, they are not the real world. Breaks suspension of disbelief if they do something that doesn’t work. All those doors mysteriously locked in a linear corridor shooter. Takes the player out of the game. Underwater city in Bioshock, a constrained environment. Lot of people are dead – easier to interactive with. If you can’t do something well, don’t do it, and real people fall into this. Anything that opens the curtain to see the wizard of Oz causes problems. Period was both familiar and new. Rapture more believable than a lot of game spaces despite its fantasy nature. Can be alienating to have no frame of reference, period piece nature helped with that. Sci-fi movies: earthling to alien world, or alien to earth, but never an alien on an alien world.
Bioshock’s Plot Gets Simple: If you want people to follow it, it has to be really really simple. Escape Rapture, Kill Ryan, Kill Fontaine. If the player knows what he’s doing he’ll go with you to a lot of strange places. Indiana Jones: in every scene he’s looking for the Ark. Scene in the tent with Marion – really makes that point. Why so many accents in Bioshock? Simple: wanted to make it clear who was talking everytime you hear them.
Bioshock is a detective story. Traditional stories of this are interactive: “whodunit”? Natural fit for games as a result. Come down to a mysterious place, everyone is dead: what happened? Graphical capabilities give us the ability to have wheat & chaff. Back in the Doom days you could only have the wheat: monsters & weapons. Now this power lets us have a lot of density in the world, put in all that detail so the player can try and find what is important. Clue isn’t a game with only one suspect. Reward the really observant player on that third level of investment. “Moira and Patrick” – clues hidden in the world.
Narrative vs Story: what is the difference. Story is what you tell, narrative is what they choose to have told to them. 2 most important: Little Sisters & Plasmids – what you do to your body, what you do to the children. Also most important to gameplay. Player can participate in these story elements and get much more engaged. Getting people to understand the girl / father relationship was key in getting them to understand the gameplay and the narrative. We were surprised about the empathy with the big daddies, not wanting to hurt them.
“Mise En Scene”. To present a scene. Telling story without words. Dr Steinman. Don’t meet characters until after you’ve been hearing about them for quite a while. When you finally meet him he’s a guy with a machine gun and a mask – but we set him up in the world and hearing what he did to get people to invest much more in the character. Sander Cohen: by the time you meet him you already have a relationship.
Mystery: Don’t tell players what is going on in your world. Answering questions is not as interesting as asking them. Ambiguity. From the very beginning: who am I? Where am I? Don’t answer those right away. Lost / Cloverfield. Godzilla with less information, reinvented the genre. The Ring – is the end reveal that interesting? But the mystery is powerful. “Mystery balloon” – half filled balloon slowly rising, need to tap it up again – but not too far. Constant balance. Last act in Bioshock really suffered. Gameplay was good but the mysteries were gone once the question about identity and Ryan was answered – balloon hit bottom. Who killed Laura Palmer – what is left after you answer that?
Opening of Bioshock: No stentorian narrator with 50 proper nouns and words with apostrophes. Ask, don’t answer. Lots of mystery. Robinson Crusoe – the castaway – so familiar.
Original Little Sister: a slug like gatherer. No ability to emote, or relate. Original prototype about a huge simulation, but who cares? It is about the players perception. Version 2 a weird ugly midget thing. Then dog in a wheelchair. Then sad mutant girl. Then to the little sister from the final game. Gameplay function didn’t change but the narrative notion changed, audience ability to relate to it evolved.
Story gelled late: 8 months before ship. Games are complicated to build. In defense of storytelling coming late. Evolved over years. Learning from the game itself – have the game tell the designer the story, not just the other way around. Being involved with level reviews and art direction. This generated a lot of ideas. Triggered excitement and wanted to add more to the game. Inspired to write the Gatherer’s Garden on the spot. If you expect writing to be thrown over the fence a year head of time you’re not going to integrate the gameplay and story. If one thing made it what it is, it was the luxury to make those changes late in the game. Everyone knows you make balance changes late, story is the same. Tough – downstream effects of this – but important. Real costs to this model, big strain on production.
Respect your Audience.
Trust Mystery.
Empower the Gamer.
Q: Hard to do humans. What about Alyx in HL? Well, it’s good to be Valve, they’ve advanced that technology really far. But even they have realized Alyx breaks at some point – you shoot her, she gets stuck. An impossibly hard problem. Levine’s approach: if you do it, do it 100%.
Q: How important was the graphics design and identity of the world? Very important, the first thing people react to are the visuals. Same but different. Unique in the videogame space.
Q: I didn’t want to kill Andrew Ryan. Narratives – are we doomed to making games to make plot devices to clean up lack of choice? Games are essentially very linear things – outside of combat and physics things are pretty deterministic. One plot at Irrational because it’s hard to just do even one – hats off to the Bioware guys. Maybe dynamically generated narrative happens in the future but that’s a challenge way outside of the game space – AI research.
Q: Single player FPS. What about multiplayer? Co-op? Marketing wanted to make the main character important. Who do you play in the game, what is the identity? Created a plot twist of having a cipher. Bioshock + coop would be a strange mix. Plan for that from the beginning. Resistance 2 – co-op mode separate. Loathe to throw it in if it is going to be compromised.
Q: What guidance to the mission teams before than final 8 months where the story gelled? You have to come up with a bunch of things to get them going. General stuff – forest, mad doctor. The stuff that evolves is the details that fill in later. So those story changes didn’t change the missions. Thousand stories can represent a given mission flow. Changes there were from gameplay, not story. Story has as many bugs as any other part of the process.
Q: Most games don’t have a moral element, where did this come from? Thinking about little sister, capitalism unrestrained. Evolved rather than with a specific goal up front.
Q: Traditional games centered around difficulty. What role does this play in a game about story? Should finish a game if you can. Unlike a book there is difficulty. Really want my grandmother to beat the game on Easy. Gratified to see how many non-traditional gamers playing Bioshock. Also want hardcore gamers too, which is what all the plasmids & world interaction is about. Give the players a lot of choice. Hardcore gamers more likely to go into options to set that, so default to experience for most players.
Q: What influenced decision about how much info to have about the main character? Started out really not thinking about that – that it didn’t matter. Gordon Freeman – not in the character but in other character’s reactions. Tried to turn this lack of thought into a strength. At first didn’t even have the airplane crash – that came from a reaction from “hey, why am I in the water”. Fill in the bare minimum about who this guys is, just enough to make those people happy.
Q: When did the big “would you kindly” narrative twist take shape? Early on knew we wanted an unreliable narrator. Like in Fight Club, Usual Suspects. Audience perception of events is not accurate, camera is misleading. Took a while to figure out exactly how that would work, tied into who is the main character – not being anyone is a strength, that that is literally true – fake identity. Playing with that expectation of not having control was a bit of a post-modern joke, then people actually expected for you to have that control afterwards! Writing checks with the narrative that the gameplay couldn’t cash. Rub people’s face in it – then just continued to rub their face in it. Put in about a year ahead of ship.
Q: 3 levels of narrative: what if someone changes halfway through? Lost does recap episodes, for example. A tough problem – like an interactive help for the narrative. Supporting that for a broad range seems very complex. Didn’t seem too bad for Bioshock. Lots of work to solve because of huge variability in player knowledge.