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ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 1)

I find there’s often a misunderstanding regarding what a game writer does— particularly at a company like BioWare, where story features so prominently in what we make. People see the dialogue and the characters, and a writer makes those, so clearly they’re at the top of the chain in such a game’s development process, right? They write the story, and everyone else turns that story into the game. They make the setting, write the codex entries and the words everyone speaks… that’s the part I like, so clearly they’re responsible for it, yes?

Yes… but only to a point. A game is a huge undertaking by a large number of people, and must by its nature be a collaborative process. Game writing has much more in common with screenwriting a movie than it does with authoring a novel. Storytelling in a game involves so much more than just the writing. And that’s not just being kind— if the words we wrote don’t have the character design, the level art, the music and the cinematics (never mind the gameplay and many other things I’m forgetting to write down) to back them up, they’re going to fall flat.

The people in these other departments are storytellers just as we are, after all. They got into games for the same reason as we did— perhaps not to write characters, no, but to create experiences. A level artist has an awesome idea for a level he wants to try creating. A character artist has an idea for a fantastic new creature. A designer has an idea for a new crafting system or a way to make combat more fun. It’s up to the project leads to weave all these ideas (including whatever ideas we writers have for the story) together into the game. The concept. And it’s from that which we all begin our work.

But how do we do that? I’d say it’s the most common question I get asked. There’s so much information to coordinate, so much required to gather together even a moderately coherent story covering a whole game, how do you begin?

The short answer is “in a meeting”. In fact, sometimes I think I spend half my time at work in meetings. There is, however, a longer answer— which I personally think is an incredibly dull process to try and describe, but people keep asking about it so I’ll see if I can’t relate how it goes… at BioWare, anyhow. The process is different for every company, and most don’t employ full-time writers, but the BioWare process is pretty familiar to me by now so I’ll give it a shot.

At the very least, the next time someone asks it’ll give me something to link to. “Funny you ask! I wrote this series of articles on Tumblr…”

ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 2 - THE EARLY DAYS)

(Part 1 available here.)

At some point I’m told there’s a game to write.

This usually happens while we’re at the tail end of another project, which is necessary. During the Pre-Production phase, especially the early part, there’s not a lot for most content creators to do… we haven’t figured out what to make just yet, so they’d be twiddling their thumbs. Better to have them still working on something while a smaller team works on the concept (not to mention that, once a big project is done, people are going to be desperate for vacations and downtime). So the folks who make the schedules (producers, usually) are always juggling, trying to figure out how to overlap projects enough so twiddling is kept to a minimum.

If it’s a brand new game, discussion over what it will entail has happened at a higher level. The idea probably originated from the Project Director level, and there’s been talk with the senior Leads— people like the Lead Designer, Lead Programmer, Lead Artist… the heads of each department— over what the Big Features will be. What are the project’s major goals? Where will we innovate? What are the broad strokes of the gameplay? More importantly (particularly in the EA days when a green light must come from even higher) is it marketable? Does it have the potential to sell? The business side has to be lined up as well, because keeping us all employed seems like a good thing to occasionally consider.

(Incidentally, from time to time I’m asked "I have an idea for a game! Who do I tell to get it made?" …and the answer is “nobody”. The people like Project Directors, the ones at that level? They have their own ideas. Getting the chance to make a brand new IP occurs so rarely in one’s career, do you honestly think they wouldn’t have some thoughts? Do you think they got into game development with no dreams about what kind of game they’d like to someday make, they’re just waiting for someone who hasn’t paid their dues to come along and tell them what to make? As the marvelous Ken Levine said— well, he didn’t say this exactly, but I still smile at the memory of the panel where he mentioned it— “Fuck your ideas.” Everyone in the industry has ideas. I have ideas. Ideas are cheap. If you have an idea you want to turn into a game, don’t tell anyone about it— make it.)

Anyhow. Back to my main point.

If it’s an already-existing IP (Intellectual Property), some of these questions are answered. Instead they’re discussing things like how will this game be different? What are we improving on? What aren’t we doing again? What went wrong/right the last time?

The Lead Writer might be consulted on these broad strokes (as any of the sub-leads would be— and by “sub-lead” I mean the project heads of the various fields within each department… Writing, Level Design, Cinematic Design, Systems Design and Combat are all examples within the Design department alone), but I also might not be. For sure I won’t be on the stuff that isn’t part of my expertise, like the business side. And good thing, because talking economics would probably make my eyes bleed.

At any rate, at some point a project is green-lit. This is when the Lead Designer gathers together his sub-leads and gives them the scoop. He wants us to establish what our plans and broad strokes will be, and has some suggestions. For me, this might be him establishing the parameters for the story— perhaps the basic concept, or a new feature to try (like the framing narrative in DA2). We’re also talking about scope, which is incredibly important. How big can it be? What word count do I have to work with? How many hours are we talking, here? That affects everything… everything we write trickles work down to every other department. We are the wellspring from which work originates. Imagine little dollar signs floating out of every word we type, lots of ‘em, and you can start to imagine why everyone is so concerned.

And it’s not like we sub-leads go, “yes, sir, Mr. Lead Designer sir!” and then run off to do his bidding. We argue. We argue like nerds on an Internet forum argue, albeit with a slightly greater grasp on the reality of the situation. If you’re not someone who’s willing to collaborate, who understands what that entails, you won’t last long in game development. Throwing a tantrum and going, “I’m a writer! I refuse to allow such things as budgets and technical limitations to affect my art! How dare you, you philistine, presume to have ideas on the story! The nerve!”… well, that wouldn’t go over very well. You’d be out the door in no time.

Because remember that part where I said that everyone gets into game development because they want to create experiences? Because they want to be part of the process of making an awesome story? Well, that’s not just lip service. That means writing must take their desires into account. There’s a negotiation, because eventually a story’s going to be put together which will determine what kind of work these people will be doing over the next two years. So, yeah, they’re concerned. Duh. And the first person I must contend with is the Lead Designer, because argue as I might he’s the guy who has the power to over-rule me. It’s not a fight, necessarily… ideally we’re on the same wavelength… but as Lead Designer it’s his name going on the box. This is his game. So I exist to make his life easier, to help implement his vision, not solely to create my own.

Which goes back to that thing where people get confused about what a Lead Writer does— as you can see, I’m not the Lead Designer. I’m not the Project Director. I’m one element of a big team. Collaboration thankfully brings along with it a whole lot of good things as well as frustrations— like most things in life, it’s trade-off.

At any rate, once I’ve talked with the Lead Designer and the other sub-leads and I have the basic parameters down— and the Lead Designer has agreed with my “big picture” thoughts— this is when I go back to my desk and the real fun stuff begins. This is where I need to start taking a set of features, vague ideas, directives and constraints and start spinning them together into the story concept. That’s when the writing starts.

NEXT: Part 3 - Pre-Production

ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 3 - PRE-PRODUCTION)

(Part 2 available here.)

So let’s say I’ve got my list of directives from on high, a rough idea of how long the game is going to be and what our major planned features are. What now? Well, I’ve got to get cracking is what now. We need a blueprint from which to make the story.

Said blueprint doesn’t just magically appear. At no time did I write a quick description which went “The player is the last of the Grey Wardens, fighting both against the invading darkspawn horde and a country that blames him/her for the death of their king. He/she is the only hope of victory, however, and must gather up allies to make a last stand against the dread Archdemon as it closes on Denerim.” Well, eventually I got there, but it didn’t start that way. Trust me, the first ideas put on the table for the Dragon Age story did not have everyone shouting, “Dave, you’re goddamn brilliant! Ship it!” Except maybe sarcastically. I work with a sarcastic bunch.

No, no, no. Sure, I’ll start with some basic blurbs like the above, enough to see if there’s a story hook which everyone likes. There’ll be lots of discussion with the Lead Designer to see if any of these hooks will stick, and generally after a number of tries we’ll find one and he’ll tell me to work on that. Maybe I’ll work on it a bit, adding more detail, and we’ll get to the point where we decide it’s not working after all— let’s try something else. But eventually we’ll settle on a premise that sounds exciting. Do we know what the quests will be at this point? No. Do we know who any of the characters are? Probably not. All we’re looking for is something that says who the player will be, what their main goal is, and to make it sound snappy enough that we can fire it at someone who doesn’t know anything else about the project and they’ll think it sounds cool.

I call it the elevator pitch, and it applies to both the main game story as well as any major quest we’re working on. It’s something all the writers have to master— essentially, if you can’t sum up what your story is and what makes it cool in the time it takes to ride the elevator, it’s too complicated. Try again.

Why is that a worthwhile exercise? Because we’re writers, man. Come on. You know what we do. We’ll sit there and try to explain the intricacies of each character’s development arc, the various permutations of the Landsmeet decision, and how the DAO plot is a variant on Arthurian legend… until the eyes of the person you’re talking to begin to glaze over. Because the ins and outs of the story are incredibly fascinating to us, but completely useless when you’re trying to communicate to non-writers. And that communication is key. Trust me, there’ve been lots of times when we encountered a disparity between the writers’ vision and what other people on the project thought it was. Why? Because we hadn’t communicated it well. We had detailed documents, walls of text explaining every last nuance, and nobody read them. As a writer on a development team (and really this applies to anyone on the team in a creative capacity) you have to learn to sell your vision. Get everybody on board, believing in what you’re doing, and the rest will fall into place. If you expect everyone to get there on their own, it’s simply not going to happen.

Case in point: there are gravestones in Redcliffe. I didn’t notice this until late in the project, as I’m running around testing the plot in that area… and as soon as I noticed, I immediately went to the art team to discuss it. “There’s, like, a whole document on the project wiki dedicated to religion! The Andrastians burn their dead!” I complained. It was, however, too late to do anything about it. And the responsibility, ultimately, was mine. Did I ever try to communicate what was different about this fantasy village from every other fantasy village in different worlds… in a way that wasn’t buried in heaps of documentation under various sub-headings? No, I hadn’t, and God bless the artists for getting most of it right anyway. It was really just a wake-up signal that we needed to talk more. It’s too easy for any team to start working in a bubble, especially when time is short. You put your head down, worry about how good your particular part of the game is and not how it affects everything else. In my experience, writers can be the worst offenders.

So you need to talk. Once we have that initial blurb, after all, there’s going to be a lot of talking as we work on what I call the “one-pager”. This will be a very short document (a few pages at most, despite the name) that expands on the premise without going into a lot of detail. We’ll want to know the basics of how the game begins, what the major beats are, and how it all ends. What does the player do in this story? What are the major decisions? Most importantly, where are the sexy bits? Those bits are the “impact moments” we need to call out, because they’re going to be where we’re sinking a lot of cinematic effort and, very likely, from where a bunch of our marketing is going to be pulled. This one-pager needs to be sold not only to the team, but sold to the people that are going to sell our game to everyone else.

If this sounds a little like trying to spin a lot of plates at once, it really is. It’s not as bad as it sounds, however. You just have to know that at no point do the writers get to lock themselves in a room and just come up with something. That’s later. At this point, we need to do a lot of talking. As well as listening. This means seeking out other groups and asking them for input— not everyone will have something to offer, but they might. Just because someone’s a QA tester or a Level Artist doesn’t mean they can’t have ideas for a story, or thoughts on what we already have (as vague as the plan may be at this point). Not everyone’s going to be on the same page, but eventually we need to reach a consensus.

The one-pager is also when I’ll start talking to the rest of my writers. They might not be on the project yet, per se, but chances are I’ll know which ones have been scheduled to be on it. And so we’ll start talking about things like story themes— what kind of story do we want to tell? And that can be difficult.

Speaking personally, I tend to think in big moments I want to achieve. For DAO, the Dark Ritual was one of the first things I came up with. I didn’t even know the circumstances yet, but I knew the basics behind what would happen in that scene and why. I had an idea for a spirit that was both male and female, both beauty and beast, and that she would be trying to redeem a group of werewolves— who perhaps might have better reason to do what they were doing rather than “they’re just evil”. I knew about Loghain, and the betrayal at Ostagar, though neither of those things had names yet. And I had an idea for a quest based on the search for the Holy Grail. All these things were very disparate ideas at first, and so I had to figure out how a story was going to bring them together. What you know of as Dragon Age: Origins grew out of those beginnings.

This is the point where a lot of stuff gets discarded or changed. Some plots which I really wanted to do just couldn’t be made to fit no matter how hard I tried. Some things that go into the one-pager get altered as we talk about it. Did you know the darkspawn were once intelligent, and that Loghain was once mind-controlled by the Archdemon? Did you know the final battle once took place at Redcliffe, with a one-on-one duel with Loghain? Or that the battle with the Archdemon once took place in the heart of the Blight down in the Korcari Wilds, and the Archdemon wasn’t even a dragon? You also needed a [temp name] artifact to kill it, which only later got replaced by the “only Grey Wardens can kill the Archdemon” thing— ten iterations of trying to figure in this foozle artifact without it seeming completely lame only to eventually realize the problem was the artifact and not how we were introducing it.

If you were a writer in the Writer’s Pit (the name we give to the big room where we’re all situated), this period would include a lot of brainstorm sessions. You’d throw out your own plot ideas, and we’d talk a lot about the plot structure— the logic behind the player’s motivations to get to each point in the quest, and why it does or doesn’t work. The “doesn’t work” comes up a lot. Someone among the writers will go “but why would the player want to do x? That doesn’t make any sense because of y.” And everyone will glare at you, because that means tossing out a bunch of work, even though you’re probably right. Damn it.

We’ll get to a big flowchart that shows the player’s path through the game (hello, Visio!). Each circle is a plot, with lines between showing “must do” or “happens if”. We need to see where the plot divergences happen, and where the bottlenecks will be. We’ll label each line with the logic. Chances are we’ll get stuck… and I’ll have to do that thing where I stand up and go “OKAY, EVERYONE CHILL. LET’S START OVER.” Word of advice: sometimes it’s actually easier to figure out where you want the plot to end up first and then work backwards to figure out what needs to happen in order to get there.

But… once we’ve done all that work, we’ll boil it down into the one-pager document which lays it all out nice and clean. Which then becomes the pitch. This isn’t the elevator pitch, it’s a full-blown pitch. I get all the leads and the Project Director into a room and walk them through it (hello, PowerPoint!). I highlight the impact moments, answer their questions, and try to get them excited about it.

Chances are they shoot it down. They ask questions to which I don’t have answers, or point out issues which we’ll have in executing my plan. More often they come up with some additional ideas, probably inspired by my plan… but we have to start somewhere, right? And I’ll nod a lot, probably argue a lot, and eventually take my pitch back to the team and we’ll work on version 2.0. Or 3.0. Until finally I present a pitch and everyone says “yep, that’s what we want.”

At this point, I go back to the Writer’s Pit and declare we’re good to go. They go “yay” (they’re tired) and we get to work on the next step— divvying up all the big quests to individual writers and taking our really sketchy list of characters and making a full list… as well as figuring out who’s going to write them. This is when I need all my writers on the project full-time, because we’re no longer brainstorming and talking ideas. We have shit to do.

ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 4 - CREATING CHARACTERS)

(Part 3 available here.)

Ah, the characters.

For a BioWare game, of course, this means the followers. The people who form your adventuring group, who you travel with and fight alongside, who you befriend… and, yes, who you romance. The number of followers in your active group has varied (from 1 in Neverwinter Nights all the way up to five in Baldur’s Gate), but for better or worse BioWare has become known for its follower characters and I imagine that any game we put out without them would likely raise some eyebrows.

"Why on Earth would you ever do that?” someone might ask. Simple. The resources required by these followers is immense. Ignoring the complication they add to things such as pathfinding (especially for things such as horseriding, stealth, climbing or swimming when dealing with an entire party), they can take up to half of a game’s expensive word-budget with all that talking… a budget that could conceivably be spent on other things.

Would that be worthwhile? I guess it depends on who you ask. Some people don’t like romances, for instance, and fair enough. Personally, I get a bit annoyed at those who sneer at us “pandering to the fangirls” by including them. Pandering being the operative word, one assumes, because we aren’t pandering to them. Which then wouldn’t be pandering, obviously, as it would be… oh, let’s say art. And that’s ignoring the notion that there are plenty of guys who like romances (and not just for the sex scenes; I can link to the gushy Morrigan and Leliana threads to prove it) and the only reason to throw up “fangirl” in this context must be because anything a girl might like in a game is self-evidently bad?

Yeah, okay, I’ll admit it. That annoys me more than a bit.

Needless to say, when the writing team approaches the creation of our main characters it’s done with a fair amount of trepidation these days. On one hand there’s a temptation to just say, “Fuck it. If I see one more romance thread on the forums I think I’ll lose my mind. Let’s ditch the entire concept.” And then we remember that we really like writing these characters. Once a follower has acquired their voice and you inhabit them fully, it’s without a doubt the most enjoyment we have in our jobs and the closest we come to actual writing (whereas quests are fun for slightly different reasons, considering we spend much more time designing a quest as opposed to writing it). So there comes a time when we put aside thoughts of what all the fans want and simply concentrate on what we need for the game.

And that time is early Pre-Production. Which means it’s not really a separate phase, but deserves a column of its own. Because reasons. I don’t need to explain.

First things first: we probably have a very basic list of characters we know about once the pitch is completed. It really depends on how much those characters are involved in the main plot. Alistair and Morrigan would have come up in the overview for Dragon Age: Origins, for instance… but they wouldn’t have had those names. “Bastard Prince” and “Witch of the Wilds” would have been their references at the time, probably, and little else to recommend them.

So we have to figure out a few things. How many followers do we need, for starters? This is usually dictated by gameplay— an array of classes (and possibly specializations) which cover the combat roles required— combined with the word budget. If I know how many words I have to work with, how thin do I want to spread those words? The fewer followers we have, the more content we can give each of them but the fewer options the players have… and the more “bases” each of those followers will have to cover.

What do I mean by “bases”? Well, that depends on the story. The best uses of characters such as these are as ciphers. They humanize the conflicts, so ideally you want them to come in on different sides of any issue… so you need characters that are moral as well as immoral, characters that reflect different cultures and viewpoints, characters that want different things. It’s this kind of push-pull on the player which makes it interesting… if all of them agreed on everything it would make for an incredibly boring experience.

So how do we say who covers which bases? This is just talking. Any writer knows how this happens. As a group, the Writer’s Pit will start talking about ideas— it might be a character type they hope to write (though you can’t get too attached to the idea of doing so, as the schedule may dictate otherwise) or just one they think would be interesting. Any idea we throw out should ideally scoop up one or more of the bases we need covered (“immoral apostate mage— check!”).

The thing to know is that, at this stage, we’re still talking in pure concepts. A character might be described as “Mystic Loner” or “Clever Jackal” …and we’ll do a bunch of these, each with a brief paragraph describing what makes them cool. Why? Your assumption might be because we have to pitch them for approval just like we pitch the plots… but you’re wrong! That’s later. We do this because the first people we have to talk to about these characters are the artists.

Writers don’t create the characters alone. We don’t write something up, hand it to the artists, and say, “make that.” Or I suppose we could. Indeed, we have done that before, and the results are not ideal… because at no point do the writers decide what the characters look like. We don’t decide what anything in the game looks like. Oh, we can ask, we can make suggestions, but that part of the game belongs to them as much as the story part belongs to us. We have to share. Thus we try to work with the artists early and find some common ground with character concepts that inspire them as well as inspire us.

I’ll be honest— I haven’t really mastered that yet. I won’t speak for the other writers, but I have a hard time sharing characters. There is possibly nothing that engenders more argument and bitterness between the departments than what our precious characters look like. How they look says a lot about them, after all, which is why the artists care as much as we do. Considering how awesome the results can be when we’re on the same page, however, it makes the need to work on sharing that creative process very self-evident.

So chances are we’ve narrowed down the concepts we like— it’s probably still more than we can use, but at least we’re down to a group which both departments can live with. Possibly we even have a few preliminary sketches that show what the artists are thinking for some concepts. Here the concepts will be claimed by writers, who will then flesh them out and own them for the time being. We want a name. We want a background, we want to know how they fit into the plot, we want to know how they’ll affect it.

And, yes, we’ll start deciding who will make for appropriate romances. Some are more obvious— but, to be honest, this is also a time where this list will change. Frequently. Once we add in the input of the Lead Designer (who has final approval on our character list), it’s likely the mix of genders, classes, races and romance status will keep changing for months. Why? Probably because the game’s story is changing at the same time. There are arguments over whether we have the right mix, or a character’s name will strike someone the wrong way because they knew someone with that name in High School. Or whatever. It’s always a negotiation.

Eventually we’ll settle on a final list— but chances are it won’t look much like when we started. The concepts we began with probably won’t be recognizeable any longer. Does Morrigan still talk in an ethereal, dreamy fashion like Delirium from the Sandman comic? Nope. Is Alistair still the grizzled veteran Grey Warden, distrustful of others due to his bitterness at being an unwanted bastard? Nope. Is Leliana still the free-wheeling adventuress from a long line of dragon hunters? Umm… no. Is Shale the unfeeling automoton who talks in a monotone and to whom you must prove the value of human life? Not anymore.

So, yeah. Changes. Sometimes before we start writing them, sometimes after. Generally not after they’ve been written to completion, but it happens (as it did with Shale). What a character looks like will change frequently, and generally not be settled on until well into the game’s development. I lost track of just how many iterations there were for Fenris’ look, for instance. We don’t generally start seeing the final results until the characters are already being written, or even completed.

And it’s not as if we don’t have anything to do in the meantime. We’ll need to flesh out the character’s plan (a document that details what their arc will be, how they relate to other characters, what happens at stages of approval, etc.) and then write it— very quickly. An entire character (meaning all the camp conversations, romance talks and other things that don’t directly involve quests) can usually expect to have a first pass done within a few weeks. Maybe a month.

Hmm. I doubt that’s an exhaustive description of the process. I didn’t get into the convolutions involved with deciding a character’s name, for instance— naming anything is easily the most hotly-debated part of a project (up to and including naming the game itself). But that could be an article of its own. So I’ll leave it at that, and hope the process doesn’t sound too confusing. Looking back at what I’ve written, I’d say the only problem would be getting the impression that writing these characters is something we do in isolation. Like we can spend a set time talking about and writing only them and nothing else… when the truth is we have to do this amidst all the planning for quests and writing the rest of the game.

Fun stuff. At least when the character you’ve been working on for the past month hasn’t just been cut. Then it royally sucks. But otherwise? Sure.

Next: Part 5 - Naming Things

ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 5 - NAMING THINGS)

(Part 4 available here.)

I know I said the next entry would be on designing quests, but whatever. I am nothing if not powered by whimsy.

That and because naming things is a huge source of frustration for me— something so ultimately irrelevant should not cause as many problems as it does! But it does! I swear to God, the naming of a select three things probably causes more consternation and fuss than almost everything else we do: major characters, places and the project names.

Possibly the reason we argue about this stuff so much is simply because anyone can have an opinion on a name. There’s no objective bar for evaluating how good or bad a name is. You can do that with art and, to a lesser degree, with story. With those, you can articulate exactly what is right or wrong with them. With a name, it’s all about liking it. Does it strike your fancy sufficiently?

"I don’t know, it doesn’t sing it doesn’t dance" is NOT. HELPFUL.

So. In the many years where I’ve had to sit through numerous excruciating ways of trying to name things— even one meeting where seventeen people sat in a room for three hours trying to come to a consensus on a name, and ultimately coming up with something so banal we may as well have grabbed a random person passing in the hallway and demanded they produce something on the spot, and we would very likely have had just as good a result— so I arrived at two laws about it.

These are laws that, since I created them, have yet to fail me.

GAIDER’S LAWS OF NAMING THINGS

1) If the name is a made-up word for something, everyone will have different connotations and immediately dislike it.

2) Within 3-6 months, people will begin to associate that made-up word with the thing… and they will forget that they ever had an objection. Of course it’s that name. What else could it be called?

You think I’m kidding? I am not kidding.

"Qunari" was initially despised. Some people thought it sounded too much like canary. Some people thought "the Qun" was difficult to pronounce, and sounded too much like a bad word (seriously?). It was allowed to remain as a temp name, and we would look at it later for what it would actually be. Lo and behold, when we turned around 6 months later, suddenly nobody wanted to change it. That’s what they were. What else could they be?

The Dragon Age world was not initially called “Thedas”. There was a name that existed, but I didn’t like it and refused to use it in the documentation or in conversation… so, when we had to refer to it at all, we called it “the Dragon Age world” or “the Dragon Age setting” (with the understanding that eventually we would have to give it a real name).

It amused us to find on our forums that, lacking a provided alternative, someone had begun using the acronym “TheDAS” (The Dragon Age Setting) …and it stuck. Funny! So we started calling it Thedas in conversation, mostly because that was shorter. Then, lo and behold, when we sat down for the meeting to give the world its real name, we couldn’t settle on anything. Every option didn’t seem right. Nothing fit. Sheryl asked, “Can’t we just call it Thedas?”… and we realized the truth. For good or ill, Law #2 had already taken hold.

"Grey Wardens". What else could they be called? Plenty! The oldest name I recall (it may not be the first) was the “White Rangers”. First we had to change the word ‘rangers’ because that was felt to be too close to the Tolkien group. There was, oh, about twenty different iterations. My frustration began to mount as each was was countered with, “Oh, I don’t know… I just don’t like it.” No suggestions, just concern about how important this group would be for DAO and how the name had to really sparkle. Ugh. I eventually threw out ‘wardens’ in desperation, and was surprised it stuck. Then the conversation turned to whether ‘White’ made them sound too much like good guys. Cue me losing more hair.

So when I became Lead Writer, I immediately imposed two rules which were based on the two laws:

GAIDER’S RULES OF NAMING THINGS

1) If you don’t like it, but can’t suggest something better, I don’t want to hear it.

2) If we can’t agree, let’s go with this as a temp name and talk about it in a few months.

Rule #1 serves me well. Lots of people like to bitch about names, but are far less willing to actually risk offering an alternative which will in turn be criticized by everyone else. Mike Laidlaw gets a free pass on this one. Well, actually he gets a veto. To his credit, he only invokes it rarely as using it too liberally makes me use The Face (and nobody wants that).

Rule #2 is me being tricksy, because of Law #2. Yet to date this tactic has also not failed me.

The one caveat of the laws of naming? Do NOT give something a temporary name unless you’re willing to risk that name eventually being PERMANENT. If a name is honestly, truly temp then make it terrible. As in nobody would ever be willing to risk leaving it that way. Artists do this with temp textures… they’re garish colors which are obviously temp, because otherwise someone might forget to change them. Name your project ‘Purple Monkey Balls’. Name your character ‘Dude McSmilesALot’. This has the added bonus of encouraging the permanent name to come along much more quickly.

Every now and again a name will come along which everyone will like immediately, however. I cannot account for why or how, but it’s pretty rare. “Morrigan” was that way. “Ferelden” as well, oddly, though every other country in Thedas has changed at least once (I will still, on occasion, refer to Antiva as “Calabria” or Anderfels as “Orthland”).

Point of Trivia: Whenever we talk about a location which has to be too cool for school, our Art Director Matt Goldman always offers up a single suggestion: “Hatecastle!” He says this with a fuckyeah! intonation, and it’s inevitably to yank my chain. Why? Because Matt Goldman’s spirit animal is a troll, that’s why. This has happened with enough frequency that, when we needed to name the castle in the DA2 “Mark of the Assassin” DLC we declared it Chateau Haine (“Castle Hate”) in his honor.

It made him laugh. We writers are givers.

Next: Part 6 - Creating Quests

ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 6 - CREATING QUESTS)

(Part 5 available here.)

Back when we were in an earlier part of Pre-Production, the writers as a group would have talked about the quests we were planning. They can be broken up in different ways— Dragon Age: Origins had a smaller number of long quests while Dragon Age 2 was made up of a larger number of “chained” quests— but ultimately we came out of that process knowing the following:

The reason the player starts each quest.

What their ultimate goal/outcome for each quest is.

The type of area each quest occurs within.

What the basic options are intended to be.

And that’s pretty much it. In terms of the quest’s story, we’ve probably got a blurb that covers the basics… a very short summary which we can use to explain it to anyone very quickly.

An example from Dragon Age 2: the Act 1-ending quest to voyage into the Deep Roads. We knew the player would need a certain amount of money to begin (giving them the motivation for completing previous quests), that the player would be going into the Deep Roads and would ultimately discover the Forgotten Thaig and the Red Lyrium within it, the Red Lyrium Idol in particular. We knew this expedition would need to give the player the wealth they would have in Act 2. And that’s about it.

The writers would have already claimed which quests they wanted to work on— this usually involves a bit of negotiation, but is more painless than you might imagine. Writers develop favorites early on… perhaps this was a quest they personally championed, or they just have a really good idea for it that everyone else recognizes as cool and that they would need to work on it in order to see that idea realized. On occasion someone ends up assigned a quest out of necessity which they didn’t ask for. Technically I would be present to mediate if more than one person wanted one, but since we’re all adults it tends to simply work itself out. My main role as a Lead Writer in this instance is two-fold: 1) to ensure the volume of work assigned to any given writer fits into their schedule, and 2) to ensure the complexity of a quest is a good fit for the writer’s experience & ability at quest design.

That last bit is important. All writers are not equal. Some writers are better character writers but struggle at quest design. Others are the reverse. Some writers write very slowly while others write very quickly. Some writers know their strengths very well, while others tend to take on more than they can handle (the ability to discern that tends to come with experience). If I’m doing my job, I can see when a writer is having a problem and step in to fix it… if someone’s struggling with quest design, perhaps I sit in on their meetings and offer suggestions. If they’re falling behind their schedule, I sit down with them and discuss the problems and see if they can be resolved or if we have to juggle their assignments. That part’s not easy— I have a full writing taskload myself, in addition to my managerial duties, and thus less time to devote to them. It’s a constant battle, to be perfectly honest, and I’ve dropped the ball on more than one occasion. I’m not proud of it, but I do what I can.

The first thing a writer needs to do with the quest is flesh it out. To do this, they meet with their pod (as in a pod of whales)… this would be a small group with representatives from the other disciplines who are also assigned to that particular quest: level designers, level artists, a cinematic designer, a concept artist and ideally a dedicated QA tester.

Why? Well, when I said earlier that games are designed in meetings… this is where most of them happen. In Pre-Production, a writer has to spearhead a pod because we’re where the design has to begin… but we can’t do it alone. Or, rather, we shouldn’t do it alone. If we do it alone, chances are far greater we’ve designed something the level designers can’t implement. We have sequences the cinematic designers say will be really time-consuming even though they’re not what we consider the important bits, or we don’t take advantage of the cinematic designers’ skillsets because we simply don’t know what they’re capable of. We get back a level from the artists that doesn’t work with the plot flow because they don’t quite understand it or aren’t inspired by it. So you fix that by talking to them early.

You explain to them: “This is the story I have in mind.” Lots of brainstorming ensues. At this point, the writer has to be good at managing a group… and that’s not always easy. Sometimes you’ll get an individual who tries to dominate the pod, or the writer himself isn’t good at directing the conversation and all you get is a jumble of ideas which never goes anywhere productive (like a forum thread with no moderator). The thing I find that works best is not saying “what should we do?” but asking more result-oriented questions like “I’m having X problem with the plot… how do we fix that?”

What you eventually have to build to is a quest flow. How does each step go from A to B to C to D? This is the most common weakness that writers run into when designing quests… they think of the story, the why things are happening, but not the how. “She starts at the entrance, and then eventually meets the mage who runs the place”… NO, STOP. Not “eventually”. How does she meet the mage? Is she traveling through an area? What happens there? You need to account for each step in the player’s experience, as if you’re picturing it happening in the game. There is no room for ambiguity.

In fact, that ambiguity is the primary place where new writers— and people applying for writing positions— tend to fall apart. What is the player doing? You have to consider that at every step. If you create a plan where a section is vague, you’ll sit down to write… and you’ll get stuck. It’ll become very obvious when level design implements the plan, and suddenly you’ll be forced to write around this hole or fill it with combat or do something with it. Your plot will unravel.

What are the choices you intend? An RPG is all about choices, so… does your quest have any? Does it account for the different types of players we design for? You don’t need to include every type of choice (and probably couldn’t afford that, anyhow) but you do need something… otherwise you’ll have a great story with no agency for the player. And, yes, that may end up happening, depending on how things turn out down the line… but it shouldn’t be in your plan.

The one thing a writer doesn’t have to do is design quest elements like combat encounters, puzzles and other forms of gameplay— that’s the level designers’ job. What you do need is to figure out where they occur. If we know a big combat is going to occur somewhere, you’ll discuss it with the designers and they’ll go off and plan it. They’ll talk to the level artists and work on creating the space, and you’ll know not to have any conversations occurring there. If we know there’s a puzzle element, we can say “they do a puzzle to get past this spot”. In the pod, you’ll discuss what type of puzzle it might be, and again the designer will go off and detail it further. That’s OK.

You’ll also have to work with a budget— the bane of any writer’s existence, let me tell you. There’s a time budget (“how long is this quest supposed to be?”) which means you’ll be working with the pod to approximate how long every step is expected to take. More importantly for you, you’ll have a word budget (as in the # of words of spoken dialogue you can have). The total word budget of the project has already been chopped up and you know how much of it is yours… so you have to figure out how much talking there is in each section. Is this idea going to be complicated to explain? Maybe it’s better to show instead. Is this conversation going to be really long and drag down the pace of the plot? Is it a show piece with lots of cinematic work expected?

Chances are you’ll over-design at first— your quest is too long or takes too many words. You’ll try to cut out the unimportant bits, and streamline it. You’ll try to figure out how to convey ideas in other ways than talking. You’ll figure out where to concentrate your efforts, where the “bang for your buck” is in your story. Maybe you’ll come to the heartbreaking conclusion that your concept is just too grandiose for your budget. Hopefully you do that sooner rather than later. That’s a hard one. Scope control is our #1 enemy, and “scope creep” is endemic. Plots will always, always grow over time… so make your plan smaller than your budget. You will not master this art. Ever. I have nightmares about scope creep.

All those things take time to determine. The writer will be working on a document called a narrative overview where the flowchart is maintained and each step is spelled out so everyone understands it. You’ll be going back and re-working it a lot. Depending on how much time we have, this could take weeks… or months. Constant meetings, meetings to update the Lead Writer, meetings to work out problems, all with the eventual goal of creating the pitch.

Much like the pitch we did for the overall story, the pitch here is where you sit down with the leads— which means all the other leads and sub-leads (of which I am one, remember)— and prove to them why this quest is worthwhile. There are three possible results of this meeting: 1) you’re greenlit and good to go, 2) you’re greenlit provided some changes are made, and 3) you’re sent back to the drawing board.

#3 happens. It happened to me just recently, and it’s as stressful as you’d imagine. You feel like you failed. Thankfully, you’re likely to go back to the drawing board with some direction… you’ll know what went wrong and what you need to fix. Which is good, as you can’t dawdle. You’ll have to come up with the new plan even faster, now, as time is undoubtedly growing short.

Once you’re greenlit, this is where the level designers take over leadership of the pod. They’re going to be working out how to implement the plan and be creating an even more detailed thing called the execution document. This takes your narrative overview and starts adding all the fussy bits— which levels, which resources to request, how does combat work, etc. etc. The fun stuff.

But you’re not off the pod. You have to start writing, yes, but you need to stay in contact with your pod because you’re about to encounter problems. It would be nice if execution documents got turned into games exactly as planned.

BUT THAT HAS NEVER, EVER HAPPENED.

Next: Part 7 - When Things Go Wrong… And They Will

ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 7 - WHEN THINGS GO WRONG… AND THEY WILL)

(Part 6 available here.)

It would be nice if things went according to plan. I would love it, say, if the main plot for a game at ship looked exactly as it did the day we planned it all out… or if even one of the major quests ended up having a smooth transition from execution document to final implementation. You might think I’m exaggerating when I say that neither of those things has ever happened. You might think what ended up in the game was pretty awesome, after all. So what’s the problem?

The problem is I will know.

I’m all too painfully aware of every last “should have”, “would have” and “could have”. I know every cut, every quest that went awry, every awesome opportunity that was missed for one of a thousand reasons… I recently said that I don’t really play my own games after release. And that’s true. Part of it is that, by the time the game goes out, I’ve played it a thousand times. It was played in bits and pieces, sure, but there it is anyhow. I know what’s going to happen at every moment, what’s behind every dialogue and every scene, right down to the formulae working under the hood. More than that, I’m seeing all the stuff that isn’t there, or the original way every quest was originally supposed to run, the lines we took out. So I just can’t do it.

"You make it sound," you might respond, "like writing for games is constantly about making things less awesome, and that you hate everything you’ve made."

This is not true. I’m absolutely proud of everything I’ve helped make because I’m aware of all the challenges we faced to make it. Remember when I said ideas don’t matter? That’s because game development is all about the implementation. A game with a really average idea might still be incredible if executed well. A game with a really incredible idea might still be average if executed poorly. A good development team rises above the others based on how they tackle those challenges.

And those challenges get harder as development goes on. As you approach release, the time to deal properly with challenges lessens. You have to become creative and start using inelegant work-arounds. You have to make a plot work less than ideally with partial resources. You have to be brutal and cut things that it really hurts to cut. And these are the things that every team has to face, with the penalty being slipping your release date. Which may indeed slip, and that happens often, but there’s always a cost.

All that’s the least fun part of making a game, but it’s also what makes us professionals. This is why many mods made by a group of volunteers never finish, because the last phases of development— the part where it all gets done— isn’t awesome. They’d much rather go back to adding new features and content rather than iterating and cutting, and their intended release slips further and further into oblivion and abandonment. It’s too bad, however, because nothing beats seeing the project finished. For all the pain that went into making it, you still can’t help but be incredibly proud of the accomplishment… and more than a little awed at how the team managed to all pull together and turn something that two months previous had barely looked like a game into something people actually enjoyed.

First game I helped make: Baldur’s Gate II. We cut so much from that game. Big, painful cuts which at the time seemed like they were everything. It was so huge, and at times seemed like such a mess that we cobbled together with glue and string that prior to its release some of us felt like the fans would surely hate it. That they wouldn’t help but see all the things we’d done badly. That all the 14-hour days and the nights I slept on the lunch room couch wouldn’t have been worth it.

But of course that didn’t happen. I still have my BG2 box, and somehow my memories of the development are a lot fonder than they have any right to be. It was a lesson, to be sure.

So, a really brief breakdown of the two things that will turn you from someone who likes to write into a bona fide game developer once you’ve been through them:

#1: Cuts

They are brutal… and they are necessary. When a limb is cut off during development, it’s done so the rest of the patient can live. There’s only so much blood to go around, after all. There hasn’t been a single cut which I haven’t argued about, fought over, sometimes literally cried over… and ultimately realized had to happen. Being Lead Writer means I’m often asked to make cuts myself, and that includes cutting other peoples’ work than my own. Imagine doing that, if you will, looking someone in the eye and telling them their efforts have been for nothing.

Why does it happen? Sometimes it’s because the project has scope creeped up to such a size that the whole thing can no longer properly be made. Maybe there isn’t time to make the levels or creatures it requires, and the plot can’t exist without them. Sometimes it’s because it just isn’t working, and the effort it would take to fix can’t be spared. Sometimes it seems really unjust, and sometimes you’re relieved because you knew it wasn’t working anyhow. But mostly it sucks. Oh, the humanity.

You will start to learn to maintain a certain distance from what you create. Because you must, or this part of development will drive you utterly mad.

#2: Re-Writes

Quest not working? Write it again. And again. And again. This is part of iteration, the process by which the game gets better by increments as it’s evaluated and tested repeatedly, and for a writer that means editing and re-writing. Maybe the information flow doesn’t make sense… it might be something you did or something which changed in another plot over which you had no control. It might be one of those same things I listed under cuts— a level not working out, a creature being cut, a release date being moved— but in this case it means re-working what you have instead of throwing it out.

There is a point at which re-writing starts to become counter-productive, where the writer can no longer figure out how to approach the problem… or they’re just not into it any longer. That’s where I usually step in, and pass it onto someone else. If I can.

I tend to find that re-writes often make the end result much better… and the more I was against doing it, the better it ultimately ends up being. Weird, I know. I think that’s probably because there’s a part of you that just resists the editing process, and you don’t want to do the re-work even if, deep down, you know it’s necessary. Iteration is supposed to make things better, so that should really be no surprise, but that doesn’t make it more fun. Especially if you’re on your fourth or fifth kick at the can.

—-

I know all this may come across as me complaining, or alternatively like me asking for sympathy. Maybe someone will say, “Awww, poor developer. You know I would kill for your job, right?” Which is kind of funny, in a way. Writing for games is hella sexy, I understand that. But what you have to understand is that, most days, it’s a job… plain and simple. Some days you’ll really hate your job, and it’ll seem like work. Some days you’ll want to throw your hands up in the air and walk out the door, shouting loudly HOW CAN ANYONE MAKE ANYTHING CREATIVE LIKE THIS?

And then there are the days when you’re done, and you see your game on the shelf. There are the days when a plot has just come together, almost magically, like it was meant to be, and you almost can’t believe you did that there. There are days when you meet the fans, and they bubble over with excitement or tell you how what you wrote touched them… maybe all the more because they were a part of your story rather than solely being a passive spectator of it.

So those are the days when, yes, I can completely understand why someone might want to do this for a living. And I’m glad that I somehow lucked into it. I suppose a few cuts and re-writes are worth that.

Next: Part 8 - When Thing Go Right

ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 8 - WHEN THINGS GO RIGHT)

(Part 7 available here.)

I lied again.

I was going to do a post on the actual writing process… but that’s boring. Who wants to read about constructing branching dialogue? Well, maybe someone does. And I might still get to that later. One of the replies to the last post (by Angry Pants, aka his fake name “Upsettingshorts”) suggested I talk about a couple of things that went unexpectedly right. And, after a post talking about how dreary this job can sometimes be, why not do just that?

Because it does happen every now and again. Sometimes it’s something I’ve done, and other times it’s something one of my writers has done, but every now and again something just clicks. You have that brilliant idea that wins over everyone immediately, and it just falls together because no earthly power can stop it. There’s that plot or that character which seemed… okay… and somehow it just ends up working so much better than you’d expected it to. And then there’s the things that are just inexplicable. “People liked that? Huh.”

Case in point: HK-47. He was the assassin droid in Knights of the Old Republic, who initially was just supposed to use “droid speak” (like T3M4 did, yet it probably would have sounded darker and meaner— like an angry car engine that just won’t turn over, I guess). I’d just finished writing Jolee Bindo, something I was incredibly happy about, and had done so early. So James Ohlen, the Lead Designer, asked me to write some actual dialogue for HK-47. I protested— you want me to write something for the stupid droid with the automatic rifle name? (Which is not where the name came from, incidentally, though I didn’t even know it at the time.) COME. ON. Yet there it was, new task assigned… my punishment for efficiency, I guess.

OK, FINE. I had a little over a week to do it, and thus he’d have to be smaller than the other companions, but I guessed I could give him something. Inspiration came in the form of the “Littlest Hobo”, a Canadian TV series that used to replay constantly on CBC about a dog that goes from owner to owner helping them improve their lives before moving on.

You might say, “Huh? HK-47 has absolutely nothing in common with the Littlest Hobo!” But you would be wrong. He’s the anti-Littlest Hobo. He moves from owner to owner, helping them engineer their own self-destruction before moving on. This thought amused me enough to form the kernel of an idea. The whole “meatbag” thing just came in the middle of writing, when I tried to imagine how an android that found humans disgusting would actually view their organic bodies (60% water seems like a lot of sloshing around, to me). I liked that enough that I used it to excess. Cue the one-note character. I chuckled, got it done on time and left it at that.

"There! Are you happy James? I finished the stupid android."

Thing is, his voice actor did a grand job. He really transformed the character, which a good voice actor is totally capable of. So… great! Then he went on to be well-received, won “Original Game Character of the Year” at the 2004 Game Developers Choice Awards and a bunch of other accolades, and I understand he appeared in Star Wars: Galaxies (in which I imagine he runs around waving his arms like Robbie the Robot going “Meatbag! Meeeaaatbaaaag!” before he rushes off-screen— probably not, but the image pleases me).

So I’ll still scratch my head about that. It’s not that I begrudge the character or anything, but complex he was not. Not that a character needs to necessarily be complex in order to be enjoyed— I suppose there’s a lesson in that— it’s just that I wasn’t expecting anything at all.

Another happy surprise? Romances. Oh yes, I’m well aware that there are some folks who are just so done with our romances (cue hipster thrashing about). Well, whatever. I’ve already talked about that. I’m not saying every game has to do it (by any means) or that we do it perfectly, but ultimately it’s something other companies aren’t really doing. It’s part of what we’re known for and what makes us stand out.

Or, at least, that’s how it seems today. Back in 1999, that was not the case. I had just started with BioWare, getting my feet wet writing a bunch of the Athkatla plots in Baldur’s Gate II when James Ohlen told me his idea for romance plots… a long chain of interactions over the course of the game specific to someone romancing the character. Seemed… simple enough? Nobody had ever done something quite like that, to my knowledge. At least, not to that extent. There was a romance arc in Final Fantasy 7, sort of, which I’d played. So kind of like that?

Gosh what a nightmare. As was the case with many things in BG2, this kind of ballooned beyond initial plans. At every turn, it was “hey, maybe this could happen here if you’re in a romance” or “hey, maybe we should add this” or “hey, maybe Bodhi kidnaps your romance and turns them into a vampire”. That won’t be hard to do, right? Which was awesome, sure, but the scripting teams were already doing cartwheels to keep on top of all the content. Add to that the plot timers based on real-time mixed with those based on game-time and it was a recipe for bugs. Bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs. This being my first game, it seemed like a bewildering sea of them. There were so many bugs in the Jaheira romance alone James once posted a sign on his door which essentially read “IF YOU’RE COMING TO TALK TO ME ABOUT JAHEIRA BUGS I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT!” I thought for sure they were all going to get cut. I’m pretty certain they teetered on the edge of it for some time.

But they went in. It just seemed like too much effort to waste, and they were kind of cool even if they were pretty prone to breaking badly. That was just how we rolled in those days. I don’t think we ever imagined it would be popular. Did guy gamers (remember there was only one romance aimed at female players) really want this sort of content? Seemed like a dubious prospect.

And yet… whoa. It became a thing. It took on a life of its own. I suppose the cynical could imagine that we simply liked the positive response and did more of the same to “pander” (there’s that word again) to those poor, deluded fools who couldn’t see how obviously insipid such plots were… but this was a visceral reaction. You don’t ignore that. This was something people hadn’t seen much of, and they wanted to see more. So, yes, I’d say it was something that definitely went right. It was kind of great to be there at the start of it, though I recall being a little chagrined at the time to find myself the only writer who wanted to write the guy-romances. Odd how things change.

There are probably a few other things I could talk about, in terms of “what went right”. I guess I could talk about the Carth Onasi Research Expedition (hello, Ladies of Neverwinter!), the Deekin Experiment, the crowning glory of angst that was the Dark Ritual or how incredibly proud I was of how both Aveline and Isabela turned out in Dragon Age II (written not by me but, respectively, by Luke Kristjanson and Sheryl Chee) and what they said as strong female characters. I could probably also talk about Dragon Age itself, and how there were many times where it seemed like it wouldn’t pull itself together at all… the fact it made it out there seems like half a miracle, with it being so beloved as the cherry on top.

But I’ll leave it there. On reflection, this post is probably less informative and more reflective than I intended this particular series to be. But, you know what? It’s my damned blog.

Next: Part 9 - Writing, BioWare Style… maybe.

ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 9 - WRITING, BIOWARE STYLE)

(Part 8 available here.)

I’ll warn you right now, this post is probably only interesting to someone actually curious about the nuts-and-bolts of dialogue-writing. I’m not sure how much of it applies to other sorts of writing… some, perhaps, but a lot of what we do for games is specific to games. This has become self-evident over many years of hiring: namely that it’s not enough to possess skill with prose. You can write a good sentence, but unless you know what to do with it, it’s not going to work in a game.

That last bit has always been a source of frustration. Writing in general gets very little credit as a skill, as something you can actually train or get better at. Many people think of it as a talent— you can either do it or you can’t— and, while talent is certainly involved, that does not change the fact it’s only part of the equation. Being able to write a sentence does not automatically mean you’re a good writer, just as being a good writer does not automatically mean you’re a good game writer (much as being a good game writer did not mean I automatically made a good novelist— I learned a lot over three books that I never knew previously).

For writers who apply at BioWare, this difficulty is something that’s only going to become apparent once they actually try their hand at it. Suddenly it’s, “holy christ on a cracker, this is so much more involved than I thought it would be!” Suddenly you have to account for player agency, you have to allow for conversations to flow more than one way and yet still be coherent, and you have to allow for a protagonist voice which you don’t entirely control. It’s fun stuff.

Here’s a few pieces of advice that I commonly give to new writers, when I’m working with them to improve:

1. Control your conversation paths. The first instinct of any writer is to write each branch in a dialogue as a separate conversation path. What you will find, if you do so, is that each such path quickly goes out of control. Not only will you blow your budget, writing a 3,000-word dialogue of which a player will never see 80%, it becomes incredibly easy to lose the thread of the conversation (particularly bad if this is an information-bearing dialogue). Use bottlenecks (points at which threads of a dialogue rejoin) frequently, and most importantly: read the dialogue out loud! The best way to make sure a conversation sounds natural is to see what it sounds like when disparate linked lines are read next to each other.

2. Don’t use knowledge the player doesn’t yet have. This is a big one. New writers will forget that the player only learned something in another part of the dialogue, one they haven’t yet accessed. Or it’s something they learned in another quest, which they may not have finished yet. There are two ways to combat this:

Reveal critical information in the critical path, meaning the path through the conversation that everyone will encounter. Bottlenecks are critical path, for instance. So a flow may very well be critical path line-critical path line-optional branch-optional branch-bottleneck-critical path line-critical path line-optional branch-optional branch-optional branch-bottleneck-ending. In this, the player choices where branching occurs take place in the first “optional branch” section, which is then lassoed back into the critical path via the bottleneck.

Use variant lines. If you reveal a piece of optional information, whether it’s elsewhere in the conversation or in another quest, set a variable that tells the game the player has received it. Then, when a line is used that takes into account the player’s knowledge, you need a variant line which takes into account the player’s lack of said knowledge. Variants are great, doubly so when they can show reactivity to the player’s actions, but must be used sparingly.

3. “What would I as the player want to do?” This is important. When thinking of questions to write, consider what the player might logically want to know— “Who are you?” “Why should I do this?” If the character bring up something which prompts further questions, make sure the player gets the chance to address it.

4. Give the player different voices. One of the most common mistakes that prose writers make is they give a single voice to their protagonist— and why wouldn’t they, if what they’re accustomed to is having a single protagonist they control? Even if the game has a specific type of protagonist (like Mass Effect, where the player is always a soldier) you still need to account for different playstyles. What would the “good” player want to do in this situation? What about someone who didn’t care about other people? Is there a gung ho path through the dialogue, as well as a path for the cautious, investigative player? If you’re unsure, read through the completed dialogue and “roleplay” a specific type of player and see if you’ve given options for that type to both speak and act. You don’t need to provide options for every player type so much as you need to not exclude them… meaning a “neutral” option that’s reasonable for multiple types is far better than having a single response which is only good for an extreme type.

Also, keep in mind your protagonist can be female as well as male. Possibly they can be gay as well as straight. This goes beyond voice as it applies to personality. You don’t want to underline the differences so much that they sound like patronizing on the part of the writer (“oh, you’re a female character! Well, let me show you how very female you are!”), but neither do you want to default the player to the point of making it obvious that you had only one voice in mind. Speaking personally, I do this by occasionally using “she” as my default pronoun for the player when writing documentation. Why? Because it constantly reminds me not to use the male perspective only, and I need that reminder. The more you do things like this, the more you’ll prevent yourself from falling into the trap of forgetting that the protagonist is a shared creation.

5. Even when the player has no choice of what to do about something, she should always have the option of how to feel about it. As the writer, you control every response to the player’s dialogue and every plot event; you have an infinite number of ways to ensure the player conforms to the plot. It does you no harm to allow the player a variety of ways to feel about that plot. It will not make the player less inclined to play the story if she’s allowed to have a line complaining about the occasional railroading. On the contrary, by letting her character express emotions she can empathize with, she will have greater emotional investment in what happens. After all, great drama is full of people being forced into situations they don’t want to be in; in many ways, that’s what makes the drama.

6. Use small choices to compensate for a lack of larger choice. The more foregone the conclusion of a dialogue is, the more choice you should give the player in terms of how she gets to that conclusion. Let the player propose alternatives and explain why they’re not feasible. Let the player rant about the unfairness. Definitely let the player have the chance to charge full speed ahead and don’t force them down paths of equivocation and explanation. While it saves word count to boil all those responses down to one lukewarm acceptance, the railroading parts of the plot are usually also the most important ones, which we want the player to remember positively.

7. Always ask “would I miss this if it wasn’t there?” You don’t need to allow the player the chance to ask every question. You don’t need to provide every conceivable piece of information— that falls into the category of over-explanation, which can be almost as bad as the opposite. If not having the line wouldn’t take the player out of the game or diminish their experience, consider removing it. Information can be conveyed by other means outside of dialogue, such as the codex, or even left to the player’s imagination. They do have one, after all.

8. Avoid “throat clearing”. This probably applies to writing in general, but it is a big mistake when you’re working with game dialogue. We have to use a style closer to movie dialogue, after all, where the normal courtesies must be dispensed with and padding the language can sap all the urgency out of a scene. These are things an editor is trained to look for, but to become a stronger writer you need to watch for them yourself. Specifically:

"seems", "believe", "feels like" — Unless it’s vital to convey that what’s being expressed is an opinion, these are pure filler.

"ing" form of verbs — These are weaker than straight verbs and usually need a helping “is”.

two closely linked verbs — If the player is asked to do something and something else (ie. “find him and call him back to camp”), ask if the second verb implies the first (ie. you can’t call him back unless you find him first). If so, eliminate the first verb.

"yes" and "no" — If these are followed by a clarifying statement (ie. “Yes, I imagine that’s so.”), you don’t need the initial yes or no.

rephrasing of the player’s previous line — A common mistake is to restate the player’s response in some way (ie. “I am a Grey Warden.” “A Grey Warden? My father was a Grey Warden!”) That initial restatement is often not necessary (an important exception being is if that line can be linked to from another line that doesn’t introduce the topic as clearly).

redundant repetition —The most common mistake is when a writer repeats the same sentiment in different ways (ie. “There is nothing we could do. It would be pointless.”) You have to watch your dialogue vigilantly for this sort of thing.

"well…", "come to think of it…", "if you’re curious…", "as a matter of fact…" — All of these sorts of phrases only exist to cover the transition from one speaker to the next. Occasionally they’re necessary to avoid awkwardness, but often they can be removed.

9. Keep It Simple, Stupid. — KISS is an important programming principle for a reason. There is no need to over-complicate matters, not from a quest design perspective and certainly not from a writing perspective. Over-complication always sounds like it would be better in theory (which is why it’s always popular on our forums, where fans view the game purely in theoretical fashion), but never works out in practice. Of course there’s a difference between something being elegant and something being simple. You don’t want to reduce everything until it’s banal. There’s room for character voice and some unexpected twists, but a writer has to manage that to the extent that they possess the skill to keep it under control. Planning something far more complex than you have the experience to handle will leave you with a confusing mess where the information flow is uneven and it’s never clear what’s going on. After all, who are you trying to impress?

—————-

All this doesn’t, of course, walk someone through the physical process of constructing the dialogue— linking lines, organizing hubs, accounting for cinematic sequences, working out how dialogue interacts with quest design— but it’s the start. At some level, you need to know how to write and the skill at game writing can build upon that. Most times, I’ll get a new writer to begin with something simple: a quest with a single scene, for instance, or a fetch-and-retrieve quest without complications. Then you add complications, and we build up complexity from there until (ideally) someone’s ready to tackle a crit path quest.

It’s work. It requires iteration, and perseverance. I’ve had people who applied, fully expecting they would master this on the first go— and when they received pages of feedback breaking down the numerous fundamental problems with what they wrote and not even the nitty-gritty stuff, they just gave up. This is the sort of thing you need to dive into and work out as you go… there’s really no other way.

And that’s it, in a nutshell.

Next: Part 10 - Getting The Job

ON NARRATIVE DESIGN (PART 10 - GETTING THE JOB)

(Part 9 - available here.)

Technically this isn’t part of narrative design, but it’s the question I get asked THE most often: how does one get a job working as a writer in the games industry? The real short answer is: you don’t… but that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t try. So the slightly longer answer, should you be willing to try, I’ll relate here. (I also did this once before in a series of three articles for the BioWare blog: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3).

Am I the right sort of candidate?

The first thing you should ask yourself is why you want the job. If what you have in mind is being able to direct the story for a game, to have full control over its vision, you probably don’t want to be a writer… you want to be a Lead Designer. Possibly more than that, you want to own your own company. As a writer, you’re not going to be sitting back and spending your time dreaming up what you want to do and working on that, you’re going to be working on a project that’s been assigned to you. Even should you get the Lead Writer position, you exchange greater say over what the current project is for greater responsibility over your team’s management.

But Lead Designer or Lead Writer definitely isn’t where you’re going to start. You’ll have to start off getting your feet wet and working on small parts of the game and probably feeling like you have very little influence over the project at large at all. And that’s just at BioWare… depending on the company, your role may involve even less control. Some companies bring writers in at a very late stage, to add story to a game that’s already mostly created. For some people who think writing for games is the same as writing a novel or writing fanfiction, as in you are the primary creative force involved, it’s a deal-breaker.

So, let’s say you don’t have any misapprehensions about what you’re getting into. What are the qualifications then?

Do I need a University degree?

Technically, no, you don’t. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get one, of course. If you do, with an eye at getting into the industry, certainly don’t look on it as a degree that you can directly exchange for a job— that applies more to one getting into Art or Programming. For Writing, treat your education as a way to work on your skills. Creative writing courses or an English degree will help you, and indeed any sort of degree can give you knowledge from which to draw and that’s helpful… heck, even a Medieval History degree could be useful. There are also some schools that offer internships— which we do use, so that’s not an invalid route to take. I can’t answer which schools do so, however. The few writing interns we’ve had have come from very different places indeed, so that would require investigation on your part.

Having an education also makes you a more serious candidate. It makes it more likely you’ll get noticed by HR if they have a lot of resumes to sift through— you’ll look more like someone who’s serious, as opposed to someone who just applied for the heck of it. Not that the latter can’t get the job, it’s just an extra hurdle you’ll need to clear.

Do I need experience?

Not really— but that’s only because Writing is a very select field within the games industry. The chances that any candidate has industry experience are going to be quite small, so it’s not something a studio is likely to expect. This also means, however, that getting a job in this field is difficult. You can be really good, and chances are you’re still going to have trouble finding the opportunity… it will take perseverence to find a company that not only has an opening but which wants the particular skills you’re offering.

Many companies that use writers also have them perform other tasks— programming, for instance. They may not even have a set job for it… knowing that you’re interested in writing, they may want to hire you as an artist or programmer or designer, but one who also does some of the writing on the side. So the best way to increase your chance of getting into the industry is to work on acquiring one of those other skills at least to competency. If you want to focus on writing and writing only, that’s fine, but you will indeed limit the places you can work.

I’m a woman— should I bother?

God, yes. Please do. I can’t say that won’t make it harder for you, depending on the company… but if there are companies who balk at hiring you because of your gender (whether they’re aware that’s why or not) then screw ‘em. They don’t deserve you. Most places will accept a candidate based on their merit, and thus more female applicants ultimately means more female hires. So long as you realize you’ll be a noob regardless of your gender, and starting off at the bottom can be challenging no matter who you are, it should still be worth your time to try.

Do I need a submission?

The answer is yes— absolutely. You need to put together a writing submission which ideally shows two things: 1) that you know how to write dialogue, preferably of a sort that shows you know what sort of writing the company you’re applying at uses, and 2) that you know something about quest design.

So put together a simple quest… and I do mean simple. A side quest. More than once we have received submissions where the described quest would need to form the basis for the story of an entire game— which is great, but certainly makes it sound like you’re an aspiring GM who just wants a new world to create, and as I said above we don’t hire anyone at that level to start. So proving you can do something on a limited scale will go a long way to showing you can do the job you’ll be hired for at the start. A simple quest for an application should at the very least:

have a scene where the quest is given (whether it’s a literal quest where the player is asked to do something, or just where the player learns about it)

have a scene where the quest is resolved

allow for the player to make some kind of choice

have at least one twist— some kind of complication, or an alternate way for the player to complete the task

And that’s really it. In the scenes you actually write out for the submission, we’ll want to see that you know how to write dialogue (you supply different voices for the player, you know how to use Investigate options and offer choices, etc.) and that you have an idea how RPG’s work— you allow for player agency and are not just railroading the player so they can experience your awesome story, like a GM in a tabletop campaign who is really impressed with their story and wants the players to experience it his way and damn whatever they want (which happens with applications more often than you’d think).

One last thing of which to be aware: the submission will not get you the job. It will get you the interview. Depending on the company, that could be an extended process. For us, it involves not only talking to the candidate but also testing them. We tend to give someone a test— we offer direction and give the candidate a deadline, and see what they can produce in that short time. Our writers have to be fast as well as good, after all, and thus we need to know what you’re capable of without the months you potentially had to perfect your submission. Nerve-wracking? Sure, but what interview process isn’t?

But how do I put together a submission? What’s the format required?

Technically there is no required format. You can use the NWN or Dragon Age: Origins editor if that makes it easier for you… but for a lot of people that does not. We wouldn’t require someone to learn how to mod an entire story complete with scripting and cinematics, but that HAS been done (and worked for some, like Sheryl Chee). We’ve also, however, hired someone whose in-game module consisted of signposts that you clicked on which provided narration/direction and told you which character to click on next for the dialogue. We also accept and have hired people whose submission was sent as a Word document— with the “this is what the quest is about” in pure text and the dialogues written as text and using hyperlinks for the player choices. So long as we can follow along, it’s not a problem.

Do pick an IP belonging to the company where you’re applying— so, for BioWare, that means picking either Mass Effect or Dragon Age. And follow the rules of that IP. So if you’re making a Mass Effect quest, make sure it shows you know what ME is all about. You have Renegade and Paragon options, and follow their dialogue style.

While you should use a company’s IP, I would personally caution against using already-existing characters. It’s possible that the very people who created those characters will be evaluating your writing… and do you want to complicate that evaluation by having them judging not only your writing but also your ability to write those characters? Because they will, no matter how much they’ll try to overlook it. I once had a submission by someone who used Alistair in their quest— clearly from a complimentary standpoint, and likely they thought we’d be impressed by having Alistair in their story. Except it wasn’t Alistair, and everything un-Alistair he did made it very jarring for me in trying to pay attention to what was going on elsewhere in the writing.

Lastly, try to keep the submission neat. If you’re putting together a module in NWN or DAO, make sure you give us instructions on how to play it… where should we start? Do we just jump in, or do we need to crack open the conversation files to look at your writing directly? If you’re putting together a submission in Word, keep it legible. Leave spaces, don’t worry about having page breaks between every section or scene in the quest.

——————

The most important part of the application? Understanding that, chances are, it won’t even be looked at. We don’t go through submissions unless we’re actively looking for a writer, and that doesn’t happen often (there’s not a great deal of turn-over here). So you’ll be applying with the hope that your application is present at the same point where an opening comes up, even though it’s unlikely you’ll know when that is and we only hold onto applications for so long.

So you’ll need to be persistent. If you don’t hear back, re-apply six months later. If youdohappen to hear back, and it’s negative, hopefully you’ll also receive some feedback… if you do, pay attention to it. If you don’t, try to evaluate what you submitted for yourself and see what you can do to improve, and try again.

If you’re the sort that gives up easily, or thinks “well I sent something in and heard nothing— I guess that’s it, as that’s the best I can do” then you may as well not make the attempt.

Do you have any suggestions for what I can do to increase my chances?

Become a modder.

Seriously, become a modder. Pick up a toolset, any toolset, and figure out how to make something. Either that or join a modding team… though I’ll warn you, there’s no team that doesn’t have people who offer their help in the form of “well I don’t have any skills, but I guess I could write”. As if that was something one does in the absence of actual skill, I suppose. So don’t be surprised if your offer to write for a mod team gets you eye rolls and little else. Chances are you’ll need to have other skillsets as well, or somehow prove your offer isn’t idle.

And the only way to get those skillsets is to jump in and try. Which means that, whenever I give this answer to people who ask me for a suggestion, their expression is generally one of disappointment… as if they were expecting something easier. But there is no easy answer. Whether you’re looking to get into writing or some other job in the games industry, there is no route which is “insert coin, get job”. If the thought of picking up a toolset and just trying is too daunting for you, then desist. If you’re looking for an entry level position where we’ll train you, then desist. This probably isn’t the job for you.

And that’s it. I have no further advice, short of perhaps looking for a different job in the industry— such as QA tester— and seeing if having your foot in the door makes it easier for you to move elsewhere. It may, though being a QA tester involves its own challenges. They’d roll their eyes at the idea that it’s a great default position for people who don’t have other skills, as much as I do for writing. So I don’t know if that’s a good route to treat as reasonable.

Ultimately, decide what you want to do and work on improving those skills by whatever means you can— whether they be self-taught or whether there’s education out there to help you. The more skills you have, and the better you can demonstrate them, the easier time you’ll have.

#writing #game writing #david gaider #game narration