The Narrative Design Exploratorium™

I'm happy to announce that as of November 1st I am Narrative Designer and Lead Writer for Day 1 Studios, LLC in Chicago. It's been a rapid process from application to the negotiation table and it feels good to be part of such a talented independent studio. This is the first such position for Day 1, having worked in the past with contract writers and/or publishers to deal with most of the storytelling, and I'm glad to say everyone I work with seems very happy to finally have a FT storyteller in-house. Everyone at Day 1 understands the narrative needs of modern interactive entertainment, and I'm happy to fill that gap.

The studio's most recent title, published by Lucas Arts, Fracture, has had mixed reviews with a current metacritic score of 64, but overall has come out strong (85 being the highest rating) for it's terrain modification tech, which allows the player to modify the terrain for tactical purposes. The studio has received acclaim in the past for it's titles Mechassault, Mechassault 2 and the port of F.E.A.R. which is to see a continution in the franchise this year with F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin by Monolith and Warner Brothers Games.

As a bit of a side-note the studio is run by the talented team from FASA Interactive. They created the Battetech transmedia franchise in 1984 which I enjoyed very much as a teenager. My favorite manifestation of which was the location based-entertainment (LBE) at North Pier and the Real-time Tacitcal game (RTT) known as Mechcommander.  These great games allowed the player to step into the the cockpit of their favorite mech and do battle in real-time with other players.

The pressure is on and as a department of one my job is to insure that the narrative experience in our products is compelling and in-sync with the studio's vision of the games in development. As a "two game" studio dealing in AAA-game development I have my hands full trying to catch up with all the work going on at the studios 2 locations (Hunt Valley and Chicago) and 130+ employees. After working with THQ on PC titles its good to cross back into the world of cross-platform development.

Being that I am a Midwesterner, and native Chicagoan, it feels great to get involved in entertainment production outside the west coast, where I've spent the better part of the last 5 years. Chicago has been a hot bed of development as of late with new studios popping up after the dissolving of EA Chicago; Midway games also continues to be a great source of talent for the city. 

I'll be sure to keep NDE readers informed as developments in our products are made public. Thanks to the Day 1 team, particularly Denny Thorley and TJ Wagner, for believing in the future of Narrative Design as an integral part of next-generation video game development and for placing me in the cockpit as I prepare to co-author a new landscape in the possibilities of videogame storytelling.

This is an ongoing NDE series featuring interviews with Game Writers in the Trenches™.  The game industry is riddled with the unsung heroes of interactive storytelling.  As game developers are increasingly looking to create meaningful virtual narrative experiences, listening to the real-world wisdom of these writers can help everyone on the development pipeline understand their trials, tribulations, and needs, in hopes of enabling them to do their job as they know best. Today's game writer is Sande Chen, her experience spans from RPG's to Serious Games. I'm hoping to see what we can learn from her experiences in the trenches of game development.

Stephen E. Dinehart: How did you become a game writer?

Sande Chen: Unlike other game writers, I don't have a wild breaking-in story.  My professional writing career has only been in games.  Basically, I pursued academic majors that were relevant to game development.  Then, I applied for a job.  

I was a double humanities major at M.I.T., which is known for its computer science and engineering programs.  After M.I.T., I attended the London School of Economics and USC's School of Cinema-Television.  I specialized in screenwriting, but I wanted to learn more, so I asked production students to teach me what they knew and I took classes like Avant-Garde Cinema.  I started making music videos and while still in film school, I was nominated for a Grammy in music video direction. During a visit to M.I.T., I chanced upon a flier for a game design contest.  A military contractor was interested in expanding into entertainment.  With this first taste of game design, I started applying to game companies.    

My first game writing credit is on Vicarious Visions' space combat RPG, Terminus, which won two awards in the first Independent Games Festival at the GDC.  I have a very analytical side to me as well as a creative side and so, I think that game design successfully merges my strengths.  

SED: Can you describe your work with Writers Cabal?

SC: We write for games and we also do consulting on story or game design.  Each project is really different from the others.  It definitely makes life interesting.  Anne and I have different writing backgrounds and diverse experiences in the industry.  I've worked as a producer and I find that's really helpful in understanding how to mesh our work into a company's production process.  Meanwhile, Anne has worked as a Head Writer in charge of a MMO writing team.  My background is more in single-player RPG's.

We're mostly known for The Witcher, which was our first joint project.  We were nominated for a 2007 Writers Guild of America Award in videogame writing for The Witcher.  Our next big game was the kids' MMO, Wizard 101, which was released recently.

In our consulting work, I find a lot of it comes from the serious games sector.  In 2005, I co-authored a book with David Michael called Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform.  So, Writers Cabal helps companies incorporate learning objectives into fun gameplay.  We recently contributed a chapter on writing for serious games to the upcoming IGDA Writers SIG book.

Tom Abernathy gave a stellar talk at the Austin Game Developers Conference entitled "Galatea 3.0: Designing and Writing the Great Game Characters of the Future". His focus was on how the symbiosis between writing and design can create richer experiences and help play designers better do their job. His fundamental thesis: Good characters, and subsequently story, make good design better. It is his belief that a tighter integration of writing and design will create better experiences for future players.

Story is derived from characters. It emerges from the internal desires of a character. When a character acts to achieve an object of desire, hence externalizing internal desires, those desires come in conflict with the outer world. It is here in this conflict that story emerges. This is truly a classical Aristotelian approach, emphasized by Tom's references to the Iliad and Casablanca. It is also very reminiscent of Robert Mckee's screenwriting techniques, which too are derived from Aristotle's Poetics.

Tom took it a step further and suggested that characters not only make a story, they sell a franchise, creating hot intellectual property (IP) and marketing hooks. It's true, and as storytellers we must remind the pockets and purses that our craft drives sales and deserves development dollars. It is only through emphasizing the fiscal prudence of investing in story that we can convince producers and investors that we deserve just as many dollars as the art or play design pipelines. As too many of us are familiar with the opposite and clearly see the detriment in product quality, and subsequent sales, which results from a lack of investment in story development.

Bruce Sterling, legendary science fiction author, was unable to make it as our keynote speaker as scheduled.  He instead sent a graduate student of his from the future to address the conference, or so said an individual representing Bruce on stage, who looked remarkable like the man himself.  At almost 90, with the skin of a ten year old and the hair of a rocker, he was unable to make with his Segway from 2043. The good news is that in 2043 Austin is still weird, because as Bruce, or his representative said "they kept it that way." According to Mr. Sterling's representative, computers in 2043 are boring; they are really quite boring, in fact they are quite like towels, paper, and other normal things of mundane human existence. His General Electric Pocket Mediator, apparently a handkerchief, didn't function as it should, since the cloud isn't existent in our time, and I'd say the same for most of his aspiration filled techno-jargon.

Bruce's representative spoke at length, rather poetically, about the incoherence of the future. His performance at first glance seemed to add little to the conference in the way of real substance.  The main hall was empty, and virtually silent, less the lonely laughter of a few forced giggles, as if to say "I get it". Though I did enjoy his rather slanted take on a GDC keynote, it was a performance, and superficially contained little helpful substance for the world of today's game makers.  If I were to take anything away, beyond a glimpse into living on the edge of keynote infamy, it would be:

1) Redefine video games for the future.
2) Don't be a clog in modern video game publishing.
3) Explore other forms of interactive media.

Looking back it was quite refreshing, there were no product pitches, no self-comparisons to Walt Disney, he did not even try to wow the audience. Instead he was honest, humble, and insisted on 'taking the piss' out of all us self-righteous gamemakers. He threw off the rules, and that's exactly what he called upon industry vanguards to do.

Andrew Walsh presented the session posed on the question 'Are game writers witnessing the death of three act structure?  Mr. Walsh was alive, full of passionate self-reflexive humor.  His talk was a great postmortem on how layered interactive storytelling can further game experiences while maintaining their classical roots.  Clearly defending the form forged by Aristotle, he went on to explain how he used the form in Prince of Persia and how it lent to creating a next-generation interactive story experience.

In creating his installment in the Prince of Persia series he had set some clear markers for successful storytelling:

• A strong identifiable story.
• A simple playing experience.
• A deep story world.
• Allow the player choice and control.
• Making the characters feel alive.
• Providing a next generation experience.

What is his conceptual tool?  "Ondemend storytelling"  Just what is it?  Andrew went on to explain, "Ondemand storytelling is a story design that allows the player to choose when to access the story and how much of it they want to experience."   It is a layer of interactive depth that is available to the player at the designers discretion to give the story hungry player additional content.  The Ondemand elements are not required to forward gameplay, they exist to provide depth to the player, in that they allow the player to customize their own experiences.  Anyone who has played Gears of War will be familiar with such systems.  By holding a button (Y) on a console controller a player can shift focus, shift control, to the game makers, so they (writers/designers) may direct their focus to story points of interest.