Get Social, Get Writing, Get Educated

Since GDC09, we’ve been busy with appearances and projects.  Anne recently spoke at Digital L.A.’s Games Go Social panel in May and discussed the social aspects of games and how successful social games, iPhone games, and casual MMOs are bringing games to the mainstream.  Meanwhile, I analyzed the current crop of social games and offered design ideals for the next generation of social games in an article for Gamasutra, called “The Social Game Boom.”

Next week, I’ll be at CMU for the 2009 Game Education Summit, on June 16-17, 2009.  I’ll be on a panel with noted game writers and academics Lee Sheldon, Richard Dansky, Drew Davidson, and Elisabeth Nonas addressing last year’s hullabaloo on how game writers don’t belong in the game industry.  We’ll also be discussing narrative design and writing for ARGs and non-AAA games.

Additionally, I’ll be co-presenting with Ricardo Rademacher, CEO of Futur-E-Scape, in a session entitled “Creativity, Constraints, and Compromises.” Ricardo Rademacher recently presented his educational theory of MMOGs at the Independent MMO Game Developers Conference in Las Vegas last April.  We’ll be discussing how his educational theory meshed with narrative design to develop a fantasy MMORPG that also teaches physics.  In fact, this game was a case study in our chapter for the book, Writing for Video Game Genres.

Next, I’ll be moderating a panel on educational MMOs and virtual worlds at State of Play VI, on June 19-20, 2009 at New York Law School.  In this panel discussion, leading researchers and creators of educational virtual worlds will discuss the challenges of aligning curriculum and learning with fun. A central theme to the discussion will be to try and establish some best practices for the integration of theory and curriculum into educational virtual worlds.

Attending any of these conferences?  Let me know!

Posted by Sande for Writers Cabal, a game writing and design partnership.

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#1 mistake in game development

Gamasutra rather ingeniously decided to examine all its game postmortems over the past 3 years and actually look for common denominators. Thank goodness, since I wouldn’t have had the stamina to do it. Their study resulted in a list of 10 problems that repeatedly tripped up developers in making great games on time and on budget. What was problem number 1? You guessed it: content added too late.

We have repeatedly brought up the positive impact of bringing in writers early, and highlighted the importance of giving writers the chance to polish (problem #8).  You can say we’re biased.  I’m going to posit that Gamasutra isn’t.  Here’s a quote from Alyssa Finley, talking about the successful Bioshock:

“We had many drafts of the story over the course of development, but the final draft turned out to be an almost complete rewrite.”

“Competing demands for time and resources meant that, unfortunately, some of the important narrative details of the game weren’t created until the final rewrite, and therefore required quite a bit of work to retrofit into an existing game.”

If a successful game with strong developer and publisher backing is wishing it had more time to write, chances are every other story-driven game experiences this problem in spades.

The impact is obvious and pervasive: “Getting story and features right is difficult at the best of times, but when that content comes in just under the wire, not only does that content suffer, every element of the game that relies on that content suffers.”  Thanks, Gamasutra — we couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

Did you read the article?  What did you think of the other mistakes in game development?

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System-level Thinking Needed For Narrative Too

In the book, Changing the Game, by David Edery and Ethan Mollick, the authors give several examples where business failed to understand system dynamics.  Basically, retailers didn’t talk to wholesalers or salespeople didn’t communicate with upper management about the circumstances on the street.  So, when the salespeople had a sale to move a slow-moving widget, upper management only got the message that there was an increased demand in widgets.  Thinking they’re onto something big, upper management puts in more orders to buy the parts needed to make more widgets.  The factories churn out more widgets and the salespeople end up with a glut of a product that nobody really wanted in the first place.  As you can see, when businesses fail to have system-level thinking, they can find themselves in a self-defeating spiral.

Designing systems, of course, is a part of game design.  And game development itself also has systems and feedback loops.  For a while now, we, like other writers, have advocated including the writer early on in the development cycle.  This is so the story can go through iterations just like any other aspect of game development, but also because the narrative should not be confined to a vacuum.  It is, in fact, part of the system and should be integrated into the system.  If you don’t know your story, how can you give a really good reason as to why your player is fighting that enemy and why the world looks that way?  Or maybe the story is out of sync with the gameplay, thus making the game world illogical.

What do you think?  Do you have other examples of system breakdown or self-defeating cycles in game development?

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Highlights from GDC 2009

Authors from Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG

If you were at the book signing for Writing For Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG at GDC 2009, thank you for coming!

As you can see from the photo, several of the authors were in attendance.  The interest was so high that the publishers even brought down the first IGDA Writers SIG book, Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing and sold those too.  In a rare instance, my co-author David Michael and I also signed our book, Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform.

For photo highlights, check out David Michael’s blog, Joe Indie.  (Quick, before he starts blogging about something else!)

I contributed to Edge Online’s GDC 2009 coverage and will also be contributing session write-ups to GameDev’s GDC 2009 coverage, including Patrick Redding’s talk on AI dialog systems.

In addition, I’m starting up my twitter channel, so if you would like to keep tabs on Game Design Aspect of the Month or my other blogs, please do visit or subscribe.

Posted by Sande for Writers Cabal, a game writing and design partnership.

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Book Signing at GDC 2009

If you’re headed to GDC next week, be sure to pick up the latest IGDA Writers SIG book, Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG.  It’ll be on sale at the GDC bookstore as well as on AK Peters’ Web site, Amazon.com, Borders.com, and in most major bookstores.

Plus, a special “Meet the Authors” book signing event will take place on Thursday, March 26, 2009 from 5:30p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center, 747 Howard St., San Francisco, CA 94103, at the IGDA booth in the lobby outside of the exhibit hall.  We’ll be there and so will other game writers like Haris Orkin, Richard Dansky, Evan Skolnick, and John Feil.

Let us know if you can make it and we’ll say hello!

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Five for Writing Interview

Short post, short interview up on Richard Dansky’s personal site, Snowbird Gothic.

Each week, he gives five questions to writers of all kinds: game writers, comic book writers, novelists, etc.  This week, it’s me.

Also, if you’d like to vote on Game Design Aspect of the Month’s next topic, please go here.

Posted by Sande for Writers Cabal, a game writing and design partnership.

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A Return to Storytelling

I’ve just returned from the Engage! Expo (formerly Virtual Worlds 2009), which focuses on virtual worlds rather than MMOs.  In the case of virtual worlds, sometimes developers have the Field of Dreams notion of “if you build it, they will come” and there’s nothing planned for activities or story other than “they’ll just do social stuff like mini-games and chat.”  For years, people have heralded emergent stories as the greatest thing ever, but if the realm of activities are mundane, the emergent story may be boring and uneventful.

In the first part of the hour devoted to narrative in the conference, Jesse Cleverly reminded us that stories exist to help people make sense of the world.  Therefore, stories have order.  If you look at a screenplay, you may realize that there is economy in words and action (”arrive late, exit early”) and that it’s nothing at all like slice-of-life vignettes.  Stories, in fact, are fashioned.  Emergent story is about taking what happened and fashioning it into a story.  It’s about storytelling.  If I just rattle off “I drove to Wal-Mart.  I bought toilet paper.  I came home.” –  Wow, that’s incredibly boring.  Obviously, there’s an art to storytelling.

Just as Jack Buser, who’s responsible for SCEA’s PlayStation Home, yearned for a missing social component in online play, Jesse Cleverly remarked that storytelling in interactive media is not a brave new frontier like people say.  Maybe we are yearning for a return to the storytelling of yore, those days when people listened to minstrels and poets.  They’d crowd around and yell comments.  Perhaps the poet would embellish or refine the story each time.  These storytellers traveled from town to town and eventually, these stories became myths.

When I did the panel on Writing for Fantasy Game Worlds, one question I asked was about how D&D compared to computer RPGs.  The panelists all had vivid memories of their campaigns in D&D.  The storytelling had reeled them in.  They remarked that computer RPGs were tremendously lacking in the level of interaction when compared to a D&D session.  The storyteller can modify the story at will, embellishing or altering the circumstances to heighten the drama.

So, what do you think?  Do you think computer games represent a desirable return to traditional storytelling or is it a divergence?

Posted by Sande for Writers Cabal, a game writing and design partnership.

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Got a problem? Fix it.

That’s what engineers do!

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