March 7, 2024

This week's question is from Desiree Bragg.

Desiree asks: " I'd like to know what advice you would give yourself when you were a student."

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I’m going to boil it down to three pieces of advice in three different categories I’m calling Craft, Intangible, and Personal.

Craft

Work to be in a place where you know when something has a terrible flow, sounds hollow, feels forced, isn’t working. Kill it and try again until it flows, it feels natural. You need to get a handle on the characters, their dialogue, the plot, the theme, and a satisfying end.

So, okay, how do I do that?

For writers, you read all fiction you can. Shirley Jackson, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Elmore Leonard, Douglas Adams, N.K. Jemisin. Mix and match. Get outside your comfort zone. Read noir, horror, sci-fi, comedy. Read how people talk in books by great modern authors. If you can get a personality from a voice so well that you can see them in your head, the author has done a fantastic job. Steal that. Look at authors who get you turning the page and decipher why. And then steal that. A lot of what novels do right in those areas can be brought over to game writing.

One more author to study: Mark Twain. Twain is rumored to have built his stories in such a way that every chapter answers something posed in a previous chapter while setting up a new question to entice the reader forward.

Part Two: I’d also listen to people out in the wild. Go to a mall or a public place with people…if you feel comfortable doing so…and sit. Just sit. Listen to the cadence of voices. Listen to how excited people talk when they are happy or in love. Listen to how upset people growl or snap. Real people don’t monologue; they get out information in fits and spurts. Sometimes they are very blunt. Other times not so much. Hear the personality and the cadence. Decipher the intent.

Part Three: Watch TV shows known for great characters, dialogue, worldbuilding, plot pacing, and themes. My go-to is David Simon’s cops-and-robbers epic, “The Wire,” but I also recommend the animated version of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” which I place on the same shelf as Simon’s masterpiece of crime and corruption in post-9/11 Baltimore.

TV uses scripts written in screenplay format, which is becoming commonplace in narrative game development. Scripts demand far leaner writing. Every word counts because of the tighter margins in the formating. Use this as a lesson in economics.

Part Four: Speaking of setting up and paying off, study branching narrative. Branching narrative is a storyteling tool that can so easily get out of control for inexperienced game writers. Study games that have excellent branching narrative and see how they set up and pay off player choices.

Part Five: So with all that homework done, you write. You write a lot. You find a mentor or a program that can look over your work and give you pointers. Writing groups (online or in person) will make you accountable to bring fresh stuff every week. You'll also learn how to give and take constructive criticism.

Write every day. Seriously. Write. Just write. A dialogue exchange, a lore entry, a character who popped into your head. Write their backstory, their barks, in-universe fiction. Write it down.

Then try to write it with half the words. Challenge yourself. Challenge yourself to take a successful brancing narrative game and map all the choices and story paths in something like Twine. Get a feel for how they do it. Once you replicate something like Telltale’s Walking Dead Season One or The Wolf Among Us, you’ll get a better understanding of the skeleton of good set ups and pay offs in games.

Just, please, don’t do something like Until Dawn for your first project. Your brain will melt.

Your goal is to write tight, write strong voices, write solid themes, and write in a way that sets up and pays off regularly for the audience. Build a solid foundation here and you’ll be golden in the long run.

Intangible

This is called intangible because the advice here isn’t something that can be measured. It’s akin to concepts like kindness or compassion. It has no metric, but it has an impact.

It’s simply this: Being aware. When you work in a studio, 75% of your job is going to be interacting with people. In meetings, during content reviews, planning quests or characters with other devs, or huddled with other writers doing writer things. You are going to need to work with a lot of people to make a game, and what you do in this social friction will go a long way in how you are seen in the studio and in the industry in general. The gaming industry is smaller than you might think, and word travels if someone is a problem. Word also travels if you have a good reputation.

I got an interview for a writing job at ArenaNet in part because a I worked with a writer at Microsoft who later went to ArenaNet. She remembered me and vouched for me. I can’t say it was the tipping point for getting the interview and the job, but if I was a jerk at Microsoft, she likely would have warned the narrative lead, who would have told HR to scratch my name of the short list.

Being aware is more than not being an prick. Being aware is having situational awareness about the interpersonal state of your teammates. You need to get a feel of how your teammates are acting, what pressures they are under, and understand the best way to approach them. Your art team might be down an artist, so now isn’t the best time to make a lot of new art asks. The programmers are crunching. Don’t bother them with new tool requests. Your lead isn’t sleeping because their kid is sick. Tired people make tempers flare in tight situations. Don’t stoke fires by accident from not reading the room.

So, okay, how do I read the room?

Listen more than talk. People give off a lot of clues. In time, you’ll be able to understand who in the studio is quiet, who is a pompous knob, who has free time, who is doubling up on work because someone is out sick. If you aren’t good at social cues, then ask people you are comfortable talking to for advice on approaching someone. A senior or a lead on your team would be ideal for this. They have a lot more experience with other team members than you do (especially when you are new). Just be mindful of what’s a proper assesment and what’s gossip. The former will help you communicate, the other is none of your business shit stirring.

The second part of being aware is understanding the interpersonal side of a team member and knowing how they do their job. Understand the pressures they are under, but also learn how they see the project and how they do their work. A concept artist approaches a problem differently compared to an audio engineer. Learn how they see the world and learn their language in how they communicate ideas.

Way back when I was at Microsoft, I was put in charge of the official Fable 2 site. I was assigned an artist and went in to talk with her about how I saw the site. I talked about 10 minutes about my vision, how it’ll work, and the feel of it.

I got done and the artist looked at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my ears. It wasn’t my finest hour.

I drove home kicking myself wondering where I botched it when it hit me: I use words, she operates in a visual space.

I went to a local Walgreen’s and picked up a box of colored pencils and a sketch pad and spent the evening using my crap-tier art skills to draw out the site I had in my head. The next morning I got another meeting with her and showed off my (embarrassingly crude) concepts. Immediately it clicked for her and we were at white board planning next steps.

Know another discipline’s language. If you take the time to do so, not only will you be able to communicate ideas better, but you’ll go a long way to demonstrate you respect their labor by taking an interest in what they do.

And again, that can serve you well in this industry where your reputation does precede you.

Personal

This is simple: Gaming is an amazing place to work in, but this industry will also kill you if you let it. There are unscruplous people in power who will exploit you wanting to work in games, who will crunch you or bully you into working long hours or suffering abuse in order to “make it” or “get along” or "know your place."

You don’t need that. No one needs that. This fabluous circus of digital dreams isn’t worth your mental or physical health. You need to put that first because no one else will.

When I got into the industry, it was a mark of pride to work for days straight, sleep at your desk, and neglect basic needs all for some stupid notion of game dev glory. Looking back, I damaged myself trying to turn into a sleepless pyre of literary might. I came so close to falling apart trying to prove that I was “worthy” of being in AAA, and if I wasn’t I was a failure. I compared myself to colleagues on social media who were (on the outside) having fabulous careers on high-profile titles, and I was pathetic for not keeping pace, not getting a killer job on a sweet title.

Two things happened: I got dangerously ill, and I later learned that those killer-job collegaues left a lot of damage in their wake as they went from project to project. I know better now.

There’s a great line in Michael Mann’s film “Heat” where master thief Neil (Robert De Niro) tells his cop rival Vincent (Al Pacino) his rule for staying alive and out of jail.

A guy told me one time, "Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."

As much as I love this industry, I had to adopt a variant of that idea while recovering. I had to know when I was getting overwhelmed, and if it was getting to be too much, just walk away.

You need to do the same. You need to be your own champion and you need to know when you feel too much of the heat.

There’s no shame in walking away and doing something else if you are in a situation that is toxic and untenable.

Take care of yourself, and if possible, be supportive of devs going through hard times. There’s a lot of them out there now.