Giving useful feedback can feel daunting or natural, depending on how well your feedback is received. Let’s imagine that you’re working with a team, and you’re being asked to give feedback on their work.
One member of your team is easy to give feedback to: they listen well, are appreciative, and respond exactly to what you’ve suggested; meanwhile, another team member gets defensive, flippant, ignores what you say, argues against you, and never quite integrates your feedback.
Continue readingNote: all markup in this post is based on using Twine Harlowe 3.1.0 Story Format. While I decided to make a prototype in Twine, my learnings from this could be adapted into any known or bespoke narrative tool, keeping in mind the syntax of the framework. My examples here are for illustrative purposes.
While working on a personal project, I wanted to create a fairly streamlined system for writers of interactive fiction and game narrative (or even linear narrative) to allow players to choose their character, including gender and sexuality, without it disrupting the flow of writing too much.
My test text would be a single passage, presented in third person, with no choices except to change character so that I could test it working on the fly.
Continue readingLast night while I was editing my NaNoWriMo17 novel, Baz asked me what I do when I got blocked. Pushing through was one of my key goals for NaNoWriMo, as part of ignoring me inner censor/critic, so while I’m definitely not a bestselling (or published, ha!) novelist, and this is the longest-form thing I’ve written, I thought about it and I generally used either two tactics depending on where I was in the story (Note: I was pantsing based on a strong sense of characters and goals). I’d love to hear if other writers do the same thing, or have other techniques to get through their writing. Continue reading
I was one of the speakers at Crafting Intangibles, an online (and local) event exploring interactive narrative design (in games and other media). The talks went live on June 10th 2017, and you, as a ticket holder, get access to them all now!
This topic is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I first tried out a little bit in a Twine game I made earlier this year. It’s about connecting the idea of Gameplay Verbs and Actioning Verbs.
I love narrative-based games. But time and again, I find myself frustrated when the way I read a dialogue option is not the way the designers/writers intended, or the way the actor interprets or rewrites it. One day, it hit me: I’m playing the character, but my intentions aren’t honoured! I’m functioning as a director, at best, hoping that the actor does what I ask.
As you can probably tell from a lot of my previous posts, I have a background/major in theatre. So it’s from theatre that I draw my idea. As an actor rehearsing a play, there are many ways I can read a line. To give my line meaning, I give myself what Russian Realist actor, director, and theorist Konstantin Stanislavski termed an acting “objective“: a descriptive verb focusing the character’s actions. So, I started to think: what if I assigned Verbs to the character’s lines?
Okay, so let’s say we let the player (and while we’re making connections between terms, let’s take note that actors are also called players) choose their intention for their next line of dialogue. This doesn’t mean that we, as designers, need to have an endless list of possible verbs for the player to choose from. Characters still have constraints, and it’s unfair on the player to offer them a choice that would be “out of character” and then re-adjust in the dialogue: that goes back to the problem of allowing the player to choose one thing, and then have the character do something else.
It also doesn’t give the player total control of the outcome of the conversation: they choose what they want the character to try to achieve, but as we know, we aren’t always as effective at achieving what we want as we’d like: our audience comes with their own biasses about you, as well as being in the middle of so many other thoughts and experiences that we don’t know about, which affect their ability to read our intentions. Thus, for the narrative, it matters not only what the player tries to do, but also the NPCs reactions based on their own perceptions of you, in combination with other trackable game events. We also don’t need to write endless dialogue based on the player’s choice: in theatre, the choice of objectives that you and other actors have can widely impact the way a scene feels, even if the lines do not change.
Verbs are already a concept in game design theory. Game players can make choices; but valuable choices need to be made between different actions, different verbs: I can jump over this rock, or walk around it, or maybe even smash it with my weapon. Giving players four dialogue choices and the option to say nothing isn’t five choices, it’s two choices: to say, or not to say.
What if we narrative designers could give players the same level of choice in dialogue-play as systems designers give them in game-play? A few games do this: Life is Strange integrates a “rewind” Verb that is part of both verbal and nonverbal gameplay; Phoenix Wright allows the player to direct the dialogue by choosing to ask the witness to clarify their statement, or prove them wrong; and Layton Brothers: Mystery Room feels like you’re investigating both in the gameplay and the dialogueplay.
How can you apply this to the project you’re working on? I formulated an activity that I do myself to help bridge the gap between Narrativeplay Verbs and Gameplay Verbs. You can see it here!
Action and Intent is the name of my topic for Crafting Intangibles, which was a series of 20-minute talks on and about Narrative Design, organised by Christy Dena.
The talks become free to the public on August 10th 2017, and at that time I’ll post again with more information and the link to the video. But until then…
We all end with a challenge/activity, and here’s mine:
Try this with some of the projects you’ve worked on, are working on, or your favourite (or least favourite) games.
That’s it! I hope this helps focus your project.
Check out the talks at the Crafting Intangibles website for more activities, advice, and inspiration!
For the past year, one of the personal projects I’ve been working on has been a “timewaster” mobile phone game. It was never really intended to be mindblowing, but rather for us to just play around with some new concepts as well as what we’ve learned before.
We started with a mechanic, and a gimmicky one at that, and then chose additional aspects based on our expectations for a general target market. When people asked about the game, it was strangely difficult to describe. When we discussed systems or features, it felt awkward trying to make them work in a way that we thought would make sense to the player. Even when giving the game to people to try, the core mechanic didn’t seem to make enough sense to them. That last one was possibly to do with a lack of tutorial and a game type that doesn’t give a relaxed entry point into the game, but that didn’t explain the rest of our difficulties.
Finally, it dawned on us: the problem wasn’t the game or the mechanics. The problem was the theme.
We brainstormed some alternatives that wouldn’t change the core of the game. We discussed pros and cons to each idea, how well each answered the questions of what and why for each of the existing systems. We finally settled on one that also promised a punny (thus hopefully memorable) title.
Suddenly all the questions we had about design were easily answerable. Everything had to make sense in the context of the game’s theme, and suddenly we had solutions we otherwise never would have thought of. We, and the game, now have a lot more direction.
What’s the difference between Comedy and Horror?
I’m not sure I really ever agreed with Aristotle’s definition of Comedy vs Tragedy, but I was thinking today about the trope of “Body Horror,” and how it was used as a comedic element in Deadpool (2016).
I concluded that: in Comedy, we are told everything is going to be okay; in Horror (or Tragedy, for that matter), we are told that it is not.
One of my responsibilities as Narrative Designer at Blowfish Studios has been to write and design an example/official campaign for Gunscape, which is an FPS level-builder and multiplayer game that heavily references a lot of iconic FPS of the past, and is now only two weeks away from full release!
When I started working on deciding what sort of campaign we might have (keeping in mind that this was late in the development cycle, and there was limited scope for new features), I decided that a good place to start would be to review the games that we were referencing art-wise, to see what patterns I could find in them.
I found that each fell generally into one of two narrative structures. Interestingly, it struck me that these two narrative structures correlated to two concepts described within Trauma research.
Disclaimer: I haven’t played all of the games I researched. I often had to rely on transcripts, level breakdowns, or synopses. Also, the quality or methods of storytelling is incidental to this observation of narrative structure.
Every time I brainstorm or critique or give feedback to someone on a creative work of theirs, I always find myself asking,
What’s your point?
In other words: what are you trying to say; what do you want to explore; why do you want to tell this story; why do we want to listen?
This has the same significance whether it’s a one-panel comic or an epic novel series. There can be, and usually is, a difference between the plot (“what happens”) and the point/moral (“what it’s about”). There are a number of ways to tell the same story, and a number of reasons that story could be told. Some reasons are noble, some are indulgent, and none of it really matters. As long as you have that reason for telling your story, you have direction. It’s like having a customer/user/persona when you’re developing a product: you have a focus, a goal. All decisions made in the telling of a story, or the creation of a product, are answered by comparing whether it will help achieve the goal, whether it is in line with the focus.
When you feel that a scene or line is weak, when you start playing around with the storyline, come back and ask yourself, “What’s my point? What’s the point of this scene?” If it doesn’t advance the plot or the characters towards the goal, try changing it to something that does.
Recently, I started thinking about why Adventure games “died” in the late-90s, only to have a resurgance of popularity now, in the mid-2010s. Is it simple nostalgia? Is everyone who “grew up” on the game just get bored of them, and now are thinking back fondly? Or is there something specific to the ideal “Adventure” story structure that no longer resonated with us by 2000, but we’re again thirsty for, 10-15 years later?
Then, the other day, someone mentioned that they haven’t seen an “epic adventure” movie for a long time. Yet, we’ve been fed a steady stream of LOTR/The Hobbit movies. There is clearly something to an “Adventure” story that isn’t the same as following someone on the Hero’s Journey, or even the alternate journey that I’ve talked about a few posts ago.
Question: What do Ferris Bueler, Westley, and Indiana Jones have in common?
Ellen Jurik 