No one cares about your stupid story

There’s an adage in games writing: No one cares about your stupid story.

This doesn’t mean that games shouldn’t have stories. It feels better to run through a space station shooting aliens in order to save the world than it does to run through a context-less maze shooting nondescript enemies in order to win the game. What it means is that designers and writers shouldn’t self-indulgently splurge their stories into the game and expect players to sit through them when they would rather be playing. Capture their attention, make seeing the story an engaging experience, and you can get them to swallow quite complex stories and even sit through long non-interactive sequences. But you’ve got to remember that they start off from a position of not caring about your stupid story, and you have to convince them to care.

I think the same thing applies to writing prose fiction, to a greater or lesser extent. Lesser because a reader has bought your book for the story so they’re at least in a mood that’s sympathetic towards caring about it–but greater because the story is all there is. I’ve enjoyed games despite poorly-told stories, but if someone doesn’t enjoy the story of your book then they don’t enjoy your book, and they won’t be buying your next one.

When I’m writing prose, I try to look at each section I write and ask myself, why should the reader care? In a hypothetical game adaptation of the book, is this section something players would be watching or playing with rapt engagement, or is this something they’d want to skip to get to the next good bit?

Beginnings, in particular, need to grab the reader’s attention. I hate long opening cutscenes in games, and I hate long boring prologues in books. The same passage might grab my attention half way through the game or book, but at the very beginning I don’t yet care. But that’s not a license to start with an in medias res action scene and then jump back to your dry infodump assuming the ‘caring debt’ the reader has built up will carry them through the next passage. If you need to convey some information, do so in the most interesting way you can. And if, after a long dispassionate look at a particular passage or scene or idea, you don’t think the reader will care about it–cut it out.

The Thing about Sequels

This afternoon I saw The Thing, the confusingly-titled prequel to the 1982 sci-fi/horror classic The Thing. It’s a prequel, but it’s also sort-of a remake, in that the credits proclaim it to be based on the same short story (John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’) and its plot goes through the same motions with a different set of characters.  It’s not exactly a bad film, but it adds nothing to the original.

Also in the news recently, a prequel comic to Watchmen is apparently in development, and there are rumours of a Doctor Who movie. I’ve seen some fans outraged about these things on social media. A Doctor Who movie would spoil the TV series! Watchmen doesn’t need a prequel!

My thoughts: it’s true that Watchmen doesn’t need a prequel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a prequel would be bad. Alien didn’t need a sequel, but most people regard Aliens as very good. Similarly the Doctor Who TV series doesn’t need a spin-off movie, but the movie might turn out to be great.

Of course it’s possible that the Watchmen prequel and the Who movie will be awful. (Very likely in the case of the Watchmen prequel, but I’m hesitantly optimistic about the Who movie). But so what? There are lots of awful comics and movies: why should people get outraged about these ones?

Because these spin-offs spoil the original work. And that’s where I can’t get my head around the outrage: because however awful the Watchmen prequel turns out to be, my copy of Watchmen will still be there on my bookshelf. Perhaps I approach things differently as a writer, but I don’t feel obliged to read a work in the light of spin-offs made later by different writers or production teams.

The author’s intentions at the time of writing aren’t the way to evaluate a work, of course. But neither is the idea that there is a fixed canon, one true history of a fictional world, and all sequels or spin-offs of the same work are windows into that world. To go back to the Alien universe, I don’t have to watch the end of Aliens with the start of Alien3 in the back of my mind. I can watch Star Trek: The Next Generation without caring that the events of the series would somehow be ‘undone’ by the 2009 movie. I can watch the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica and pretend that it’s leading up to an ending that made some kind of sense. The writers didn’t have these later instalments in mind when they wrote the original works, so why should I think about them when watching them?

This isn’t about ignoring bits of canon that you don’t like: it’s about taking each work as a thing in itself, respecting it more rather than less because it’s not real, because it was created at a particular time by a particular person or set of people who had a partricular idea in their mind.

So, the prequel to The Thing added nothing to the original work, but it also took nothing away.

Assume your rules will be abused

(Since this post is a little bit political, I should make clear that views expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer. OK, with that out of the way, carry on…)

I don’t really intend to talk about politics or current affairs here much. But I read this morning that of the 62 apartments sold in One Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential block, only nine are paying council tax.  And that got me thinking: you know who would be good at writing laws?

Video game designers.

One of the first things you learn when designing game systems–either the easy way, from a more experienced designer, or the hard way from seeing how people play your game when it’s released–is to design rules with the assumption that they will be abused.

It’s not such a big deal with single-player games (where rules-abusers only affect themselves) or small-scale multiplayer games (where the group can police itself), but it becomes very important with massively multiplayer games. You’ve got to think about griefers (deliberately disruptive players), but you’ve also got to think about groups of players organising themselves to take advantage of the rules. You can design what you intend as a co-operative game, but if one player can get an advantage by screwing over the other players, that’s what they’ll do; and you can design what you think is a competitive game, but if players can maximise their rewards by co-operating, that’s what they’ll do. Players will always look for the way to maximise their rewards, even if it’s less fun to play that way and even if it screws over other players.

Game designers have to think about this as they design the game rules, so they release a game whose rules can’t be abused like this. And in most modern games, if they find after release that people are abusing the rules in a way that spoils the game for others, they can release a rules patch to fix it.

Maybe this is wishful thinking and betrays a lack of political knowledge, but when I see news stories like the one I linked to, I wish that the same design philosophy could be applied to real-world laws. Whatever legal hoops involving companies registered in the British Virgin Islands people can jump through to avoid paying tax, that’s clearly an abuse of the law, and the fact that the abuse is possible means the system is poorly designed.

I suspect that a lot of modern problems could be solved if we were to take a bit of games design wisdom and make it a guiding principle for our lawmakers: Design laws with the assumption that they will be abused, and if it turns out they can be abused, fix them.