Writing with game mechanics

I work as a writer in the computer games industry (actually I’m a combination of writer, designer and programmer, but it’s writing that’s relevant here), and I write prose fiction in my spare time. I’ve been thinking lately about the intersection of games writing and more traditional non-interactive storytelling, and I’ve realised that there are some skills (or at least habits) that I’ve picked up from games writing that I’ve been able to transfer to other media.

Game mechanics, briefly, are the set of rules that a game uses to determine what happens, and the set of things it lets the player do to interact with the game. Almost all games try to depict the real world with a greater or lesser degree of realism, even if that realism is just a thematic dressing for abstract game mechanics (e.g. Nintendo doesn’t make games about an abstract shape that moves up the screen then down again when you press a button: they make games about a plumber called Mario who jumps).

On the other hand, even the most detailed and realistic games don’t simulate the world perfectly. (Even if we had the technical capability to realistically simulate every detail of the universe, doing so wouldn’t necessarily make for a good game.) So a game has to take its scenario and decide which parts of the scenario it wants to depict in detail, and which parts it wants to abstract away.

In choosing which parts of the world to make into detailed game mechanics, and which parts to ignore, the game is making a statement about what kind of game it is. A first-person shooter will likely have detailed mechanics about shooting at enemies, reloading, modelling the different effects of different weapons, and so forth. (Note that I said detailed, not realistic–realism isn’t necessarily an aim, nor should it be.) The player character’s need to eat, sleep and urinate are likely to be ignored, as are your enemies’ and squad members’ interpersonal relationships. In the Sims games, on the other hand, the characters’ bodily functions and feelings towards one another are modeled in some detail, but fighting is barely present. Both games are set in the real world but they model different aspects of it.

What does this have to do with novels?

I’ve found that a good way to keep my story focused is to ask myself, What are the game mechanics of this story? What are the sorts of obstacles that get placed in front of the protagonist, and what set of skills does he or she have to overcome these obstacles? This is similar to the question, What is the story about?, but that question normally has a larger-scale answer: it’s about space pirates, or telepaths, or underground-dwelling goblins. Thinking in terms of game mechanics means thinking on a smaller, more detailed scale: what are the specific moment-to-moment interactions the characters tend to have with their world.

For example, in my current novel, the main character is good at reading people’s emotions and manipulating them by saying the right thing. Once I’d decided that, the question of how he could get out of the situations the plot put him in became much clearer: he would start by thinking of how he could talk his way out, and only in unusual circumstances would he find some other way. It also suggested the kinds of situations he could find himself in: not ones engineered for him to get out of easily, but ones he could use his skills on (whether to succeed or fail) in an interesting way. If I hadn’t thought about game mechanics in this way, I think I would have ended up with an unfocused plot and a central character without a specific interesting skill.

Questions to ask yourself about any story:

• If this were a game, what abilities would the player have to interact with the game-world?
• If this were a game, what sort of obstacles would the game put in the player’s path?

Going too far with this thinking could easily lead to single-minded or contrived stories, but I believe that thinking sensibly about game mechanics can help give a story a memorable focus.

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.

The girl in Hal Jordan’s Bed

Ever since I posted my thoughts about the movie, a surprising amount of this site’s traffic has come from people searching for variations on one question: “Who is the girl in Hal Jordan’s bed in the Green Lantern movie?”

Well, I believe in trying to give the readers what they want, so: as far as I can tell (from IMDB), the character is listed simply as ‘Beautiful Girl’ and is played by Marcela Duarte Fonseca, who has no other film credits. I could be wrong, though: this is a mainstream movie aimed at teenage boys, so basically any of the female characters could be described as ‘Beautiful Girl’.

The film tells us very little about Beautiful Girl. Presumably Hal Jordan picked her up in a bar the night before the first scene, they had a one-night stand, and neither of them expects to see the other again. (The dialogue in that scene definitely implies that it’s the first time she’s been in his apartment.) Her presence in the scene is just to establish that he’s the kind of guy who picks up girls; having served this purpose, the character is forgotten about. Presumably Beautiful Girl goes back to her mundane, non-superheroic life, maybe occasionally noticing that the Green Lantern she sees on the news looks kind of like that guy she slept with one time.

But that’s boring. With so little to go on, we can invent whatever story for her we like. Here are some ideas:

• She’s a sleeper agent (yes, yes, pun intended) sent by the Guardians of Oa to observe potential Green Lanterns on Earth. She’s not actually a person but a tiny robot drone that projects a hard-light construct around itself, similar to the Green Lantern rings but able to do other colours as well. She keeps close to Hal by taking on new appearances that Hal will be attracted to, then letting him chat her up and take her home–in fact, almost every one of Hal’s sexual conquests have been this same robot. The reason Hal is fixated on Carol Ferris is that on some subconscious level he knows that she’s the only real woman to have ever been slightly interested in him. Because Hal is a jerk.
• She’s the real intended recipient of the Green Lantern ring, but a quirk of human physiology means that the rings can get confused between humans who have been in close physical contact recently. She’s genuinely brave, selfless, and kind-hearted, possesses huge reserves of willpower as well as being of peak physical fitness, and is also an accomplished sculptor with an amazing ability to imagine three-dimensional shapes. In some parallel universe, she led the Green Lantern Corps to usher in a new age of peace and justice for the universe. And she wouldn’t have been such a jerk.
• She’s a naive, romantic girl who’s had a crush on Hal Jordan for months, and has eventually got him to notice her. From his point of view, she’s just another of his conquests, but from hers it was a beautiful romance and Hal was clearly The One. But all Hal is interested in is the chase, so once he’s bedded her he forgets about her completely. She tries phoning him but he stops returning her calls, partly because he’s busy being a superhero, but mostly because he’s a jerk.

There are infinite other possibilities. Maybe she’s an alien construct as in the first idea, but rather than working for the Guardians, she works for an evil race for some sinister purpose. Maybe she will return to take part in a love triangle involving her and Carol Ferris. Maybe she’s quite coincidentally destined to be another superhero, and someday they’ll team up to fight robot zombies from the moon, during which Hal will wonder why she seems familiar but not be able to place her.

She’s a blank slate. Who do you want her to be?

P.S. to everyone who got to this page by searching for “slutty fantasy armour”: no.

NaNoWriMo

Tonight the dead walk, witches screech through the sky, and, more scarily, thousands of would-be novelists put finger to keyboard on the stroke of midnight to begin NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is a self-imposed challenge to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November.

After a month of umming and ahhing I’ve decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year. When I first did it back in 2009 it was a massive help to my writing, but right now I’m not at a stage in my writing development where it would be helpful. Tonight seemed the night to recommend it and to say a few words about its pros and cons, though.

The good

NaNoWriMo is a great help in turning off one’s inner editor for a month. Quality and coherence are jettisoned for the sake of churning out 50,000 words of prose. Back in 2009 that was exactly what I needed: I had written short stories, but I’d never finished something novel-length, and focusing on word count let me prove to myself that I could.

NaNoWriMo also helps you to spend time every day writing. You know you’ve got to write those 50k words, and the only way you’re going to do that is if you sit down and do 1,667 words per day, every day, for the month. You learn how to write quickly and you learn how to make time for it. Once November ends you might not be writing that heavily, but you’ll find sitting down to write a bit easier than you did previously.

Most importantly (for me at least) there’s the NaNoWriMo community. With NaNo you have a whole support network to help you achieve the things above: to give advice, to nag, to compare notes and to all be in it together. I made some great friends through NaNo, and it was only with their support that I got through the month. The reason I was even considering doing NaNo again this year was for the community element of it. But…

The bad

The bad is that NaNoWriMo is restrictive. It’s one-size-fits-all. The community pressure is great, but the community pressure is to write 50,000 words and nothing else. The only way people vary the formula within NaNo is to set themselves even more insane targets: 100,000 words, 200,000, more. The rules of NaNo become a straitjacket: you must write 50k words, the word count is more important than quality, you must start in November and not before. If that isn’t what’s best for you as a writer, you’re outside the community; it’s not fun to go to the parties and have people ask about your novel or word count and have to say, um, well, I’m not really doing NaNo as such. I was tempted to do NaNo just for the sake of being in the community, even though it would be a month wasted from the point of view of my development as a writer, and that was when I knew I had to give it a miss this year.

Another potential problem with NaNo is that it’s easy to stop there. It’s recreational novelling: you write a novel in a month but you don’t intend for anyone else to read it, and you might not write anything for the rest of the year. That’s great if recreational novelling is what you want, but if you’re serious about being a writer you have to step past that and judge whether next year’s NaNo is for you.

For anyone doing NaNo this year: good luck, and enjoy! If my local NaNo community is anything to go by, NaNoers are all brilliant people and I’m proud to be part of that community even if I’m not doing NaNo itself again.

And for anyone considering doing NaNo: it might not be right for you, but if you think it is, go for it! Depending on when you read this, it may not be too late to start. It’s a unique experience that’ll teach you valuable writing skills, even if there are other skills it doesn’t teach.

Think through the implications of your handwaves

SPOILERS for tonight’s episode of Doctor Who.

Very much enjoyed tonight’s episode. It’s nice to see the series having the confidence to use time travel as a story device, rather than just as a setup for adventures-of-the week in different settings. There were some great dramatic moments, especially towards the end, and it did a decent job of exploring the ethical implications of time travel rather than sidestepping them, leading to some dramatic moments. It was also very nicely paced: I loved the speed with which it got through the initial setup, and the abruptness with which it cut to the end credits.

I think the only major thing I’d have changed would have been the reason why the accelerated time stream that Amy gets trapped in exists. I’d also have added food dispensers around the place, rather than a ‘you don’t need to eat in here’ handwave. These details set my science-fiction-writer mind off thinking about their implications, which distracted me frm the point of the episode.

All the episode needed was a time-acceleration field where years passed inside for hours outside, but what it gave us is a field that selectively accelerates some biological processes and not others. Someone in the field experiences life, and ages, at the ‘fast’ rate; but diseases and the need to eat only progress at the ‘slow’ rate. A whole lot of energy is being magicked into Amy’s metabolism in order for her to keep functioning for 30-odd years without eating. The more you think about this, the less it makes sense. Suppose Amy cries or sweats: does she need to drink to recover that fluid? If her hair and nails keep growing and her skin cells replenish, where does that new mass come from if she doesn’t eat? (If her hair and nails aren’t growing, and her skin isn’t replanishing, how is she showing physical signs of aging?)

My first thought was: these aliens could create an accelerated time-field within which you can live life normally except that you don’t suffer from diseases and you don’t need to eat. Judging from the size of the facility, they had no problem creating this field over a large area. Why reserve it for people who had the plague? Why didn’t they all live inside it permanently?

The plague itself they could get away with by saying it’s a magic time-plague that somehow knows what time it is outside (which ties in nicely with a Time Lord being affected by it but not a human), but there was no need for the metabolic implications of Amy not needing to eat. I think it’s an example of two mistakes that can be made when writing science fiction:

Firstly, not thinking through implications. The writer comes up with a one-line handwave of something inconvenient (in this case, Amy not eating for a week) and doesn’t think through what this means. A different hand-wave (e.g. there’s a food dispenser in the room) could have worked just as well without the implications.

Secondly, fuzzy thinking about time passing at different rates. To use a different example, at first glance it makes sense that our hero might know he’s in a time-freeze because his watch has stopped–but if he’s able to act normally then the mechanical processes of his body must still be working, so how does the watch know to behave differently? Similarly, if Amy’s muscles can move at the normal rate for her new time stream, how does her digestive system know to slow down? If time is passing at a different rate, that should affect everything, and you should only see effects at the boundary between one time rate and another (e.g. you can look out of your slow-time bubble and see clock hands whizzing round, but your wristwatch should be working normally from your point of view). If you want a more complicated effect, you’ve got to have a different cause.

(For example: the two-streams facility could put the plague victim into a life support unit and plug their brain into a computer. With the aid of the computer, their consciousness lives at a greatly accelerated rate, inside a virtual-reality environment. The plague is still working on their real body out in meatspace, in real time, and the VR environment doesn’t have to make them feel hungry if they don’t want to eat inside the simulation. The simulation could age their simulated body at the normal rate, although there’s no technical reason why it has to. Family and friends could exchange messages via the computer, or even visit by temporarily jacking themselves in. Although, again, I’m wondering why this should be reserved for plague-victims…)

Yes, that’s a lot of text devoted to a nit-pick of what was generally an excellent episode, but in science fiction a lot can hang on technical details and it’s important for writers to think them through.

What is your novel about?

A few days ago I finished the second draft of my novel. I’m far enough through the writing process, and hence confident enough that I’ll finish it, that I’m happy to let slip to casual acquaintances that I am writing a novel. People almost invariably respond by asking one awkward question.

They ask, “What is your novel about?”

I can’t speak for all writers, but I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who finds this question challenging. Of course I know what my novel is about, but when I try to boil that down into one or two sentences that can keep the conversation going, I draw a blank.

Normally I say, “It’s about space pirates.” Which it kind of sort of is, although there’s really only one space pirate and her piratical activities aren’t the focus of the book. It also brings to mind images of cybernetic eyes and robot parrots and all sorts of clichés that aren’t anywhere in my novel, but they’re fun mental images that make the asker smile and keep the conversation going, and that’s what the answer is really meant to achieve.

But when someone wants a more detailed and less glib answer than “It’s about space pirates”, I find myself at a loss. Part of that is because I haven’t prepared a good answer. I’ll have to, when I come to write a covering letter, but that’s not for a while yet and when I do it I’ll have plenty of time to agonise over every word. Mostly, though, it’s because I didn’t set out to write a book about any particular theme. There are lots of things that my novel could be said to be about, and once we’ve got past the glib “space pirates” answer, I don’t know which to pick.

• It’s about a society that has collectively given up and resigned itself to extinction, and what such a society would be like for a cross-section of social classes.
• It’s about the different ways in which people’s personalities can be shaped by tragic events in their past.
• It’s about obsession.
• It’s about the question of whether, when you’re faced with an overwhelmingly powerful enemy, it’s better to make a futile last stand or just roll over and die.
• It’s about cyborg zombie space pirates vs giant planet-devouring alien robots. In space!

Some of these were part of my original idea; others are things that have emerged from the novel as I wrote it, without my being fully conscious of them until I examined what I was writing. Any of these would be a truthful but incomplete answer to what the novel is about. (Pedantically, the only complete answer would be 80,000 words long and identical with the novel itself; anything else loses detail.) When someone asks the question, I have to come up with an answer that both accurately reflects the novel, and also fits the tone of conversation and what that person wants to know. Because “It’s about space pirates” and “It’s about obsession” are different types of answer for different types of conversation, and I don’t think it’s disingenuous to pick one or the other based on context.

So, advice to writers: when you’re ready to tell people you’re writing something, have several answers lined up for when they ask what it’s about.

Harry Potter is not the hero

Some thoughts on the final Harry Potter film and the series as a whole. Note that I haven’t read all the books (I gave up after book three or four, when it looked like they were getting exponentially larger), but I don’t think that disqualifies me from an opinion. Films and books are different things, and if I can’t appreciate the film without reading the book then that’s a failure on the film’s part.

Oh, and Spoilers for the final Harry Potter film.

Harry Potter isn’t the hero. He’s the plot device. If you compare the series to The Lord of the Rings, he’s more like the ring than he is like Frodo.

From the start, Harry’s main quality is that he’s the Chosen One with the Special Destiny. He’s surrounded by people who are more competent than he is and who do most of the actual work: in particular Hermione, who seems to come up with most of the useful ideas but inexplicably lets the boys take most of the credit. Harry Potter is dragged along by a wave of destiny, continually given the hints and aid he needs by magical visions or by adults who know more than they let on.  If you take away this aid and this special destiny, he’s not any more heroic than the characters around him.

Over the course of the films/books (and especially in the final one) we learn  more about what Harry’s Special Destiny means–and I do love the fact that it turns out to mean something very specific, rather than being the vague sort of destiny that lets the author have things happen for no reason. Somewhat chillingly, Harry really is a magical macguffin, raised from birth for a particular purpose that doesn’t require any more from him than being in the path of the villain at a certain moment.

There’s the seed of a great story there, a twist on the normal fantasy formula. The hero of a work doesn’t need to be the same as the point of view character. Make the magical macguffin into a person, and you can tell the story from his point of view, as he watches the real hero or heroes get him into position and save the day. Our macguffin-man doesn’t need to be completely passive, but if his main asset is being the one with the special magic destiny, rather than having some actual useful skill, then the work shouldn’t treat him as the hero.

That could be an interesting story…but that’s not what the Harry Potter series does. It can’t seem to make up its mind whether Harry is the hero or the magic item. It explicitly tells us that Harry’s fate has been mapped out for him by others, that his only notable quality is something that happened to him as a baby that he had no control over–but it then expects us to believe that his going along with this plan makes him the world-saving hero, and expects us not to notice that most of the work is being done by others. I’m not saying he did nothing of use, but did he really do that much more than any of the supporting cast who fought and perhaps died in the final battle?

I’m not saying it was a bad film–it was very entertaining, and the story did mostly work–but I felt there was a good idea there that it didn’t properly explore.

Phrasebook foreign language in games

Interesting rant in the Guardian about writers peppering dialogue with occasional foreign words but rendering it mostly in English. This annoys me, although to be honest I’ve noticed it more in games and movies than I have in novels.

The worst offender in recent years is Assassin’s Creed 2. The game is set in Italy, and the characters are presumably speaking in Italian, but this is mostly rendered in modern English. Good so far. But the dialogue is only mostly rendered in English, and there are odd Italian phrases dotted around (which are translated if I have subtitles turned on). While playing, it left me wondering what the change of language was meant to signify, since presumably the characters in-universe were speaking Italian the whole time. Worse still, they’ll often say a word in Italian and then repeat it in English. In-universe they’re speaking Italian both times, so did they repeat themselves for emphasis? Or did the writer expect players to believe that people in renaissance Italy spoke English with Italian accents?

Writing and the battle with procrastination

Procrastination and lack of self-discipline are traditional problems for writers. This post by Elizabeth Bluemle on Shelftalker lists some ways in which some writers and artists have conducted their own battles against procrastination, and it was refreshing for me to see that I’m not alone in having a problem with it. I thought I’d share the techniques I use to stay focused on writing.

I do most of my writing on my laptop, and do most of my other stuff (research, social networking, random web surfing, etc.) on my desktop.

Unlike some writers, I don’t have a strict no-internet rule on my writing computer. I’ll sometimes have Facebook and Twitter open in the background, and I’ll let myself check them every now and then. I don’t post, though, and if someone links to an article or similar then I won’t read it until later. Feeling that I’m around people virtually, even if I’m alone physically, helps me feel more positive and is worth the slight waste of time.

I don’t ever play games on my laptop. In fact, becoming mostly a console gamer rather than a PC gamer has probably helped with my discipline, since I no longer associate games with computers at all.

I move to a different room in order to write. At the moment I do most of my writing at the dining table. It’s a little silly that I’ve ended up sitting in a nice ergonomic office chair while reading webcomics and doing my serious work on a dining chair, but maybe sitting on a less comfortable chair helps me to stay alert. Sometimes I’ll take laptop to a cafe or (if it isn’t exam season and full of students) to the public library.

If I’m writing at a weekend or have taken the day off work, and the weather isn’t terrible, I start my writing day by walking to a local park and back. As soon as I get back, I start writing. This formally separates out my writing time in the same way that moving to the dining table gives me writing space. Basically I pretend I’m walking to work, and as soon as I get there I’m ‘on the clock’ and have to focus. Plus it gets me some fresh air and sunshine.

I usually listen to music while writing. I’ll start an album playing, and I’m not allowed to get up or do anything but write until it finishes. Then I let myself stretch my legs, check Facebook and Twitter, make yet another cup of coffee, and decide what to listen to next.

I’ve tried using rewards to motivate myself, but that only has limited success for me. On the one hand, if I feel the urge to play a videogame, it’s good to tell myself “You can do that, but only after you’ve hit your writing target.” On the other hand, if I don’t reach the target, I also don’t get the reward, so I’ll go to bed having not made enough progress and also not had the nice thing, which puts me in a miserable mood and not the best frame of mind for writing the next day.

Anyway, that’s enough time spent blogging for today. Now I should take the laptop into town and get some work done on the novel.