Once Upon a Pixel

Storytelling and Worldbuilding in Video Games

Eddie Paterson, Timothy Williams, Will Cordner

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351014250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Once Upon a Pixel examines the increasing sophistication of storytelling and worldbuilding in modern video games. Drawing on some of gaming's most popular titles, including Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, and the long-running Metal Gear Solid series, it is a pioneering exploration into narrative in games from the perspective of the creative writer. With interviews and insights from across the industry, it provides a complete account of how Triple-A, independent, and even virtual reality games are changing the way we tell stories.

Key Features

• A fresh perspective on video games as a whole new form of creative writing.

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• Interviews with a range of leading industry figures, from critics to creators.

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• Professional analysis of modern video game script excerpts.

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• Insights into emerging technologies and the future of interactive storytelling.

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1

Interview with Walt Williams

Walt Williams is an award-winning writer for Triple-A video games, including Spec Ops: The Line (2012) and Star Wars Battlefront II (2017). In 2017, he released his first book, Significant Zero: The Fight for Art and Soul in Video Games, which recounts his fascinating career in the industry to date. Walt currently lives in Louisiana with his young family.

In this interview, Walt reflects on different approaches to designing narratives for games, advocating a philosophy that includes story from the very beginning of the process. He argues that, at least in the Triple-A space with which he is most familiar, a clear leading voice encapsulated in the modern role of a “creative director” is essential in ensuring that each disparate piece of the design puzzle can fit together. Yet he also acknowledges the realities of the video game business, citing the economic constraints of big-budget productions as a powerful deterrent to anyone seeking to challenge the norm. Reflecting on his work on Spec Ops: The Line, he bemoans the frustrations and hurdles of the Triple-A system, highlighting the notion of player agency as one of the most powerful illusions in gaming today. Even so, Walt remains hopeful that, with a realignment in recent years toward more varied and personal story experiences, particularly in the independent scene, the role of the writer in games can continue to develop in interesting and meaningful ways.

EP:	We’re interested in the space for writers in Triple-A games. How has the industry changed in this regard while you’ve been working in it?
WW:	There definitely is a space for pure writers in this industry. Clearly, there is because there are quite a few of us. It’s a role that’s becoming more readily available as teams begin to realize that writing is a specific, studied skill set. I always compare writing for games to architecture—you use words to build a narrative structure that will support the many disparate pieces of a video game and keep them from collapsing on top of each other. However, the Triple-A games with the most celebrated stories usually have a creative director who personally identifies as a writer and who takes a hands-on approach to crafting the narrative. Those games have a better chance of elevating their craft because the literal creative boss has the authority to harmonize story and design. That’s not the case when you’re working with just “pure writers.” Sometimes, writing and narrative are treated like a plaster cast, forcing a shattered, useless bone to hopefully knit itself back together, whereas the best game stories understand that narrative is the bone, the entire skeleton, giving their game structure. This is because writing can be seen as a constraint by other disciplines, such as design, art, etc. These disciplines traditionally control the form of a game’s vision, and they bristle at ceding any of that control to people who just “put words on paper.” But, if we want a game to have a truly impactful narrative, then design and narrative have to be built in tandem. It’s like building an arch out of stone—you place a stone on the right, then a stone on the left, over and over until both sides come together at the top, creating that perfect balance of weight and pressure that makes it stand firm.
EP:	What are the qualities that these sorts of creative directors, these architects, bring to their work that is slightly different from a more design-focused creative director?
WW:	A design-focused creative director, in my experience, is going to be focused on the player experience entirely. The sandbox they’re building is all about how someone is going to play with it and express themselves. That’s not to say that a story-focused creative director doesn’t care about that. They do. For example, someone like Ken Levine cares about that sandbox aspect of his games, because in games like BioShock and System Shock, you’re playing with all the different systems to find different ways of solving your problems. Player expression is important, but the narrative aspect comes in because there is a vision beyond simply what the player is going to be doing in the game. This vision plays into themes, narratives, arcs, and a message of what the game is trying to say. There’s a cinematic aspect that design focus does not necessarily draw from. A narrative-focused creative director is able to think narratively in a visual space, a space that’s cinematic and theatrical at its core. We have many thousands of years of storytelling to learn from and lean on. Having an intimate knowledge of that structure is an important aspect of being a narrative creative director that a design-focused creative director does not necessarily have in their personal toolbox. I came from writing first, and I then learned design by working in games for 13 years so I always approach a game from a cinematic angle. I’m looking to create a logical series of progression, conflict, and escalation that is driven by character choices (player-driven or predetermined) that will maximize the player’s emotional reaction at any given time. Design is looking to create a system by which the player can choose what to do during gameplay and thereby maximize their personal emotional reaction by feeling as if they authored the flow of the experience. It’s a very different kind of thinking.
EP:	I suppose it also lends to a certain type of production process. Are there moments where you feel like the Triple-A production model is really frustrating to work within?
WW:	We have a tendency to put the world and the experience before the story. That’s frustrating to me as a writer and world-builder because it feels like we’re putting the cart before the horse. I like to find the core of the story first, the emotional core that is personally resonating with me and with this experience. That gives me the themes I want to tap into and the emotional arc I want to create for the player. At that early stage, I’m thinking more about the feeling that I want the player to have than exactly what’s going to cause that feeling. That emotional core is the seed from which the world grows. As the world grows, design, art, and story can take the fruit of that work and expand upon it, until you have a whole ecosystem that feeds upon and fuels itself. Once you have that, then you can find the actual beat-by-beat details of your story. Unfortunately, Triple-A has a tendency to focus on the world first and that’s because that’s the biggest aspect. Who the character is or what the character is doing isn’t important at the start of development. We just need to figure out everywhere they’re going, everyone they’re talking to, and everything they’re going to be doing—we don’t need to figure out why, or who they are, that’s later. Up to this point, that strategy has worked perfectly fine, and by perfectly fine, I mean it hasn’t tanked a game. A great story can elevate a fun game to being a masterpiece, but a shitty story has never stopped people from buying and enjoying a fun game. Accepting that there are different ways to come about crafting these big games and building these worlds is difficult. Obviously, Triple-A video games have a hard time branching out into the “totally new,” and we instead focus down on what we know how to make. We work within these familiar structures over and over, and a lot of that comes from the technical aspect of our industry. If a developer spends 20 years making first-person shooters, they won’t suddenly start making racing games. The design, feel, and balance of these experiences are totally different. That’s not to say making a jump like that is impossible; you’d just need more research, experimentation, and development, all of which comes down to time and money. Modern Triple-A games already have astronomical budgets, and they’re only growing larger. Increased cost means increased risk. So, we stick to what we know. Instead of branching out, we double down on a formula that works and polish it to a perfect shine across multiple iterations. Or beat it endlessly until nothing is left but a bloody, soggy pulp, depending on your point of view. The more technologically advanced the game becomes, the more difficult it is for that game to branch outside of a very thin track because you have too many moving pieces, too many timelines, and too many budgets. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rewritten dialogue for a cutscene that was finished and had to match new words to lip syncs of old lines that were completely different. I’ll put a video of a cutscene up on a screen in front of an actor and say, “okay, here are the new lines—watch your lips and match it to the lips that are moving on your character’s face.” These guys are professional actors so they pull it off and you never even notice, but we had to do that a lot on Spec Ops. This is why a lot of experimental stuff is coming from indie teams. Smaller teams, smaller budgets. There’s just as much risk involved, because an indie team doesn’t have the safety net provided by Triple-A publishing, but you can turn a sailboat a lot faster than an oil tanker. Instead of a 300-person team, you have ten people who can more easily interface and experiment.
TW:	One of the advantages of Triple-A development would seem to be that more resources allow for more expansive game worlds and stories. In Spec Ops, for example, there are branching endings. Is there one ending that you consider canon? Is “canon” even an applicable term for interactive narratives?
WW:	I don’t know that there’s an ending that I consider canon. I’ve always said that he [Captain Martin Walker, the game’s protagonist] is dead, and that is true—I think he is dead. How you want to interpret that is up to you; he could be physically dead or he could be emotionally/spiritually dead. Ultimately, if a game with multiple paths and multiple endings is written with thematic intent, then all the endings can be considered canonical, as they will still speak to the same theme. With Spec Ops, in every ending, Walker is destroyed by what he’s been through. The choice comes down to how that destruction manifests through your guiding hand. Can you accept blame for your actions in destroying this character? Will you cast blame off on the developer? Or will you decide it’s just a game, it ultimately means nothing, and you can keep shooting people until we make you stop? The choice is about examining your own culpability and expressing those feelings, or lack thereof. But, thematically, it’s all the same, so it doesn’t really matter what ending you have. In that regard, canon in games does exist.
WC:	Have your thoughts on that changed in the 6 years since Spec Ops was released?
WW:	I certainly used to think that there was one specific ending, and now I think they are all the same. I definitely didn’t feel that way when I wrote it. Back then, I hated branching endings, because they don’t provide a definitive conclusion to the experience. If a player knows a game has multiple endings, they will either change how they play the game so they can get the “best ending,” or they will just play through it multiple times to see every possible ending. These days I suppose more players just watch all the endings on YouTube. Instead of creating a personalized experience, multiple endings make players worry about the content they might be missing. With Spec Ops, I wanted to write a branching ending that felt definitive, no matter which ending you chose. First, I made sure that the ending wasn’t determined by the player’s choices throughout the rest of the game, so that it wouldn’t affect how they played. Second, I wanted each ending to feel so personally definitive that players would beat the game, put down their controllers, and say, “I’m satisfied. I don’t need to see anything else.” Some people actually did that, and it’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever gotten.
WC:	You suggest in Significant Zero that there’s really only one kind of Triple-A game story: there are bad guys, you’re the good guy, you save the world. How successful was Spec Ops in challenging that template, and where were you unsuccessful?
WW:	I think Spec Ops was very successful, in that the game called out the lies we build around the Triple-A hero narrative and the violent mechanics that support it. In regards to simply getting the vision of the game across to the audience, it was very successful. As to it having a lasting effect on that audience, it was a total failure—absolutely 100%. People felt very bad for playing shooters for about a week, and then a new Call of Duty came out. But that’s okay! The goal of Spec Ops wasn’t to fundamentally change the face of video games. The goal was to create a shockingly personal piece of art that resonated with its audience, and we did that, as evidenced by the fact that we’re still talking about it 6 years later. Our industry is always looking for validation and trying to find proof that games are more than just games, to justify our choice to make and play them well into our adult lives. But the world has already accepted games as a legitimate artistic medium. The question of “are games art?” still pops up from time to time. But more often, that question is replaced by “what constitutes a game?” Our medium has reached the point of cultural relevance that people now attempt to control it through definition and exclusion. As terrible as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Authors
• Introduction: Creative Writers and Video Games
• 1 Interview with Walt Williams
• 2 Interview with Brooke Maggs
• 3 Something to Fight for: The Last of Us and the Language of Linear Games
• 4 Interview with Brendan Keogh
• 5 This is Snake: The Storytelling Legacy of the Metal Gear Series
• 6 Interview with Anna Anthropy
• 7 New Horizons: Open Worlds and Storyfeel
• 8 Interview with Damon Reece
• 9 Dear Reader: Virtual Reality and the Narrative Frontier
• 10 Interview with Lincoln Davis, Tam Armstrong, and Shauna Sperry
• 11 Interview with Tomasz Bednarz
• 12 Conclusion
• References
• Index