Interview on the Narrative Design Exploratorium

I was interviewed by Stephen Dinehart for his Narrative Design Exploratorium. Stephen is a narrative / story designer, experienced with and fascinated by the integration of narrative into video games. His interview with me is the fourth in his series "Game Writers in the Trenches."

While I make no claim to genius or insight, the series that Stephen is running - "Masters of Narrative Design" and "Game Writers in the Trenches" - have a lot of great content for people doing game writing.

Please take a look and comment on my foolishness and/or wisdom.
http://www.narrativedesign.org/2009/01/game-writers-in-the-trenches-4.html

P.S. And enjoy the photo. It's my "uncompromising artistic tough guy" shot. With stubble.

A moment of silence...

 
The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, a staple of the speculative fiction world, will not be published this year. The series ends with last year's volume, the 21st. This is a loss to readers and writers alike, as evidenced by the comment thread on the LCRW site.

I've been BoingBoinged!

 
Which is about as cool as it gets. The Tumbarumba anthology was posted on this very famous blog site by Cory Doctorow, SF author and uber-geek. The submission came from Ethan Ham, who collaborated on Tumbarumba with Ben Rosenbaum.

Excuse me, I must go lie down and wait for my heartbeat to return to normal.

Another kindly review

 
SFRevu has nice things to say about my story "Everything That Matters," which has the fortune to be in an issue with some superb writing by Jason Sanford, Gord Sellar, and my fellow Villa Diodatian Aliette de Bodard. I don't mind being overshadowed by writers like that...

Vacation snaps

1. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow... er, rain.
   The first full day of our Christmas vacation we discovered that our ski suits were no longer waterproof. It is a strange sensation to be soaked, pretty much to the skin, and not be cold. Hooray for modern technology. One can of waterproofing agent later things were much better.
   
2. The Joy of Sechts
   ...couldn't resist that one. Secht is the Austrian version of champagne, and the best ones do have a level of dryness and finesse that is similar to the original. However there is a lot of plonk out there as well, and they are often too sweet. If forced to recommend or purchase it, Henkell is generally a safe bet.
   In addition to the bubbly Austrians also make a wide range of schnapps (however, the Joy of Schnapps is nowhere near as interesting a title). Plum, pear, and apricot are probably the most common, but there are a lot of more exotic and infinitely more interesting ones. Enzianschnapps made from gentian, vogelbeere schnapps made from rowan berry, and himbeere schnapps (raspberry) are my preferred after-dinner shots of choice.
3. Hooray for Austrian trains
   The long-distance trains have plugs for laptops in second class. Even the famed French TGV can't rival this.
4. Vienna for the holidays
   Highly recommended; it's a city that knows how to dress up and celebrate. The streets are decorated, there are Christmas markets all over town, and a zillion little stalls spring up that sell mulled wine, hot chocolate, and other specialties like gammsmilch (spiked milk) and jagertee (spiked black tea), etc. Further proof that for Europeans, alcohol > cold.
   

Hooray for nice reviews

 
http://www.sfcrowsnest.com/articles/books/2009/nz13475.php

A tip of the hat to Garth D Jones and his impeccable taste in speculative fiction (he liked my story). He liked Aliette's tale as well, calling it the best one in the issue.

Tumbarumba; a frolic of intrusions

I have another story that is Out There; it is being published in this on-line art and literature experience created by Ben Rosenbaum. My first paragraphs are on his blog entry.

What is also very cool is that the LA times has a brief article on it. Thanks, Ben!

So if by any chance you use Firefox, download the extension and wait and see as your browsing experience gets irregularly invaded by (brilliantly written) speculative fiction.

A nice--though brief--review

 
On the sciencefictionfantasy blog:

"Everything That Matters by Jeff Spock (illustrated by
Kenn Brown, who also did the cover): a traditional SF thriller about
hunting for alien treasure in the oceans of another planet, humans
adapted by surgery to breathe underwater, murderous 25 metre long
sharks, and revenge. Great stuff!"

So is it spam, or is it marketing?

 
"S'il vous pla?t, pardonne-nous de perturber votre précieux time.We sont [name removed] company.This Tai est une company.one électroniques des plus
grands grossistes du commerce international dans China."

There is a fine line...

Zoé grows up; Dad freaks out

Zoé's new haircut! It's kind of a watershed, actually. She's 11 1/2, and this is the first time she has really wanted a more grown-up, teen-looking haircut. I'm not ready for this...

Real, actual emotion in games

Not that fake, cookie cutter Freeman how-to stuff.

Games that made Margaret Robertson cry.

I met Margaret at the NLGD in Utrecht and as wowed by how smart and cool she is. In addition she is now blogging for Offworld, the gaming extension of the BoingBoing blog. This blog entry is a thoughtful, intelligent discussion of why and how emotion in games is not the same as emotion in books or movies.

Gnashing those teeth...

From a job wanted posting:

"This is a new company boasting a wealth of talent... The Games Designer is [a]lso contributing to creation of the game story & character descriptions, including in game dialogue & text."

Hopefully the "wealth of talent" part extends to the ability of the game designer to come up with interesting plots and complex characters and snappy dialogue and concise in-game text...

ET skype home

This is why we have Skype.

When I'm away on a trip, I can call and say hi -- with video -- to the kids. One of the things for which the Internet actually shows a real, tangible value.

To parents, anyway...

Game length, gameplay, and story

There is an interesting article in The Escapist on the fact that one rarely finishes a game these days. Regardless of the affection you may feel for it, the Haloes and Witchers and BioShocks don't see many people get all the way to the final scene. Our best guess for Heroes 5 was about 10%, and we have a pretty hardcore following.
Tom Endo points out in his article a few points and problems; one is that once you figure out the gameplay the rest is just endless (more or less repetitive) variations on that gameplay. The designers try to pull you in with new tricks and some plot twists, but stacked against the odds of finishing is the enormous time commitment required to get all the way to the end.
I think that there are a lot of cogent arguments for trimming game story to a more manageable size while adding tons of extra gameplay content for the hardcore gamers. After all, if a player has to leave the game for a few days, will they remember who the characters are? What quest they are doing and why? Is there any point in writing an enormous sprawling plot that is the equivalent of two or three screenlays if so few finish it?
It might make more sense to make games smaller, tighter in both story and gameplay, and then provides tons of downloadable content for those who want to keep going. Mod kits, additional levels, and unlockable bonuses would probably be more than sufficient for the hardcore player who falls in love with the game.
Especially if the development costs drop, and the price tag along with it.
I recently played Portal, and was very impressed by it. It didn't have a story, more like an atmosphere, though I suppose you could argue that there was slender plot thread. It was brilliant playability, fun writing, and all over a great experience. It was widely lauded, won many awards, and took only three or four hours to play.
Is that the wave of the future? Maybe it should be, otherwise studios are paying to create, and players are paying to not play, an awful lot of game content.

The latest Yahoo! headlines

I see these every day -- Yahoo! takes a headline from the French newspaper Le Monde and runs it through some sort of translator. 'A' for effort, 'F' for execution. Recent samples:

"With the approach of the victory of Obama, arms manufacture filled the tank"

The article is actually about the fact that gun merchants are stocking up due to future regulatory worries. Doesn't quite come through somehow...

And this one:
"Garzon judge deprives himself of the investigation into the missings of Francoism"

Is subtitled:
"The judge, who was likely to see himself declared inefficient in this business, deprived himself with the profit of the courts of province."

Computers are just, well, not quite there yet...

Teens and reading genre fiction

Recently within my circle of contacts a couple threads have popped up on the question of getting kids to read more. This is sort of a classic question, posed by authors and academics as if it was some sort of cry in the wilderness (Potter-san notwithstanding). Richard Dansky had a particularly interesting question on developing a list of genre recommendations based on what kind of games kids like to play.
That one really intrigues me, as it is a very pragmatic approach to getting kids into books as opposed to asking the local English teacher who would probably reply: "You like First Person Shooters? You should read Cooper's Leatherstocking series. You like fantasy games? Gosh, there are a lot of fantastic elements in Love in the Time of Cholera."
Richard started with a few, and more have been added, and hopefully we'll end up with a lot of good ideas.
The other interesting thread was started by Cat Rambo here, and a lot of good comments were added by readers.
This is important to culture in general, I think, and will continue to be so until that improbable day in the future when game writers are nominated for Pulitzers, Nobels, and Bookers. As the game media takes over more and more of mass culture, and as generations grow up using that as their first window into art and writing, the question can only gain in pertinence.

The Bad Guy in video games -- why is he so much more interesting?

Part of it, I think, is inherent in the media. The player-character tends to be relatively generic; often either a voiceless cypher (Gordon Freeman, Master Chief) or a relatively unimaginative remodeling of the wise/tough guy that we have known and loved from Bogart/Cooper to Willis/Ford. The player needs to identify strongly with the main characters, want what they want, and love them enough to endure tens of hours of their trials and tribulations.

Too much "character" in the main character can turn off players; not everyone wants to walk in the shoes of a metrosexual angst-ridden teenager with a gravitationally impossible hairdo (yes, I am talking about Japanese RPG's).

So I think that both writers and designers play it safe with the main character. Easy to like, based on well-known and well-loved stereotypes, a comfortable pair of shoes to put on.

So where do you get to be crazy and creative? The bad guy. You get to make him as offensive, outrageous, irresponsible, unbalanced, and crazy as you want. He can be over-the-top sexy when the main hero can't, outrageously flamboyant when the hero is tough and restrained, insulting and offensive when the hero has to be cool and/or supportive.

So why do we make evil sexy? Because we don't want to put too much in the player-character and risk alienating the player. But the bad guy... there is no risk, only reward.

Removing the SFnal element from a story

During the VD3 workshop I presented a story that is really actually about marriage and family life, though it had a fantasy trigger element in it. A couple of reviewers commented that they thought it would be stronger without that; just the couple and their two kids (what? autobiographical? of course not...).

Then someone -- I think it was Chance -- started riffing on that idea. I mean, how many genres out there can you do that with? Could you imagine someone writing a Western, and then in the workshop someone says, "Why don't you take the cowboys out? And it doesn't really need the saloon and the Indians" Or a thriller, and someone says, "I think it would be better without the guns and spies." "You know, this Harlequin might be better without the tall handsome mysterious guy with the shadowy past." "I don't know... I think the thing under the bed should really just be a teddy bear."

It's a funny idea, but it does underline a point about the universality of good SF that is generally missed by most critics of the genre.

 
In the market of Avignon we happened across a local chef doing a cooking demonstration. It was for an apple crumble with honey and thyme; we watched him make it from A to Z and taste-tested (wow!) the final product. It was a great idea -- publicity for the restaurant, a bit of life and animation for the market, and a great little cooking lesson for those who happened to pass by.
Who knows? The next time you stop by chez nous it may be on the menu...

A guy I could like

Kevin Smith, the director who did (among others) "Clerks," "Clerks 2," and most recently "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," comes up with a great quote in an on-line interview. He calls "A Man for All Seasons" (also one of my all-time faves) "...basically porn for people who love dialogue."

That is just so true.