Evan Skolnick - Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know about Narrative Techniques

Copyright 2014 by Evan Skolnick

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Watson-Guptill Publications, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.watsonguptill.com

WATSON-GUPTILL and the WG and Horse designs are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-3853-4582-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-34583-5

Cover design by Christina Jirachachavalwong and Amy Huang
Interior design by Amy Huang and Betsy Stromberg

v3.1

To Lynn, to my sons Jacob and Bennett, and to my Mom and Dad.

All but the smallest-scale video games are created by groups of people working together. Mission designers collaborating with AI programmers, concept artists working with 3D modelers, audio designers coordinating with tools engineers, environment artists working with lighting experts, and dozens or even hundreds of other potential kinds of interactions. But success will elude them all, unless everyone on the teamwhether its comprised of two members or two hundredis pulling in the same direction.

Theres rarely one person you can point to as the reason a game is of high quality. Conversely, theres hardly ever a single individual you can blame for the opposite. Game development is a team effort, and the team wins or loses together.

This is also true of the game story. No one person can pull it off alone .

It is not enough to hire a talented writer and/or narrative designer for your game. Depending on the scope of your project, it will ultimately take designers, artists, animators, programmers, audio experts, and potentially many other specialists to deliver the narrative content in the final productto bring the story to life.

Thus, the working relationship of the writer with the rest of the team largely determines the games potential narrative quality. That relationship hinges on the team members familiarity with storytelling, their attitudes toward storys place in games, and their mastery of a common language with which everyone on the team can discuss the game narrative.

It is the goal of this book to provide that common language, and to help give you, your team, and your game the best chance to deliver entertaining, effective, and well-integrated story content .

I have spent over a decade in the game development industry, working in various roles, on dozens of projects, delivered on every major platform. During that time I have collaborated with hundreds of developers to solve creative, technical, and logistical game development problems. I have found narrative challenges to be among the most subtle and intractable.

And Im not alone. Over the years Ive been fortunate enough to become acquainted with many fellow game writers and narrative designers, each with their own war stories and frustrations from projects current and past, each of us trying to find ways to make game and story play more nicely togetherattempt after attempt to solve this ongoing conundrum.

My own efforts in this area have met with some limited success, on projects ranging from kid-targeted handheld games such as IGN Game of the Year cowinner Over the Hedge for the Nintendo DS, to the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences story award nominee Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 , to the first mature audienceoriented Star Wars title ever attempted: E3 2012 showstopper (and unfortunate victim of corporate upheaval) Star Wars 1313 .

Beyond toiling behind the scenes on these and other projects, Ive also very publicly tried to bridge the gap between gameplay and storytelling by speaking at various conferences and shows, particularly the Game Developers Conference (GDC). On an annual basis since 2006, I have run a day-long tutorial at GDC in San Franciscoby now experienced by over one thousand working and aspiring game developersfocused on the essentials of story development. With a wide mixture of attendees including game producers, designers, artists, programmers, and academics, the workshop provides core principles of storytelling in a compact and intensive primer.

But not everyone can get to San Francisco easily; nor can every producer afford GDC passes for every member of his or her team. Thus this book, which contains similar information to what one would experience in my tutorial, albeit in a noninteractive (but eminently more affordable!) format.

The book is divided into two main parts. represents a deeper dive, investigating the specifics of storytelling as they relate to the main areas of game development and describing in greater detail how members of each discipline can contribute toor potentially sabotagegood storytelling.

As we embark on this journey together, you may notice a few choices Ive made. The first is that when it comes to examples from existing stories, many of the ones Ive selected are from movies. As this is a book about video game storytelling, you might wonder why most or even all of the examples arent culled from games. The simple answer is that there are a significant number of movies that I feel safe in assuming nearly everyone has seen from beginning to end (for example, the original Star Wars). When it comes to games, though, due to their longer length and potential for players to get stuck, there are few if any examples for which I can safely make the same assumption. Sadly, there just arent many games that everyone in our industry has purchased and played. Even if there were games we had all played, its unlikely we all would have finished them. Online player data regularly confirms the low percentage of players who tend to push through any games story mode to completionits almost always less than half.

Another aspect you might notice is a focus on console and PC games vs. games on other platforms, particularly the burgeoning mobile and tablet gaming sector. With regard to narrative, large-scale projects generally offer the biggest stage for storytelling, which in turn allows for a deeper discussion of those elements as they relate to game development. Please be assured, the core lessons from this book are applicable to the development of any digital game, whether its on a console, PC, handheld system, tablet, or phone.

Finally, although they are two distinct roles, for simplicitys sake I will use the terms game writer and narrative designer (along with the more generalized narrative expert) interchangeably throughout this book.

With those caveats and explanations out of the way, its time to dig in. Lets take a look behind the curtain at what makes your favorite stories tick, and discover how you can apply these lessons to your own role as a game developer.