Game Writing Prompt #2: One Line to Four Lines
Good Days, Bad Days, And Everything In Between...
(The second in a series of game writing prompts and exercises I’ll be posting intermittently between larger articles.)
In my last post on creating and improving fictional characters, I discussed a framework called ‘Always, Sometimes, Never’. When we write fictional people, it can be a really useful tool to think about their behaviours, actions, and traits in terms of ‘rulesets’ rather than just their existence as make-believe people. When we are audience members meeting these characters for the first time, we start to develop a sense of a character’s personality, behaviours, and actions that will always manifest in multiple areas of life; likewise, we will start to discover things that the character would likely never do.
The ASN framework is as follows. The bulk of a character will be found in the things they ‘sometimes’ do and those things they sometimes are as people. For most fictional characters, this flexible middle ground will always produce a larger list than always/never columns, because it’s in the relative ways most people respond to different situations, contexts, emotions, good and bad days, etc, that they show us who they ‘are’ and the nuances of how their character works. In real life, as in fiction.
The problem is, in a video game, you might ask yourself how this framework could really apply if the audience is offered choices.
For example, THE LAST OF US? This is 99% linear in the way its narrative storytelling operates, so that the ways we generate our Always/Sometimes/Never ideas about the character at hand are not that different to the way a film or TV show might operate. There’s a visceral difference in engaging in those preset, gameplay-required behaviours as Joel and undertaking the physical actions he undertakes, but this is not likely to lead to a radically different understanding by the audience of his actual underlying ‘rules’ as a person, VS the retelling of that story in another medium.
If we consider ‘blank slate’ games such as the FALLOUT series and THE ELDER SCROLLS, they present protagonists who may have some level of pre-determined backstory but the game is at pains to allow the player a wide range of choices, routes through the world, and different things to say in different conversations.
The dialogue options are setup to allow varying degrees of politeness, comedy, and aggression. They are there for the player to shape the kind of person they are controlling. Here, it might be said that the ‘ALWAYS, SOMETIMES, NEVER’ options might be present but the player is inventing them in their own minds, with a dialogue system that exists to support any such experimentation. If players are just doing what they would do in real life? They’re squeezing themselves then through the ASN framework, like dough through a tube.
The problem is the tube itself — games are unlikely to be able to account for every eventuality of human behaviour and inclination, so this “trying to represent ourselves” in a game is doomed to failure as an act of characterisation at the very least. An enjoyable doom perhaps, and it’s unlikely that many players are bothered by this aspect as this genre isn’t really trying to tell in-depth emotional stories about our own emotional natures.
But this can trip people up when they’re trying to write games, especially those coming from other mediums. They imagine sometimes that they need to account for lots of variation of player intent, of players trying to do almost anything in the game world. It’s related to the same over-scoping intent my last game prompt exercise dealt with, and often leads to a lack of coherency.
Middle-grounds exist at various points on the spectrum.
THE WITCHER 3 has Geralt of Rivia. Geralt is very clearly a personalised character with his own complexities, traits, and red lines. Geralt cannot become an evil tyrant nor is he likely to become a foolish bard, unless magic is involved. But, within the scope of his personality, his ‘Sometimes’ column, he is capable of different choices — choices that are offered to the player also with real meaningful choices. Here, already, we can see that the offering of choice does not negate the idea of a ‘traditional’ type of character, nor does it overly limit the player feeling like they are deciding things. Both impulses can co-exist.
If we consider DISCO ELYSIUM, we see an inversion of THE WITCHER 3.
We are given much more choice about dialogue, political positions, ethics, and intent than we are with Geralt of Rivia. But here, the story itself is designed to show how a ‘traditional’ character of Geralt’s type has purposefully obliterated themselves in amnesia to make this game’s scenario possible, and that the ‘obliterated’ former self is perhaps more alive and more in the driving seat than we might have expected. What seem to be ‘ALWAYS/SOMETIMES/NEVER’ columns we are in control of, turn out to be mostly ‘SOMETIMES’ behaviours, with the real red lines and real inescapable consistencies beyond our control.
PROMPT:
ONE LINE TO FOUR LINES
Pre-requisite: choose a character from a linear non-video-game franchise to practice with, just as the Witcher 3 used Geralt.
Choose a film, TV show, comic book, or novel. It should not be one that has had any kind of video game adaptation. Choose a character from one of these that you understand well and that you think is really well written with some complexity.
Before you do or read any of the below, find a scene or piece of dialogue where your chosen character is talking with another person. I wouldn’t choose the most dramatic iconic moment in the whole thing necessarily, but just a good exchange of dialogue where our character is dealing with another person, maybe in a slightly amped up tense or intriguing scenario.
Choose a line from that dialogue where the character clearly takes some kind of stance or expresses some kind of attitude towards the topic, the person they’re talking to, or any other surrounding context. This instruction is vague, I know, but we’re looking for something that’s not a giant monologue and that isn’t really overcomplicated, but likewise we’re not looking for a boring uninteresting line either. Something in-between!
Now, put the above to one side, and ignore it all for now.
Create three columns — one marked ‘Always’, one marked ‘Never’, one marked ‘Sometimes’. You’ll be using them for the following purposes…
Always: this column is for anything that is true of your chosen character in 99% of situations.
Never: this column is for anything that your chosen character would never do.
Sometimes: this column is for anything your chosen character is capable of doing, thinking, saying, acting like, etc, in different situations and different moods.
Think of as many traits, behaviours, beliefs, attitudes, etc as possible about your chosen character from throughout their entire canon of appearances in whatever mediums they’ve been in. Organise them beneath each of those headings above.
Augment your ‘Sometimes’ column by drawing two subcolumns, one titled ‘Good Day’ and one titled ‘Bad Day’. Don’t fill them in yet. (The former should involve imagining the character on one of the best days of their life, when they’re at their happiest and most rested. The latter should be one of the worst days, when they’re spread thin and struggling.)
Create separate answers for the following scenarios in the good/bad columns, ensuring the good/bad answers are distinct for each element:
Someone is incredibly rude to your character
Someone is incredibly rude to a stranger in front of your character
Someone is incredibly rude to a friend/loved one in front of your character
Someone is incredibly rude to an enemy in front of your character
Someone physically threatens (and is perhaps about to attack) your character
Someone physically threatens (and is perhaps about to attack) a stranger in front of your character
Someone physically threatens (and is perhaps about to attack) a friend/loved one in front of your character
Someone physically threatens (and is perhaps about to attack) an enemy in front of your character
Someone flirts with your character
Someone is angry at your character
Someone is behaving in an embarrassing way in front of your character
Someone is in pain in front of your character
Your character has an opportunity to do something bad for a good result (for other people)
Your character has an opportunity to do something bad for a good result (for selfish reasons)
Your character feels tired
Your character feels hungry
Your character is betrayed
You can add to this list by thinking of multiple contexts, events, emotions, situations, and expand your sense of this character. If there are contradictions? Totally fine and expected, as long as they don’t contradict the ‘always’ or ‘never’ columns.
Read through your work for the ‘Sometimes’ column and consider whether there are any underlying consistencies across both columns. Consider adding these to the ‘always’ and ‘never’ columns as abstractions.
Likewise, if anything in the ‘sometimes’ column contradicts the Always/Never columns, consider revising those.
You know that character dialogue you isolated during steps 1-3, the scene with the line you highlighted that wasn’t too complex and wasn’t too simple either? Well… What we’re going to do next, when you’ve got your solid ‘Always, Sometimes, Never’ columns…
Look at that line, and create THREE alternative lines that would make sense as replacements. Ignore the flow of dialogue/plot events that originally occurred in the original script after that specific dialogue line.
(So if our chosen character had just said ‘I refuse to accept our death’ in response to Commander BlaBla losing hope in the middle of a war? We’d want three lines that could replace ‘I refuse to accept our death’, that would each make sense as alternative responses to Commander BlaBla. However, some of them might be agreeing with BlaBla, some might be making fun of BlaBla, some might be saying nothing at all.)
For these alternative lines? You’re going to be using the SOMETIMES column to draw your replacements from. ‘SOMETIMES’ shows what your character is capable of in different moods, contexts, situations, etc. So here, you’re going to use that list to create variations. These variations will suggest different ways of approaching things and communicating, but should all still feel like they come from the same personality.Now that you’ve got the original line + these three alternative lines? Number them 1-4 and ask yourself if it’s clear how each line is different in terms of tone, and whether it feels like — if this were a real conversation — such lines might invite different kinds of responses from the other person being spoken to. (For example, being polite or sarcastic would rarely lead to the precise same outcome in real life).
If they aren’t different enough? Amend to make their distinctions clearer.Congratulations. You’ve just created a video game choice where you have both a consistent character in a traditional sense, and you also have freedom of personality/mood/action as a player controlling that character.
Of course, many spectrums of ‘consistency’ and ‘characterisation’ are possible in video game narrative. This prompt is not arguing that the above is superior in all scenarios, but it is a useful corrective to extremes, particularly for new writers from other mediums struggling to connect what they already know to how these style of story can work. It’s also a very useful analytical tool when applied to characters you enjoy, as you can unlock how you enjoy them and how that could work on the level of a game. You can easily adapt all of this to your own characters whether at the start of a project or even part-way through.
We work on ‘ALWAYS SOMETIMES NEVER’ with several related interlocking exercises as part of my game writing workshop’s PHASE 2 element (click here for more information about how the workshop runs and how you can join).
And, if you’ve not read the sister-article on ASN or the previous prompt in this series, some links below.