Game Writing Prompt #3: GAMES ARE LIKE ONIONS
Use the fact you love game narratives to do the surprising thing of, well, making game narratives.
(The third in my series of game writing prompts and exercises. These can be completed in any sequence and are suitable for use multiple times. Let me know how you get on!)
So many people think they know how to write stories purely because they enjoy and consume stories all the time, so, knowing what they like, they assume they can do the same thing. They are not wrong entirely. There is a very low barrier for entry into storytelling, as unlike drawing for example, we all tell ‘stories’ on a very regular basis even just in conversation or in answering questions about our own lives. To master this discipline? Incredibly hard. But people can still basically do it, in a way that most of us cannot just create basic code without any kind of training.
However, with all the talent and hard work and training that goes into becoming better at telling stories, writers (even great ones) often make a really silly mistake.
We forget what novices know in their blood.
We are all readers, players, audience members, not just writers.
In fact, we likely want to do this as a pursuit because stories have really touched us at various points in our lives, because we don’t just enjoy them but we love them.
We forget this, and in doing so, we miss out on one of the most simple and yet most effective ways of experiencing rapid improvement and idea generation in this field.
If you write video games because you love video game narratives?
THINK ABOUT WHY YOU LIKE THEM.
Today’s prompt takes this principle for a single game and shows you how to go beyond the surface to use this for actual writing and narrative development. It’s repeatable for any number of games you enjoy, and can also be applied to other mediums. Enjoy, and let me know how it goes!
PROMPT:
GAMES ARE LIKE ONIONS
Choose a game with a great narrative component.
Create a table with eleven rows and four columns, with the headings ‘Reason’, ‘Method’, ‘Abstraction’.
In the column ‘Reason’, write ten distinct reasons why you believe the narrative of this game is great, not in a general sense but specifically those relating to the project’s WRITING/NARRATIVE DESIGN.
This may bring in other elements that writers/NDs may not have been solely responsible for, but which clearly relate primarily to story and choice mechanics. (For example, someone having great voice acting would not solely justify inclusion in this exercise you are completing. Though the quality and presentation of the script might influence the voice actor being so great, we can’t necessarily know that was the case. If you mean the -character- was great in general, that’s another matter!)Here is an example of something I might pick, which clearly likely involved non-NDs/writers, but which emerges primarily from narrative events and choices:
REASON: In Bioshock, the player is asked by an individual called Sander Cohen to murder a number of enemies and take photographs of them. At the end, he walks away from the player with no instructions given in the game’s HUD. Many players end up not only shooting Cohen, but taking a photograph. If they do this, the game shows an achievement ‘Irony’. This was a great moment that felt very restrained by the game’s narrative, as the fact it didn’t explicitly tell me to do it but somehow seemed to guess I would, felt like it moved beyond the usual instruction/response linear nature of the experience. It felt like it had somehow guessed my intentions!
Only when you have finished all of the ‘Reason’ column, and not beforehand, go on to the second column, ‘Method’. For ‘Method’, you are now going to try and analyse -how- (at a more specific stylistic or design level) the writers have achieved this element. You are trying to say something that’s insightful and may not be noticed explicitly or consciously by most players, but which is likely a core part of why it works so well. This does not need to be exhaustive, but it should go beyond the initial ‘thing I liked’ to explore how the writers did it.
Here is how I could extend my Bioshock example above:METHOD: The game never presents any other non-combatant that you have the option to kill without the game explicitly drawing attention to our ability to kill them. By the game repeatedly training us in a loop of taking a photograph of recent enemies, we are primed to ‘complete’ this instruction once more even though we have not explicitly been asked to do so. We are conditioned to want to do this, by the repeated nature of ‘punishing’ someone not only through death but display, combined with Cohen’s forcing the player to do his dirty work likely building resentment. So when we have a chance to do the same to him? His behaviour has already infected us. The ‘irony’ here is therefore memorable in a very complex way: it gives the player actual free will without highlighting the choices and rewarding us by making us feel very clever. However, it’s more than this: the game shows free will can be manipulated and may even be an illusion, as EVEN OUTSIDE THE GAME, the forces of this world have engineered behaviour through subtle psychological control, something the game will go on to thematise).
When you have finished explaining all of the METHODS for each of your REASONS, what I want you to do now is this: ABSTRACT the method in such a way that you describe what the game did without actually mentioning the game, the specifics of the characters/moment, or anything that identifies what it was at all.
For my Bioshock example:
ABSTRACTION:
You have a general type of destructive action you have to engage in throughout a game that’s always signposted by an explicit instruction.
In a particular section, a particular individual attempts to control and restrict your ability to engage in your usual gameplay, while treating you badly in an unlikeable sense. This individual enforces a secondary objective that must always follow your destructive act. This new objective is creative instead.
When our restrictions are finally removed, the individual who tries to control us is presented in the same type of environment where we would usually be given a destructive command. We do not entirely know if the game will allow this destructive action to actually work, and may doubt this, as usually the game makes it clear for big named characters that a ‘death’ is mandated or possible.
If we do engage in this destructive act, and then follow up with the creative action, the game acknowledges our behaviour, revealing that it has anticipated we might once more follow the instruction.
This links to a central theme of the game, without making that link clear.
If you repeat all of this for each of your REASONS/METHODS? You have now created a giant menu of systems and possibilities you clearly really enjoyed and which mattered to you in games you have played. You will understand why you like a lot of what you like: and in future, you can start purposefully embracing these elements.
SOME POSSIBILITIES FOR FUTURE USE:
CONSIDER AS INFLUENCE:
You can use these abstracted methods as inspirations for your own story. There is no problem with this whatsoever, as artists throughout history have similarly deconstructed other works to figure out what they would like to experiment with. In your own style with your own story and characters? It will likely become its own completely unique thing, but channeling a core initial spark you’re carrying from your own narrative enjoyment.
CHANGE THE CORE:
From my example above? I talk about destruction → creation as a loop. What if there are different types of actions in this sequence?
How would this affect things if, say, I generally engage in flirting in a dating sim?I could combine my typical action of ‘flirt’ with something that feels like its opposite, I could be strongly encouraged to destroy potential romantic interest purposefully. How then could I create such a situation where the player might be encouraged to finally flirt with the person who had put them up to such cruel behaviour, and then throw that cruelty back in their face? Experiment!
CREATE CHIMERAS:
If you have totally different abstracted methods throughout your table? Pick random combinations and see if it’s possible to not do both at the same time, but take elements from both and form a single new method that doesn’t resemble either one.
So, I have that destruction-creation example from above. Let’s say another method in my table involves the opening of Bioshock, where pithy philosophical remarks in worldbuilding and audio tapes create a very rapid, effective, interesting world I want to know more about. I might think, how could worldbuilding in the environmental detail and/or in lore objects engineer as complex emotional behaviour as the destruction-creation loop did, in the same kind of manner that loop did? A difficult feat! But one worth exploring!