The first line I wrote for No Man's Sky
And how to deal with players skipping the story
NOTE: Two places remaining for my upcoming game writing workshop - read testimonials from past students and apply over at https://www.gregbuchanangames.com/teaching
(The first in a loose-knit series of articles touching upon, orbiting, directly addressing, firing nuclear warheads upon, uplifting, resurrecting, gently whispering to, running away from: BARKS AND VIDEOGAME WRITING. I’m going to be experimenting with a faster cadence of articles but divided up into smaller instalments, which fits the sprawling nature of the material AND gets it out into the world faster than my grand magnum opii sitting in my Drafts folder.
We’ll be starting, appropriately, with something that is not a bark at all, but which is going to get us there. Starting, for me, at the very beginning.)
NO MAN’S SKY
The first line I ever wrote for NO MAN’S SKY:
“I demand a place on your throneworld, interloper. Acceptance will grant you the glory of an Exocraft and a Vy'keen Mech-Priest to administer its mass….”Followed by some more dialogue and descriptive nodes, after which, Options: Hire the Technician / Decline the Offer
If you choose accept:
“You are weak and unworthy of my skills, but I have no choice. I will flee to your vile world. I will -- I will become an interloper.”I had multiple purposes in writing this, but one was key: I wanted to be rude.1
When players talk to this character, they want cars. I can write all the story in the world but it will not change that fundamental gameplay purpose. Which means: no-one has to care about anything I say in this section of that game. No-one has to invest in the personality of this character.
It is perfectly reasonable to imagine this in many games, even segments of games that seem primarily narrative driven: the story can feel skippable. Unlike a movie theatre or a novel, you don’t have to be here to give a crap about the made-up scenario, and that’s a perfectly valid way of engaging with the thing.
This means that the job of a game writer is often twofold:
Don’t let overt narrative elements get in the way of the other stuff
Convince players not to skip the narrative elements when you introduce them
So, for this Exocraft technician: I used rudeness.
I took something that is essentially a servile relationship (the guy gives you cars) and:
abruptly (making sure it did not overstay its welcome)
abruptly (introducing an element of surprise)
rudely (invoking a secret of narrative that is as powerful as save the cat)
I managed to create an interaction where YouTubers were indeed mashing through the text but came crashing to a halt and read out the actual words: “weak”, “unworthy”, “vile”. In other routes, you can hit on “pathetic”.
People were not expecting this guy - this guy who is here to give them a car - to insult them.
Typical narrative wisdom holds that there is one surefire way to get people to engage with your story: “Save the Cat”, a term that’s growing as reviled as '“the Hero’s Journey”, but which is often inappropriately used as synecdoche for a larger narrative structure. I’m interested here in the actual “Save the Cat” trope that gives the whole model its name: the idea that a protagonist should do something early in a story that makes them likeable and that non-plot-related altruism is a good vehicle for this approach.234
What’s better than Saving a Cat for invoking narrative engagement?
DEMEAN. THE. CAT.
Click the article below to continue…
(Upcoming: why a version of this in DEMON’S SOULS is one of the best barks I’ve ever seen (yes, a Souls game!); how the absence of many barks in the Souls games (and their presence in Bloodborne) tells us a lot about their purpose and methods of operation; and then, onto the main event — “GRENADE!”)
Added Bonus:
PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER INTERACTIVE EXERCISE
“26/09/24 - The Right Level of NPC”
(For a limited time, available for others to access — these additional exercises will be popping up throughout the Substack for those who take the Workshop or who support the Substack.
The purpose and method: Follow a chain of thought without knowing what all the questions are right from the start. Examine and expose underlying assumptions in the way you think about different concepts, trying new methods and new ways of seeing things.
On submission: You receive your answers in your inbox for reference. For current Workshop students, I will receive the answers also + give feedback and discussion in our channels)
FOOTNOTES:
This led to some incredibly fun questions from localisation, who wanted to know if “mass” meant the physical substance of the vehicle or some sort of religious rite (the answer: yes.)
‘Interloper’ is one of the main things the Vy’keen had said in prior storytelling in the game (along with Grah!). It’s alway fun to use a familiar trope in a new context: having their ‘thing’ be something they direct towards themselves.
I was only supposed to stay at Hello Games for a few days to create this tutorial for a vehicle-based update. I managed to get a time trial mechanic to have a surprise gut-punch when you finally reach the transmission the priest is trying to obtain, with the first ever moral choice in the game.
They let me remain after this, which was very nice of them. I got to work in the original tiny office post-flood pre-move, administering the story mass.
I find it so boring and tedious when I encounter certain vibes of mockery relating to storytelling models online. Yes, studio heads should not inappropriately enforce “Hero’s Journey” on narratives, but as diagnostic tools to test your story structure against, they can be really valuable. Indeed, they’re ignored at your peril: not only were they created as retroactive descriptors for existing storytelling (a pre-internet ChatGPTified version of The Narrative Goo Common To Narratives), but they are often further entrenched once writers start following them on purpose. So? It means that it’s a lingua franca that most audiences are inherently familiar with: not a model we have to follow, but one which we should be very much aware of, as deviations from such models should be made knowingly. Every time we deviate too much from any model — be it a story structure or even a genre model - we are increasing the cognitive load and demands we are placing upon our audience. The audience knows how to “drive the car” of the story, they don’t need to think about it. Changing the norms is like changing up the controls: the audience may figure out the new controls, but they’re not focussing upon the road as much, and this effect can cause a crash if the controls are particularly complicated VS the need to pay attention.
There’s a Frasier Craneish comparison I could make of the Hero’s Journey and its origins as a descriptor being transformed into a prescription, and the way in which Aristotle’s writing on tragedy became a set of rules for the renaissance. Others came up with theories of tragedy throughout time, but there’s only really one useful model that goes beyond and presents an alternative to Aristotle: Hegel’s model, which, we shall go into in the future as this is already a wild diversion of my train of thought - BUT -
Another fascinating model to look at for “things that achieve identification or engagement with character quickly”: Chuck Palahniuk’s idea of expertise. If we learn information that we would actually find interesting/useful in a real world sense, and a character is particularly associated with this, we want to follow them almost by sheer virtue of “what else will we learn?” We value them. See also his idea of “authority speeches”, such as Miranda Priestley’s amazing dialogue on the colour blue in The Devil Wears Prada.