Contrastive Juxtaposition: Contrast and Context in BioWare Story and Cinematics

[Music] good afternoon everybody it's a great pleasure for me to introduce our speaker for this afternoon session Jonathan Perry when he sent this proposal to the Advisory Board I thought now I can finally find out why I'm in love with lay Lana so my goal for this entire presentation was to figure out how he made me fall in love with his characters and really care about them and worry about them I've seen the presentation is gonna be fantastic this is his first presentation and his first one at GDC of course so I ask everyone to be really gentle you give them an amazingly high score so they comes back and does this again because I think this is gonna be a real treat all right Jonathan thanks a lot for coming so just a few reminders before I get started please we could silence your cellphone's and keep an eye out for the email that they send to give me a review

probably end up in your spam folder so I definitely check that out so let's get started my name is Jonathan Perry I'm a lead cinematic designer or a cinematic lead at Bioware in my time at Bioware I've worked on Mass Effect 1 & 2 I've worked on all the Dragon Age titles as well including a lot of additional Dragon Age DLC so this talk is called contrast and juxtaposition and contrast of juxtaposition is really just a fancy term for putting two things that are completely different right next to each other to create a dramatic effect and it's an effect that we use in our scenes to create these powerful and emotional moments in our games it involves a dramatic reversal or a rapid shift in the audio narrative or visual polarities so to give you an example of what I'm talking about I'd like to show you a scene from the very beginning of Mass Effect 2 and to set the scene the Normandy is under attack from a collector ship most of the crew is either dead or has escaped and Joker is the only one left on board and Shepherds trying to get him into an escape pod

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[Music] so this scene was a really powerful and emotional moment for me in the game and part of it was because I just lost a character that I had spent 40 or more hours with in the previous game saving the galaxy but it was also the manipulation of contrast in context in the scene that really made it hit home for me the quick shift from being alive to dead was also supported by a dramatic shift in the audio and the visuals as well so we'll talk about creating the timing and the content for these types of moments we'll also take a closer look at contrast in context and how they can be used as creative tools throughout the development process to make your scenes better so I'll start by talking about the role of story and cinematics at Bioware so a bit about the people and the processes involved then we'll talk about contrast in context why they're

important and how they can be used to impact the player experience from there I'll discuss how contrast can be used to create strong story themes and a narrative possibility space how content teams can use contrast to create content that supports those story themes and how content or how context can be used to create a more meaningful experience for the player so be spoiler alert I'll be using a lot of great examples from Dragon Age and Mass Effect but I will be talking about Mass Effect 3 a little bit I've tried to keep this a spoiler light as possible if you've played the demo or you've seen the trailers you've already seen a lot of what I'm gonna show but if you're one of those people who doesn't want to hear anything doesn't want to see anything I'll give you I'll give you a heads-up before I spoil any plots for it consider yourselves warned so as most of you already know stories a huge part of Bioware games our goal is to create the best story driven and emotionally engaging games in the world and to that end we have a lot of storytellers if so

if you look at the make up of some of our design teams on Dragon Age 2 or Mass Effect 3 you see we've got a lot of combat designers systems designers but about half the team is made up of storytellers so writers editors cinematic designers and when I talk about cinematics I'm not just talking about the pre-rendered scenes that you see in the game we do those too but every single line of cutscene is a cinematic as well and by wars a bit different from most studios and we have two cinematic teams we have cinematic animators cinematic designers so the cinematic animation team is the one that most studios however familiar with they create the biggest and most complex moments in the game so scenes like the dragon fights and dragon age the epic space battles in Mass Effect 3 they also do a lot of the complex character interactions or introductions to your possible companion characters as well as a lot of the highly choreographed combat scenes ambient kill scenes those types of moments in the game now cinematic designers on the other hand work on the interactive moments in the game the

interactive conversations and cutscenes and we create these using a massive library of animations we also work very closely with the writers throughout the development process to develop the narrative flow of the game and we designed the tools for generating and iterating on massive amounts of high-quality interactive content very quickly so between the two teams we end up creating about 30 hours of cinematic content for an average Bioware game and we try to use all these principles I'll be talking about throughout the development process on all of this content so here's a very basic model of how we create the story in the cinematics for our game so the writers create the story the content teams then create the various assets that we need to tell that story and then the cinematic teams put it all together to create the cinematic experience so we'll refer back to this model but as we go through the presentation but first I want to take a closer look at contrast in context how they work why they're important and how

they're usually create meaning and shape the player experience so I think the picture on the right is one of my favorite pieces of concept art from the Dragon Age franchise and it's a great example of contrast because in the same image you see light and dark life-and-death gentleness and brutality and it's beautiful but it's sick and I love it it's great it feels important it feels meaningful there's a story here but why is it that this contrast gets our attention oh because like it or not from an evolutionary point of view we are hardwired to notice contrast or change in our environment it's a survival instinct really seeing the orange line in the green field or hearing hearing the twig snap in the dead of night or the smell of smoke in the air can alert you to danger in the environment and it can often mean the difference between life and death no to see in this contrast it's a good thing it's a built in spidey sense and we use

this attention to contrast all the time for survival but we have a hard time not noticing contrast so it's great to use for advertising your product getting it to stand up off the shelf getting somebody to pick it up and play it but in pretty media this contrast occurs all at once but when somebody's picked up the game or is watching the movie the rules of contrast change in a narrative audiences like to see characters undergo transformative change or have a change on the world around them over the course of the narrative we love seeing characters get thrown into these unfamiliar situations struggle to adapt and survive and learn something in the process now when talking about contrast or change in a narrative narrative I like to think of it in terms of polarity it's still about the difference between two things but it takes that difference and applies it to a two dimensional coordinate system so we have positive and negative polarities and these could be anything a good versus evil is one we're all familiar with light side versus dark sides one of my favorites but they don't have to fit the pattern of a good'n bad or good and evil they

just have to be different so up versus down left versus right these would all work - now visualizing contrast with a polarized system it makes it easier to see the movement over time clarity creates conflict or struggle between two opposing forces and allows us to see not just that a character is changing but that they're changing in a direction so - we're away from a certain state of being over the course of the narrative and if we want to track this we can kind of change our model a little bit and and track this shifting between polarities over time so those players in a game we like to be the ones that are driving that change in our character or the world around us we want to choose how to play what side to align ourselves with who lives and who dies so we want to be the one that's driving that change so polarities or contrast is an important part of all narratives because it allows us to create these characters with different personalities beliefs and values and instead difference between these characters that creates conflict and that conflict

motivates a need for change or action so everyone's familiar with this Xena if you played Mass Effect one but this struggle between polar opposite forces creates suspense and drama we all want to know who's gonna win who's gonna live who's gonna die what happens next so let's take a closer look at context now what somebody asks you what a word means the usual response is well what's the context meaning what's around it because what's around something can have a significant meaning on that experience or on that theme or an influence on the meaning so the picture here on the right an example of the Kuleshov effect and in this experiment the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov created a montage first he showed a bowl of soup then he cut to a reaction of a man's face he showed a child in a coffin and showed the man's face they showed a woman lain seductively on the couch and then he cut back to the man's face now the audience who watched this experiment or this this piece of film were asked to comment on

the actors performance and they loved it they raved about it what a brilliant performance subtly magnificent you could see the hunger when he saw that bowl of soup and Oh a sadness that sadness we saw that child in the coffin and all that lasts in his eyes when he saw that woman but really it was the same expressionless face the guy every single time so this just shows us that the audience perception of the actors performance and what it meant was heavily influenced by the surrounding content so the Kuleshov experiment demonstrated that the context of an experience can often hold more meaning than the content of an experience so it was a bit hard to see it in the previous example so I'd like to show you a more modern example of this effect as demonstrated by Alfred Hitchcock [Music] and how it can be changed to create the

different eyes closed up let me share what I see let's assume he saw a wolf holding a baby now we come back to his reaction to what I see and he smiled now what is he is a character he's a kind man he's sympathetic now let's take a little piece of film away the woman with the child but as they were he looks though it seems like that is a

little out of sync but you get the idea by changing one image in a sequence of shots you can change the meaning of that entire sequence in this case he loves babies or is a dirty old man so we do this alone by our games and the image or the sequencing we kind of swap out is influenced by your previous decisions creating a more meaningful and personal experience for the player so we'll talk about some additional forms of context in a bit but the important thing to keep in mind here is that we can manipulate the order or context of events to enhance meaning or create meaning that would not have been there otherwise so now that we covered some of the basics of contrast in context I'd like to take a look at how we can apply these ideas to improve our story and content in our games so contrasting contexts are used as creative tools when developing a strong narrative theme for your game and to start to fill out that world with characters and missions that the player can explore through choice so the first

thing we try to do when working on a new game is to identify the theme of the game so if your game is more than just a bunch of mechanics holding hands what do you to mean if your game has a story what is the story you want to tell so this can be hard but it's important to establish these themes very early because they can inform design further down the line and this is hard the way I like to think of it at first is verses so something versus something someone versus something in the case of Dragon Age would be great wardens versus the darkspawn or in Mass Effect Reapers versus humanity so once you've established the mayor major players think about what side each side represents so if your game is about a conflict between two forces what is it there and disagreement over what beliefs ideals or background as each side represent and these can be deeper or more abstract themes that don't necessarily have to fit into the pattern of good versus evil right versus wrong so for example in Mass Effect 3 humanity represents innocence free will and of

course of chaos in the world whereas the Reapers represent Authority determinism and wanting to restore order and we start to explore these themes with content very early in the game starting with the first shot in Mass Effect 3 so let's take a look so we start with this boy playing with his toys ship but it's more than that this is the only child we've ever seen in the Mass Effect universe he stands out by contrast and that's a good thing he seems important because we want this boy to represent something we want him

to represent humanity he's young and innocent he's got his whole life ahead of him to make decisions make choices to shape his own destiny and then we cut to shepherd watching so this is really similar to the Hitchcock clip that we watched earlier we see a boy playing we cut to Shepherd and she smiles so what does that say about her as a character that says she loves humanity and she wants to protect it and we see this as we kind of go through the opening of the game the Reapers attack she tries to coax this boy out of a vent and then later she watches him board this shuttle to get out of the city and by this point you realize that this boy represents everything you're fighting for everything you're going to spend the rest of the game fighting for him so we explore similar themes in Dragon Age 2 themes like free will versus fate being an individual versus being part of a larger community and the balance between freedom and security so early on look your game think about what are the different sides what do they represent when establishing the major conflicts and story themes of your game so we also use contrasting context when starting to

create the world and flesh out the world of our games and when doing this it's important to think of contrast or polarity as a meta pattern it it exists on all these different levels in your game so think of all these levels when trying to build out your IP or build out your story in even if conflicts or struggles on certain levels aren't necessarily central to your game they can be really useful for creating context explaining why things are the way they are why people behave the way they do and so going through this you could have polarized states of reality in Mass Effect 3 shepherds fighting a war against the Reapers in reality but also explores the world of her subconscious through her dreams at a galaxy level the entire galaxy is engaged in war with the Reapers but within that galaxy we have world and polarized conflicts between these worlds for example between the Krogan z-- and the Solarians within every world you have conflict between groups for example the mages versus the Templars and Dragon Age 2 and within every group you have polarization within these smaller groups for example the mages in Dragon

to represent a larger group but within that group you've got circle mages blood mages apostate mages all kind of doing their own thing all having their own goals and agendas there's also individuals that compose every group and they represent various polarities in our game every companion character stands for or against something so there's different personalities represented in clashes and goals beliefs and character and an inevitable and this makes for some really great content the banter between the different character combinations and Dragon Age is hilarious because it draws so heavily on this contrast of juxtaposition of characters at odds with each other for comedic effect there's also conflict within every individual so Fenris for example hates mages but he also hates slavery so what do you do when you see a bunch of mages being enslaved so within an individual there can be a struggle between revenge and forgiveness love and hate trust and suspicion so think of all these different things this is also there's polarities within the player who does support or oppose who lives and dies

you're gonna play a Paragon are you gonna play renegade so we let the player influence the world around him through these choices and as much as possible we want these choices to be meaningful and to have a real impact on the world or the people around you no previous Mass Effect games the player usually had these Paragon neutral or renegade options in any situation and we love giving players choices but this neutral response is essentially the man of the conversation will it's I don't care what do you guys think I don't know what do you want to do so it didn't do anything to shift the player towards one side of a polarized conflict of the other he just kind of sat in the middle so a Mass Effect 3 one thing you'll notice it's different is in most cases this middle option is gone in this game there's a lot at stake there's a lot of really big decisions to made a lot of really huge consequences so we're not just gonna let you sit on the fence and let somebody else figure it out for you and the interesting thing is that even with this middle option removed it still feels more like a role-playing game choices

are harder and have real consequence the choices are tough so while the player has control over the polar alignment of their own character it's interesting to see the effects that players choice and action can have on the companion characters in the game so every one of these characters has a you any collection of attributes behaviors and values that define them as a character and while these don't change much over the course of time the choices you make as a player influence your relationship with these various characters in Dragon Age Origins for example your followers had very clear opinions on what was wrong or right and these didn't really change much over the course of the narrative when you were making a major decision they'd let you know how they felt about it what they thought you should do and based on how you responded you would either get approval or disapproval points from each follower high approval points improved the followers combat performance in the game would open up the door to a possible romantic relationship with some characters and people with a low approval rating might leave your party so we use Mike this is for you buddy the players relationship with Leigh

Liana my my relationship with Leigh Liana is a great example of how different things could be in a great example of contrastive juxtaposition in the narrative so lately and I lately Anna and I we were in love I gave her all these gifts I had high approval rating through the roof and I was totally romancing her but one decision I made in the temple of sacred ashes she really disagreed with so strongly that she came at me and in a fight to the death I had to kill her and this is great contrast of juxtaposition she went from my friends to my enemy and alive to dead in this that moment the player of oh my god what have I done i reloaded so back to the approval system as this polarized system overall it was very clear and it worked very well so disapproval is bad approval is good the system worked well it was clear and

players understood it some players felt like the system kind of limited the choices they could make they everybody wanted high approval ratings from their followers so sometimes they felt like they couldn't choose what they wanted to they had to choose what the followers that were they were with them wanted or that they could only take along the followers on the quest they would agree with whatever decisions they wanted to play it a style they wanted to play him so we wanted players to feel free to make their own choice and so we tried to tweak this a little bit in Dragon Age 2 so we created this friendship and rivalry system and the idea was similar players or followers would move towards one side of the other of this scale based on whether they agreed with your actions or not the difference here was that rivalry wasn't bad achieving a high rivalry value with your follower character triggered this dramatic conversation where you hash out your differences agree to disagree I don't like what you're doing but I respect you type of thing and it would open up those combat perks open up the door to these romantic relationships your your relationship with this player character would improve as a result of this big

argument so high friendship and high rivalry we're both good but players were used to the old system from Dragon Age Origins and didn't really understand that rivalry wasn't bad and looking back at it it's easy to understand why because we presented it as this polarized system except in this case friendship and rivalry were both good and okay it's bad to be in the middle but the color scale on that it kind of looks like the old Paragon renegade system and and so we can see how players got confused so the important thing here is when creating this these polarized systems or things that look like polarized systems make it clear your player what the different sides are what they do especially if the systems change from a previous iteration so we also use contrast when designing the missions or the quests in our games now once you know the plot of a mission or this could be applied to a conversation and act the entire game a great exercise is to map out the narrative beats so you can see these little ticks on the bottom of this image so pick one your polarities and think

about what side you want the player to be exposed to at any point throughout throughout the mission of the game at each of these narrative beats so whether it's how you want them to feel or what side of a conflict you want them to identify with or to expose them to and then we can make sure we expose players to both side of in a polarized conflict before letting them choose which side to align themselves with and we've been trying to get away from these good versus evil type of choices really we want to give you a hard choice shades of grey we want to make you pick between shades of grey there is no right or wrong but you've got to choose anyway so this exercise is great for making sure that each of these different sides of a polarized conflict gets a proper exposure and this back and forth between polarities also does a great job of keeping players engaged all right so this is a part if you won't have to close your ears or their eyes don't listen to this if you don't want to spoil for it's really not that bad but so we're gonna take a look at a mission from the middle of Mass Effect 3 now if you've played the demo you'll know that one of the missions involved helping

ward and escort this female Croghan out of a Silurian facility because she represents a possible cure for the genophage which has been a huge issue since the beginning of Mass Effect 1 so in this later mission you have to help Morden get this female Croghan to the shroud facility on tachanka to release this cure into the atmosphere curing the genophage so that the Krogan will join you in the war against the Reapers but before setting off on this mission you get a secret message letting me know that there's a secret way to sabotage this cure in such a way that the Krogan will never know so the Krogan will think you help them out they'll help you in the war but the genophage should still be in place so at this point you don't have to decide but you know you have two options you can sabotage a cure or cystic Rogen's so to make it easy to chart this out over our narrative map we can put the action events that supports sabotage and they cure on top and the events it some support assisting the group on the bottom or on the top these roughly correspond to Paragon and renegade options so we'll track it like that

so on the way this Croghan leader who's kind of helping you out he's all about getting revenge on the Solarians after today the Krogan superior is gonna be program superiority will be obvious to everyone so he's already planning his revenge you meet up with a bunch of other programs and they start fighting amongst themselves even though they should be working together towards this common goal you see how vicious and cruel these Croghan czar to each other so this point the player is thinking maybe maybe sabotaging the The Cure isn't such a bad idea but then this female Croghan comes out she gets him to stop fighting the groups unite you load up you're all out the music is inspiring let's do this thing right on the way there she's telling Reeve we need a leader who's not focused on on war we spread war across the galaxy before and the genophage was a result so we needed to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors or it'd be doomed to repeat them okay awesome maybe all these Croghan need is a strong

female Krogh and keep them in line keep them in order unite them as a group so I could see how this could work maybe yeah maybe helping him out it's not such a bad idea after all but Reeves not behind it so he's still determined to get revenge you step outside and look around you and you see how destroy the world is how the program's grew tired of a peaceful life and started nuclear wars with each other destroying their world long before the Solarians implemented the genophage okay hmm but then we also show the player that Crow goons were once a peaceful in advanced society they weren't always creatures of war and you can see this in their architecture and their art so there's a sense of wonder here a sense of history and you can imagine how things were long ago and might be again so I'm gonna stop spoiling this for you but there's a lot more I won't spoil but I you can see how we exposed a player to both sides of a polarized issue before making them choose how to align themselves and and these are tough

choices eventually you've got to make a decision you've seen how vengeful and vicious these Croghan can be how they've waged wars against each other destroy their own world but you've also seen how hard they fought for their future what they had been and could be again and how strong female Croghan might just inspire them to a peaceful greatness once again and so now you have a narrative map that you can use when working with the content teams so you can start thinking about how you can use various contents to support the different sides of these polarized issues so moving on to creating the content and once you've established the high level story theme in polarities you want to create content that supports them so this is all about creating the language with visuals and audio to develop unique identities for the different sides of the conflict for the various people in the place that you'll encounter over the course of the game and you also want to think about how the visual or audio design can change over the course of the narrative and provide

feedback to the player about the state of the world and how it's reacting to your choices as a player so now when I talk about content I'm talking about the vo the character is Louisville animation sound effects music visual effects all this stuff there's a lot of content that goes into the creating the experience so at this point good communication is essential this process can end up being a bit like a game a telephone where from the story side things are pretty clear but once it goes out to the different content teams and it goes through their various pipelines and workflows the message can get diluted or lost in translation and it's often the case that when it comes out on the other side and we combine it together to create this experience all these asses aren't telling the same story so it might be that the tone of the music or the vo isn't right for the scene or a character's appearance doesn't accurately reflect their personality and when it doesn't work it's really obvious here's a great example from Dragon Age 2

legacy DLC this character was low rious and he's an old grey warden commander who goes off to the dark to the deep roads on his calling to die fighting darkspawn except he doesn't really die he just gets corrupted enough that they leave him alone so he's left to wander around slowly losing his mind okay okay yeah I got it I got it so we go off and somebody records the animation for him somebody else records the vo for him and the character team is working on his character and it wasn't until we put it all together that we realized how wrong we were how different our understanding of who this character was so he's hobbling around like the spry young monkey and he's talking mica we either and he looks like this nuclear fallout victim and put it all together and it was wrong it was all wrong so we ended up having to go and rerecord the animations we had to get any mocap we had to go and rerecord the video we had to tweak his character and we ended up turning a lot of time and money to fix this problem so what could we have done

differently how could we have done this better surely a more documentation write more documentation 'he's always the answer wrong so sometimes excessive documentation can be the problem it buyer where we are occasionally guilty of writing narrative overviews like george RR martin rota choose your own adventure book so i once made the mistake of printing these narrative overviews out i've got a little time to do a bit of light reading right and the resulting stack of papers was absolutely overwhelming and it's now there i realized that maybe i have to read through this but a lot of the content developers and creators aren't going to read through this massive stack of papers so they're gonna remain unaware of the central themes of the game so it's said they'll kind of resort to creating content that's cool and cool content is cool right but it doesn't necessarily support the theme of the game as well as it could now we could have avoided this whole catastrophe if we just spent five minutes and used contrast to talk about where the

character sat between these different polarities the process is really about communication and making sure that everyone understands what something is and what something is not now we want everything to support the story the team's responsible for telling the narrative the audio and the visuals and the gameplay elements should all be telling the same story with their work so communication is obviously key here and it's not just about communicating more information but about boiling that giant stack of papers down to easy to understand ideas so the idea is to keep it simple right when communicating the story vision with the content teams you want to be able to give them a clear idea of the players the polarities that you want to explore and then let them decide how to support those narrative polarities with polarities within the disciplines so artists can use visual polarities to support the narrative themes and this goes back to the basics of visual design does the villain dress in black does the good guy wear a white

hat so getting back to the basics you want to be able to see a character and immediately know and have a good idea of what he represents who they are and what do they want so familiar saw familiarize yourself with the basic visual components visual design and how they can be used to tell a story or convey emotion so visual components like line color shape space movement tone rhythm think about what each side represents and how they can support narrative polarities now it's kind of meta here but uh the opposite of contrast is affinity so sometimes it's not about making things look different but making different groups look like they belong together so for example we used color shape and patterns to make these different groups of Templars or Grey Wardens kind of look like they belong together a great example is the darkspawn in Dragon Age Origins they all look really cool but they were all very different they didn't really look like they belong together and we wanted them

to seem like they they should be together like a family so we used tone and color to make these guys look like they're they belong in a group in Mass Effect 3 it's immediately clear who the bad guys are if you see these little glowy blue dots and it's running out you start shooting or get the hell out of there now visual polarities are also great for showing character progression or for externalizing the interior qualities of a character this is a great example from Mass Effect so if shepard plays as a thinking sympathetic paragon he looks more human whereas if he plays more renegade thinking or not thinking more logical and unfeeling he starts to look more like a machine as skin starts to split revealing these cybernetics beneath and this is great because it reflects that larger story theme of humanity versus Reapers or humanity versus technology and think about how color can tell a story for example the in a scene could represent danger or think about how the polarities of light

and dark can tell a story in this case transition from life to death so the same thing with audio polarities think about the basic audio components whether it's volume pitch speed rhythm so figure out what the polarities are and think about how they could be used to represent the different sides of the story things like all these and in Dragon Age 2 we use the pleiades of known versus unknown when doing the ambient sound design so for example we wanted Kirkwall to feel like your home it's a familiar place you spend a lot of time there we want you to feel safe there so the ambient sound design is full of real and familiar sounds kids playing dogs barking merchants shouting but by contrast when you venture outside of kirkwall the locations are full of unreal and otherworldly sounds it's strange and unfamiliar it creates this sense of danger in comparison same thing within music using rhythm and tone in the music to represent the different sides of a polarized conflict like the Templars versus the mages and Dragon Age

then the music changes as the player compete completes quest for the different sides it has a mystical sound when pursuing these major related quests in a more structured ordered militant sound when pursuing Templar related quests so I love working in cinematics because we get to take all this great meaningful content and put it together and then we add our own layer of meaning on top the camera can tell a story - and - powerful tool in creating an experience so things like the camera angle lens shot composition camera movement these all tell a story so again it's important to understand what the different cinematic components are and how they can be used to create meaning or support the story that you're trying to tell for example the camera angle can make a character look weak and vulnerable or powerful and oppressive in this case it again reflects the larger theme of humanity versus the Reapers just tilting the camera can make a can't make a world seem chaotic get out of balance a close-up is personal while

long shot feels detached and we can combine these elements to create more complex shots more complex emotions in this case a feeling of detachment or distance from your character in this world that's out of balance so we can also use a spatial context to add meaning through Locke people call this environmental storytelling so with Dragon Age 2 we wanted to give the followers their own space they could further reflect their personalities for example we've got Barret here and he's got books behind him he's a storyteller and that reflects that him sitting in this chair kind of mirrors him sitting in a chair telling more stories in an interrogation room in the framing narrative and this is fun this is a lot of fun it's a great example of working with your level artists to tell a story outside of dialogue so Thames for example is this badass lizard assassin and so we stick him in this Assassin's aquarium with these fluorescent lights and guns everywhere and the environment

around the player conserve to remind them of the things they've done the adventures in the quests that they've already gone through so now you've got used now that you used contrast in context to create your story to create content that supports that story in the narrative themes of your game you can put them all together and everything's telling the same story right well when this works it is absolutely amazing there's a dream sequence in Mass Effect 3 and it's very emotionally powerful and it stuck with me for a long time after playing the game and in contrast to the real world this green world is d saturated and foggy your movement is slow and heavy the sounds are strange and the music is haunting and it really stands out from the rest of the game because the narrative the visuals the audio in the cinematography you're all working together to create this experience for the player now we also use reflective context to further shape the player experience we want your current experience to be shaped by your previous choices and actions so this

takes a person or it takes a player experience and makes it a personal experience and that's how you take players and turn them into fans so for example your experience of the genophage mission I described earlier it could be completely different if you didn't kill Rex in Mass Effect 1 it's pretty hard not to kill Rex and so if he's still alive it means that you pursue this relationship with them you've got a strong relationship with them you underst dan how he thinks how he feels a bit more about the Krogan history and how he could potentially be a leader so it definitely has an impact on that experience of that mission so your previous actions also influenced the choices that you have in future conversations we've got thousands of choices in our games and every one that you make opens up or closes off future choices so some people occasionally lament the lack of choices but not realizing that the choices available to them at any point in these bioroid games are based on how they've been playing the game so far now we want you also to see your choices reflected in the cinematics and this is something that we

could have done a lot better and Dragon Age Origins if you've played it you might be familiar with the murder knife now this was this kind of weird wooden handle dinky kitchen knife and various points throughout the game you had this opportunity to kill various NPC's for whatever reason and when you did so I always wanted to kill him with this giant two-sided axe with purple electricity and flames shooting out that I've been carrying around for like twenty levels but when I killed this guy I kind of pulled this knife out from behind my back and you throw it or swing in or we had all sorts of these scenes and it was really a missed opportunity to do something unique and show the player killing a guy in a way that was consistent with how he had built his character and how he been playing the game so far so for Dragon Age 2 this is really important to me to fix this and allow the player to kill somebody with their weapon in a way that was consistent with their character how they been playing the game so far so just as an example

you can definitely see the results in Dragon Age 2 and the Dragon Age 2 DLC this is a few examples of a cinematic kill scene where you take out a boss in various ways depending on whether you're an archer a rogue or a mage so this creates a very personal experience for the player which is much much much more satisfying now we also use temporal context to help shape the player experience now in Bioware games in particular you have a lot of freedom in where you go what you do what order you do things in so when working on any conversation or cutscenes we have to be aware of well what does the player already done what does he still have left to do what does he know what does he not know at any point in the game and sometimes timing is important in Mass Effect 2 if you don't go save your crew fast enough after they get kidnapped by the collectors a lot of them died including Kelly chambers who's gonna feed your fish now so this is also important when creating the DLC for a Dragon Age 2 because the player can play

this DLC at any point in time in the main game they can play knack of 1 act 2 or act 3 during the main playthrough and a lot of consideration had to be given to what was a player's previous experiences and how could they shape the current experience so just as an example in the Dragon Age 2 DLC Legacy Hawk learns a bit about the true nature of his father and it was really important to us that Hawk be able to have this discussion with his mother to talk about what he had discovered but depending on when you played this DLC in relation to the main game Hux mother could be alive missing or dead so we had to figure out how to make this scene in all these different cases and make it meaningful so in the case of hawks mother being dead we set up the scene we use these cinematic polarities to create this effect where it's really hawk having this conversation with a memory of his mother and this allows us to add more emotional weight to the scene now occasionally players are able to play through your content in a way that you might not have expected in Dragon Age

Origins the party camp was this safe place where you could go in a quicker gear chat with your followers pursue romances and it was a safe place you never got attacked in the party camp except for that one time we thought it'd be cool to attack in the player camp right so you get attacked you take out these bad guys and you're covered head-to-toe in blood but you just kind of go back to business as usual chatting with your follower a swapping gear pursuing romantic relationships and these romantic relationships they take a lot of time to get to so we wanted these to be sweet and sensual there's there's a nice romantic music plane but in this case in this case you were covered in blood so what was supposed to be this sweet romantic scene ends up just being disturbingly bizarre and hilarious because of what the player had done previously and this is not what we want it's what I wanted when I created this scene it was all wrong so the lesson here is when you craft these key moments in your game just be aware of what the

player might be able to do before and how it could potentially sabotage your efforts so back to contrastive juxtaposition so now that we've talked about contrasting context when creating your story your content and your cinematics how do we use all these together to create these powerful emotionally engaging scenes so first I'd like to give you kind of a simple example of contrast of juxtaposition in music now normally I wouldn't suggest this when showing a clip from the show but pay close attention to the dialogue especially towards the end [Music] what [Music] just better to start rocking or I'll really give them some of the crime [Music]

[Music] [Music] well if they didn't have like a part of the song that sucked so it's a pretty silly example but I think you get the point I'm trying to make it demonstrates this basic concept of how the juxtaposition of these two contrasting elements in this case the soft version the hard course can have an emotional impact on the viewers and I love this idea that if they didn't have

a part of the song that sucked then maybe the other part wouldn't be as cool now obviously none of us want any part of our games to suck but it just speaks to the fact that you can't necessarily crank it up to 11 and leave it it's that back and forth between contrastive elements that grabs your attention and holds your attention and sometimes you need that slow moment that calm moment before the storm for your key moment to really stand out so to do this you have to first identify what those story moments are around that target moment so the story moments in that example I showed at the very beginning is Shepard is helping Joker into the escape pod she gets thrown back by an explosion barely presses that eject button before another blast shoots her right out of the Normandy the Normandy explodes and then she floats off into space to die so if these are the kind of story beats have you're seeing what is the moment that you want to stand out what is the moment you really want to have that emotional impact on the player so in this case

it's Shepard floating away into space to die so if that's your key moment how do you make it stand out and what you want to do is you want to make the lows lower and the highs higher create that strong contrast in the narrative the audio and the visuals around it so in this case we want to highlight this narrative shift from alive to dead then we do that by first showing this massive explosion the big biggest explosion you could have and then immediately cutting to these tiny tiny tiny little VFX in the background and you can kind of see how we might map out that polarity shift now the music completely cuts out as soon as Shepard is outside of the Normandy and the music doesn't come back until the sad piano at the end and sad piano will always make you cry so the sound design in the scene goes from sounds of the world around Shepard to just sounds of Shepard and her suit as she's gasping for air and a single shot we go from a close-up to this wide

shot of creating this feeling of loss of separation from your character and here's that transition and then in the final shot we watched this sunset back behind the planet until the world is dark and this visual polarity mirrors the narrative shift from life to death so now that we've kind of gone over this let's take another look at that scene and see how all these elements work together [Music] [Music]

[Music] so I hope I've given you a better understanding of these different shifts in polarity and why contrast in context are important and how we use them as creative tools throughout the development process when creating the story the content the cinematics and the overall experience for the player so some key takeaways here are identify

your story themes early so you can inform design for the down-the-line keep it really simple when communicating these ideas to your content teams and remember the context can really have a significant impact on the meaning of an experience if you're interested in learning more about narrative visual and audio polarities I'd highly recommend these books the writer's journey by a Christopher Vogler the visual story by Bruce Bloch and sound design by David Sun and shine so that's my end of my talk I hope you got some time for questions if I don't get your question today please feel free to email me or follow me on Twitter and I'd definitely be incident here your feedback