Devising Stories as an Ensemble

[Music] hello GDC hi how you guys look fantastic how are you doing the chatter means you're having a good time wonderful all right before we settle in just some quick words to get yall started uh a reminder that this is being recorded by a very nice camera that's much nicer than whatever you have uh so please refrain from videotaping uh but I will encourage you to take pictures as you'll see uh I won't be doing questions after uh but I will be in the handy wrap-up area just outside uh so let's get going all right uh so before we get started uh here's kind of our agenda for what we're going to talk about uh today we're going to start with surprise a Theater history lesson on the idea of the modern Ensemble then we're going to talk about how to put it into action and

we'll close with a common language to start getting an interdisciplinary group together to tell stories so again before we get started two things we'll be discussing spoilers for these titles and more second thing keep your camera ready for still pictures no videos I'm looking at you uh for slides where there's a lot of text or a critical slide there's a camera up in the corner to let you know to take a picture of this for later and now for me hi my name is Allison lures uh I'm an associate narrative director and theater artist I trained in performance and devising for theater at Western Washington University and performed unscripted theater professionally uh for about 13 years or so while also working as a Game Dev I was on the creative lead of World building at Wizards of the Coast and worked on everything from Magic the Gathering to balers Skate 3 and now I am an associate narrative director for seasonal content on Destiny 2 uh but I am not here to talk about what we make I'm here to to talk about

how why did this skip ahead like so many slides oh my God all right so the story of The Ensemble starts with the true story of how a medium was changed by changing How It Was Made we begin as all dangerous ideas do with two art nerds complaining about brunch it happened inside a busy restaurant in Moscow on June 22nd 1897 at 2 p.m. that day two men Constantine stanislowski and Vladimir nich danchenko sat down to discuss the state of R Russian Theater which was in a heinously dismal State Theater of that time was a lot melodramas were popular at the time so the style is kind of like imagine if Nick Cage's style of acting was the peak of performance uh it wasn't performers inhabiting a character so much as performing emotions uh and it was built

around the star system where entire Productions would be spun up around one single actor again very Nick Cage uh and when Productions were made it was kind of in siloed pieces so the set designer would get the gist of the show and reuse something in storage costumes might make a custom piece for whoever that star is they're building around but everyone else uh kind of gets what's on wardrobe already and staging I got it great idea give us one Flatline so we can see everyone's face Nick Cage Style no depth again it just kind of thrown together right and worse theater in Moscow in 1897 was funded by the ruling class and their tastes even when they weren't terribly informed built and determined what theaters Rose and fell sounds kind of familiar to our industry right in stanislavsky's own words Vladimir like me thought the theater

situation hopeless for the brilliant traditions of the past had degenerated into a plain collection of easy technical devices the theater was in the hands of dilatant and bureaucrats I think we all know a few dilatant and bureaucrats too the conversation at the restaurant was so electric it continued late into the night stanislowski and nich wanted to make sure that actors and designers were Central to the theater both actors and designers they mapped out their values and emerged with a foundation for revolution centered around an ensemble ethos that discouraged individual vanity in favor of creating something collectively with a set group of interdisciplinary artists overtime they started their brunch at 2: p.m. and they talked until 8 the next morning one year later the Moscow Art Theater was born and in stanislavski's opening speech he urged his friends and colleagues to dedicate their lives to creating quote the first rational moral

and accessible theater and it was their Ensemble survived investor changeovers the October Revolution even stanislowski having a heart attack on stage and the troop disbanded after 990 years after it was founded what stanislavski and nich den sheno created that Wild Knight in 1897 was a radical Manifesto on how they wanted to work they wanted a cross-disciplinary group of individuals so a director playwright designers performers to collaboratively create new works uh and they wanted to work over many years of time not just one-off projects and each discipline bore equal weight the sets were just as important as the costumes were just as important as the blocking were just as important as a script because they were all contributing towards the same holistic work and when I say work it's a capitalized W the work is the final

produ product cool but more importantly it's the method of creation and collaboration for this method of Ensemble creation to function the work had to be prioritized the final product sure but how it was made was what matters so departing theater and returning to games for the most part the game industry is already kind of structured This Way Studios of roughly the same people work on many projects over many years sharing the same common goal think how this contrasts with the film industry right where each movie uh has a different group of people who work on it they change in and out but rather than working as a holistic Ensemble we usually work in silos art design narrative audio work separately with each Silo responsible for their own kind of separate thing from the others and there's a lot of Sturm and drying even at this conference over who should start their part first

and who should follow and inside those silos are pyramids with everyone working to support one voice at the top and usually it's that disciplines director right who is in an additional pyramid supporting the vision of a creative director so how do we go from creating game stories where everyone's supporting one voice to creating stories with a system where not only is everyone contributing and supporting everyone else but individual expertise is also shining through to create something holistic so how do we create as an ensemble without it combusting into constant argument uh or one person steering everybody else or devolving into design by committee blah working as a true Ensemble requires a shift in values that everyone has to buy into to make it work the most challenging hurdle that one in blue the no that each of these other ones touches

the one that isn't just faced at the start but every single day is relinquishing control especially as the Director or the lead but what is gained in that trade-off is security trust and the freedom of shared ownership so let's break down these values be kind not nice this is the most powerful rule of Engagement nice withholds a opinions to not cause Strife or make anyone upset it shuts up to protect others feelings but kind knows that we can give and take critical feedback without dealing damage that it's more cruel to let opinions fester and not be shared next up make a case I don't believe in designed by committee uh or democracy but I do believe in designed by conversation so if someone disagrees with the group and cares passionately but the rest of the group is aligned we make space and at the very at least hear them out this is how we resolve

disagreements and if the idea isn't convincing then the rest of us are kind and whoever is assigned to call the shots and there should be someone who is assigned to call shots even in this structure is the one who lets them know everyone gets a fair shake and violent choices uh the majority of poor collaborative experiences happen because someone refuses to make a Clear Choice you Circle the Drain and Wander Way out of gold it's a miserable and uncertain place and I say violence because violence is decisive it is a decision that is when it's made it negates all other options and clears a path forward for everyone now as you work listen for when the time calls for a violent Choice make it and stick to it that's how we can keep momentum and then willing Grace not the TV show uh will is the courage to speak up uh it's to put out an idea to identif ify that no one is doing anything and

take initiative and Grace is accepting what The Ensemble wants letting your ideas go supporting what the work with a capital W needs every Creator must be able to balance both when working collaboratively next you aren't your ideas uh preciousness is dangerous it's fearing not taking feedback it's holding on to an idea simply because it is yours it's creating while holding on to shame I tell our writers room we love bad art we love unfinished garbage we love trash show me your worst writing you've ever done in your life because if you bring it when it's in that stage when it's a thumbnail then we can give the most helpful feedback and to and we do that to emphasize that you aren't your ideas you have the grace to let go of a cool idea when you can tell it isn't going where the work is and an important value of this as well is that an old phrase I learned when I was in college is theater

not therapy know the difference between making something for an audience and making something for yourself uh because the first is a powerful gift and the latter puts your heart on the firing line and finally hold yourself accountable this is the most important one this is the most important value you are responsible for your own boundaries and your own attachment you need to know when to speak up and when to lead with your idea and when to back off and know when your idea isn't fitting unless everyone is holding themselves to the same standard this is how we invite disharmony so in practice those values are what keep effective collaboration from turning into design by committee we don't want everyone's ideas shoved in because that's how we lose focus and direction it's how we make a final product that doesn't say anything but design by collaboration prioritizes the work which remember is is both what we make but more importantly how we make it

we listen to what the work wants and are using will to introduce ideas and Grace to let them go and most importantly again there's still a shot collar here like even though we're working in a very Splat structure when we hit those like 5% of the time when we can't make a decision one person needs to be able to go yep we're doing that one to make sure that things move so finally in our values and most radically sear this sentence into your brains environmental storytelling isn't a strong enough way to describe what I'm talking about every discipline is a vector for story Every Game Dev is capable of telling a story through their discipline and when I say story and here's a free story definition I we were just asked for those when I say Story I mean it in the absolute broadest way possible story as the perceptual ability to see and understand logic systems as an arrangement of collected information woo it's a crunchy one uh and when I talk about narrative in this talk I'm

referring to the discipline responsible for implementation of story through dialogue and systems narrative is something narrative does but story is something all disciplines can do so to reinforce that idea our highlevel story should be broken by the leads of every discipline working together with the writers bring in your design leads your art leads your audio leads your cinematic expert into that writer's room this Probably sounds alarming but having lots of different brains from the very start in that room will build holistic stories it also means early buyin and a sense of ownership from all of those different people it prevents table flipping and seagulling later when you tell them what the story is because they were already in there and most importantly narrative first or design first is a fallacy because great games are made as a marriage of both disciplines and they move as one so now we've got all these different people in a room and we're sharing the

same values now how do we build together using a Common Language so that we can all share and communicate our sister medium of theater already figured this out so let's learn from them and apply the lessons from immersive physical performance into immersive digital performance meet Mary overly she was an American choreographer a dancer and an experimental theater artist the big question that she asked was what are dance and theater made of visual art has a vocabulary to describe it but performance did not so when Mary was dividing up the parts of dance and theater she didn't divide them by choreography set design audio design lighting design costuming she didn't see set design as separate from movement or lighting as separate from costuming but all of them serving a single experience so what she made was called the viewpoints uh Mary later collaborated with my hero uh American director Ann

Bogart in the 1980s and they continued building on this idea of the viewpoints the two worked together and an built on the ideas that Mary overly established when she formed her own Ensemble City company so what Mary and an created was a way to talk about story in an interdisciplinary way they understood that the parts of theater that aren't the script and the set design and the lights and the blocking uh it's all one final holistic experience that we hinder ourselves by thinking that they're separate and so the vocabulary they created is a way for every discipline that we know uh to be able to talk to each other and express story in unique ways that suit everyone's talents so this is vocabulary to teach across your teams because as you'll see it encourages us to think about story using every tool in our toolbox all right here we go we'll start with space uh so space and the viewpoints by the way are broken down into three categories of space shape and

time uh space is unique to Performance and to games because both are mediums built around immersing the audience or player in a shared space physical or digital first up is architecture and by architecture I mean the structures that Define the space we occupy in the game so everything from trees to buildings to Rooms To dungeons in the viewpoints it's all architecture so the Horizon series shines when we see familiar Arch Ure in unfamiliar ways and the moment uh when we swim through the Vegas Strip and emerge at the very end is stunning because it allows the moment to breathe with the architecture here that architecture that shared environmental space is our reward at the end uh and it's a wonderful met visual metaphor for the life that we' brought back to the desert spatial relationship this means the distance between objects in the space so the player to other NPCs or to enemies or to the architect spatial relations conveys a relationship

right uh in this Frame from the first few minutes of jfo who is Cal in relation to that star destroyer we know that they are connected from this framing uh and that the Empire is represented as a dominant figure but very distant and far away it literally Towers over the landscape and thus over Cal both physically and from a storytelling standpoint Topography is the path a player travels uh or a character traverses so what stories can we convey uh through the paths that we travel in season 19 of Destiny 2 there's a secret Quest that leads to a very special surprise paw prints in an area lead away from the main action uh and they follow down and away then really the [ __ ] out of the way and at the end if we got rid of all the security drones we gain access to find a very sweet robot dog at the very end that path that distance

that topography we traveled tells us that this exod doog was supposed to be a secret the computer that runs this place was built to build war satellites and at the very back of the longest path we find the heart that computer kept safe from the world now for descriptions of visuals with an emphasis on bodies yay characters in space shape is how we think of uh shape and visual mediums it's the same thing but with bodies figures so shape is the Contour or outline of bodies in space uh the shape of the body itself or relating to others or the architecture so think of lines and curves angles either stationary or in motion uh so how do we tell stories with shape the cool thing is that it doesn't have to have an inherent meaning so here's a screenshot from immortality uh where we see Ambrosio on his knees leaning at the same heavy angle as the last Tree in Hell the relationship between these

shapes these two bodies it tells us who's clearly in charge here and that Ambrosio and the architecture are telling us that Ambrosio belongs here gesture is a shape with meaning uh so either behavioral gesture uh realistic yeah or expressive well abstract or symbolic so here we see Ellie raising her hands in surrender it's a realistic gesture uh she's conveying fear vulnerability and as the player we know what this gesture means and the fact that she's doing it callus badass Ellie who the [ __ ] is she surrendering to that's a scary moment and another unique to games example of gesture is the gestures we ask the player to do in the physical act of playing our games uh so how impactful is it in this very same game where the player strums their controller like a guitar and what changes when later in the game we lose some fingers and we can't play the same way it's a lot more

powerful when the player is using gesture to tell that story and finally the spicy stuff telling a story with time itself Tempo is how quickly or slowly an action occurs by the player the NPC or an aspect of the environment so we can think of tempo as really fast right like twitch based play hordes of enemies like rapid rapid action but there's a whole other side to Tempo that games has a hard time wrapping its head around sometimes what story is told when we go slow What story do we convey when we want a player to control their pace and ask for Stillness ghost of sushima does a great job of playing with Tempo we shift back and forth between moments of charged Mo action and intentional Stillness them bursting into action once again our Samurai is a master of control and we as players inhabit that play

through that control keeping a lid on it in actual physical play and purposeful Stillness before exploding with directed action this time the game play is the character duration is how long an event occurs over time how quickly how slowly we can stretch out and manipulate time how long the player or NPC maintains a particular movement Tempo or gesture before it changes so our Instinct as designers wants to say well players don't want to spend a lot of time doing nothing but what happens when the duration is the point pendent is a game about history what deserves to be called it and my favorite moment of the game is a moment where nothing happens rather it's a moment at the tavern near a dramatic conclusion where everyone in town gathers to listen to traveling musicians playing performing a song for Christmas the gaml stops the characters settle down to

listen and it's a moment of reflection a pause to look at every single character on screen and know that we're about to make a choice that ruins one of their lives [ __ ] that feeling that exactly kinesthetic response is the players or NPC's spontaneous reaction to a motion that occurs outside of themselves so it's an instinctive response to an external stimulus uh what can we do to elicit a gasp a laugh or cough or an exasperated G and how does instinctual responses in our characters and players tell a story we can also write scenes built around our characters involuntary reactions characters are H are alive I was about to say they're human they're not always human but they respond because they're alive and living in the world and it's infinitely more interesting to watch watch somebody sneeze than it is to watch them say a

prepared line of dialogue so the one is a great example of kinesthetic response because the first time we meet her we we feel her first like in your hands and then we hear a strange noise and if we rewind it out of nowhere a smash edct comes and we can't help but startle but the startle happens for two reasons one that's a [ __ ] solid jump scare uh and in terms of the story it's the gasp of waking up it's alertness it's a mirror of the narrative Revelation that in this story there's someone else just behind me the whole time and finally repetition is one of my favorite tools it is repeating an action Motif visual design music signature or a line of dialogue now at the end of the game control you put into a dreamlike situation as an office worker you're flooded with basic tasks making copies tidying up cof cups emptying bins and the repetition hammers home the titular

concept of the game your actions and thought patterns have shrunk your world down to a small number of actions and you as the player create your own enclosure through repeated actions and finally repetition is one of my favorite tools it is repeating an action Motif visual design music signature or line of dialogue thank you for thank you for suffering that that joke uh comptition can also connect unlike ideas to change its meaning so you press X to kill humans like tons of times in Last of Us Part Two but why is that repetition different when you press X to kill a dog it it'ss different because the action is repeated but the context is altered that repetition and the juxtaposing discomfort we feel as a player is the story so now zooming way back to the start we can imagine being in that

writer's room in that story intensive working alongside our design director our audio director our art director using a shared language now where we can say hey we want this story thing to happen and now there's a vocabulary for that design director to go I can play with Tempo to communicate that or our art director can go I got a good idea for the architecture for this one and now we can start to play off of everyone else's strengths to tell something all right get out your cameras uh so I am going to put up a couple of slides with just like a pile of questions to help uh open up conversations about each of these so uh yeah here's questions you can ask yourselves to start playing with the viewpoints as you tell your stories across disciplines so when you and all those different brains are breaking the story you can ask how does the path a trer a player travel tell us who they are what are we saying when we create distance or closeness between the player and another NP PC how does the architecture support or even lead the

story all right are our gestures realistic or expressive what is the Contour of an NPC in relation to that architecture and what does that mean what gestures are they using how do they know we can see them do their actions change whether they're public or private how might that change what they do and what does that convey and last one I swear most importantly communicating with all the viewpoints demands that we use all the tools in our toolbox if we are a medium where the player experiences time at the same rate as the content then why shouldn't we use time to tell a story what does it mean when we encourage Stillness What story do we convey when we speed up the actions or use gameplay to tell us about how a character feels that's incredible so here we are we have an ensemble each with with a different expertise able to do what they do best

while still being part of a holistic ho communicating in the same language to express it in individual ways working together to create one incredible story and with all that vocabulary those tools those values you now have a way for an ensemble of game developers to start thinking like stanislavski and movich danchenko did because when they prioritized how they made things it changed their entire medium The Ensemble of Moscow Art Theater uh made work in this style that is called realism it was a cool fat at the time uh it's the idea that art should imitate life it should not embody it should embody it not just imitate it that every part of a production should talk to each other uh with set design that feels part of a story with acting that acts like people behaved with words like how people talked and that trend of realism that their Ensemble embraced and made famous in theater carried into a

new medium of the time Cinema and even a century later games the reason that realism still has a hold on our movies our theater our games is because a group of artists in 1897 decided to work the way they wanted to and what they can teach us we can carry forward here into our medium how we work is just as important as what we make thank you thank you so much for your time uh and don't forget to please fill out your evaluations uh I'll be around in the wrap-up area uh for questions so we can talk about collaboration I could give you more Theater history lessons I got I got lots uh thank you all so much for your time have a wonderful

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