Ghost in the Empathy Machine: Exploring Player-Character Connection in Life is Strange: True Colors

[Music] yeah welcome to ghost in the empathy machine exploring the player character connection in life is strange true colors i'm john zimmerman i'm the narrative director at tech9 games thank you so much for coming to our talk especially considering that wordle is happening next door it's pretty cool i would be there right now i'm i'm zach garris uh formerly the chief creative officer at deck 9 and creative director of truecallers i'm currently the vp of story at telltale games so to kick things off we have 30 minutes let's do a brief history of narrative 3000 years ago storytelling consisted of basically one thing it was people hanging out around a fire and a poet singing about stuff that happened

that was inspiring or uh compelling [Music] like achilles or age and the homeric origin 2500 years ago poets realized they could start pretending to be achilles and story became something that was performed yeah there we go and the audience went from hearing someone tell them about a narrative experience to watching a narrative experience unfold and seeing the drama and the comedy on the faces and the body language and the vocal tones of the actors 500 years ago we invented the printing press which led to the novel and now audience members could experience the interior spaces of achilles or any other character and they could imagine what was going on inside the hearts and minds of the characters little over a century ago motion pictures

now we can physically put the audience on the battlefield next to achilles or other things a few decades ago video games and now digital media is something that the audience can directly interact with leading us to games like life is strange so when we're looking at this arc of storytelling's history we just want to call out the movement of the ark as one toward interiority it's toward empathy the audience has gone from hearing someone talk about a story to watching people perform a story to imagining the story from the inside to physically seeing the inside to now through agency participating in the story themselves yeah great so as zach just laid out all of narrative history and really human history has led

us to video games so let's talk about what makes video game narratives distinct it starts with a controller video game narratives are about control we control a character usually and we call that the player character the player character is given tools where they are able to act upon the world we sometimes call these verbs or interacts and the world is usually filled with non-playable characters or npcs for the player character to interact with or against one of the most crucial decisions we make as game writers is the question of prescription how prescribed versus how open is the player character experience so let's look at a spectrum on one end you have player avatar from stardew valley he or she can be molded out of 24 skin tones 73 hairstyles hundreds of combinations of clothing whatever name

you wish and of course dog or cat preference and on the other end of the spectrum you have kratos kratos is not an avatar kratos is kratos you did not customize kratos you do not make choices for kratos kratos verbs are move jump and smash so getting a little more nuanced here is a character like max caulfield from the original life is strange max is obviously a character she's not an avatar but as a character she is designed to be open for how the player wishes to interact with the story she begins the game shy and passive her relationships are mostly blank slates giving us a lot of agency to craft them and her core objectives align perfectly with the players she is seeking to understand the world and the people around her as we are she's confused about her power and wants

to learn more just like us and she's undecided about many things including her romantic entanglements giving us a lot of space to get to make those choices for her now let's compare that to chloe in life is strange before the storm the game we made chloe is far more toward the kratos end of the spectrum than max's and this makes sense because chloe began her life as an npc in the original game she wasn't created with player control in mind instead chloe is really bold and really aggressive and often angry about one thing or another not as angry as kratos but still angry she's opinionated about the people in her life and her backstory the trauma she suffered from her father's death is critical to who she is she's decidedly not a blank slate so despite sharing a franchise the experiences of being max and chloe are

by necessity very different and this was something that we only really came to appreciate as we were making before the storm at a certain point in the scripting process we really faced a choice of whether to soften chloe's personality and try to turn her into more of an open player character or retain all of her personality those those wonderful rough edges and try to find other avenues for bringing the player into the story and you can see which one we chose so it turned out in the end that having a prescribed player character actually wasn't a hindrance it was a massive gift because if we could get the player into the headspace of this very singular character we will have achieved here it comes empathy so how did we do this let's talk about the building blocks

not having a power like max's rewind ability in the first game our tools were very very basic we would explore interact express ourselves and make decisions so explore that's simply pathing around the spaces that chloe lives in the spaces that are important to her interacting with the objects that reflect her personality and being rewarded with her thoughts and sometimes opportunities for action expressing herself through dialogue through dialogue choices and through opportunities for play and then making decisions sometimes big decisions about her personality about her morality about the people she cares about everything the player did in before the storm was filtered through chloe it's why the most important relationship in the game we realized wasn't between chloe and rachel or anyone else in the story it was between the player and

chloe that was the relationship we came to care about the most with every interaction that we built we strove to build out chloe's interiority that's the thing that we focused on and hopefully as we did that we were bringing the character along with her into her headspace cementing that empathic link we were trying to build it's one thing to do that when it comes to elements of the story like rebelling against your mother's dickish boyfriend or falling for rachel amber hopefully most players are going to be ready to go along for that ride but it's more challenging when it comes to a deeper and more complex emotion like grief so that that's the the foundational uh mechanical link between the player and the player character in narrative adventure but we want to focus on something we discovered in before the storm something that ultimately led to why we made true colors at all

and that's a scene we call junkyard smash so this is the end of the first episode it's building suspense chloe just spent the day with the most popular girl in school chloe is 16 her father recently died she's filled with anger she's alienated she's hurt and she just had this magical experience where someone opposite to her in every way took an interest in her life and then they arrive at this junkyard and inexplicably that person turns on her hurts her and abandons her and we enter the free roam space where the player now is on the sticks and has control with the goal stated to them this place we replace traditional verbs that allow for choice in terms of how you want to interact with the world with the loud interior voice of chloe's need to smash things and she really does in fact she begins to project the people in her life that have hurt her the most

on the junk that she finds and she smashes all of it a mannequin for rachel a camera for max it's hard to see but that's a toolbox for david and then something magical happens up to this point the relationship between a player and chloe is one of spectator an angry girl very few players are feeling the rage she's feeling in fact the playfulness of the verbs themselves frame a kind of entertainment from watching her be angry and then she finds her father's car and we just we just found this working on the story trying to come up with what would be the most compelling narrative movement to the scene and that relationship between the player and chloe in this moment shifts

from spectator and subject to a real alignment if people cried and before the storm they almost certainly cried in this scene we take minutes with it we frame it cinematically with the score we show chloe taking in the car and reeling from it and players slide right into that spot and then we gave them another smash and we ask you to pull the trigger and it destroys chloe and when we when we discovered this it really surprised us and we realized that there's a power to interactive storytelling in terms of its ability to engender empathy that we didn't really understand most of the fan letters we get are from people who demographically don't have a lot in common with chloe some of my favorites are from people who

are 50 years old or older men who say their relationship with their father was improved or something they had closure from because of experiencing chloe's journey that humbled us and blew us away and so ultimately led us to wanting to make a game about empathy yeah so we we were fascinated by those letters we received the reactions we received by this extension of empathy to all different kinds of people into as we laid out this really singular character of chloe right not being an avatar not being someone that you craft but someone that you role play and you inhabit so when it came time to concept uh the next game life is strange true colors we started with a set of questions and interests that we carried over from before the storm like what would it be like to experience that

kind of empathic connection in the real world outside of games how would it shape you as a person and what would a power based on empathy allow us to do as storytellers so fast forwarding over many many months of iteration here's what we landed on as before we start with a player character this time she's named alex and the player is going to control her the entire game to interact with the world we get to explore as her hear her thoughts make choices but now we wanted to extend that player character experience outward so we came up with this empathy power for alex that functioned like a prism projecting us through her into the interior spaces of the npcs in the world around her it starts with auras showing us that an npc is feeling an emotion and when we use our empathy power we're rewarded with the npc's thoughts in their voice

about the emotion that they're feeling and we actually discovered something really interesting while we were writing these npc insights players enjoyed hearing them but with all the different voices coming into their head they would begin to feel lost and disconnected from alex and we solved this in a really simple but we think really interesting way which was capping every npc insight with a short follow-up thought from alex sometimes it was just a couple words but it would reflect or react in some way to whatever emotion she just connected with and it was a really small shift but it had the effect of realigning the player to alex it brought them back into her as the player character after they'd taken that journey into a different consciousness together they were side by side again experiencing that emotion together rather than separately so let's look at how that relationship functioned in one of the bigger power moments which we call novas in this scene alex has asked eleanor for

help finding mac uh and at one point eleanor seems to become confused disoriented and she starts eliciting a surprisingly strong emotion of fear so we use our empathy power to connect with that fear and when we do her aura suddenly explodes outward it literally colors the world around her and here's what that looks like when that happens [Music] she looks terrified i can't leave her like this [Music] holy [Music] so uh the only part we missed at the end there was seeing that fear aura

completely project outward seeing it um surround the space and then we go back into a free room and we're exploring the space again right so that's what gives us the entree into exploring eleanor's emotion we're now going to path around and alex and the player are going to be side by side exploring eleanor's fear together so we're going to interact with objects that are connected to it we're going to hear insights and ultimately we're going to be inside eleanor's thoughts and we're going to fill out an understanding of that fear of that emotion of hers now once we've explored eleanor's emotion we come away understanding the cause of it that she's suffering from dementia and she feels her grasp on reality slipping away and hopefully what we were really going for the crux of all of the um sound design the cinematics that you saw was to try and engender some of that feeling that we captured with chloe in the junkyard of not just being the spectator

but participating in the emotional experience except now it's not just our player characters right it's eleanor's we are through alex sharing in a different character's emotional experience we're projecting our empathy outward so now that we've been armed with this connection and this um this empathy for what eleanor is going through we're set up to make a difficult choice on eleanor's behalf alex realizes that eleanor has forgotten her brother's death and is unaware of her funeral of his funeral that evening do we remind her even having felt how much pain that's going to cause her so all the fundamental tools from before the storm we're all there in that experience they're just projected outward we explore another's world we interact with the objects important to them we express through another's voice and we make moral decisions that impact them

we really loved using this power to explore the empathic connections that games can build we loved getting to create power moments like the eleanor power moment and explore something that we would never get to do if we were tied to just one player character experience and when we brought empathy from the meta in before the storm to the plot in true colors we came to understand it far better and explore it far deeper than we did before the more we explored it and the more we read we discovered something else about empathy that really surprised us yeah nobody's complicated who knew that also just side note thanks for bearing with us with the tech i know it keeps cutting out game devs i think we're 99 of the time we spend with tech is broken so maybe it feels familiar did you plan it that way it's not it's not intentional okay yeah empathy is complicated uh we read a lot

uh organizational psychology behavioral psychology social science spiritualists gurus empathy is a bit of a buzzword lately too it's a positive it's not good it's a virtue um i think often when people talk about the positive elements of empathy what they're really talking about is compassion empathy is when someone else's emotional state overrides yours when your best friend is mad at you and they say something dumb from a place of anger what's the best way to react to that it's probably not to immediately be as angry as they are it's equally wrong not to pay attention to what's making them angry but that's the complication that's the that's the thing that really became interesting to us so as often happens with story development the thematic and conceptual exploration ultimately came full circle and influenced the plot and the entirety of the fifth episode of true colors is

about this so when we end four alex gets shot in the head and thrown down a mine she wakes up and she has to in a very surreal series of exchanges perform the empathy power on herself and go through constellation points in her life that have wounded her the most and that have coded her to be the person she is sadness over her mother's death it's the first time we're going to see alex shooting a nova out of her own the terror when her father abandoned her brother and her one of the harder moments in the game alex has to sit in a version of the orphanage she grew up in and watch as potentially adopting parents would approach and she would feel all the reasons they

didn't pick her and she's sensitive i'm sure she's a sweet girl she hears but she's not for us it's the kid who's been in all those fights right there's just something off wrong with her and we watch alex explode in anger i think it's my favorite shot in the game it's really cool why do we do that it's because she needs to face the lies she's told herself because of the wounds she suffered she needs to actually practice a kind of self-empathy and from that place she finds peace she finds what we discovered in research is known as emotional self-integrity she's contended with her demons which puts her in a place where she's actually ready to deal with other

people's and that's what the game became about it's not to say empathy is bad empathy is wonderful it's an extraordinary thing but like most powerful things there is risk associated with it so what does this mean for narrative adventure or empathy and storytelling mlk says the ark of the universe bends toward justice i think the uh narrative arc of story over the last few thousand years bends toward empathy in a certain way we're striving to get closer to each other why do we love stories so much anyway what is it that they provide i think they build maps it's not my idea but a lot of writers think this their maps they show us the way to go they show us how to find peace in our lives that's how a 50 year old man can play chloe

and come away from that experience enriched in his relationship with his dad so john as he often does and has done for years challenged me last night he said the best talks he seen at gdc uh conclude with some kind of call to action and he asked like what's what's our call to action we didn't have one we were just making a presentation about empathy and i thought a lot about it and i don't think it was until right before this talk that i realized what i wanted to kind of end on and i pardon me for how dark this may sound especially when the wordle presentation is applauding right now something i think a lot about as an entertainer and as a game designer is the state of our kids i think our kids are in a certain kind of crisis more than any other generation in history they are involved with tech

they deal with interactive media every day and more hours a day than than we did when we were when we were young and anxiety depression suicidal ideation and loneliness loneliness or at all time highs and i'm not a doctor few game devs are and i don't know the answer to this but surely a part of it has to be that the places we build as devs it's what we do we're builders the digital places we build are places that strengthen they're places that teach emotional self-integrity and from there how to love across difference and how to build meaningful relationships and how to practice empathy in a healthy way that's my hope for what we can do i think that's my call to action

thank you thanks everyone we have lots of time for questions uh so please come ask them i think we have the microphones on both sides oh no there you go okay hi uh my name's eric and i was late but great talk um it's not exactly a question it's more of an endorsement actually i think you guys are doing great work i think i haven't played this game but i really want to as game developers we don't have time to play games and we just spoiled the ending for you no i know right i'm just like holy but um as everyone here uh i have a solution and i'm going to implement it one day and anyone wants to come come along the

journey i actually volunteer on a suicide and crisis hotline and i've been doing that for about two years about it i've got about 500 hours and if the stars align and if everything works out i would like to make some sort of role-playing suicide and hotline game to encourage everyone to have empathy for our fellow human beings and our struggles and uh if anyone's interested in that they can contact me later what's your what's your name my name is eric ciao okay from honor games thank you yeah thanks for sharing any other questions we probably have time for another one yeah um uh great talk um i'm curious like you depict kind of like the inside of the head of very different characters and what was your process to depict them authentically and the state of mind that they're going through yeah i can start on that um

we spend a lot of time a lot of time a lot of thought a lot of reading a lot of talking we have a writer's room there's a talk a few days ago about the importance of writer's room maybe maybe some of you were in that yeah um yeah our experience validates that you need you need a team of a diverse set of experiences and perspectives to come together and consider something as nuanced and important as the topics that we that we hope to to deal with um so i always think about um exploding the idea of write what you know and changing it to know what you write you know as a writer you have to you have to feel uh a sense of not not that you are ever a master with with these topics because how can you be but just that you um

you know that you have immersed yourself to a point where where you feel comfortable being able to um to be in that world and if you don't then you have a writer's room to to help you and and share that burden thank you yeah thank you please hi so uh you gave the example of the junkyard scene where uh what the players doing and what the players feeling doesn't really match what the character's feeling and how that was kind of intentional because you brought it together later on i'm wondering if there were any moments you have in mind where the player was unintentionally not feeling in line with what the character was feeling and what kinds of things you did to address that um i mean the first time we introduced alex's power in true colors it's deliberately uh off-putting strange shocking kind of overwhelming she flips out on anger and

beats a guy up and kind of ruins her day um we were doing that to put the on two levels like on one level you know you're not angry and punching mac you're not doing that that's not what's happening um so you're like what the but then um neither is alex like alex is also like what the hell like what did i just do i don't have control either and i think we found a harmony there we were a little bit concerned at that and there were voices on the team who thought that would be really off-putting but then we just leaned in and we decided that's actually a pretty interesting way to engender a closer connection between the player and alex out of the gate yeah i think also you know we we have different language that we use to talk about this idea like we're always talking about where's the player and where's the player character and how close are they and when are they separate and the answer isn't always that they have to be in lockstep with each other sometimes like i think the junkyard scene is is actually an example of this you can find a greater

harmony by beginning from a place of dissonance because you can't expect the player to be right there with your player character experiencing something difficult or unique right at the beginning of the scene but that's where we get to use our tools and create a sense of play to draw the player into it so i think you know there's almost a musicality to it where you can think about like a dissonance and an assonance that builds over uh the course of of a sequence where you hopefully land at a place that comes together and finds that poignancy i think we have i'm sorry i think we have time for one more question um and then i want to remind everyone i was asked to remind you to fill out your surveys about the quality of the talk and then we're probably going to head down the hallway and hang out in the main atrium area if anyone has follow-ups or questions or want to talk about anything please hey uh i'm blake from gorilla

i just wanted to ask you guys based on my experience building sequences like this and you guys do it extremely well it's very hard to get across exactly the kind of thing you want to get across in the early part of the process when asset fidelity is really low you know you don't have that music yet you don't have that final interaction that you have those animations how do you guys build this stuff what does it look like in the early days to make it sell to get across the idea that it's like gonna be there eventually yeah can i do this one quickly yeah yeah um i think about i use this phrase in the talk deliberately i i think about the the grammar of constellation points what galvanizes the room in an early idea will be one particular moment one concept one thought what if chloe finds her dad's car and everyone's like oh my goodness okay let's start building around that let's build from that if the constellation points are strong and you learn to know and trust your instincts oh this is a good framework then the music that comes afterward both

actual score but also the music of all the artistic elements the performance the actual dialogue all of it it'll be it'll be fantastic and conversely if the constellation points are not clear early on that's really a page one problem and you want to look at that again it takes time i'll just add two like we're very lucky that we have a tool set that lets us script the entirety of the scene so like a screenplay for a movie we can show the power of the scene on the page or if it's not working it goes both ways and and that is the ultimate proving ground right and and that's we encourage in our studio everyone to read the scripts even when they're when they're in their rougher states because we want to use that as kind of the ultimate litmus of like is this hitting people is this galvanizing people do the artists want to make this do the animators want to animate this if not then then we know there's something wrong okay yeah no i just wanted to say that's it we have to go thank you very much

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