Information Density - How Mr. Robot Does a Lot with a Little - Extra Credits

okay today's episode is going to be a little bit weird because I'm going to use an example from television rather than from games but it does serve as one of the clearest cut examples of what we're going to discuss and as students of design we should be looking to and learning from design in all media not just games so let's do this last time we talked about how important it is to get the most out of every sentence you write in a video game because of how few words per minute games usually get today I want to go over a few techniques for achieving that the first is information density information density is the idea that we can pack layers of meaning into a single element of our narrative delivery whether that be an image a line of dialogue or a song and while this concept is simple in games we use it far too infrequently some of our best game narratives like Silent Hill 2 and some of our best game Mythos like Dark Souls rely on it to be able to condense their worlds and their stories into surprisingly few words so the television

example I'm going to give is called Mr Robot it's fantastic it's certainly one of my favorite shows from last season but there was a moment in it that really made my jaw drop it's the kind of moment that makes James go all right I'm done I quit I'm done being a designer I will never do something better than this I quit now this is going to require some heavy spoilers to discuss so if you're still hoping to watch this unspoiled you want to leave right now right away is everybody good spoilers are incoming in 3 2 1 leave the room okay here we go the part I want to talk talk about comes at the very end of episode 9 mirroring even the title provides us context but in this episode the main character and the character who has sort of been set up as the main antagonist are both falling apart they've both essentially hit a psychotic break everything is spiraling out of their control the antagonist gives a monologue on the wonder that he felt the first time he took a life and then the music starts the scene cuts and there in The protagonist's Hideout the antagonist is discussing the plan that the protagonist has been working on the entire season and the antagonist asks

why did you do it and the protagonist responds I don't know I wanted to save the world and over all of this this haunting piano music plays and it takes you a few bars but then you realize what it is it's Where Is My Mind by the Pixies and that realization causes everything to come crashing in and this is the first thing to know about embedding dense layers of information you need this moment of realization you need to create that moment that Clues the player in to the fact that there's more going on on here than just the surface level information and pushes them to start paying closer attention and carefully analyzing everything you've laid out before them and there is a lot to be found in this episode the pixie where is my mind is a song about going insane but it's also one of the most poppy songs The Pixies ever wrote it has this whole theme of going mad in a world that is superficially pleasant but at the same time it's a song about letting go themes that mirror what the whole show has been about but more than that what other famous piece of modern pop culture is this song associated with

fight club by bringing in this intertextual reference of Fight Club they force the viewer to completely reinterpret how they hear that last line I wanted to save the world fight club's vision is salvation through destruction and in some ways through a very self-indulgent self-centered form of Destruction up until this point the viewer has probably embraced the protagonist view of the world and the revolution he's about to cause but this moment this one small musical clue with all of its layers of information and reference cause us to pause and perhaps reconsider everything we've thought up till now because much of the episode mirrors fight clubs Tyler Duran reveal the writers are doing everything in their power to give the viewer the tools they need to see what the show is doing with that music at the end then with one line of dialogue and one piece of background music they are able to give the viewer an astonishing amount to think about and perhaps even make the viewer second guess their perception of many of the earlier scenes in the series and not only have they done all of that but they've managed to use the viewer's

heightened awareness during this moment to plant a seed in their mind for later story events in the very last shot of the scene the protagonist looks toward a popcorn machine in which a gun was hidden in the previous episode now even though a fair amount of the audience would have picked up on that connection anyway just remembering the gun in the popcorn machine by putting the viewer in a heightened observational State the director is doing what they can to ensure that as many viewers as possible recall that crucial information without the show having to explicitly call it out hey hey remember the gun leaving that information implicit allows the show to do more with less it keeps the viewer thinking about it and it allows them to convey all the information they need without having to be heavy-handed about it and this is all hugely important for what they're trying to set up in the next episode an episode that takes place several days later but where they don't show what happened in the intervening time at all the viewer is supposed to keep thinking about that gun what happened with it did it play some role in the portion of the story we didn't get to see of course none of the works if that haunting piano Melody

isn't also just perfect for that original scene in and of itself as a piece of music it still needs to be powerful and impactful even if the audience doesn't get any of that subtext we talked about and that should always be the first consideration for these things but it just goes to show how much more information we can pack into some of our sequences through subtext and layered meaning freeing us up to use other space to serve our narrative in different ways it seems like such a simple thing using internal and external referencing to increase the amount of information any one part of your world or narrative may contain and yet in games it's a tool we underutilize I'm curious to hear your thoughts though because there are games that do this well and I'm willing to bet there are plenty I don't know about so comment if you have any examples of high information density that you have seen in a game let me know see you next week [Music]