Interactive Storytelling in Mass Effect 2

[Music] all right here we go so uh name of my talk today get out get your game out of my movie narrative design and Mass Effect 2 so I want to talk about the title because actually a lot of people have been asking me about this and what it kind of means and really uh for a BioWare game we really don't differentiate between game and story uh they're pretty much the same thing they um they we start with story and we add gameplay but really they're um they're symbient to each other they don't we don't really differentiate between the two and really I think the title itself kind of just encapsulates what we believe the the rest of the industry is really struggling with right now which is the fact that you know we have story and we have gameplay but we're really trying to merge them so what this presentation is going to be about is how we solve those issues uh for Mass Effect 2 so who's this guy talking to you well

my name is Aro tresi I'm the lead cinematic designer on the mass effect effect franchise uh I've been with the team uh for about four and a half years now and I've been writing uh what we call the Cinematic design department and cinematic design is really kind of an odd thing it doesn't really exist in a lot of places and um we just uh kind of sorry Frank so uh yeah that that'll be a good one for later on um so what is Cinematic design well we're narrative designers um uh first and we're cinematic artist second and what we really deal with is the how of interactive storytelling and the how of interactive narrative we provide the writers with the tools and the processes to create the interactive conversations that are in the game and when we talk about the interactive conversations we're really talking about the main way that we're communicating with the player it is the main device in which we um we um um get story to the player and have

them understand uh what the intent of the writer and the rest of the narrative design team is doing so really what are we talking about here today well we're going to talk about a couple things first thing is story perspective and if there's any writers out there they understand that story perspective is a very powerful thing and it even gets even more complicated once you add the player to the mix of protagonist and antagonist and we're going to be addressing some of those issues that we encountered in the many uh role playing games that we've made at BioWare the second is the agreement and the agreement is really the rules in which we deal with interactivity in the Cinematic space and how we apply those rules to what we're trying to achieve with the role playing experience and you know we all know them don't know if we all love them but quick time events uh We've added QuickTime events to conversations in Mass Effect and I'm going to we're going to go

through kind of what the process was in designing those and making sure that they um um they're part of this agreement um you know they fit into our narrative design structure and we're going to have some Q&A at the end of this uh so you can ask me all types of great questions so firstly um a BioWare game is composed of what we could what we call the pillars of design and really either story exploration progression and gameplay so we have this concept of activity chaining which happens between these four different quadrants of the player experience and the one we're going to be concentrating on today is story but that's not to mean that the other parts don't have story like they obviously do but in in terms of referencing and framing this Con this uh discussion today we're going to be talking about um this interactive cinematic space and this is our product um this is the you know the conversation system

that uh hopefully a lot of you got to play and uh we're going to be talking about the mechanics behind story and how we uh navigated the Minefield of different uh player choice and agency so firstly let's try to Define what we call a conversation and the first thing that I think of really is that it's a narrative tool it's a way for us to communicate with the player and there's lots of narrative tools that we use we use ambient dialogue we we use video video screens we use uh codexes we use a myriad of of techniques to communicate but this is our primary narrative tool and and secondly it's a game system uh it allow it is a massive massive thing that we develop at BioWare and it allows us to coordinate the content from diff disciplines like art and writing and animation and level design and bring it all together to make these great interactions and it's also a philosophy when we talk about conversation of

BioWare we're talking about this character interaction this emotional storytelling that we're really trying to achieve so this is something we're always working on always trying to evolve and this is the scary part of a bio game um this is the conversation tree and I know I know a lot of people have a lot of opinions about conversation trees and and you know whether or not they're uh uh a good way to do interactive narrative and interactive dialog but it really works for us we really have spent many many years refining this uh particular uh way of communicating with the player and you know and it's the one thing that's very common to all BioWare games we all use this basic technology everything from Baler gate to the new MMO uses this technology and this design principle but if you look very closely and very deeply into this this crazy web you'll notice that there's one thing that's inherent to what we're trying to achieve

and it's the idea of choice and choice and cinematics is something we we take really seriously at BioWare and it's the culmination of all the animations the cameras uh the scripting the dialogue the vo and we bring it all together and what we're trying to do is just really make sure that the player understands hey you know what this is your story this this story doesn't belong to the writers this story belongs to the players and we really try to imbue everything we do with that kind of sensibility so in order to frame this discussion we're going to be talking about perspective and uh when we talk about perspective we're talking about a couple of different things uh we're talking about the point of view in which the player interacts with the story and in BIO or games it really comes down to two different types of of categories one is subjective and one is objective so subjective uh we have a huge history of doing these types of games and I'm sure you can recognize uh a lot of them up there um it really and

really um what a subjective game is is a traditional role playing computer role playing experience it's it's the one that we've all known for many many years where you are the Avatar and or the playing character um dialogue responses that you make are verbatim um there's no interpretation what you say is what you're player says there's uninterrupted agency which means that my character doesn't act with without me actually telling him what to do he he doesn't act on his own um there's always a a level of choice that happens moment to moment between me and my avatar and it's really great um it allows us to quickly empathize with the Avatar in order to get into his head and this is really the design of you know this this is you um um this is not someone else this is you playing the game but there's a couple of things that happens and and that we're going to be looking at right now and the first is

really some of the side effects that happens from this subjective point of view and it's temporal Distortion and really lots of dialogue so temporal Distortion happens when choices are being made or your player says something and we usually say oh your player's silent but no your player's not silent we just sped up time really fast and we just chopped out that time and we went straight to whatever the response was and really what happens is uh in that type of situation uh the the PC has to hold up a lot of the dialogue on their own so there's a lot more Exposition needs to happen so we're going to take a look at a clip here from kns of the Old Republic in which we uh we use this subjective storytelling technique back again is there something old Guk can do for you or did you just come to chat with a lonely old man so once again this is the Distortion that happens when you're making a choice isn't as sharp as it used to be that's

why I'm giving up the gambler's life but I think I can still manage to answer some simple questions and again some more Distortion when you make a choice we're saying time has stopped at this point and you are now contemplating your next um your next choice so uh and I forgive me for the choppy video um I'm running this thing off my little laptop here so um uh just forgive me for that please um so here we go now we get into the objective story and this is kind of what some of our newer titles are doing uh especially for the Mass Effect franchise and it it actually brings brings along a lot of new challenges so when we talk about objective story it's really countered to the traditional role playing model you are not the Avatar so when people say that they get kind of weirded out because they're like Shepherd's me but you're not no it's really not and I'm going to explain why you well most

people feel that way about Shepherd uh but you are not shepherd shepherd has its own motivations he has his own voice he's a he's a he's an actual character he's more akin to Kratos than uh than anything like on Dragon Age or or any of the other titles so Avatar has his own voice and motivations the player is now voyerism model where you're very um you're very objective to what's happening and you're kind kind of watching things and then trying to control it through your choice so a lot of there's a lot of reasons why we try to do this uh really it's this idea of real-time narrative environment uh that actually removes a lot of these temporal distortions that we saw with the previous clip um and the temporal distortions being when you make a choice or you're waiting for a choice so this allowed us to really break through and add drama to these interactions which is something which our Project Director really wanted to do and this is really the Breakthrough and

interactive storytelling that we made with uh Mass Effect so we're going to take a look at Mass Effect and uh we're going to we're going to see this real time uh environment in action what are you looking at the man who D mother with I'm not looking for trouble maybe I am maybe you better get out of here before I find you something all right all right I I've got stuff to do anyway come on let's get out of here so as you can see it was a very fluid interaction you've made a choice nothing really stopped um and a a lot of cool stuff just kind of happened around you and uh it really feels like it's real time and and it really feels good it feels very cinematic at that point but I'm wondering if a lot of people out there who are very traditional notice something very odd about what shepher did and um so if uh if you can take a just a little quick guess at what I'm

trying to allude to let's roll the clip again and let's take another look a man who damn about your ruin I'm not looking for trouble maybe I am maybe you better get out of here before I find you something all right all right I I've got stuff to do anyway come on let's get out of here so um I wonder did anybody catch it at all oh nice exactly so what it was is auto reply so Shephard acted on his own without me telling him to do something I didn't want to say that as a player I'm like okay well what if I wanted to Turtle what if I wanted to make another Choice um you know shepher just did something maybe I didn't want to like you know am I disconnecting from this role playing experience my My AG gency has just been interrupted like so you

know what's going on here was it lack of choice was it an anti-roll playay design and really with so many of these traditional rules broken why is Mass Effect such a successful RPG experience and really it comes down to what we call the agreement and the agreement is something that we have with the player it's a set of rules that binds us to the player and the player to the designer to make sure that their role playing experience is always um expected and uh is always in line with with their expectations so what is the agreement well it's a covenant the designer makes with the player it's a set of rules that governs choice and expectation and we'll be getting into these in some detail it binds the player to the role playing experience and allows the player to access the Avatar so it allow it allows us to have this very fluid very first person very uh subjective role playing experience while still H while still maintaining this this objective um point

of view in the story so what is the agreement we made well every time we're writing things at BioWare or at um on Mass Effect we always come down to some certain principles which is a lpness test for us to say whether or not this is a good role playing experience or not and really these are them and um we often describe them as the Covenant this is something to us is very sacred and something that we we always come back to and something that's just so important for us to maintain that role playing experience so first interface for choice is always predictable Choice produces results the player expects give the player the choices they want and hopefully when they want to make them and as and the last one is the player Story the play the the like I said before the the story doesn't belong to the writers the writers give you this great multipath narrative they give you this probability space to play in but you make your own

story so let's look at some of these things so inter interface for choice is predictable and what are we really talking about well it's the conversation wheel um the conversation wheel is a gooey interface that we introduced uh that replaced the list system that uh we see with a lot of the subjective narrative games that we produced and really it was a in response also to the highdea era and the fact that we didn't have uh you know black bars um the letter boxing to put words in so we needed something was very slick and very intuitive and also now that we moved to this uh different model when we were now that we're um objective to the experience we didn't have to write out the whole response anymore so we came up with a slick little interface which actually ended up becoming uh a very core component to our narrative design so if we look behind this interface it's the dialogue tray which we saw and really when we look at the blue the the blue responses these are all Shepherd's

responses or his potential responses uh for that interaction so we're taking this and we're mapping it to a nice simple goey that a player can easily interface with so we know what the conversation wheel is it's a it's a it's an it's a dialogue navigation interface which allows the player to interface with the story and we get we get all those choices and we map them to these uh various points of the radial and we have an indicator that we move around and we can make choices and it's uh and it's pretty easy breezy it's a it's a very simple kind of interface uh but we're going to look we're going to look deep into it uh because even though it appears to be very simple there's a lot of mechanics that run behind it uh which allow us to to keep that predictability that I was speaking of so firstly uh we talk about the behavioral player and and when we talk about behavioral we're talking about the

different parts of the wheel actually mean something different every uh to to to a writer or to an interaction for example uh if you look where it says Paragon every time you pick uh the upper right it's a paragon response regardless of what it says or what it does it's uh it has a subtext or it has an emotion that's attached to it uh in this case Paragon means do the right thing in the right way um whereas Neal is you know it's very kind of bland usually ends the dialogue Renegade is do whatever you want like do what you have to do to get the job done friendly and hostile pretty self-explanatory and investigate as always give me more information so we have this kind of uh interface now where someone can just be flicking the stick around without getting into a lot of detail and really get whatever they want out of that interaction if they're playing as a paragon or if they're kind of mad at the guy they can switch it to Renegade and they don't really have to read too far

into uh exactly what's going to happen they don't have to read too far into that role playing experience so obviously this is the first layer of predictability um um so it allows us to um uh shape the narrative according to um the behavioral player maap emotional reaction so and reaction is exactly it uh most of the time people who play this way don't really wait for the scene to end they they're just as soon as the wheel pops up they're just making choices and they're getting rewarded with a very fluid cinematic experience at that point and one of the things that it does it also uh the direction on the wheel also colors uh what is going to happen and we'll get into that uh on the next slide but really um it adds a lot of subtext to what's going on and I'll explain that in the next slide so the cognitive player um the cognitive player is the the the role

player it's the person who wants to really read into what's going on wants to make a careful choice and and be very exacting on what's going on so we add these things called paraphrases and paraphrases are really small um I think it's 32 characters that were allowed in in a paraphrase but they're a condensed version of what is going to be said next and it's really sometimes it could even be described as what's in the player's head right before he says it as well so when we we look at this we have several kind of choices here so we're going to be looking at the first one here uh second later predictability sure uh we're going to be looking at um this first choice here so when we look at this Choice which is I'll look into this uh we understand it to be in the Paragon section of the wheel so when you as you can imagine that line could be said or interpreted in so many different ways but because it's in a paragon section of the wheel we understand it to

be something that you know Shepherd's going to do the right thing in the right way so in this case it gives it a a dramatic coloring which is now we understand it to be something very positive like you know Shepherd's going to he's going to look into this he's not just doing it flippantly or whatever uh it allows us to really narrow down the interpretation of what that choice means and also if we look at uh the investigate abusing Suspects my expectation here is that I'll be getting more information about who's who's who's uh abusing suspects so um like I said there's two layers here and that's the big takeaway here there's the cognitive and there's the behavioral and they interact with each other to allow us to have predictability in the role playing experience so the next one is Choice produces results the player expects um so this is pretty selfish explanatory if you make a choice you

expect something to happen if as a designer if I don't meet that expectation your roleplay experience is now busted um so we're going to look at something here uh we're going to look at uh a dancer on ilam and we're going to use what we learned on the predictability of the interface here and we're going to move around just one little aspect of the narrative design and just see how much of a change that makes to uh what the player expects so as we ship the game when you talk to this uh dancer you can tip her and she'll dance for you and and uh all that so it's in the Paragon position which is like okay well the subtext can be interpreted as you know Shepherd's tipping her he you know maybe he he liked the dancing and gives her a tip and really that closes my expectation like you know it's like wow that's cool and I can move on I'm not really expecting much more so let's take a look at that interaction ction

[Music] [Applause] so so at that point the player's like Oh okay that's cool it's uh it's a very light interaction it just happens in one of the clubs and okay that's fine but what happens now if I move the tip to the investigate portion of the wheel right now it's kind of like okay well what's next right so let's take a look at that one with the subtext of there's more information [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so as you can see nothing happened like I I made a choice and I got kicked out back to the first choice and nothing really occurred right so really I'm I'm at this point the the player could be felt could feel really cheated with this interaction going okay well do I have to keep tipping her for a plot to open up um is there something else that I need to do I'm very confused at this point so really that that would be an error in design in narrative design right there where we don't meet the expectation of the player so once again what if we moved it to the Renegade well you know yeah you know use your

imagination it could be pretty much anything at that point but um you know as you can see by just changing positions on the wheel we're adding subtext to uh just a um a word that says tip and we're adding that predictability to the interface and uh we're trying to meet expectation whenever possible so the last one or our third I should say it's one more after this uh is give the place give the player choices they want now and and and I often preface this with uh when they want to make them which is also very important so one of the things that we're going to be looking at here is another video clip and this video clip is of an interrogation sequence that happens now Shepherd's interrogating somebody so you know if I'm a player and Shepherd's interrogating somebody I expect Shepherd might get rough for them so if as a designer if I don't put that interaction in I'm not meeting someone's expectations of what an interrogation

should be so that's exactly what we did with some interrupts uh with this interaction I want to see my Advocate your Advocate hasn't arrived we're trying to find him I'm not saying a damn word until he's here you two are in whale pay attention Mr Kellum that wasn't a good idea kid that is going to cost you control your temper we want him to talk sorry my associate gets a little excited during interrogation hit me again [ __ ] every bunch is another credit in my pocket works for me no do you know what I'll do to you when I get out of here keep it up tough guy you'll leave in a bag go to hell I I think female Shepherd rocks by the way yeah so uh so what happened there so the vo and the situation all kind of supported and focused the player to have this inter action which allowed them to hit them so you know while he's saying

it and you're like wow this guy really sucks like God I wish I can hit him and bang that thing pops up and you're like that's fantastic I really feel like I wanted to make that choice and there it was um other other kind of examples of that would have been uh on the game when um uh when when Tally's dad's kind of dead there uh spoiler alert um but uh and and she's crying and most players are like wow you know I wish I could just hug her and then the interrupt comes up and then you can hug her and it closes that loop on expectation and you feel really great and good about that about that interaction so we're going to look at the opposite now where you know maybe things don't go good like there's a lot of stuff in this game right so uh we're going to look at somewhere where choices are kind of weird and kind of didn't work so in this one we're going to look at a shopkeeper on the Citadel good day my friends welcome to the Citadel so we're giving a choice which is like accused of classism and

it's just like okay well you know I there was no setup I I have no idea she just said welcome uh so let me let's just see what happens if I press this button you know for a bunch of cheap touristy crap your prices are pretty high I am sorry you feel that way there are many stores on the Citadel perhaps another would be more in your price range so you're saying I'm poor just because I'm not as well off as you doesn't mean you can hold yourself above me what no I hey everyone this store discriminates against the poor please calm down as an apology I'll let you have my station employee discount is that acceptable well all right but you still have my feels please enjoy your shopping experience so and we all really love that interaction but it actually doesn't really work because it's like okay accus of classism make a choice and kind of

sit back and watch and really I don't really have a any agency and Shepherd's talking and I can't say anything so it breaks a lot of the rules of the agreement and that's really a great example of where things go wrong and ways we could have fixed it could have been U we gave a little interaction with somebody uh right before we stepped into them maybe we give her some lines uh maybe some ambient stuff like there's things we could have done to repair that situation but um with with times constraints the way they are some things have to slip so really we have these two ideas of choices you want and results you expect and really there it really is a cycle that happens uh when we when we when we're dealing with this uh objective narrative so when we talk about choices you want and and results you expect and that's always being constantly reinforced as you're playing we get what you call role playing flow and you're really in the zone at this point and you're getting what you want and you're and you're making choices and it's really awesome but really you're

you're not this is not a real traditional role playing experience this is like you know like I said this is not you this is another character and um you know through fantasy fulfillment through this idea of of you know keeping people in the zone uh we can still maintain a lot of the characteristics of of the traditional roleplaying experience in this new model so uh one of the other ones that we got here is uh it's the player story and this is uh something that we really take seriously at BioWare and you know what sometimes it it backfires on us like you get into a lot of situations when it's like wow you're ready to go to endgame and everything's really awesome and you know you got your love interest and it's really good but then you stop by the Citadel by fish right it's just the it it's it's this idea of absurdity that can happen in the narrative and if you ask writers and traditional cinematic artist they all go kind of crazy and they're like no no no but drama and this

and that and the other but it's all emergent it's the idea that you can do whatever you want you're building your story it's Unique to you and that's what we're really trying to push with BioWare so what so let's talk about the player story for a second and kind of one of the biggest things that we did uh with the sequel and what we're planning to do with uh Mass Effect 3 as well is this idea of importing your save game and and this is something which was obviously very technical to try to do uh on a number of levels but it really illustrates our our commitment to making sure that the actual whole story is yours you know this is this is something which is unique to you and then you can tell your friends and compare notes and go wow you know like I had this experience and that experience and and it really just becomes about you at that at that point so what is it it's your Continuing Story uh for Mass Effect uh it allows us to get get some plot threads and bring them forward and it really is the the

Uber feature of the mass effect Universe uh we are story-driven games BioWare is committed to making the best story driven games in the world so um features like this really fall in line with what we're trying to achieve so how much actually came across and you know I I see I see a lot of things in the blogosphere and the rest about um it not being uh you know there's not enough choice not enough things came across but in reality we had 700 different hooks that came across for uh from me1 to me2 that changed the narrative based on choice you had from the first one and what we found really is it's the small things that matter it's the small things that make it your story um obviously with the second title it's really hard to Branch the narrative in some gigantic way it's you know scope gets out of control and um it you know it it's it's just not practical to do but what what can we do we know how can

we make this your personal story um so I'm going to show you some examples of things just real small things and if you can imagine the next thing kind of you know uh multiplied by 700 uh you can get an idea of uh what we've been trying to accomplish with this particular feature so here's a shot of a really ugly Shepherd on me1 uh and I don't know uh if anybody remembers this this is the Big Choice save the council let the council die let the council live so we let the council die um you know they weren't they weren't mon use to us and uh they were kind of uh they were kind of offputting so we're going to take that choice and we're going to bring it forward to Mass Effect 2 and give you some examples of of things we did with that so uh we have these advertising um um uh kiosks on the Citadel and excuse me uh they did allow us to do some really cool things and uh what we're going to see here is a movie that

someone made of your exploits on the Citadel for Mass Effect 1 and um there's a lot of things that change about that movie based on your choices and actions on the first one so we're going to take a look at the council is dead this began with an attack on a human settlement in the Traverse but sarin won't stop there his get aren't going to stay on the fringes of Citadel space abandon the Citadel and Evacuate the council the citadel's closing they're sealing the station is surrender not preferable to Extinction all Ali ships wait for a shot at the get Flagship Nothing Else Matters this fall Humanity takes its place Among the Stars Citadel a film by Rea erson presented by aridon films so there's a couple of things in there it's a it's a fall release uh it's

not a summer blockbuster uh you know uh Shepherd's actions were there it was male Shepherd in the ad um so let's see what it looks like council is alive but this time with a female player with an attack on a human settlement in the Traverse but sarin won't stop there his gu aren't going to stay on the fringes of space abandon the Citadel and Evacuate the council the citadel's closing they're sealing the station is surrender not preferable to Extinction Commander we're picking up reinforcements it's the alliance this summer Humanity earns its place Among the Stars Citadel a film by Rea erson presented by a rid ey films so summer blockbuster fantastic so um uh what we saw there was really four different permutations to

one interaction that could happen uh you know council is Dead Alive male female uh and this is a very simple example uh of something that we do uh pretty much everywhere in the game in order to make the your story so uh the last topic here uh I'm going to try to get through it I know everybody's uh we're running a little late here so the idea of QuickTime events and you know uh these things got a real bad WP over the last little a while um but we're going to we're going I'm going to show you how we kind of took the idea of QuickTime events and integrated it into our philosophy of the agreement so what are we trying to solve for with with with interrupts like you know if we're going to add a feature we got to be solving some sort of problem so this is what we are trying to solve for what are you looking at so okay sure I'm looking at

somebody okay this is getting uncomfortable uh damn about to ruin I'm not looking for trouble so we still have problems with temporal Distortion and really it's a side effect of adding interactivity into the Cinematic space so the idea of QuickTime events were really this idea of adding these interrupts or these very visceral QuickTime uh events that would allow the player to take control of situations and really allow them to steer the narrative in a real-time way so this is our first sort of foray into the real-time uh character interaction uh side of design so when we talk about interrupts we're talking about a couple of things uh we have uh we have these Renegade interrupts we have Paragon interrupts but we never have both on the screen at once and it was one of the one

of the design philosophies we we had is the fact that uh okay well making a choice and and because we had to make these very binary we found that giving people too much choice in this real-time space confuse a lot of people it was just too much so really we just ended up making it one choice or the other this moment with the either Renegade or Paragon but we there's a lot of interesting things that came out of that and one of the interesting things that uh we found is if you're applying as a paragon and a renegade moment came up people were very conflicted about whether they should take it or not because man if they see a flashing icon they really want to take it but that's not the way I'm playing and like you know and if you look at some of the biometric readings on this stuff man it's just all over the map and they haven't done anything like you know it's like they're just sitting there and they're just really getting conflicted and having some internal conflict so not having not making a choice was actually very powerful so we kind of kept everything very

constrained to that sort of uh design philosophy so let's apply the agreement to this and see how it lands so firstly interface for choice is predictable sure there it is it's uh Renegade it's Paragon it's left side it's right side it's pretty easy and when it when it comes up I can train the player to always take that one and you know so I would say yeah okay that makes sense give the player choices they want well we S as we saw with the interrogation scene you know it really depends on the writing and iterating with the writers to make sure that they do give you choices they want it's the player story like I said sometimes not making an interrupt can be more powerful than taking one so yeah you know I'd say it's it's a player story Choice produces results the player expects well this ended up being a little hard for us because it was a real-time interaction we didn't have the ability of getting any of the of the C cognitive sort of paraphrasing into this into this space

so what do we do uh you know we on the first implementation it was really a lot ofo broken role playing uh you know people accidentally shooting other people in the face it was like it was just it was it was all over the place so we had to really come up with a a different idea of how to implement it and what we came up with was this idea of telegraphing which is really just a visual paraphrase um it helps predict the specific action that's going to be made and let a cognitive player make a meaningful choice so I'm going to show you some examples of what I mean by a visual paraphrase so we have a situation where Shepherd talks to a suspect and then Shepherd just attacks him so if there was an interrupt there you'd have no idea that like yeah yeah you know it's going to be a renegade action but there's there's so many Shades of Gray there uh iy could slap him he could shoot him he can push him he could do he could talk mean to him like you know there's just so much there that uh it really doesn't help with the predictability of the role playing so

let's take a look at what that interaction looks like with uh without a telegraph yeah yeah I told you I ain't saying nothing fine we'll do it the hard way God D help me so uh you know in that case it's like okay well I don't want to push on this poor kid like you know you have to like people have a a lot of really strong feelings toward these digital actors like you have to really respect so it's like wow you know what I didn't want to do that my role playe's broken BioWare I hate you it just goes on and on so we had this idea of a telegraph so this wouldn't work so oh fine what do we do now so we add a we add another shot to the sequence where Shephard starts to crack his knuckles and this allows us to say hey you know what this I I have now

I have a really good idea not only do I know that it's a renegade action he's cracking his knuckles I bet you he's going to hit him so let's see what that looks like now but you can for me you gave another drill instructions for an assassination who's the target I don't know I didn't ask cuz the people I work for we don't have time for this God dang so the Cinematic designer there very cleverly just put a small little knuckle crack animation which now made the the role playing experience uh what people expect so we would consider that very successful so in conclusion uh I just want to hit a couple of really uh real real powerful points here is interactivity is a very potent narrative device and putting activity into cinematics is something something we should all be looking at uh really the

the idea of the linear cinematic has been around for a long long time and hasn't really change much uh you know yes we get into facial map and a lot of the crazy stuff to make the Fidelity up but we're forgetting these are game systems and what they do really well is interact is be interactive the other is perspective is powerful so making sure that when you start writing your game you choose your perspective very wisely and discover your agreement and whenever you can stick with it thank you very much [Applause]