Kill the Hero, Save the (Narrative) World

[Music] hi I'm Hannah Nicklin from Dakota Fabrique I've tried to adjust my slides because I'm gonna be sitting here in the right-hand side bottom corner of your screen so I've made some slight adjustments so anything that you can't see just trust me that it's not that important it's just sort of like a background setting and otherwise if the slides seem a little bit unbalanced in terms of design it's because I've had to move things around a little bit to make this work so I hope it still gives you somewhat of the experience that you would have got had you been listening to this talk at GDC so I'm Hannah Nicklin I'm from db2 fabric and my talk is called kill the hero save the world I'm a narrative designer and writer format a CEO night which is a mutant soap opera where small town gossip meets the supernatural that's our tagline which was released in

September 2019 on Apple arcade ps4 and PC and I'm now CEO and studio lead of dg2 fabric before transitioning to video games as the main practice I also worked as a playwright and theatre maker and I have a PhD in the spaces between games and theatre and their uses as anti-capitalist practice that might sometimes color my perspective here a little bit but I hopefully it's a useful perspective I've been practicing as a writer and game designer therefore for over a decade so I want to just take a moment to shout out the other talks which would have happened by other members of the team Nils Denikin was going to leave lead a talk on the visual design of the game Christopher HomeGuard and Oscar masada were on a panel on the dialogue UI and I was also super stoked to be in a narrative innovation panel with a whole host of awesome people working in narrative design and writing I hope that they can submit that talks to but in picking up the work code of a cancer DDC it's hard to find the time to record a

talk we've lost a lot of expertise this year and I know that our team are especially sad that we can't mark the many years of hard work that we put into matachi own a solidarity with everyone affected the world a final aside while I was the narrative designer and writer my work was obviously deeply influenced by the skill and practice of other members of the team Matteo knee is the work of many hands and hearts and minds over almost a decade of on and off production so if you have a copy of the game please take the time to look at the credits so this talk is called kill the hero save the world and because I'm a writer it has a fairly predictable double meaning there I think that killing our heroes might produce better narrative worlds and games that's one meaning but I also think there's something fairly politically urgent about destroying the narrative of heroic exceptionalism that it allows us to tell better more relatable truer stories about how we live together in the world and which

begin to think through the qualities of the problems of our contemporary lives I think one way to do that is to kill the hero and consider the ensemble cast and that's what my talk is about but don't worry I'm mostly going to concentrate on the practice of ensemble cast storytelling rather than the polemic or the politics of it there'll be a little sprinkling of that towards the end so I'm going to talk first in more general terms about what unsub or cast are and how and why telling stories with them is different to telling a hero's tale story and then I'm going to talk in depth about specific decisions and examples from Matassa inators illustrate how I specifically went about it in writing for and designing Matassa and his narrative okay so kill the hero for better narrative worlds next slide why do I want us to think about alternatives to the hero's tale let's first set out what the hero's tale is the hero's tale is also sometimes called the monomyth or the hero's journey and is a basic

template for storytelling that features a hero who goes on an adventure and overcomes some kind of crisis or obstacle before returning forever changed or transformed and it's the basis of a bunch of storytelling I think we in particular gravitate towards the world revolving around one character in games because a lot of the language of games is borrowed from film which love the hero's tale although it's worth saying that the hero's tale is as old as Aristotle film loves to dive into single timeline psychologies and it's really good at exploring these you have a discrete amount of attention 90 120 minutes or so and you can carefully construct every moment to pressure and expose that hero in transition but I think we need to interrogate whether the aesthetic and fullness umph shion's built into that tendency to use the language of film is actually useful to us in games or at least if it's always useful to us so in order to do that we

have to understand how they work why use them and to take the time to ask what if there's something better than the hero's tale out there so let's set out some of the qualities of the hero's tale typically it revolves around one central character in a patriarchal society usually a man usually a white man it's usually a white sees head man etc and that central character begins naive they are called to a journey they face challenges and they return change which means that all the other characters in the story serve this forward arc it becomes this typically man versus everything versus the world versus characters versus environment which are all there to serve their story victory is inevitable especially in games when using the hero's tale because when we build the player's identity into this hero giving them room to fail as film more often can't and tragedies etc

giving them that room to fail is less possible because honestly it's not fun to fail and the mechanics of games whether it be puzzle solving or fighting battles tend against it leaving aside experimental practices here this results in more often false jeopardy the feeling like in the end you never really had anything at stake the hero's tale works when the psychological focus on one individual is served by a specific structure for example a short time span and a directors eye which can focus on their psychological journey so I'm asking what if they heroes format prominent in games taken largely from films is not suited to a lot of game stories especially those that intend to run longer than two to four hours two to four hours is the length of a film or a long piece of theater a perfect unit typically the content of the human bladder how long you can hold yourself before needing the

toilet that is the well okay films these days think Marvel etc you kind of need a toilet break but in general this two to four hour length is a perfect unit in which to hold the attention of the audience or the player and to explore the inner workings of a single character as they're put under pressure changed in the heat of whatever kind of story that you're trying to tell when we're talking longer than that single human of human attention everything changes you need new structures and foundations to make your story stand up as people are able to in games explore a world rather than follow a directorial eye as players choose their own kite camera angles and pacing and characterization is shifted by player choice focus can become dissipated it's hard to provide the focus and interior eighty that you need to explore a single psyche and the hero's tale begins to feel spin interrupted we also often pad out this

single unit of storytelling with filler to make it longer whether that be convoluted plotting or tasks that don't move the story or the characterization forward which can in turn begin to make the story feel like it's it's decoupling from the mechanics and that the world is there to occupy you rather than in thrall or move forward that's not to say that it never works but unless you have the resources to make an open-world that is is as delightful or thrilling to engage whether the level of something like breath of the wild where actually I'd I'd argue that the world itself is the hero I think we could be looking more often towards ensemble casts rather than heroes in order to build engaging convincing and compelling open story worlds and games so it's time to back away from the film's my friends and try some other media so I come from this until SATA background this means I'm a really big fan of interdisciplinary thinking learning from other art forms collaborating with people from other art

forms and I think there's a big lesson out there for games storytelling to be found in the ensemble cast template employed by long-running TV shows you see I'm leaving going all Aarti interdisciplinary on you and explaining how we need to learn from contemporary dance or experimental live art not that we can't ask me about that in another talk no I'm just asking is to look to television so the ensemble cast TV show template focuses on a group of characters rather than one central hero style character in this story template it's the interplay of community rather than the victory of the hero which is the focus of the story so here are some qualities of ensemble cast storytelling ensemble cast storytelling focuses on a group of characters giving many of them the same importance it means that you're looking at a community rather than an individual under pressure the drama of rises from the community in context either with their environment or each

other you can play with much more variety whether that be different characters locations and that means that you can tell longer more complex stories you can play with different tones comedy or drama without making it all forced through one single character you can switch through different plot levels in order to give the pacing a break and a shape conflicting points of view can arise when you have an ensemble cast so rather than one true truth belonging to one person several different people telling you different things can leave you guessing about the ending and provide more genuine jeopardy and the jeopardy at stake is something much more recognizable to our daily lives were often there's no ideal action no fully informed position just people trying to do the best so the ensemble cast can also examine cause and effect over longer periods over generations as communities often

carry with them the consequences of past action in a way that can be more naturally exposed from lots of small clues rather than one hero having to law dump their whole psychology on you okay so let's look at a concrete example of ensemble cast storytelling in action Amita Sione so I would define a mat a CNA as an ensemble cast driven story when I joined the team nearly four years ago it was being described by Nils gana Denikin the creative director as a soap opera and that was a strong part of what appealed to me about writing for it because soap operas are ensemble cast driven and I think this ensemble cast format is massively underused as a template for game storytelling by the way if your instinct is to turn up your nose at soap opera I would invite you to examine that reaction a few reactions to the game online have focused on that soap opera label as wrong because they think it's a good game I mean thanks for thinking

it's good but I would say that rom-com soap operas they share that they're typically seen as feminine or domestic forms of storytelling they often Center female characters and experiences and therefore somehow lower quality less concerned with the big themes of life but I'd argue that soap operas are not low-quality television they are to my mind more neutral than that they're defined by being long running running character driven ensemble cast slices of life they share a lot of their crap their qualities with situational comedies except they tend to be drama rather than comedy driven the soap bit of soap opera is just referring referring to those domestic concerns about a community in a place rather than using a journey to shape the drama it's their past present and future context which is the heat of the storytelling so let's take a look at some of the useful tactics of ensemble

storytelling and how they can be used to build a story world using my work in Italian a as an example and real quick I'm not saying we did this totally right with more resources we would have liked to have been more elegant about fleshing out the world of the game won't particularly key thing would have been interesting to us would be to allow you to play as other characters on different days in the game but this is what we did with the resources that we had available ie game dev okay so first a little bit about the game which you can find trailers and links to Atma tascioni game calm if you don't know how to spell that it's written in the corner that's how much ice earliest old and it's pronounced like I'm saying it you can give it a bit more of an Italian flair it's an Italian word if you want to add a CRNA that's my best impression it was named by Nils and a longtime collaborator an incredible composer and musician Alessandra Coronas who lives inside Enya so it's got sprinklings of

Italian all throughout the world it's a 2d adventure style game where you explore a community over a period time you can also gather seeds from the wild talk to people over here conversations and grow gardens with the seeds that you've collected in Makati na you explore the community as a 15 year old girl called Chi Chi sets out at the beginning of the games thinking she's heading to the community to care for her dying grandfather he thinks he's going to train her as a replacement spiritual leader for his strange and isolated town of part mutants and by the end both of them discover it's all a bit more complicated than that the answers are in the community itself soma tascioni is this world of weird and wonderful flora and fauna and a community cast of characters of many shapes sizes and colors there are beautiful landscapes to explore full of Nils incredible art and the great animations of our two animators please look up the credits as before and there's this magical musical

gardening mechanic at the heart of it where you can create Gardens which are procedural music engines where every seed you plant adds to the composition and where each garden represents a step towards healing a fractured community it's also who as I said a soap opera it's interested in the mundane as much as the sublime it's about a community of people who live alongside the consequences of the past as well as the actions of the present there are love triangle and old wounds band nights and Camille Barbra piece so that's a little bit about the game the following is how I employed some of the tactics of the sample storytelling in this fantasy tinged alternative world of meta CEO name so I used a variety of characters and locations we treated days in the game like carrot chapters rather or episodes and had special events and different characters to focus on in each episode varying the characters and key

locations helped us keep the storytelling alive engaging and to use different characters to vary the pacing meaning that we didn't have to generate relentless jeopardy in a single character arc we were dipping into other characters backs every episode while kaya's your way into the themes of meta C&A it's only how the ensemble casts begins to build a sense of time place and presence that the themes and problems of the game begin to emerge you discover that this is a community dealing with intergenerational grief and that by bearing witness to stuff people haven't been able to speak about by being the catalyst as a new person in the community the community can begin to process it the story builds like a collage not at a point and the gameplay rewards you in understanding this so I designed the narrative to work with what I call multiple middles one of the first

things that you're often asked about interactive narrative is how important all the choices do they matter and I'd like to think that all the choices characters making a game matter but the amount of control you have over them and what they in turn affect is often seen as the sum of how complex or accomplished a piece of narrative designers a lot of games discourse tends towards judging the accomplishment of games on how close they get to the real world of choice and consequence but sometimes abstraction is more valuable than simulation in helping us reflect on the world when asked this question with regards to matter Sione I don't like to talk about the game having multiple middles rather than multiple endings in conversations in the game are very much used zero model of choice coloring how the character responds to the situation but not letting you choose who the character is are you attempt to be articulate Kai or I use defuse the situation with a bad joke okay either way you're still kind the conversations branch you might

access different reactions memories or stories but they come to the same place in the end instead there's a great deal of choice in terms of which BC a plot should dig deeper down into who you make deeper connections with and how much the complex and thoroughly plotted history that you uncover multiple middles this means you explore widely this means that the game rewards you for Marietta meandering for exploring the context of the moment and uncovering the interrelationship of past and present D centering pie by not making you control her and her character allows you to see the whole ensemble cast on the same level this allows conflicting points of view to emerge following and developing several characters instead of one allows for much more subtle exposition and conflict from which insight can emerge again like a collage not making the

player invest everything in one character means that they can see a balance of points of view contrasting and highlighting one another it allows for the player to feel like they're choosing a way through the narrative unpicking a mystery in a way that is cheap in terms of narrative design of interaction like I'm not having to plot hundreds of thousands of branching paths but it's rich in terms of player experience in a hero's tale version of meta seoane a your grandfather would have been your guide in the game and would have given you unbiased and true information the other characters would have things that you needed to harvest in order to proceed along your quest but in our ensemble cast template asthma tascioni progresses and your conversations begin to paint past conflicts and mistakes into the picture you realize that not only is your grandfather's account unreliable but that the discontents in the community are not soluble as he claims the choices we give

in dialogue don't affect the outcome of the conversations they're more about revealing Kai's characters and altering outcomes and about uncovering the community through discourse with them it's meant a dissenter her from being a conventional player heroine it also encourages the player to listen to rather than souls other characters when you spend time with them the big structural lesson when thinking about learning from long-running TV series is the a plot B plot C plot and the earth plot so the earth plot is what I'm calling in TV the series long plot not all ensemble shows have these especially not a slice-of-life ones but having a central theme or narrative problem that the plot of the series returns to can be a pleasing and useful underlying rhythm sometimes in light monster of the day style long-running TV shows there'll be one main bad guy that they keep on

returning to throughout the whole of the season and that's a good example of an earth lot another good example and a TV show which I return to a lot in writing the game is Star Trek ds9 a great example of ensemble cast TV formatting that often uses season-long air plots for the big historical shifts in the world and the wider Star Trek universe but develops the characters and the community through a B and C plots they put community in context politics becomes practice the ABC plots they happen within episodes in this wonderful diagram that I drew yeah the shifting focus of an ensemble cast allows an episode to deal with one big theme our problem whilst also varying the pace and levity with smaller subplots again not all placing it on a hero where shifts in tone could feel unbalancing the a plot is the driving theme or problem of the episode in day five

Matassa gained aid that might be go on a boat trip with turn and new and discover that you should grow a garden to help with his boat making B plots are the secondary stories in an episode often lighter comedic or contrasting thematically in a way that reflects on the a plot all of which makes the a plot more compelling when you return to it in day 5 Verma tascioni B plots include following upon the events of the night before when it was revealed that Spike the bartender has a long-running crush on tongues mother Claire see plots are the smallest unit and might resemble empty side quests but the difference in ensemble setting is that you care about the characters because of the previous investment that you've put into them what you mean is that these details can be dealt with lightly but also used to add to your satisfaction with the completeness of the universe in day 5 vertices own a a see plot would include the sausage folk if you haven't played

the game please do and you'll find out all about the sausage people they're plotting a new scheme which this time will definitely make them all rich I should add that meta sione is a non-monetary economy so that gives you some sense of the levity of that plotline so imitatio night I make a conscious decision to make only the a plots contributing to that a plot mandatory in each time of day you have two or three conversations or actions that when completed will move time forwards we always mark the manager conversations with clear clues in a journal and in the world with a symbol that tells you when the last conversation will move time for words this means that you always have the choice whether or not to move time for words or to explore the many other hundreds and hundreds of conversations that you can have throughout the game imitatio knee each day in the game has

an a plot which contributes to the ER plot these mandatory conversations or actions then there's a great deal of choice in terms of B and C plots which you can dig deeper down into with characters you can make deeper connections with and you can choose therefore how much of the complex and thoroughly plotted hitch that you uncover it gives player choice in terms of breath in terms of expiration that's why I talk about multiple middles not multiple endings so I therefore make narrative design decisions that focused on the characters as complex rich and I also made them a little bit different for the smallest of their community I wanted getting to know them in this broad exploratory way which rewarded the player for digging deeper I wanted getting to know them to reflect this central musical gardening mechanic

which was so wonderfully devised by Douglas Wilson and Alessandro Coronas to feel like coming across a number of new plants you've never seen before watching to them grow watching them grow tending to them when possible and allowing them to surprise you I set out to build a narrative design that would allow the player to choose their own pace the push at the central plot or to meander wander and grow the story at their own pace the themes of the story are tough in places among the everyday it also deals in trauma colonialism infidelity aging and illness but in reviews the game is often characterized as gentle I think because of the opportunity that the player has to pace their own experience hopefully as you play meet a CEO name none of this narrative design will feel visible instead it'll feel like you're making your own way through a community full of life a community that's lived long before you and all being well will live long after you leave the ensemble cast

template allows me to imply this complexity and depth with a variety of voices plot lines and a form of player agency which reveals layers of the onion skin the more and more deeper you dig down finally in the last couple of minutes I'm going to touch lightly on the political implications of ensemble cast storytelling all acts are political all storytelling contains politics the choices in any piece of storytelling or design hold within them political functions and affordances so as a last note I'd like to say a little bit about why I think we should care about writing for ensembles rather than heroes beyond the fact that it can help you tell a long-form story in a more compelling way we live in a global society my actions today in Copenhagen well that used to buy or eat can have a material impact on people I will never meet in China or Maui or the Democratic Republic of Congo

climate crisis demands every country on earth to take action people die and are dying because the fictions we draw on the world like borders and Nations we are connected I wrote these words a month ago before I'd ever heard the words novel coronavirus or cope at 19 I considered whether or not I should turn them down in the context of a global pandemic and I assure you I don't mean to instrumentalize people's anxiety or suffering but this is just true that's it we were always connected but now more than ever we can wield our connections far more dangerously and I think it's time we start to tell stories about the world that explore that that do away with the hero that begin to work on the challenges that emerge when we ask how

we live together as an ensemble that paints the people we touch with our lives as more than just non player characters placed there to further our quest or that says that we just need to wait for a hero to get us out of this mess that's why I think it's not only useful for longer form games to tell stories with ensemble casts but also I think urgently relevant so really quickly key takeaways I'd offer to people thinking about telling an ensemble cast story make sure the ensemble cast characters reflect and shape one another when you write a hero's journey the character has to change beginning to end when you write for an ensemble cast think about how they all change think carefully about the players presence in the world and therefore the narrative design be diverse in characters varied identities voices backgrounds perspectives make it

rewarding to dig into the world don't define characters by their difference it's an easy and slightly lazy mistake to make in building a diverse world to make characters defined by the ways that they're different but when characters live together in a community they'll have a lot of similarities as well make character surprising complicated watch TV but also opera ISM 24-hour durational theater read detective novels get to know the affordances of all of the forms and genres and the relationships between audience and storytelling that exists out there and keep track of it all your world your universe the past the complicated present how you conceptualize the story and storytelling and plotting planning and programming somewhere there is a 24 hour long presentation I could give about the spreadsheets and narrative design system

summit a CEO name you're not going to get it today but think in a connected way between all departments about how you're going to tell the story how are you going to manage time how you're going to present characters and what player exploration means in this world what choice means get rid of the hero keep examining your assumptions about what storytelling is and how those assumptions shape your view of the world look to other cultures and forms historical and contemporary especially outside of the Western tradition and build your teams in a diverse way there's no better way to write diverse stories than to build a team made up of diverse peoples so thank you so much for your time I hope this has been valuable to you you can find me at Hana Nicklin putting on all of the internet and and Goethe fabric is you should follow on if you want to hear updates on the game

I hope that you're all well and safe and in these complicated times I wish you the strength and solidarity of good community thank you