Learning From Loss: Designing the Experimental Narrative of 'Before Your Eyes'

[Music] hi everyone thank you for coming I've been told to tell you all to turn your cell phones off so you should probably turn your cell phones off but it's okay if you don't want to as well um uh my name is Graham Parks I'm the main writer and one of three creative directors behind this indie game before your eyes it came out two years ago on Mac and PC released on mobile via Netflix last year and just about a week ago launched on Playstation VR2 but if you're not familiar with the game you definitely will be by the end of this so don't worry um yeah in 2014 was my last year of college um and one of my oldest friends from high school will hillworth who you see right there uh called me up and pitched me this crazy idea for a video game he wanted to make for his college thesis project and uh basically what he had discovered is that with this readily

available plug-in even the most basic computer webcam could do ey tracking and he wanted to design a game around that specifically around the process of blinking he was intrigued by the physical inevitability of that process that no matter how hard you try to keep your eyes open you'll ultimately fail and and he saw this as a metaphor for death which is something that he'd been wrestling with in his personal life for a a a variety of reasons um but he also saw it as kind of like a subversive punk rock statement on what video games can be because I think we're so used to video games being about winning and triumphing over adversity and you know powering up and leveling up and defeating the final boss and uh yeah I think his his his question was what if we make a game about losing where you lose a you know no matter how hard you try you can't win a staring contest with a web camera you're going to have to Blink and so what if we made a game where you lose over and over and over again and then you die and that's the

end of the game and the game will take place on a character's deathbed and life is going to flash before your eyes and every time you blink you'll jump forward in time to a different memory of your life and will knew I was a writer we grew up but we went to the same high school we we we took the bus together and spent you know all our time talking about video games basically and and he knew I wanted to write games and so he wanted me to come on and write this game for him and and I can tell you right now it was the single greatest call uh I'd ever received in my life um because it just this game this pitch felt like the culmination of everything I wanted to be a part of creatively um while will was at USC studying games I was at NYU studying playwriting but really spending most of my time watching old movies at the Film Forum this Repertory movie theater where I used to work smoking a lot of weed playing a lot of video games uh and in my very pretentious NYU film kid way uh I'd become obsessed with this idea that these filmmakers that I was learning about from the silent era or Alfred Hitchcock or the French new new wave that if they were alive today

they'd probably be making video games and not films because you know you watch all these groundbreaking old films that were sort of playing with the form and I wasn't seeing that kind of formal innovation in in in the current Cinema um but where I did find it uh was in games and I don't think it's really discussed enough but those were some really incredible G uh years for narrative Indie Games I think um it felt like every few months something was coming out that was totally left field and groundbreaking and you know being the perfect age you know in college it just felt like my mind was constantly being blown um here's you know some few of the classics that uh that left a big mark on me um yeah and it felt to me like playing these games must have been what like seeing breathless or watching Psycho or something must have felt like in the 60s this sort of feeling of I didn't know this medium could do this um and that was so core to what you know this concept that will had will had pitched me um I had I had started signing up for classes at at the NYU

Game Center which was sort of a new thing at the time had a great time in all the theory classes and all that but as soon as I signed up for a uh intro to Unity course I had to drop out because I uh three weeks in I was just too dumb to uh to follow along so this is a GDC talk from somebody who couldn't make it through an intro to Unity course uh yeah I hope it gives some hope to people who maybe are as dumb as I am and you know because of that I kind of had this I kind of felt like well I'll probably never get to work in games um it was this you know medium I was obsessed with but uh uh it just felt like there wouldn't be a place for me so then when I get this call from will I just you know decided I was going to grab onto this thing and and never let go uh and at first it went really well um we will brought in more of our old high school crew like some of um our all our sort of best friends from high school Oli Luen uh who was the composer and became a co-director griffin Libby blesser who was our art director these were like people that I'd known since I

was like three and six and 12 um and he brought us all on to kind of bolster out his USC team that were building the actual game and together we created this 15minute version that we submitted to indiecade in 2014 and it got in um and it barely worked I mean the blink Tech really was rough at that time um but when it did work uh we were kind of shocked by people's reactions um and I'll be honest the the game really wasn't good enough to elicit the reactions it was getting I mean people were leaving the booth crying and you know I speaking just for myself the the writing certainly wasn't um there's a a comment that we received on the Youtube upload of it that I uh that stays in my memory um and you know I kind of agreed with him not that I'd necessarily know but uh uh there was you know but he had he didn't he hadn't played it you know um

uh and I think that you know it was bad when you watched it as a YouTube video but there was clearly something in the concept that was just sort of inherently emotional by creating this physical connection between you and the game and forcing you to lose this staring contest again and again and again the game sort of breaks down your defenses um and you have no choice to get kind of invested um so uh uh in 2014 it won the developer choice at indiecade which we were shocked um and we decided we'd put more work into it I wrote a totally new script we basically rebuilt it from the ground up into something much more much better and more polished it still was very rough by Where It ultimately landed but something that was better um and then in 2015 it won the student award here at GDC uh at the igf um and uh off of that we started getting kind of cocky we really thought oh maybe we really we have the magic fairy dust here so we

decided we're going to make a full version of the game a 2hour movie length experience that could fully explore this concept and really break us as this studio to be wrecked with and uh what did that lead to was 5 years of constant failure um so that's what this talk is going to be about it's going to be about the failure this sort of cyclone of failure we found ourselves in why it happened how we event eventually pulled ourselves out and so it might seem a little Rim at points but I do promise a happy ending um structure of the talk is going to be quickly take you through why I think we were failing so hard at these three key areas and then just doubling back and and and uh explaining how I think I pulled us out of that rout not how I pulled us out but how we pulled ourselves out um so we'll start with the first which is the one I'm most responsible for which was the story um back in college I actually had the pleasure of working as a part-time assistant for this amazing screen writer Michael AR who has this great talk on

the writing Beginnings for Pixar that you can find on YouTube um but in it he says this that uh writing a script is like climbing a mountain with a blindfold what seems like the hard part is climbing the mountain and it certainly is but the really hard part and the part that can really take years is even finding the mountain at all um and that really resonates with me for this game because I it took me 5 years to even find the mountain of this story and so to prepare for this speech I went back through all these different versions and it really was shocking to see how many versions there were of this game um the first one was you know a Shameless death of the salesman ripoff which at 22 years old I was audacious enough to literally steal dialogue from verbatim actually found the quote that I stole from I guess that's homage not plagiarism I'm not sure um you know then there was uh this one which was kind of had this extending framing device I think this was the GD I think I don't I

literally don't remember which which story went with which build at this point but this your a strain father is reminiscing with you and the twist you know on takes you out on This fishing trip and the twist is that you've both been dead the whole time which I most certainly stole from some Twilight Zone episode um love that show but that is basically always the twist that they've been dead the whole time um and then we you know started experimenting with twine for a while so there was another version where you know we had all these different endings where you could like as a rich CEO or you could die as an alcoholic on the on the street and Twine is an incredible tool um but as I said I'm very dumb so it made me very confused very fast uh you know and all these versions I think were clever enough um if there's one thing I've always been okay at it's consuming and internalizing other media and I had no shortage of amazing work to pull from which dealt with the themes that I felt this game needed to deal with with death and regret and the passage of time but the stories always just felt like excuses for a tech demo

really and and then they showed the potential of the concept but they taken on their own they were inauthentic um but there was another big issue which was how the [ __ ] are you supposed to tell a story when the player might blink out of any scene at any moment and that leads us into how we were failing at design um so for those short early versions of the game literally every single time you blinked you would jump forward so if the bler is good at staring contest they might see the whole story but if say they had allergies or hay fever that day they just rapidly blink through all the most important scenes and it was sort of you know interesting in a uh uh uh uh P punk way but yeah it was as you can see here it was not the most comfortable experience for our players and uh it kind of left me screwed over as a writer because as we know good writing is often built on structure and callbacks and how are you supposed to call back to something if I don't even know if the player has seen it or not but it also felt like it was impossible to abandon

this design principle because it was sort of core to the pitch of the game which was every time you blink you jump forward in time um you know we found a couple short-term Solutions uh we took out 3D Movement we uh we switched from text to vo which was something I had always wanted to do anyway and those just allowed you to focus more on the staring contest and not worry about other elements of the game um and we introduced that narrative framing device that the DAT on the boat and that that allowed us to like at at least to have these little siloed sections where you would blink a bunch and then you would go back to the framing device and you could kind of rest your eyes but you know no matter what we did the player feedback was the same that the game was fascinating and interesting and the concept was great but it was really annoying to play and it worked in a 15minute festival setting but it certainly wasn't going to work for two hours and it certainly you know wasn't something we could charge for unless we wanted to you know only have a bunch of refunds uh and this led to Big arguments um about how the blink should work and

you know should we abandon the blink or find some new use for it and and that became this you know kind of philosophical argument about what the game is supposed to stand for and you know as this team full of old best friends that was happening a lot you know a conversation about you know some section of the game would would spiral out into you know these giant you know arguments about who we are as people and so that kind of leads into how we were failing so badly at our process um you know after uh the big win at indiecade and igf we got cocky and we did what all Indie teams do when they get cocky we uh made a Kickstarter and uh it uh it funded uh we raised $335,000 um and I still laugh when I look at that number considering the scope of what we were trying to do we were all like you know cheersing each other after that but we were young and basically consisted of five high school friends none of whom had ever shipped a

game before um and uh we were heading into our actual 20s you know college was was behind us and our side gigs were turning into real jobs and and time was getting Tighter and Tighter which was stressful enough on its own um but then you know we had these Kickstarter backers and they were getting angry which was totally fair because we had over promised and underd delivered as a lot of kickstarters do and our comment section quickly devolved from these words of encourage M to Tire raids against us here's a favorite um I just like when he says are so many I like when he says blowing smoke up my ass while you spend backer money on whatever yuppity [ __ ] sushi lunch or New Age toys you choose I just Li I just think I mean we weren't doing that but I just think it's kind of good dialogue you know it kind of feels like David mammo or something but this guy's good this guy's got a future uh um yeah so we uh began to feel that

there was this angry public outside with pitchforks which only compounded our stress so we did what any team of immature Manchild would do in that situation we turned on each other and uh we started pointing fingers and we started blaming and uh of all our failures as a team and this is a talk about failures this is really the only one that I'm actually ashamed of uh you know because you really can't create anything without emotionally safe environment and you can't call yourself a team unless you trust each other and a couple years into our fail Kickstarter we found we had neither of those things um and that was really hard for us to admit to ourselves because we were all such old friends and we loved each other so much but maybe that was sort of part of the problem that we we we loved each other too much kind of like family um and there wasn't you know the kind of clear boundaries that you maybe want uh in a work situation uh and the months passed into years the game became a kind of real

source of stress for me and I think for the whole team I mean I'll only speak for myself you know I'd be out at dinner and a family member a friend would hey what happened to that game I gave 40 bucks to you know two years ago and I'd have to try to explain it away and it felt like a really impossible situation because on one hand we all knew what we were doing wasn't working and our lives and mental health would definitely be better if we just abandoned it but we also had too much pride and and I think you know we still somewhere really did believe in this game we just had no idea how to make it um and uh you know I'd like to say now we're going to get to the solving problems part of the talk I'd like to say that you know just hard work or Ingenuity pulled us out of that but I I really do think it was a lot of luck um uh I happen to you know I'm also a filmmaker and uh I happen to take a meeting at this company called Riot R yot not R iot we always have to uh make make that clear but there uh there were a company that was recently recy bought by Verizon they were looking to fund

sort of experimental VR and AR we were their first like you know game we kind of got in under the wire you know because we were going to do a VR slice of of the game um but we ended up meeting this Jak uh producer Jake Sally there who' been aware of our game from back in the day and he felt like it was a great fit and he convinced it us to come in and Pitch it to his bosses and you know I said this to Jake recently on text but there's really no way that I'd be here or anything would have happened if it weren't for meeting him at that point because uh for some reason he chose to believe in in the game and the team at a point when truly no one on the team believed in you know believed in it uh uh later we also signed to skybound games and they were equally I mean probably more important for the game success but but I focus on Jake for this talk because um he's really the the guy that kind of was was the light in the darkness um and you know you'll find those people throughout the life of uh making games um yeah but so to our surprise right decided they wanted to fund us and it wasn't a ton of money but

it was enough that some of us could go full-time for a little bit and uh more important than that we could bring on new team members and uh you know the team really started to grow and it grew outside of just a bunch of childhood friends and this is you know how you fix a process because you know first of all you just sort of have to button up when you actually uh enter a real professional uh situation you get other voices other perspectives and you also get uh you know when you're this long into working on something you've completely forgotten what makes it cool or what makes it exciting I mean I think that uh you know we were all at the point where talking about this blinking game was like you know it was like nails on a chalkboard but then to you know bring these new people in who are really excited by the concept and seeing it through their eyes um it's really an amazing way to uh to uh uh rejuvenate a process and uh the other thing we started to do is we had the infrastructure to play test and so Jake would help us organize play tests with with the riot employees and obviously

play testing is helpful but I found one of the things that you know consistent play testing and obviously this is anyone in games this should be obvious but as I said we were dumb so it took us a while to learn this but you know it just it helps you table arguments you can just sort of if you're disagreeing you can just say well we'll we'll find out at the play test and it just makes everything feel a little less personal um and that kind of led us into how we solve the design of the game um we had hired a new designer Bella messix who had just launched his own game little bug which is very cool um you guys can check it out um he was a solo Dev and we brought him on and and uh he you know he was one of the people that really helped us start looking at the concept with fresh eyes and you know he was like why are you guys not just using blink why are you just using blink for this one thing can't blink be used for other things that can be more fun and joyous um and he just kicked off a conversation that became months long with tons of iterations um but you know we kind kind of landed on embracing that idea you

know that we could use blinks for other things than just passing time forward so we started using blink to do things like you blink and you reveal the environment around you or uh what just happened there and uh you uh uh take photos or play music or paint but because we still need to retain that essential idea from the game that that genius idea of Wills um um at a certain point in the scene you're going to see this little metronome come up well not yet here but about Midway through the scene you're going to see this little metronome show up and now the game is going to play like the game always played before um and so that this is telling you that the next time you blink it's going to be your last um and what's really cool about that is like we were able to you know uh put the scenes into these two halves so you didn't have to be constantly frustrating and freaking the player out you could let them have fun let them actually in and enjoy the moment of the scene and then introduce

that tension of okay you're about to leave um and we could also kind of mix that those two designs because we could introduce like you see here uh interactables blinks after the metronome and those were like these little Islands so it's like if you blinked before you got to that then you would jump forward but you can kind of jump over to that and blink and that can help you to stay in the scene so we actually found by sort of um being a little more flexible with our concept uh we were really able to actually bring out what was great about that you know that initial concept we didn't have to lose it um and it allowed us it allowed me to uh retain that sense of frustration of [ __ ] I I missed it I keep missing out on things but also not letting that frustration totally dominate The Experience um uh and you can see here like this is a little scene from the final script um and every scene I was able to kind of write at the bottom at that time we called it the blink counter it you I don't know why um but uh but uh you know so you could kind I could kind of know

okay I'm going to put the necessary stuff the stuff that I'm you know you need to know that I might call back to before that but then once that comes up I'm still going to leave you know we had amazing voice cast I'm still going to leave all this really you know Charming dialogue and funny stuff and and and uh interesting moments that fill out the experience that you you can still miss and still get that feeling of oh God I missed out but um you're not going to just like jump through the stuff that you need to even you know understand the story at all so we kind of were able to have our cake and eat it too which leads to how we ultimately kind of how I ultimately solved the the writing part of the game um I think the real key to it was that I had time um as I said uh before most of the other team had to were taking other jobs and when we started with Riot I was able to have about four months where I was the sole person working on the game um fulltime uh uh and I recognize this is a really rare opportunity for Gam writers we are often asked to fit our work around crazy

production schedules but I think as writers we sometimes have to advocate for that importance of that time and just uninterrupted time because I I really do believe the most important work happens in your subconscious and if you don't have that time to think and to gate and you're always on that next deadline you're not going to access the Deep work um and that's what those four months gave me and so I'd have these long meetings with Will and sometimes our art director Griffin and olly who would become a co-director on the and we' you know we'd all just sit around and and and uh you know pitch ideas and then I'd get to go off and write and at the end of the week I'd send them stuff and they'd send me reactions and you know it was it was sort of a dream for a writer uh and uh I realized that what was holding me back for so long was this impostor syndrome because you know all those years ago will had brought me this incredible idea maybe my favorite idea of all time and I felt like it could be the most meaningful and heartbreaking

work ever I think there was just something about Blink you know you're going to literally blink through someone's life um and it kind of felt like why isn't you know Terrence Malik doing this why am I doing this and uh to kind of give up on that feeling of we're going to do the best version um and you know try to uh and just try to figure out what's the version that that I know how to do and what's the version that this team knows how to do um because that was something we had that other teams didn't you know we were we were all childhood friends we grew up within biking distance of each other and we were all intimately aware of each other's upbringings and life story that's me and will at prom uh that's olly and I when we were literally four years old there's Griffin and Olie I don't know what they're doing there with their boxers but uh uh so we started um kind of taking walk down memory lane and we digitized old home movies of our real childhood memories and we're sharing things with each other other and a lot of the props and environments you'll see in the final

game are taken directly from those home movies like the house in the game is actually based directly on alli's childhood home which I grew up two doors down from um you can see there at the rat party for the game we actually projected uh a streamer playing the game against the house that the the house in the game was based on so it was a very meta crazy moment um but through the process of uh unearthing these memories I started to think about a time in my life that I didn't think about that often often um in middle school I dealt with a pretty severe chronic illness had had to have a big surgery and was homeschooled for a year and a half um there's a picture of me in the hospital and um yeah that was a tough time and a lot of memories and and emotions I realized you know going back I realized you know I repressed I had not thought about these things in a long time and bringing those memories back LED me down the path to finally breaking this story and finally finding the mountain that you know I felt I was meant to be climbing um which was figuring out the central twist that the plot hinges on

which if you play the game you'll know but I won't spoil um I actually found this photo on Facebook yesterday it had been posted by Olly um and I like this one one comment why the [ __ ] did you put this on the internet but you know I'm actually this is I I guess 15-year-old M me was angry that he put that on Facebook but I'm now you know 30-year-old me is 31-year-old me is very uh happy that he did so I had it for this speech um uh but uh all at once sort of in a meeting with olly I figured this thing out and I rushed home and I wrote out a little two-page Fable version of it and I sent it to olly and will and for the first time there was unanimous praise there was no fighting um they both told me they cried after reading it and we all felt sure this was going to be the game um you know only uh four years late but we got there um and of all the positive press we received this little article on fan bite is one of the ones I'm most proud of um because this writer had no way of knowing that some of this stuff came from personal experience but

she could somehow feel that um because she had gone through that same experience so she didn't need a fact check it she just knew um and you know I've always hated that advice to write what you know because I always felt like I I never experienced anything worth writing about but I also think genuinely you should write about whatever you want um but I do think what I learned is that on some level you should be or for for certain projects I think you want to be able to be able to write from a place of personal vulnerability um to approach subjects that make you uncomfortable things that you maybe want to run away from uh you know you have to be maybe a little bit willing to put your hand on the stove and hold it there and I think if you kind of force yourself um in that direction you know into those vulnerable and comfortable places I think that's where you know a lot of the magic really starts to happen um and don't just regurgitate the the structures from other media that you've consumed cuz

that's what I did for for all those years and again it didn't work and you know uh we all know there's something coming that is probably going to be better at doing that than all of us um and one thing chat gpg can't do is be vulnerable so I think uh now more than ever it's a good time to to lean on that uh yeah so looking back if there was one thing our team needed earlier it was to get comfortable with that discomfort and I would have hated to hear that seven years ago but I just think it takes a certain amount of life experience to get to that place um in 2014 we had set off to make this game about loss but we didn't really know anything about loss uh but in the 7 years of failure we got to know it very well first was the loss of the dream that we'd be the successful Rockstar Indie Studio out of the gate but we also endured P personal losses family members ended long-term relationships and Partnerships and even friendships some of which which were strained to the point of breaking by the very pressures of making this

game uh and I just wanted to take a moment in case anyone ever finds this who worked on this game just take a moment to share some gratitude for anyone who worked on this there was so many people that worked on this game there were so many erors and so many people that put so much of themselves into it and I worry sometimes that the ones that didn't get to see it through the end feel like they can't share in its success but they absolutely should because the game really does belong to everyone I mean yeah a game that takes that long has a lot authors um and yeah so the story ends with us winning a bafta um winning a bafta is a crazy process after you get it you're taken off stage and you have to sign all this paperwork which stipulates that you don't own the bafta but you're actually renting the bafta from them and you got to take care of it and you can't sell it and you should and you can't let it get stolen or lose it um but uh at the Afterparty I lost both of the baftas

so uh so it actually ends with me losing a bafta I was I was drunk I was supposed to be watching them I tried to blame olly for a while but I'll admit it here it was me um and and then I came back he said you were supposed to be and we ran back and they were gone um this was an email we had to send to bafta uh um which uh and and they we had to send the last photo that we had of it so if that you know as if we didn't already seem like two dumb Americans who didn't deserve our baas there's olly looking like an idiot with the two baas um yeah but don't worry you know it it worked out uh it turned out just the forza team had won so many baftas they thought they were theirs so then they s the back there but uh U uh you know but uh in the span of those two hours I went from feeling like this artistic genius to once again the biggest idiot on Earth um you know and

my phone had died in the process so by the time my phone came back to life uh we had lost the bafta so my first call to my to my parents wasn't I want a bafta it was I lost my bafta uh which was a bummer but uh you know I tell that story to just illustrate that the years of failure aren't going to be all made worthwhile by reaching some big glorious ending and if you think about it like that you're definitely going to be disappointed because you know the universe has a way of reminding you who you are that just a dumb guy who couldn't make it through an intro to Unity course um and over the last year we've started work on a new title we're still part of the Goodbye World family but we've actually created a brand new studio called nice dream which literally just went public today so we don't have like any followers so if you guys want to get in on the ground floor there it is um and we're still idiots and we fail constantly but I think that what this one success has given us it's the ability to not be so afraid of failure

um the teen certainly still argues over what the right path is but we just sort of assume that everyone's a little bit wrong and that we'll find out later in play testing um the last couple years I've gotten really into two things jackass and you know uh from software games uh these be been my comfort viewing uh for some reason going back to jackass I don't I don't know why um uh but I was thinking about and I realized what links the two and why maybe I like them so much is that they're really about celebrating human failure um and our incredible ability to know that we're going to lose and that we're going to get very very hurt but still go out and try to do impossible things um and uh if you choose to make games for a living uh uh or any highly collaborative art form that's what it's going to be like sort of like trying to win a staring contest with a web camera you're inevitably going to lose over and over and over

again and then you're going to die so uh there's your happy ending uh hope you guys all enjoyed it thank you so much uh uh for [Applause] [Music] attending