Multiple Middles & Mutazione

[Music] okay hi uh i'm hannah nicklin and i'm really delighted to be part of this narrative design panel uh really well curated thanks to uh clara and everyone involved um i'm the narrative designer and writer for matasione which is a mutant soap opera where small town gossip meets the supernatural that's our tagline and it was released in september 2019 on apple arcade ps4 and pc i've also been ceo and studio lead of the good fabric since gdc last year just to give you a quick overview of the game we call it a mutant soap opera because it's very definitely formerly a soap opera some people push back on that a little bit which is interesting as a writer i have to look at form and genre as quite neutral um i wouldn't say that action movies are always bad i wouldn't say that soap operas are always bad you know they have qualities which you might expect from them in terms of storytelling and mertescione is very much considered with both the dramatic and the domestic

and it's an ensemble cast story so it's very much a soap opera in those terms and the mutant bit is uh fairly clear from this cast picture which you can see here um it's a 2d adventure game mostly focused on exploration conversations and with this really beautiful magical musical gardening mechanic folded into the story so in matasiana you explain explain you explore a community as a 15 year old girl called kai kai sets out at the beginning of the game to to head to the community in order to care for her dying grandfather he thinks that he's bringing her there to train as a replacement spiritual leader for his strange and isolated town of park mutants and by the end both of them discover that it's all a bit more complicated than that and the answers are in the community itself so mutasioni is this world of weird and wonderful flora and fauna and a community cast of characters of many different shapes sizes and colors there are really beautiful landscapes to explore and this magical musical gardening mechanic where you can create

gardens which are procedural music engines essentially where every seed that you plant adds to the procedural composition and what each garden represents a step towards healing a fractured community it's also 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 action of the present there are love triangles and old wounds bans nights and communal barbecues there are big life-changing events and small inconsequential ones um so uh that aside i'd like to talk particularly about one aspect of the narrative design with you today something which i took to calling in conversations with the team and um in the press as i've talked more about the game in public as multiple middles um so let me go to the next slide um multiple some nice gifts for you all multiple middles is how i'm articulating the narrative

design structure that i used in metastana to support that soap opera ensemble cast community driven dramatic story so at the same time as providing a linear structure and experience which chimed with the more sort of conventional tv and film intentions of the creative lead nils denicken i.e that there's one single story that every player experienced one history which you're going through whilst giving the player lots more room to discover more besides that main history so how they encounter and build their sense of that history of what's gone before and what's being written now is very much down to their agency through exploration the more that they explore the more they're rewarded with more time in the community which helps them understand it better one of the first things that you're often asked when you're working interrupt narrative is how important are the choices or do they matter and i'd like to think that all the choices characters make in a well-written game matter but the amount of control you have over

them as a player and what in turn that effect is on the rest of the game is often seen as the sum of how complex or accomplished a piece of narrative design is so a lot of games discourse can tend towards judging the accomplishment of games and how close they get to the real world of choice and consequence but sometimes abstraction rather than simulation or linearity is useful sometimes things don't have to be branching in order to be rewarding as a piece of narrative design we have to think of these things as tools that we use in my opinion when working with any form or set of expectations the craft is to consider the quality of the materials that you're working with in this case writing for interaction like working with or against the grain of a piece of wood it doesn't really matter what you do as long as you do it with intentionality you can work with it or against it but neither of those approaches is wrong if you understand the quality of that decision and why you're doing it so when i'm asked this question about choice with regards to mutasienae i've taken to describing the decisions i made

in the narrative design as the game having multiple middles rather than multiple endings so in the individual conversations in the game i very much use the kentucky root zero model of choice coloring how the character plays the situation but not really letting you choose who the character is so are you kai attempting to be articulate are you kai trying to defuse the situation with a joke either way you're still kai you're still a version of kai depending on whether she might be in a good mood or a bad mood that day the conversations branch but they do always close down to pretty much the same result at the end of a conversation you might have access different reactions memories and stories but they do come to the same place in the end so the player agency is instead found in exploration let me go to the next slide so why did i design it like this um well uh as a writer and narrative designer coming to the project of matassione um which was you know i came to about

four years ago but the game and the story world itself had been in nils's head and been developed for um you know five or so years before the point at which i came to it um as i came to i said what is the story what is it to you and nils said it was important that it was driven by this ensemble cast of characters um people were using the term soap opera to talk about it so you know i did my homework i made sure i understood what that meant formally um and it was centered around a theme of looking at a community that was a little bit differently aligned with nature so they'd had this disaster in the past that had changed them and they'd built their world a little bit differently um so i wanted to show what that meant domestically as well as dramatically um and it was also built on this really clearly defined pre-existing story world and plot so i had those things to work with and the decisions that i therefore made about player choice were driven by these considerations

which could be translated as needing room to develop many characters journeys in tandem drama driven slice of life setting that's how i define soap opera in this context able to examine the interplay of community because that was very much um there were so many stories in there the only way to tell them was to give an ensemble cast approach and i really wanted to contrast usefully with this sort of fantasy tinged setting that nils had so beautifully built in order to to give a depth of storytelling that belied their sort of cartoonish appearances and so that would give a really interesting contrast and make the world feel really rich and alive so for these reasons it made a lot of sense for me not to give the place a different means that to affect the outcomes like multiple endings i don't want the player to fail because failure means sort of destroying this community or allowing them to continue suffering which doesn't seem ethical to me when designing a piece of

narrative um so to not allow the player agency to exert on the outcome linearly um i.e to make it to make it branch instead i wanted to invite them to shape their experience of the story laterally i wanted them to explore sideways multiple middles as opposed to multiple endings um so this is something that really uh opened up a lot of um references to tv style storytelling and there is another talk that i have uh delivered digitally for gdc called kill the heroes save the world about ensemble cast storytelling and how that those choices that i made in order to tell the story of all of the community well were very much drawn from the influences of long-running tv shows um a b and c plots is very much an approach which i took to matasione and its multiple

middles also so the player choice imitation is exploration rather than conversation focused it's not about branching it's about whether or not you ever experience this conversation or that conversation or if you move the story forwards and decide to never see those um it meant a lot of careful planning to make sure that those mandatory moments in each time of day encouraged the player to discover b and c plots and that no matter which kind of pace you took it at or no matter how much you decided to explore in one time or another it still felt rewarding um and it also gave characters well-shaped journeys so it meant that every character had to sort of dip into the mandatory a plot or plot as you might call it in a sort of tv series-length kind of context every character that i wanted to develop over the time they had to dip into the mandatory stuff in order to bring you out if you wanted to continue following their story so do check out that other

gdc talks that i gave for more context and that stuff um but just some examples of what like an a plot b plot c plot is um as i looked at multiple middles i considered the a plot as the driving theme or problem of the game um we split it up into chapters so i would think about this on a chapter by chapter basis as well as that sort of er plot whole game length context so for example in matasiani on day five um you have to go on a boat trip with tong and new and discover that you should grow a garden to help tongue with his boat making and that's really important to move the story forwards to bring in the gardens for that day that has to happen um b plots are not a thing that you have to do in matassione but they will be really sort of keyed up in previous episodes mandatory plot points or hinted at in those mandatory plot points in that day particularly so they are sort of the secondary story

if you're talking in tv terms in an episode they're often lighter comedic and they contrast thematically in a way that reflects on the a plot really usefully or gives you a different tone to break off into um and then when you return to the a plot it's hopefully more compelling so in day five mutasione b plots include following up on the events of the night before when it was revealed that spike the bartender has had a long running crush on tongues mother claire so there are hints of that in the a plot and if you want to you can dig more into it c-plots are the smallest unit and in a more linear form of storytelling where you have a lot of control over outcomes multiple endings um these kind of c plot style things they tend to feel a bit a little bit empty a little bit like side quests without much purpose because they don't move things forward in that real punching linear way but in a multiple middles kind of explore as much as you'd like sideways c-parts become a really nice place to

develop characters to develop light relief and to just add to your satisfaction with the completeness of the universe so in day five from itacione a c plot would include the sausage folk plotting a new scheme which this time will definitely make them all rich by the way they live in a non-monetary economy so that's never gonna happen but that's why it's fun so um the only mandatory path is the a plot um the multiple middles of the choices you make each time of day to dig into b and c plots hopefully that makes sense um a big part of making this work was in making time transparent because um one of the ways which i made it feel like a universe which is happening whether or not you are there which very much chimes with the sense of building a really convincing story world was that if you moved time forward you would never be able to access those conversations again um that meant that i had to uh work uh i co-developed a bunch of

narrative design details along with um game designers ui designers and the whole team in order to really give you a sense of what it what your decisions meant in terms of time so we have details such as the journal which is a diegetic means of setting out which conversations or actions are mandatory um these that you see here the the uh the black text that's the prompt that you'd get and when you complete an a plot um when you complete a piece of mandatory plotting or with an action or a conversation you get a follow-up in purple um so once you've completed all of the mandatory actions or conversations for a time of day so this is tuesday night in this picture here um time will move forward that last action or conversation will have a timer symbol marked above it so you choose that knowing that it's going to move time forward you can choose not to click it and to explore elsewhere if you feel like

you've not got enough of that time of day yet it allows you to make an intentional decision as a player they also gave them many characters habits and routines constructing plots which progressed whether or not you'd found the first or seven second conversation added to the sense of this pre-existing alive story world in which you are not the only protagonist which was one of the core values of the storytelling um and the slice of life aspect of the soap opera genre um i was able to serve that by interweaving lots of plot lines and allowing the player to discover histories and participate in different dramas past and present um and to work that into this ensemble cast to use it to develop them as characters because there's not room in the a plot for everyone to have meaningful journeys but in this way the player gets to choose who they like and who they're interested in and to try and intercept with them in most times a day and see how they're doing um it's still player choice but it's choice through exploration rather than branching pathways

so this allowed me to build this drama-driven domestic life characteristic which is very much aligned with the soap opera genre and that super pro setting of personal dramas and everyday routines and the choice that i made to draw characters who are very naturalistic contrasting with the fantasy setting i hope that it gave weight to this mutant world that otherwise could have come across as a little bit glib there were some really like big themes in the plot as it was originally presented to me including um the trauma of losing your kids of um of of being betrayed of death and it was very much hanging over the community from all of these past events which described to me when i i joined the team as a writer multiple middle style storytelling allowed me to build characterizations which were rich and complex meaning that the full ensemble cast felt real and part of the texture of the place and it gave me room to explore those

themes more delicately more carefully and more naturalistically in a way that did them justice i hope um and i also work carefully in the dialogue to imbue each character with a distinct voice from cadence idioms style manner of speech all of those things um my playwright training very much came in there the the idiom is is that you should be able to um cover the lines the names of every person in a script and just looking at the way that they talk tell who they are i very much used that naturalistic dialogue style approach to the way that people talked again building characterization building nuance and building journeys that i hope feel real and rewarding to dig down into so in being transparent about time and combining this with the freedom to explore nils's wonderful environments i hope that the narrative design was able to reflect this theme of this closeness to nature which was part of the original brief and also build in the main piece of mechanical gameplay the

the magical musical garden so beautifully composed musically and programmatically respectively by alessandra corones and doug wilson i made narrative decisions that focused on the characters as complex rich and a little bit different for the smallness of their community i wanted getting to know them to feel like coming across a number of new plants you've never seen before tending to them watching them grow and allowing them to surprise you um i set out to build an active design that would allow the player to choose their own pace to push at this central plot if they wanted to but also to meander and wonder and grow their story at their own pace because the themes of the story are tough it deals with trauma colonialism infidelity aging illness but actually when you read reviews of the game or people just talking about it they often characterize it as gentle and i think it's because of that multiple middles approach to the storytelling which gives you the opportunity to pace your own experience your own journey

through the story so when i talk about multiple models what i mean is exploration focused lateral narrative design which opens up a community of characters rather than linear choice and consequent style storytelling which focuses only really on that hero's journey and how their weight of agency affects the world um that's a perfectly acceptable way to tell a story but it's not the way that was going to be best useful in telling this particular story which i was given a brief of telling so in this context it enabled me to build characters that had routines and habits in the physical space of the game and that made exploration easier because you sort of knew where people were going to be i also worked to allow you to choose which characters or subplots you're more interested in allowing you to find the natural ebb and flow of different times of day and all together giving you more of a

sense of natural pacing of really existing in this world it was quieter in the evenings when everyone had gone to bed for example or some characters were always up early and some didn't get up until later these things really gives a universal sense of place i also work really hard in the narrative design to be transparent around time really giving the player a sense of control and agency around their own pacing and that was excuse me that was key to really enabling multiple middles and making it feel rewarding um so that enables characters to feel you know like they're living full and well-rounded lives um and that the player's presence in the world feels situated and grounded uh in the context of a quite fantastical setting um this enabled me to talk more effectively about community as well um because the community was not there to serve the player's journey rather the player was being rewarded for exploring and listening to it tending to the story

rather than applying pressure to it to take general principles from this talk like as an offer of like uh what i learned and what i think people could learn more generally um i'd like to advocate for the consideration of player agency as a quality and not a virtue of writing for games and of storytelling in games restricting agency can be a useful tool in helping you tell your story more effectively more intuitively and in a manner which allows you to explore maybe more complicated themes more sensitively multiple middles as i've described it here style design allows for player agency through exploration rather than changing outcomes um and i think that this is a thing that you develop over time uh is a sense as someone as you develop your craft as a narrative designer and a writer you start understanding you know that you know genres don't have uh virtues they have qualities the same with form and the same with

this structure of player interaction they are all tools with which we need to really like consider what will serve our story best um one of the most meaningful dialogue options i offer muttacione is often the option stay quiet when someone is talking to you of their grief or their sorrow or their regrets sometimes the most powerful act is not to act but to listen we can build narrative design that supports the telling of that kind of act of listening and multiple middles is how i personally attempted it thanks very much for listening and um i know that we're all doing this virtually so i'm really stoked to watch the other contributors to the panel's videos on all of their expertise and what they've learned from what they've been working on thanks very much for listening to me take care