Narrative Nuances on Free-to-Play Mobile Games

[Music] so i'm ryan kaufman i'm the vp of narrative at jam city and this talk is titled narrative nuances in mobile games i do have two caveats first of all it is early i realize it's only 10 a.m but i do swear a lot so just so you know don't be shocked there are cusses in this presentation um and i am sorry i will do my best not to do that [ __ ] second it is totally okay to laugh at my shitty graphics i am a writer i am not a graphic designer um and so there's some stuff in there that you might think maybe a child got hold of my presentation or a chimpanzee or something like that and it's okay to laugh i do like a really cheesy google slides transition so enjoy a bit about who i am just briefly i started at lucasarts back in 6000 bc when we made games out of sticks and rocks and it was really cool

and i was in qa and then a designer and then i started to write so i do come to writing from a design perspective so interactive story is something that's always been in my head how do we make stories that people can play after that i was at a place called planet moon and we did some sort of co-op and kids games so i started to broaden what i thought of as the audience it wasn't just star wars people with lightsabers and pew pew anymore it was like kids and parents and and playing together and having a story experience together after that i was at telltale games for eight years i worked on the walking dead i was creative lead on wolf among us and game of thrones in addition to being the narrative director there um and so you know making those games really helped hone the craft of what is interactive story what does choice mean how do you play something how do you feel uh these emotions that the character's feeling um and i developed i developed sort of a

curriculum about that and i gave these seminars to the writers and the designers and a lot of that is in this presentation so these are not just theoretical things but these are actually some battle tested techniques that you can take away from this presentation and use um because i know they do work to some extent and then most recently i came to jam city and um that's been really interesting to be engaged with a totally new audience so in addition to like harry potter we also have games that are super casual like panda pop and cookie jam and our audience is uh comprised of all sorts of different people so it's been really interesting to develop stories for people i'm um i'm not used to developing and that game sometimes ignore so that's that's been really great um for this presentation um i did a lot of research and by research i mean i spent a lot of time looking at twitter and because that's easier than

researching and at one point i came across this quote and i thought this really encapsulates i think what our struggle is right now and that is we have to deliver all this information and we've only really got to the point where we can dress it up a little bit about with you know we really need to get across give me 12 ram horns for a plus 3 sword but we can kind of gild the lily a bit with the gravid plane and the codicils and realm voids and all that stuff but is it any better um i mean that's the question boom look at that pretty cool um the this is the question i want to address in this presentation we're going to talk about why it hasn't gotten that much better on the whole and i think to start with maybe it's something to do with how we view our jobs so i think we often start with this assumption that we the writers

need to transmit the story to the player who is essentially like a reader there's a lot of information to cover and you know we need to include backstory and plot and well more backstory and characters oh you should have those locations yes critical dq why not more backstory world building a plots b flat z plots a whole bunch of stuff needs to get shoved into our story and the experience can be very unequal on either side of that arrow and on our side we're like sitting there thinking we're like mary shelley we've invented a new genre um because we've given all this amazing lore but on the other side on the player side it can be different it can be kind of like what who and we have to be careful about that and there's some techniques i'm going to cover to help connect people to that information we're trying to give them we labor under maybe a fantasy that if

you pair a well-written story with a reasonable player you're going to get this love affair and this love affair is gonna last forever like these two crazy kids i think it's gonna work but all too often because we're making them drink for the fire hose the reaction is more like yeah okay i don't get it bye i'm not connected to this game so i see instead of an arrow i see it more like a virtuous circle and it starts with the things that we are going to give we are going to give emotional story we're going to give character relationships participatory art compelling choices and that the players are going to come back with when they see when they experience our emotional story they're going to come back with emotional investment they react to the character relationships with like their ships and their memes and all that cool stuff and the art becomes cosplay and the choices become

tears and loyalty and i'm coming back and i'm playing season two or whatever but we have to sustain this circle because that's how we create the connection and the connection is extremely important the connection is what brings people back the connection is what builds loyalty or builds investment and even monetization and if you come away from this talk with one idea in your head if everything i babble about just like goes completely one in one ear out the other remember this connection is better than information information is just data your job as writers is to form a connection you are artists you are looking inside of your own heart so that you can connect with someone else's heart information is just that's for robots you're not robots the people playing these games are not robots we have to strive for something deeper than that

information will take care of itself if people feel connected to what you're trying to get at so this is the big takeaway you can leave now if you want um i just gave it all away i just wanted to underline this i'm really sorry i couldn't make it blink um i'll do better next time all right so now that i've established kind of my my my large goals let's talk about actual techniques and i'm going to drive through about six proven things i know can work and that you can take away and apply to your own games and your own narratives first there's a right story for right audience crafting payoffs something i call writing for the triangle compelling choices and sharing is caring and i realized that i said there were six and so i'm going to include a bonus there will be a cat this comes because um when i used to give these seminars for the writers and

designers at telltale the only time we could do it was at lunch and i knew that they were sitting out there angry that i had taken away their lunch so i would always promise them hey no matter what is boring stuff is in my slideshow i will include a picture of a cute kitty and that tended to mollify them so i've i continue to use that and and it might work on youtube hopefully oh god i love transitions um so write story for the right audience this is where it often begins and it can go wrong right from the start you have to know who your audience is and you have to know what they care about i think sometimes we assume we know um i was in a room recently with some devs who were kind of like blue sky blue sky brainstorming what is their game going to be like and they were throwing out references they were like i love you know mario kart and i kind of want to be like that and like um super smash bros and playing a lot of that so they were drawing in all these like

really credible references mainly from sort of those nintendo products and i said i said well okay so who's our audience and they said oh it's like women age um 50 to 60 and i went it's totally possible that these women would get those references but we didn't ask anybody and they just assumed they knew and i think that's where it often goes wrong is that it needs to start with a conversation you need to go to your audience first of all identify your audience second go to them ask them what are you into what do you value what are you looking for in a game because it's totally possible that you could come to the table with some really credible pitch that included a lot of high quality references like it's going to be like true detective wrapped in the best parts of jessica jones and in a gritty fantasy setting with real political intrigue and like that sounds really cool but what if your audience is like they don't get those references those values are not important to them so you sort of wasted everybody's time

and it's easy to get caught up in what you love but remember there's a second part of that equation and what can help you with this are for a long time we talked about demographics and demographics are now seen as kind of limited like males 18 to 35 well a male 18 to 35 an 18 year old male could be just getting out of high school and a 35 year old male could be like have kids and own his own house and their values and what they're looking for are not really aligned so now we talk more about segmentation and there have been a couple of great talks so i won't go over segmentation too much but it's really more about thinking slicing through that entire demographic and looking more for personality traits or like play styles or goals um what your audience is looking for so like as an example we did for panda pop recently we were thinking about what if we had a more robust story in panda pop because

there kind of isn't a story it's very suggested so we went to the audience and we talked to a lot you know we talked to men we talked to women all ages and we sliced um sort of one demographic and did a little deep dive on like what do you like about this game like what are you looking for when you when you get into panda pop and there were three groups and first of all it was a skill group and these women were really interested in they wanted high scores they loved to discover strategies so like how to bank the you know like the bubble and and understanding the mechanics and using all the various like weaponry and stuff they were super skill based and then there was a second group and they were more resonating with the content they liked the cute pandas they liked the magical world that's what was getting them back into the game and then the third group was the escape group like the uh this is my stress relief this is my me time it was a little place they could go to get away from it all

and that was really instructive for thinking about the story because it automatically gives you a sense of who your story might appeal to and or even better we started to think about how could we include some of these elements in the story so that players could feel they were reflected somehow like could some of the pandas be very like skill-minded pandas who take pride in how well they do and we're not the only people who think about this i mean netflix i thought this was interesting they talk about taste communities and you can see it in their ads right now i have a bunch of ads where like a bunch of really disparate looking people are all sitting around like watching umbrella academy and like i think that's really real i mean both my daughter and i really enjoyed that show for completely different reasons but when you think more about segmentation than demographics it opens up again avenues for connection you're trying to connect with people you have to know what they're looking for

so the ideal way to conceive a story this is a graphic you can laugh at um i do that with my finger guys so it should start with the stuff you love i don't want you to come away from this talk thinking ryan told me you can't like i can't do what i love please start with what you love it has to start from something real and that's something is probably in your heart or from your life but don't forget to include the stuff they love too and know what that is don't guess at it go ask and the sweet spot is the is the pink squiggly bit and pink squiggly bit is so important to know because that's where your game story should live and um i would love for that quote to get taken out of context pink squiggly bit so now that you have pink squiggly bit and you kind of know what the values are what kind of story should you tell um why don't we go to the old hoary

chestnut uh what about the hero's journey okay it's an incredible story template you have you know what does it look like well it's got a call to action there's an arc you know there's shenanigans in the middle where you have adventures and fight monsters and storm troopers and then there's a resolution where there's a big conflict and the hero learns something about herself and changes and that works really well because it maps really well or has mapped really well to like aaa single player type of games where you're going to start with a tutorial it's like how do i get involved and then there's going to be a mid game and that's all your levels um and then there's the final boss who comes in and you fight and the game ends and boom it kind of maps nicely over the top but we're in a different era now so free to play kind of looks more like this doesn't it you have your fatui and then there's like you start churning through those levels and you get like level 500 and level 1000 but it just keeps kind of pointing out

infinitely so that doesn't look like the hero's journey there's no arc there's no resolution so then what what what kind of story is this i say consider the humble sitcom structure i mean sitcoms are built like this they start with um a cast of characters and they don't know how many seasons they're going to go so they really have to build the story to be somewhat pliably infinite and their structure looks more like this we have all these ups and downs and they're way more frequent which we know suits the mobile environment a lot better so i'm not saying you have to i'm saying consider this is this is a really interesting possibility um and i'll make one more play for it i'm not being paid by the sitcom industry or anything like that i just really see that there's potential here first of all um sitcoms are based on characters with unresolvable dilemmas you know like leslie knope is always going to be naively optimistic she's not going to change

joey's never going to turn into a rocket scientist um ron swanson is never going to believe in government like but that's fine that's what we want out of that entertainment and putting those characters in conflict is how you generate stories over and over and over and it can scale infinitely they also have clear act breaks so every sitcom if it's a half an hour it's got three act breaks and that also gives you a really nice rhythm um and it's something that you can map on to your own stories they're smaller producible arcs it's not like a gigantic 60 hour mega arc you could do smaller iterations on that and the scenes tend to be character based i mean you could do most sitcom scenes in a room an empty room with two chairs and two characters that could be a sitcom scene it's totally doable and that's way closer to uh how we need to produce things in mobile has to be somewhat cheap somewhat easy to produce and quick

we have a lot of content to put out and so if you look at sitcoms there's a nice parallel there but don't forget do fit your content to its format especially if you're working with a big ip so for example what i mean is in harry potter we have like the books have these amazing set-piece adventure things you know the lake of fire with a million zombies coming out and attacking them um the movies do this too because they're visual medium and movies have to be a spectacle however with hogwarts mystery we knew we needed to be somewhat more contained and smaller but still feel very meaningful and connected so hogwarts mystery is all about characters there's a million characters and you meet them all and they have different personalities and putting those personalities into a room together is how we drive the drama we don't do it with giant you know set pieces we do it with character drama and that's because we're fitting the

content to the format all right number two crafting payoffs okay so now that you've got your audience in the door and you've talked you're telling them the right story how do you keep them there regular narrative payoffs bond a player to a game what you want to do is establish a habit or establish an expectation of this payoff that's going to come and you need to do that by starting with emotional storytelling not informational storytelling you will never hook anybody with a bunch of data about here's some plot points and a list of planets you're going to visit nobody cares they just don't remember what i said connection is better than information start with a connection and that means starting with a theme because themes are what people feel like theme is a really easy way to explain to people how they're supposed to feel about your game or feel in your game and you have to know what it is i've can't tell you how many devs i've talked to that they would explain their story

you go here you go there and i'm like okay that sounds cool but like what's your theme what's the theme of the game and just like look like just haven't thought about it so think about it um examples of themes are like when we were doing game of thrones we talked with um some people who knew george rr martin and we talk a lot about this idea of your passions will destroy you and that's a theme that runs all the way through game of thrones we see characters who you know like rob stark spoilers um his passion for his father that that loyalty drives him to pursue revenge which leads to his death and the death of a lot of people he loves and that kind of thing you see all over the place and when mobile it kind of i was trying to think of examples of this in mobile and i thought of donut county and um kind of tickled me because i think it's it's applicable to what we do too romance is always a good one romance is something we all understand um at some point in our lives we engage

with it personally and it's a really powerful driver for players too and there are a lot of games out right now that engage in romance um and even in potter we're sort of starting to explore that too as the kids get older we just did our celestial ball um [Music] so that was and that was well received by the fans redemption especially redemption interrupted so with walking dead we had lee and that whole first season was all about redemption interrupted and it's very tragic and sad and and it makes you cry and actually sadness is a powerful theme and it's something that i think especially in mobile we're scared of mobile is traditionally very conservative when it comes to content because we don't want to scare anyone off however i've seen it work in games like lily's garden where i take a pretty common trope of the the kind of homescapes like builders and that is that a relative has died and

left you this giant estate and the story ends up being about like the estate that you renovate instead of like wait somebody died like did i love them does am i sad about that and i think lily's garden does a great job of bringing that grief back in a way that's not oppressive but it feels real and three-dimensional so props to them now that you have theme you have to think about cadence like i said you want to establish a habit and you don't want to give them the extended edition with the beards that go to the floor when all they want is like seinfeld you want a quick experience they might because you've done your research and you know what your audience wants so for telltale um just quickly we had sort of a 90 to 120 minute experience and every episode ended with a big cliffhanger and it was followed by a next time on which was essentially a tease for the next thing so we knew we would have at least one big emotional payoff

and then interspersed we had what we called the big five and those were like smaller payoffs and those would happen about every 15 minutes or so so excuse me um so this is kind of like what the cadence looked like for a typical telltale episode and every 15 minutes worked for that format because we knew people were probably sitting on their couch they were pretty dedicated to trying to finish the episode we weren't competing for their attention as much with potter we have these things called time limited side quests and those tend to be for one big theme that is chopped into maybe six to eight chapters and each chapter takes place in a location and they're about 10 minutes each so it's a way it's a smaller time slice and each chapter is a mini cliffhanger about halfway through and that mini cliffhanger tends to come in the form of a question it's usually they're trying to do solve some mystery or you know figure out ingredients for a potion or something like that so it's like a what is question like what is you know ingredient x and then they go

and they work on it and this is where the player spends their energy and that always ends with the payoff which is the okay now we know we figured it out and that pivots the scene to what's next and each chapter usually has a choice and it's often a role play choice so you guess you get at least one moment of forming a relationship or changing a relationship with a character and then it ends with a hint of what's next so in some senses it is kind of like a mini version of of the telltale cave sort of like most dramatic um episodic formats so kind of looks like this and there you go and i drew that with my finger too so i'm very proud of it so you can see this actually if you if you blew it up and copy pasted it it would kind of look like that telltale thing but what's important about both of those examples is that was very much codified by the teams these are like

rules they were always something we would evaluate and say do we have our big payoff um for potter it's like do we have the scene pivot and do we have something to send players off to the next location so making it more of a formal structure is really important to make sure you're not missing that and that you're creating that habit and remember that this is a retention tool like once you form a habit don't don't let it go like that's really tough so be consistent and deliver on the promise of your theme it's important to deliver on that promise and speaking of promise hey what about that cat you told us there was a cat and frankly i don't think you deserved the cat yet um that's just me that's how i'm feeling you can't force me all right so now that we've got our audience we've got some sort of cadence now let's talk about this notion of writing for the triangle and this is a

really easy technique to take and use yourself or at least be aware of when you're doing it a lot of times we have dialogue between two npcs and they can be really cool npcs they can be very well written of course they're because you guys are great writers and um you're you know you got cersei and she's very interesting and evil and she's gonna say something cool and tyrion is super funny and witty and he's gonna say something cool so we spend all our dramatic energy in that conversation between these two characters because we know it's gonna be fun and fireworks what we forget about though is like the player the player's sitting there and it's now non-interactive i mean and that's fine for tv that's fine for movies that's what we expect but if they're sitting there with a phone in their hand they do want a little bit of that interactivity so are we forming a connection no this is information this is one way so even the best dialogue then becomes kind of lands in that information bucket

so how do you fix this this is a really common way to do it and we did it in harry potter this is an example of how it works um this is penny and penny's currently engaged in a project to create decorations um and her teacher professor flitwick has told her you are not to use magic to create these decorations and she follows rules so she is of the opinion we shouldn't use magic to uh enhance the decorations so character one states an opinion then you have character two and character two usually has the opposite opinion or at least a different opinion this is all well and good then the two characters turn to the main character the player and ask an opinion they solicit participation they solicit the opinion and i want you to note the positions of these characters because that's what i'm talking about we're starting to form that triangle

physically you're telling the player that they are part of what's going on and the camera work here reinforces that um and then we allow for actual input so here's the interface and the choice then becomes let's use magic or don't use magic and here's an here's the most important thing that i think people forget about a lot feedback so the narrative solicits your input and then gives you feedback to say i heard what you said i saw what you valued your opinion matters and now the narrative has changed somewhat because of that we're acknowledging it and in this sense it was done nicely through through the narrative itself there wasn't you know an on on on screen ui or anything like that this is actually one of the characters saying oh yeah because the character you know hermione told us not to

so what we're really doing there is we're taking some of that dramatic energy that we usually invest in an npc dialogue and using some of that energy to solicit player input and then we're using some more of that energy to create narrative feedback so you can call that branching or whatever but you're forming that triangle with the player they are involved in this conversation and so that's where the triangle comes from and that's where you get that connection because now they're invested in this conversation they had some input um they're interested to see what happens next so now that we've got them talking to the game how do we create those choices that are compelling because not all choices are created equal i'll tell you this good choices are a sleight of hand what you're really doing as devs as creators is you're implanting ideas in the player's head

and then at a key moment you ask them for their opinion and you put those those topics on screen as if the player thought of them themselves what that's the best form of a choice because it feels like the player is like oh yeah this is what i was thinking of anyway and they should feel like they are organically arise from the player's own mind and you can contrast this with choices that arise externally like from an author so for instance if i said um guys what's your favorite flavor of ice cream and then i listed your options and i said pistachio chunky monkey and banana like those are technically ice creams but it's probably not what you were thinking it's probably not even close to the range of stuff you were thinking about and that can feel very much like an authored choice or an inorganic choice and what i should have said was probably something like chocolate strawberry and vanilla like

fairly safe like probably something that was in your head so setting that context and setting the parameters for what that choice could look like is really important too because that's how you narrow the field to something that you can control and use that slight of hand magic to make it all seem very seamless and the last thing to do is to strive to find room for personal expression in the choices so remember you're not conducting a survey you're really trying to elicit some kind of personal expression some sort of emotion from the player because again that's where your connection is going to come from if if the answer answer's coming from their heart you're probably in a really good place you've really connected with them uh and by the way so monetization and premium choices [ __ ] all this [ __ ] up so uh i will get to that later but let's just put that to one side for now um anyway i want to illustrate kind of what i'm talking about it's it's fairly subtle and so we'll do a fake case study this does not exist anywhere but it's i made it up for this and it's

called the draco malfoy beatdown so let's say we're in a harry potter game um and we get a prompt from the game as players and it says draco malfoy is coming down the hallway what do you do there he is and your choices are duck into a broom closet take out your wand and attack and make friends now these are all choices that like don't break reality but do they feel organic i say no i think there is a lot wrong with this range of choices first of all like the detail the broom closet came completely from me the author like i didn't say anything about the broom closet when i said draco malfoy is coming down the hallway um so in order to introducing that into the choice space is bizarre like not what you were thinking right taking out your wand and attacking i guess so but is he doing anything aggressive why would why would a player be reacting that way they wouldn't it's totally a suggestion

from me the author and also the parameters are completely wide open the question is what would you do or what do you do i mean there's a million things i could do i could run away i could like run up and kiss him like why aren't those represented here so the choice piece is really really problematic and finally there's no personal expression why would i be expressing any of these and what does it have to do with how i'm feeling there's no prompts for how to feel about draco malfoy coming down the hallway it's too neutral it's too wide open so this choice is super problematic in a lot of ways but we can fix it first of all let's give a little more context and a smaller parameter to the prompt so here he is he's looking a little more aggressive let's change it to draco malfoy challenges you to a duel in the hallway but you know dueling is against the rules what do you do accept the duel refuse the duel

or tell them i'll meet you later at the bike racks we'll go out behind hagrid's hut and you know off school grounds and i'll kick your ass there so we're closer this is more organic it's probably when i said challenges you to a duel you were probably thinking something like oh we're gonna fight or i'm not gonna fight so that binary is more organic but it is also very philosophical because the whole thing of you know it's against the rules well rules didn't come from you rules aren't inside of your heart rules are something that are again external um and there might be moments when following the rules is is something emotionally engaging but not here the parameters are closed so we really narrowed the field by saying you challenged to a duel so the choices do feel a little more natural the deferment choice is not great really the meat later at the bike racks is just a way of saying uh let's return to this exact same choice later and that doesn't really do anything for

your story or for the player so the final suggestion would be how could we make this a more personal player-centric question and here's my attempt to do that so now we could change this to uh malfoy challenges you to a duel in front of your new crush who then offers to defend you and your choices are found fight malfoy yourself i got this um leave without fighting wave the peaceful warrior let your crush defend you and then it does sort of suggest a fourth one which is beat his ass together so like this is how couples bond sometimes um so what i did was to create a more personal version of the same question so now instead of asking about rules we put a little romance in there so this is probably something more close to how you think and feel and your worries and anxieties because that all comes out when we introduce romance or someone you want to impress

so the parameters in the context are more clear what's going on who's there what's your relationship to them um it's your crush it's draco malfoy he's being a dick um so and finally the personalization is stronger because now at least there's an implied relationship outcome like if your crush says i'll defend you and you say don't there's maybe some implied relationship change there or you let them do it again reply implied relationship change and this is how to get closer to maybe what the player really feels and thinks inside and when they give the game that kind of input they're sharing personal information and that's how you create a connection in a bond um so again so monetization just so you know we do survive on monetization and i'm not like down on it but i i think it's worth calling out that it activates a different part of the brain and it's like an acquisitive part of the

brain it's the brain it's part of brain that like wants something and you can see it it's often kind of um staged that way so here's a here's an example from choices and i like choices i mean i'm not down on choices or anything but like this is a good example of kind of how how they have to bend over backwards to make this work so the first frame your boss is asking you out to dinner like so far so good like relationships are clear like stakes are clear then you notice that the game itself has to introduce a piece of meta text to actually tell you what this choice is about and it's not really about your love life it's like you need access to your new boss and then that's followed by okay now do you want to buy that access the implication is you're going to miss something if you don't and so that's different and it just works on a different part of the brain and be conscious of when you mix them together sometimes the gears can grind sometimes it can work but i just want to

throw that out there so finally sharing is caring and when i mentioned participatory art earlier i was talking about characters in dialogue that lend themselves to sharing and like what i mean by that is like fan art and memes and cosplay and these are a big part of games now and fostering that community is really important too you want to give people something that survives really well outside of the game like are your characters too visually complex to make any sense to somebody who hasn't played them or do you have like a cool you know a catchphrase that like totally works outside of the game if someone took a snapshot of it and sent it to their friend who never played it how well would that person kind of understand what this game was was getting at either in terms of humor and tone or you know just some funny concept it's absolutely worth thinking about

at a very early stage so that you can create something shareable one example of this is like using really distinct costume or visual designs something that's actually easier easy for someone to caricature or cosplay i mean break it down to like we introduced this character diego kaplan into uh hogwarts and he was designed with this bright yellow hufflepuff scarf and like that's something you can draw and the blue jean jacket and sure enough when people went to create fan art this is a totally different art style they're not trying to draw diego kaplan in a way that you recognize him from the game they've picked up on those visual elements and that's what i'm talking about in terms of shareability if you can do it in a few lines it's more powerful because you've widened the audience of people who can then do fan art about your characters um again so for mirrorless night she's one of the main characters she's got this like highlight in her hair and guess what when people started

to do fan art of marula that was the go-to element everybody picked up on it you you just once you get that you know who she is and it transfers into real life too so this young lady was doing the cosplay and she got the wig and did the bright um bright highlight and boom she's marula and that's the kind of thing that lowers the barrier to entry for fans who might otherwise be like i can't replicate this costume well now you can this is easy this is simple and it's accessible and go out do it cosplay and spread the love for marula and it's not just harry potter i remember when we were um at telltale we were talking to gearbox about tales from the borderlands and i asked them about their relationship with the fans and they were telling me that even at the concept art stage they think about their characters as being cosplay like what body type is this good for cosplay or what visual

element on this character is appropriate for cosplay can we simplify it can we heighten something so that people can do this and that the fans can go out there and really you know celebrate the game instead of making it so i don't know maybe visually complex that it's hard to cosplay so you can see it right here this is maya and you know she's got those three really strong visual elements the hair the yellow one piece and this big old tattoo and sure enough you know someone goes out to cosplay she nailed it you would know who she was if you were even a casual fan of borderlands and you can also take it to the next level like this is not to exclude people who really want to go bananas on the costume but you can see there's a range here in somewhat accessible range for people at the lower end who just like maybe are more casual fans well now she's a cosplay fan um i don't actually know anything about this woman she could be a totally dedicated cosplayer but my point is creating something simple to replicate

another thing is inclusive and representational characters and relationships inspire fans so addressing and engaging underserved communities we can do this like we just just came up in avengers academy where there's a relationship between nico and carolina that's in the comics and they sort of have an on-again off-again thing and they would they wouldn't really touch this in the avengers movie you know um i think there's some media that feels it's too big to go for this type of thing but we can work in the so-called margins of larger ip and create and address these communities and say like look this you know you're part of this and and draw them in and that i got this off of the tumbler because someone found it in the game and was so excited they posted the whole sequence where nico asked her out on a date she says i have a weird question

and it's just a really cute moment that we were able to put into the game and someone saw it felt like included posted it and then that went out to all their friends and we saw it again with walking dead where we introduced the possibility the choice for a player to start a relationship the clementine and violet could have a relationship and we put this scene in where they have their first kiss and of course the community picked up on it immediately the fan art started coming and they really ran with it and to the point where they even created their own like name for it so these communities especially if they haven't been well represented in the past can be extremely passionate if you represent them in your games and address them and encouraging community response is key and we do have a place in you know hogwarts mystery has a facebook page and occasionally they ask fun questions for the fans like what do you think of diego

and people just love to pop off and they just want to have that outlet to say i've you know got a crush on this character or no way he's totally not my crush like they want to sound off and you should give them a space to do that um not only is it just fun for the fans but we look at these responses and we think about well how do we include diego in future episodes how should we use them how are people feeling about him um even if sometimes it's negative they're like well we don't like him so then our job is to say oh we should probably make diego more likeable what's wrong with him and starting with that fan response again it's that circle it informs new content so finally as a sort of a cap on this um don't explain your story to death i know it's we all get very passionate about the stories we want to tell but i've found over and over again it's actually really important to leave space don't say everything you think you need to say because the

fans need to have space they need to have a void that they can fill with their enthusiasm and with their imagination because they can't imagine any more about your characters because you've said literally everything again that's not the circle that's that's information you're downloading data and they're not robots and you're not robots and especially shippers shippers will if you have two characters who have any kind of sexual chemistry don't be tempted to have them kiss and have a relationship you will get so much more mileage out of a wink or a look i guarantee it um and give people space to tell their own stories could be on forums um you know fan fiction is really powerful but give these communities a place to to talk because remember you can tell one story you have time to tell one story then you ship it but they can tell a million and let them tell a million build your stories to be accessible in that way and i found this really cool graphic look at this

look at this thing it explains exactly what i'm talking about i didn't even need to say anything um so yeah back to the circle um it starts with you it starts with emotional stories character relationships um participatory art compelling choices and then on the other side you've got the players and they're going to give back to you you have to give to them and make it the circle because you're going to get that connection and you want to build to this relationship over time you want to build up to this relationship and of course you want to build to the payoff cat so important so um that is my presentation and thank you um we have some time for q a and so i'm happy to take questions you

guys thank you first off first off thank you so much for this talk this was one of the more pragmatic and how to sort of work in this space conversations i've seen um i'd love to hear more about how do you balance choices and sort of character payoffs and dramatics alongside energy systems or upsells that might be in your game where you know you have to you know be serving some sort of premium economical sort of aspect through your choices and how do you balance making sure that both choices feel appropriate but for the character and that players don't feel like they are being funneled away from something because they can't necessarily afford the energy at that time yeah i mean that is the tough question right how to do that i think we're figuring it all out there's a couple of different modes choices sort of has an aesthetic where you kind of buy up front as opposed to along the way and i think that is easier

to handle narratively like as a chunk i think we're used to consuming media in in chunks whether it's a book or um you know a movie or something like that where where that pay payment is more for unlocking a content and formats where you sort of are interrupted with a sudden choice it comes out of nowhere and it's a monetization choice you didn't see it coming can feel really abrupt now obviously they're still profitable i'm not saying it doesn't work i'm just i'm wary of those because i think they break the immersion that we're trying to create and that over time um you start to turn people out because they're just like well i just don't believe the story anymore i'm not into it you know you do have certain hardcore fans who just push through anyway but i much prefer something that feels more like how we consume media like now in this world where we kind of pay for a chunk

of it and the chunk tends to have a resolution included in it that's my opinions but it's that's the toughest question right now thank you very much uh also thank you very much for the talk um i work at choices personally oh okay wow well i love choices by the way i hope i wasn't i didn't mean to call anybody out i like it it is very distinct the um trying to acquire something versus a narrative choice um so i already answered some of that question but i have more of a question on stories with grief as a primary component to them um we've worked on a lot of stories dealing with romance adventure excitement horror all across the spectrum but we're really starting to go into grief coming up and i'm curious how you have any suggestions for that um i'm making stories with grief as the main motivation for the player and grief is a really hard one and that's why i was so impressed with lily's garden because grief is grief is often seen or felt as very

personal and if you're looking at a character and they're grieving um and you didn't know who they're grieving for which is often the premise of these games you can't feel much more than empathy and you don't ever get to like true compassion you don't feel what they feel so grief is like in walking dead we were able to build over five episodes to grief um you got to know the character you invested a significant amount of time in that character and then they were killed so if possible that i think that's the best way to introduce it because otherwise you are facing a very steep climb to get people on board the portrayal um the portrayal in lily's garden is interesting because it isn't the overriding concern of the story she is trying to rebuild and and it's more like a it's very clever she'll find the little pictures and stuff and that's like a reminder and i feel like that at least is recognizable to a lot

of us who have grief for someone or lost someone that your life returns to normal which is how the game feels the game feels like life is normal and then you'll find something you know you'll pull a drawer open and it'll be something of theirs and and it just floods back and they don't linger too long on it but it is that rush of like sadness and then it fades again and that seems to work um i don't know if that works for you everything is so context dependent right like every story is completely different but those are the two things i've seen work okay thank you so much um i heard or basically there's an author that i am a big fan of that once said that when you're building a world or essentially a story that is kind of like an iceberg where the amount of information you know as an author is huge but what you actually want to

tell the audience is very minimal how do you approach knowing where that line is a great question um i think that's completely true i think that the amount of effort that it takes you know it takes you eight hours to write one line sometimes where you're just like i have to think about it that long to make sure that it makes sense and that feels authentic and real um knowing how much to say is is so it's for me as a whoops as a former designer um i put almost everything i do into the game and let it play because i never trust myself on paper i have to see how it plays and i have to feel and that's i do feel my way through how much information and where it needs to sit and it drives people crazy because i iterate constantly but that's that's my personal method and it comes from being a designer and you know the way same way i approach

level design which is just build build scrap build again until it kind of feels right thanks hey great talk um so you mentioned some techniques like the the triangle and meaningful player choice that apply in narrative driven games but if you're talking about games like whether it's panda pop or tycoon like simpson's tapped out or a team rpg like marvel strikeforce they have a lot of narrative in those games but you really don't have that player side of the triangle yeah the players really represented so in that situation where do you lean and what do you do in games just so the player doesn't have a voice those are really tricky um the best you can do is reflect the choices or allocations that they might have made you can still get the sense of your impact and that there is maybe an unspoken conversation um depending on where you're allocating you know whatever assets or in the case

of panda pop the the conversation is extremely simple but it is if you start [ __ ] up mama panda begins to cry because she's worried that her babies are not going to get rescued because you suck so like that's a conversation that you can still have and no no words are spoken um and that really comes down to feedback and it's not the kind of feedback we usually think of where it's like pull the trigger and the gun doesn't muzzle flash it's narrative feedback it's the same concept but it's with words or story if you can't use words so just thinking about maybe where you might insert feedback that might be a little bit conditionalized or or some feedback that might be more personalized even though maybe there's no dialogue to accompany it thanks a lot hey man thanks for the talk uh-oh how's it going um good man i just had a question in games like hogwarts that have a lot of different characters and they all have unique traits that you said drive the story do you have any strategies to share in

introducing these characters to players that allow them to be rememberable and not overwhelm the player with names or like who dis again yeah yeah we i mean for hogwarts we rely pretty heavily on archetypes so like if there's a character who is going to be hard to get to know like first of all he's going to be drawn so that he's like really solid looking right and they're going to communicate everything in much the same way that a sitcom or like what is it the old italian like comedia del arte or whatever like where where are those archetypes on your sleeve so that's your hook and then even if the player goes oh yeah i think i know what that that archetype is or i know what that stereotype is then you can like build the layers or subvert the expectation later but at least you got a hook where they can kind of remember oh yeah that guy he's like a he's like a sullen guy who likes to be alone you know gotcha thanks man sure hello hey so i was curious on what you were talking about

with the monetization in the narrative games right because i have i've seen it before narrative games where you have two choices and one of them is very clearly better because it's locked behind a paywall and i know that that seems often like the most obvious way to do monetization but it does really break immersion what what i mean what are your preferences i guess like what would you what do you think works better for getting monetization in the game but not breaking players and reminding them that you're in a product pretty much um this is a weird answer but it just came to me the other day i was watching a talk about fall in london and i've always admired that game from afar but i haven't actually played it but olivia wood was speaking about how they do premium content for their players and it just the way they're approaching it seems so respectful but also like you really got your value for your money so this is this is my non-answer i want to go play that game because it seems really interesting and i'm very curious how they did it um as opposed to kind of what i've seen

out there where i don't think we've hit on the perfect solution for it quite yet hey so i noticed that a lot of the examples for building connections used romance or some elements of romance so is romance kind of the be-all end-all of building connections is there any other theme that even comes close to romance in terms of like just staying powers of building connections yeah i mean romance is romance is the most accessible because it encompasses so many ages and stages of our of our lives you you you know start when you're you know 13 or whatever and those early crushes and then you can get all the way into you know old age and you still have romance so it's really accessible and really easy to adapt into a story um but also i mean you'll see you'll see themes of like parentage you know like god of war just came out and it's like a really strong parenting story and lee and clementine like really

strong sort of parenting theme that can often be a thing that really resonates with people whether they see themselves as the child or they see themselves as the parents and you know best friends can also be a really strong theme is making a new friend um and trying to help that person and have them help you but yeah romance is the obvious one because it really lights up a whole bunch of parts of our brain so i think that's why you see it so often thank you all right well thanks again guys for showing up here on 10 a.m on a thursday appreciate it