Productive Dissension: How a Diverse Writers' Room Created Life is Strange: Before the Storm

[Music] thank you can uh can you guys hear me okay yeah awesome okay uh i want to start just by saying thank you for coming to the talk it's an incredible honor to be sharing our writing process on life is strange before the storm at gdc and i'm really excited to be here okay so productive dissension how a diverse writers room created life is strange before the storm this is going to be a postmortem of our process integrating narrative design and writing using a kind of tv model of a collaborative writer's room and crafting our 1500 page script for before the storm yeah oh just kidding that looks better okay introduction my name is zach garris i'm

a writer game designer narrative consultant i've been working in the industry on and off for about 18 years i got my first job in publisher side qa for electronic arts i worked on a game called majestic i'm just curious does anyone in the in the room remember majestic i see a couple hands yeah it was kind of an intermedia uh storytelling game the log line was it plays you my last project i was a lead writer on life is strange before the storm i led a team of four writers in the production of the script for those of you who might not know i can't believe i i can say this before the storm is now a bafta nominated prequel to the bafta winning life is strange that came out in 2015. thank you it's crazy before working on life is strange i was on a show called criminal minds beyond borders so prime time crime procedural before that i was a narrative designer on kingdoms of

amelore reckoning how many people played a reckoning are familiar with it that's awesome it was an open world combat rpg before writing and designing on reckoning i worked on two other open world rpgs that were never released welcome to game development at university i studied classics ancient lit ancient history latin ancient greek and i published academic work that i guarantee you no one in this room is read okay a writer's room in its most reductive shape a whiteboard of some type where you can put information in a public space that everyone can look at and think about you can use it to frame your conversation a bunch of writers and a lead writer writer's room is kind of a weird thing writing is a very individualistic creative endeavor and here we we take a room and we bring a bunch of writers who would be working on their own into a space not even to write you don't even write in a writer's room you just talk about writing you talk about story

what do you produce with this process we talk about something called the break at a really high level it's an outline that seeks to explain the constituent beats of a story so some character does something another character feels a way about it maybe we have game play narrative pity fear a boss battle catharsis and that's a rough outline that's really all you need we'll spend hours days weeks months creating a break that writers can then take into their own writing practice to work on whatever element of the story that they're developing whatever scene whatever fragment it was seen writers write their components individually but we break together we do that so that we frame a collective understanding that's sort of uniformly calibrated around the vision of the story so even when john's writing the first scene and police is writing the last scene of an episode they're doing so with a mind toward each other's work and the cohesive vision of the whole

the break might not be the only thing we're talking about in the room though we might spend a few hours just talking about a character like chloe what's her arc in this scene what's her arc in this episode what kinds of choices are we giving the player and how to perform chloe as a character and how do those different choices intersect with our story in productive or non-productive ways we might spend a day talking about a theme like grief an environment like arcadia bay elements of our story like race and gender and because we're also designers at deck 9 we talk about the gameplay mechanics we're using in developing the story as the players seeing it through their eyes why do it i'm going to admit that sometimes and maybe even often working in a writer's room is frustrating and difficult and the title of my talk productive dissension i think speaks to this idea that a healthy room is a room that has multiple voices and perspectives but

inherent in that is conflict you want to discuss ideas contentiously you want to be critical of each other's perspectives because at the end of the day it's all about the work it's about making the work as good as it can be and a writer's room despite all these difficulties that accompany it can produce something really special having a plurality of voices will let you leverage the diversity of your team in a way that will protect your script and your story and your game from any one person's blind spots i'm the lead writer on before the storm i have never been a 16 year old girl but half my writing team has and when they have a voice and the construction of chloe is a character that's going to make chloe better a room has the ability to produce high quality content quickly enough to keep up with your production team to feed the beast as it were game schedules are excruciatingly difficult at times one writer will have a lot more difficulty composing content quickly enough on a narratively driven game to to keep your content pipeline flowing

a team can do it fast and to the quality of the work a good room a really healthy room can essentially voltron a group of riders into becoming one super writer if you don't know who voltron is it's this guy he's basically a giant sword-wielding robot composed of individual robot cats all right so the crux of my talk this is my argument i'm going to suggest that to build a really great room you need three things you need what i call an etiquette of exchange you need a vocabulary and a methodology for talking about complex story work in a way that your team shares and understands and that can do the work in a room that can have conversations in a room that are different from the conversations you have in other spaces you need a culture of transparency which is to say that every voice in the room can speak and will be heard and every member of the room is deliberate in paying attention to their peers perspectives

and if you have those first two you also need a mechanism in place for actually making decisions it's pretty easy to spend a lot of time talking about story and accomplishing very little okay so what do i mean by an etiquette of exchange let's look at virtually any kind of room with people in it not a writer's room just a space where people are near each other they think about different things like work food sex fake news mario odyssey this is this is human nature we're islands unto ourselves we're little universes running around colliding with each other in effective and ineffective ways a writer's room tries to suspend what's normal it tries to bridge those islands so that for a window of time we can all focus on one thing and every individual's talent and experience and skill set can be leveraged for that one thing all right so here's a writer's room we have our lead writer in red we have the white board

guys i want to talk about voltron yeah voltron's cool he's that sword wielding robot composed of individual robot cats i know about that guy ultron's awesome he's a giant he's got a giant sword he's got cat feet voltron sucks i don't get it why would individual cats make a giant dude why wouldn't they make a giant cat why can't cats have swords no no you're missing the point voltron's a metaphor for what we're doing right now it's incredible something that's stronger than the sum of its parts i like care bears so this is a writer's room in action and up until the care bear comment we saw a certain kind of etiquette of exchange at work the lead writer is framing the discourse guys today i want to solve the voltron problem we need to talk about it and in that the lead writer is seeking to curate a very specific discussion with a problem in mind you want to go

into the room with a problem that you want to solve and the lead writer is saying okay guys this is what we're going to focus on and each of the individual staff writers are striving to contribute to that solution and i think for it to really work they need to curate what's coming out of their mouth as they speak and then we have the care bear guy it's probably one of the most common mistakes i see junior riders make in a room you're excited to be there you've never done it before you're surrounded by writers who probably more experienced than you are and the conversation that's happening is really exciting and at a certain point you have a you have a lightning bolt and you're like oh my god care bears i want to contribute i want to say my care bear thing and so you sit there for five minutes waiting for a lull in the conversation and then people are quiet and you're like care bears and when i see it i call it out because this is how you make junior writers more experienced writers and i say oh my god care bears really you think we should stop talking about voltron and start talking about care bears

tell me why and often it's like oh i didn't i don't know that we want to do that i just thought care bears are cool and i wanted to contribute something this is the work of the lead writer in the room it's having to decide whether to talk about voltron or care bears but in in seriousness at all times what you're doing with a team a good team of writers they're full of imagination and they have ideally the experience and the talent to tackle any narrative problem you've got and you like the fuse you introduce the problem and you let them go and you're courting a whirlwind of ideas and a great lead writer can navigate that whirlwind with a decisiveness with an intention and what you have to constantly do as you're doing that is listen to what your writers are saying and how they're contributing and developing iterating on the idea and clarify and focus them as you go it's really easy to talk a lot about something like voltron or care bears or chloe price for hours and hours

and walk out of the room at the end of the day with less clarity around the problem you were trying to solve than you had at the beginning having a structure in place that lets you discuss productively is key to this the other part that's kind of inherent to this process is contention we saw how heated that dialogue got around voltron when we're talking about things like lgbt themes or grief such a personal idea or what it's like to be a teenager i ask my writers to really invest their work and the conversation with themselves i want them to passionately talk about their perspective on the issue and they're going to disagree with each other how do you do that how do you have a dialogue in a group that can become so contentious around around socially charged issues um and and make it fruitful little unpleasant to engage in so as an anecdote when i joined the criminal minds team i

was hired by eric messer she's the showrunner for criminal minds and she told me when she was interviewing me that she has one rule that she uses to sort of evaluate who she brings on board every staffing season from assistant writer position all the way to an executive producer when she's building her rooms she's got one rule no that's kind of silly and funny but it's really true there's an alchemy to a healthy room that's able to passionately argue drawing from their own personal experiences without making the argument about each other and for me it comes down to kindness and humility and i hire writers with that in mind that's really important because it it it keeps the conversation about the work and that's what it should be ego and sensitivity the kind of writer who hears criticism of an idea and really feels like it's criticism of them they might not be the best kind of writer for for a writer writer's room okay

so let me talk about my team for a second the writers who wrote life is strange before the storm john zimmerman he's 32 years old he's a bachelor from brandeis in journalism and creative writing he has an mfa from usc in film production one of the best film schools in the world prior to working on before the storm he wrote and directed a bunch of his own indie projects and this was what really caught my eye when i was interviewing him he taught interactive fiction and enrichment programs for children felice kwan 34 bachelors from princeton and mathematics emma from harvard and education mfa from nyu and musical theater composition so she's obviously a dummy she taught s.a.t and a ct prep she's tutored mathematics she's an extensive larper and she loves to write and read why a fiction mallory littleton she's 21 she's currently in school pursuing an associate's degree from colorado film school in film production with an emphasis in screenwriting mal has done

everything you can do on a film set she watches and plays everything she can and she hates pretty much all of it [Music] i want to talk about really two things pointing out two things related to my team the first is that particularly for john and felice prior to working on before the storm they were teachers and that was really important to me because education is a wonderful space where you learn how to break down complex ideas using simple language and you develop a sensitivity a sensitivity to your listener to discern whether or not they understand what you're saying that was a whole toolkit they could bring out of the gate into the room that really helped us develop the right kind of conversation the other thing that i want to point out is that none of the riders on before the storm shipped a game prior to working on this one they're really an extraordinary group i couldn't be more proud of what they've done okay enough mushy stuff so second

element i've claimed is critical to building a really great room a culture of transparency what i'm talking about here is a recognition within the space that it's important that everybody has a voice and that everybody pays attention and listens to each other this comes down to room stewardship this is not something that happens on its own it's kind of counter-intuitive how to talk how to how to productively dissent and it comes down to the lead writer's responsibility and framing this now i think it goes without saying that a toxic lead writer will create a toxic room but often challenges that rooms find they don't come from the lead writer they come from junior writers because they don't know better because this is hard so i think it's the lead writer's responsibility to be highly critical of the behavior of their team i was in a room once where i saw one writer roll their eyes it's something another writer said it was a personal thing and i called them out on it immediately not cruelly not wanting to be

vindictive in any way but because it's really important that kindness and humility is actively present in the discourse especially when you're writing a game like life is strange that's really trying to tackle socially significant and personal issues so i would i would encourage lead writers to really thoughtfully shape the culture of your room and how you're talking how you're listening to each other and be highly forgiving as you go there's no shame in calling someone out on something they didn't know they shouldn't do and as the lead writer if you're driving the ship you have to be really great at receiving criticism yourself i demand for my writers that they challenge my ideas and my direction when they feel it's appropriate that's why i want them in the room with me so that they can help me work past my blind spots so i have this mechanism i call the make your case rule i'm the lead writer in my room i'm driving the direction of the break we're talking about chloe and the junkyard processing which has happened

in a conversation with rachel i want to take one direction and maybe john wants to take another i need him to say to me zach you know i hear what you're saying but i think we really want chloe to be in a lower register of emotion don't you think that'll be stronger for the story and i'll ask him okay that's an interesting idea tell me why that's better tell me what work that does and it's this kind of covenant we have my commitment to him is that i'm going to listen to what he has to say and i'm going to critically evaluate the idea and then i'm going to make a decision and we're going to move forward and having heard him out when i make my decision he's going to back it up and he's going to he's going to throw his weight behind it and that's that's how we we maintain our compositional velocity as a group which brings me to my last point like i said it's really easy to spend a lot of time talking about story without producing actionable content let alone an intelligent plan for how to take the work of the room out into the actual writing of the script

and then from the script into actual content production so you really do need a mechanism that holds your feet to the fire that says okay the time for conversation is over we need to draw some lines in the sand and make some calls okay so in ancient greece uh there was this thing called the ostracon which was a basically a shard of pottery and when a citizen offended his neighbors because he murdered someone or slept with somebody you shouldn't have or tried to overthrow the government the citizenry would gather and vote by taking these astraka and writing angrily the name of the person they didn't like anymore and casting it out and if enough astraka with your name on it were assembled you would get exiled from the city for like 10 years you'd have to move away it's where we get the word ostracize it's it's a a prototypical form of democracy in action that's one way you could make decisions in a writer's room just kidding that's a terrible idea it's basically it's the lead writer but what

i want to point out with this is is it is not a democratic process healthy rooms have a culture of transparency where everybody has a voice but velocity is needed above all else production is king you've got to hit your schedule you've got a right to scope the lead writer's responsibility is that it's maintaining an awareness of your overall content pipeline and your need to make decisions when when you're looking at a story as complex as something like before the storm or the script that's as long as the bible you've got to have somebody with a hand on the rudder making making these calls and and so the way that we worked is i charge my team to be as creative and imaginative as possible i shape the conversation as we go but i am making decisions as rapidly as i can here's the thing you're going to be wrong i was wrong lots uh you're going to make the wrong call sometimes you just want to be right most of the time and you can't let waiting for

certainty prevent you from being able to make some kind of a call and move forward with the story don't let the idea of the great the ideal of the great be the enemy of the good and honestly if you get it right like 85 of the time you're a rock star and your script's gonna come out really well so i'm going to end with one thought writing stories is hard writing interactive fiction is way harder writing collaboratively is i think the hardest thing but when you're in a room as a lead writer or a staff writer you're there because you love storytelling you have a joy about it that's the only way that we would put up with what this career is like remember that trust each other trust that joy and whatever you end up producing will be spectacular thank you very much

okay so i've got 10 minutes for questions if people want to ask anything there are microphones yeah yeah hi um having worked both in a writer's room for television and for interactive fiction and games what do you find are the similarities and what do you find are the greatest differences that's a that's a giant question so yeah looking at tv and games what are working in writer's room for both what are similar what are different um needing to write discursively when you're writing in games you have to write within mind toward branching structures depending on the type of game the rigor of those structures will vary but you have to remember that when you're writing for a show you're presenting something your audience watches when you're writing for a game you're presenting something your audience determines they they have agency in and in the

writing the way that you're writing it you're sculpting that agency so it's as if you have the player character in the room with you at all times and you're imagining how the different elements of the story options that you're presenting will sort of influence them and their experience of navigating that i honestly think it's it's the hardest thing about writing games and it's the thing that's most exciting because we have no idea what we're doing with this still we're still figuring out what it means honestly to have the consumer of a story practice agency in the development of that story thanks for the question yeah yeah hi um there we go uh so i thought your words on critiquing junior writers like habits it was very insightful i was wondering uh if you had any other observations that you found that like a junior writers did something very like well uh that might be applicable to other junior writers uh to learn from and improve yeah that's an interesting question um everyone can hear the questions from

the mics yeah okay go ahead and repeat it um one thing i love about working with new writers is that they haven't become jaded or cynical yet um and and that's that's it's funny um but it's honestly true um and and i think outside of that you get into a writer's room it's because you're excellent you've done something really well to get to that place but at the same time you're just your education is about to begin for real um so i tell my junior writers i want them to talk as much as anyone else i want them to ask questions i want them to get involved i want them not to be afraid of failure or looking stupid or any of that but it's that enthusiasm that they they really have going for them that i find i find joyful to work with thank you for that question yeah hi thanks um i was wondering if you had any challenges working on the culture of say the writer's room versus the culture of the

organization that you were for as a whole is it were there discrepancies between how you run a writer's room because we're i work at a company where we're trying to establish writer's rooms and just just the idea um how do you like merge the two cultures i guess that's a that's a really insightful question um i mean it varies obviously from what kind of organization you're in and what kind of room you want to have at deck 9 the writing group is also the core design group we have level designers who are much better at many kinds of design than we are but we're narrative designers we write code we iterate on gameplay mechanics and things like that and because of that we are essentially the start of the content pipeline so we have a really autonomous culture in that regard i think like many elements of software development the most important path forward is the one that works so i think maintaining an agility of thought about what the writer's room needs for your needs what kind of a culture it needs

maybe that's contrary to the organization as a whole and maybe that's totally okay at the end of the day is the room being effective or not i think that's the question you want to ask and if it's not then be willing to reimagine it i think yeah thank you yeah hi hey i have a bit of a brain teaser i guess i teach game writing workshops with students and my past policy was that everyone's even and it's always the most painful part of the workshop to get these people to make a decision together when everyone's even so would you would your suggestion be that maybe they vote for a leader or do you think it's possible for someone to create a story without a leader that's that's a great question um i'm a big fan of teaching the way the work actually happens so i would definitely say elect a leader voting has its own challenges depending on the length of your class the length of your semester the segment of work if it's a three person team and you could do it i would say have three pieces of work that they work on in

three different phases and have each person take the helm so everyone gets that experience and that might be the most sort of equitable way to do it great thank you yeah you would uh mention briefly that none of your writers had uh game experience before yeah and beyond just being teachers do you have any other advice for what you look for or filter for when trying to make a speculative bet on a writer and whether they'll do well in this craft um yeah so i said kindness and humility and and i really do mean that it sounds like kind of a trite thing but it's not i think a demonstrated awareness and vocabulary around how to talk about story and that doesn't mean that doesn't need to mean that you've published something that could mean that you've collaborated with a group very unsuccessfully to write something that never got off the ground but you learn something from it if i'm interviewing someone and they're talking about that experience and i hear that you know in their language and how

they talk about it that they thought about what that was for them that they're capable of sort of engaging that critical thought about those processes that gets me excited that that makes me think okay this is someone who i could learn from this is someone i can teach and i'll give that person a closer look that's that's end thank you thank you so i just want to say we have two minutes until i think i need to disappear um but i'm not going to just take it to the wrap yeah so i'm going to go down the hall um to the wrap-up room it's basically at the end on the left and i'll be sitting at a table and if anyone has any more questions and you want to or just introduce yourselves please come come talk with me i'll be there for about an hour thank you so much [Applause] everybody you