Queens of the Phone Age: The Narrative Design of Reigns: Her Majesty

[Music] hi thank you so much so many people came I really appreciate this my name is Lee Alexander before I get started I just want to get a couple things out of the way the excellent title of this talk was unfortunately not done by me it was my awesome friend and colleague Matt leaves from shut up and sit down and cool ghosts I wish I could take credit but unfortunately I'm terrible at coming up with things great quality for a creative writer and also I want to give a shout out to David for letting me tether with his internet because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to run my presentation so no technically incompetent two great skills for game development anyway it's been a few years since I have been at GDC I used to be a games industry journalist and a games critic up until about a few years ago when I guess let's say I decided I could do I did all I could do in that space and I decided I was just gonna quit

video games totally and explore some new horizons so I made a podcast for the Guardian on digital culture I started writing fiction and you know stuff about our virtual lives all clear totally my undercuts growing back in I was done so I'm here today to talk about reigns for majesty it is the follow-up to the well-loved original reigns game from Marielle it has done pretty well in the App charts we've gotten some really nice press and we are we're nominated for a Best mobile game here at the game developers Choice Awards this week we're nominated for thank you well you're still clapping I've got like more accolades to list we're nominated for a British game BAFTA my role was as the projects writer and narrative director the whole team and I want to thank so much all the players who made the game a success if you hadn't heard a Nintendo will be bringing rains King and queens to the switch I know look mom I'm on the Nintendo and

there's going to be a co-op mode where you have to have consensus with the other player to swipe so I think that should enable some really cool discussions as you can see though my plan to burn all my bridges and quit video games forever has not been a success there have been some setbacks along with some other wonderful writers I got to do a piece for where the water tastes like wine I'm also a writer on chance agencies neo cab which is a upcoming a narrative experience about emotional labor in the gig economy and I do a lot of world building narrative design writing consulting on indie projects blah blah I even wrote and helped write and design something for Amazon Alexa so I guess I became a game designer I don't know how this happened but her majesty team was Francois Elio who's the designer of reigns it's his system he made the system and the tools the essence of reigns is very much his heritage our artists are no debauch carried on the color-blocked visual

style that artist Mirko Murakami introduced in the original rains you can also think Arno for the maze we were also lucky enough to have music from legendary Jim Guthrie JJ Epson and sound from Eric van a Maranon so we were of course published by the excellent folks at evolver so the original reigns has been extremely successful thanks to this quirky tinder interface that lets you manage a kingdom and unfold a story by swiping cards but lots of players started expressing their wish to play as a queen which is where I came in so when I was invited to the project I actually had a really unique opportunity it's one that I think is quite rare in our industry in which I felt very grateful to have we were not starting from scratch we had this system that had already excited people with its narrative potential my teammates like tended to give me quite a lot of space both in a big-picture way in terms of it and also the details of their writing itself to figure out how best to tell the stories of the Queen and in this talk I will share a lot of the considerations I had in mind as I worked and hopefully you will find those interesting I do want to

warn this discussion may contain some kind of like binary form treatment of gender some of that has been hard for me to wrangle when I'm talking about making the queen version of a King game when the game uses you know historical fiction stereotypes so apologize in advance for my limited reference point obviously gender is greater than you know man and woman and hopefully these design ideas will about kings and queens can be relevant to everybody so let's start with a quick rundown of the key elements of rain's games at least as I see them so these are the traits that fundamentally formed my narrative design toolbox and were the foundation out of which the Queen's story emerged basically characters come up to you and ask silly questions and you have to make your best guess about the potential outcome of your choices both narrative ly and statistically and yeah then you swipe and see what the effect was you navigate the story branches and their associated puzzles by swiping left to right your decisions have somewhat predictable but occasionally unpredictable effects on the health of your kingdoms four key markers which are

the church your people your army and your finances if any of these become entirely empty or full it triggers a death and you are revived to rule again so living as long as possible is a viable goal for many players it's less so in reign so you know it's less of the primary objective and reigns Her Majesty than it was in the first game you know avoiding death is a subconscious primary driver as you play but more importantly the experience of Her Majesty is about what you can do within the confines of your little life you can do on lock an avenue that will create progression that's the foundation of the experience and some really unexpected and complex things are often able to emerge from it so yeah dying in as many ways as possible and unlocking all the possible deaths is another objective that our players have been enthusiastic about so so many of my friends are like I like your game but I'm so bad at it I just keep dying and I'm like well yeah this is you're supposed to yeah this is something of an aside but it's funny to

me how condition players are to associate death or ending with failure and how a sense of dissatisfaction always tells them they've done something wrong rather than gives them a clue to keep searching empirically I hear this more from women who women friends who play the game like oh my god I'm so sorry I just suck which makes me sad so I just want to tell you all that none of you suck at rains don't feel discouraged by dying a lot you know all the story of every ruler has to end and death is just a beginning can you tell the developers are French so the original rains of course had a king who could be as hapless or as brutal as you wanted him to be the game was fun because you were a bit ridiculous but you still sustained the sense of being part of something epic which gives you fun themes like the fragility of power the caprices of the masses and lots of dark comedy about the brutality of life in the Middle Ages now the first range rains had an overarching narrative whereby the king had been cursed to by the devil to keep returning to life and he had to find a

way to escape these loops narrative ly and literally the characters were mostly comic archetypes and while there was some courtly intrigue and interpersonal relations stuff the decisions frequently mainly concerned large-scale Kingdom issues like how to deal with Wars or diseases Crusades you know or our settings are not so much historical as they are inspired by history both of the games use familiar and archetypal types of concepts and events like a powerful Church corrupted by wealth or an unexpected drought causing a war so we knew pretty early on that we wanted to move this new rain story about a queen into a Renaissance inspired period beyond that we decided not to simply make the King a woman or create a female protagonist without changing her lens on power I mean sure we're making a comedic flippantly violent a historical fantasy pastiche but to me the idea of simply having the ruler now be a woman instead of a man without changing any of the underlying politics or perspectives would not be challenging in any sense of the world I generally find power

fantasies boring so I really wanted a reigns Queen to face some non-traditional types of friction rather than leaving it simply at like well a woman can do whatever a man can do an equal society asks us to account for and understand differences and experiences not to simply ignore them and and hope they come away for example plenty of women achieve power and success within the same systems that promote inequality for others they may even end up as shields for corporate or governmental abuses because they appear to put a progressive face on them and were intended to find it inspiring in some sense that occasionally women are anointed with this type of success like Ivanka Trump yes Queen right like I didn't want to uncritically replicate the power of the reins King by just putting a woman's face on it I need to emphasize that reigns Her Majesty is not super deep it's light it's rooted in archetypes it's meant to be funny and bleak well of course I took the opportunity to make a reigns led by women seriously and I worked in a way that I felt was sincere I didn't have

any pretenses that I was reinventing any kind of great wheels basically I'm not here on the advocacy track to tell you the tell you that you should celebrate the great victory for feminism I attained in our funny tender game which you can buy on the App Store Google Play on Steam for $2.99 but I mean I do think that even experiences like these can benefit from thinking critically about the intersection of gender and power in the way that we tried to do and I thought maybe we could talk a little bit here today about being a queen playing as a lady boss you know the work of advocacy and how this all sticks to the often icky and misshapen world of video game culture because I don't know for some reason I cannot stop [ __ ] in that particular bowl of cornflakes anyway here we have Cersei Lannister from Game of Thrones now seriously is a bad queen she is a bad feminist she enacts domineering conspiracies against people that are rooted in her own bitterness she's not even particularly savvy about it she brute forces all her maneuvers feeling powerful is the only thing she cares about and as such she can constantly prioritize his short-term

gratification for long term strategy any indignity that comes her way this be throws everything she has at it and I love this character I would have made a whole game just about being her if I thought people would be okay with being that hateable this is just such a plausible idea for a queen who has acutely felt all the ways that being a woman has held her back from her desires she's so preoccupied by all of this she's hooking up with her own twin brother she's that in love with the idea of a boy version of herself in her selfish world that's all her brother is meanwhile he's probably killed way more people than she has including betraying his King which is a serious crime and the fact that everyone hates her brother has not interfered at all with his success even people who hate him admire him while by following the same rules people want to see her get taken down so yeah she's what you call a trash garbage human but she is a great character because her story and exemplifies the toxic role that gender can play in power when we conflate a good character with one who is ideologically pure we risk saying that

even in fiction some types of characters necessarily have limitations that others don't and for me the thing that made Circe's decision so interesting was the fact that she had no choice but to make them alongside around and even using men as everyone in the story loves to point out to her Cersei is not the queen she's the King's wife and even the King's mother and from that indirect role she had to be so much cleverer and more of a survivor than she would have just which she would have been if she had just been a regular old monarch let's move on to Beyonce is a great Queen actually this slide is not unfortunately it's not about Beyonce I just thought you'd rather see her than Cersei as I was saying I wanted the reins Queen to have the same range of grotesque silly thirsty ruthless vain loving choices mmm for the player as the reins King did without uncritically celebrating traditional power and in a way that I thought could really let me kind of tap into that tireless manipulative agility of a character like Cersei so I thought

let's shift the locus of power in the game just a little bit for her majesty you're the queen but like Cersei you're not on the throne you're the King's wife you'd like to have the same kind of power and freedom as the king but you're surrounded by sabotage and confidence double standards and men who are half as qualified as you yet receive twice as much respect I wanted the player to feel at times like the only voice of reason in a despairing Kingdom of fools because that's an interesting kind of power that it's difficult for women to assert so as I was saying I came up with this whole political rationale for why you play as the King's wife instead of as a woman ruler but the larger reason for this decision was mainly to enable some of the kinds of narrative beats that I wanted to write you know ruler has to make decisions about you know whether to build a dam or not a lot of the King reigns kings decisions worst at management of the land but really I was kind of more attracted to the idea of managing the kingdom via social intrigue and sideways influence and making moves behind the scene now that is not to say Oh men fight with swords

and women's use words and feelings you know any time I have been interested in simply new mechanics that are perhaps more story driven and slightly less concerned with violence or conventional power people are like oh so just talking solving problems by talking because men fight and women talk supposedly and that start conclusion that people jump to for me miscarries the point when you don't have access to conventional power you have to make more complicated and more personal choices in conflict it's sometimes more interesting when you don't have as much control as you want so let's say it rains your majesty if you find the life of a king's wife and a church figurehead demeaning and confining and you probably will you have to shake things up through unconventional means you know dark bargains ambiguous righteousness self-service using people who trust you all while making sure you're viewed is lovable and powerful and fun in the acceptable way those kinds of dynamics are conflict they are full of violence conflict and cruelty and tough choices and messiness and I think we do those types of mechanics a disservice when we

reduce them to oh just talking it out also that being said we did use poetry for our dual mechanics no team thought that would be fun um so if these ideas about the narrative emerged for me most of all not from outside influences but from the native systems themselves this concept that's innate terrains that you're you know constantly trying to please multiple irreconcilable goods you can't always say what you'd really like because you can't statistically afford it takes lifetimes to eke out progress that just felt like a you know a pretty natural field in which to stage an experience about being a woman trying to gain any kind of power for herself no matter what your definition of power is so the original reins dynamic where people were constantly coming to you with needs was you know as you can imagine pretty fruitful to work with and I saw a great opportunity to build a nonlinear narrative experience of just those thousands of moments where your objectives and your desires whether for yourself or your kingdom naturally conflict I thought maybe rains her Majesty could go a little further than the first game

just in terms of an interactive fiction experience which is my personal favorite genre I thought that deepening our storytelling could invite and entertain players who were not necessarily systems thinkers and that even those who didn't want to dig into the item quests and the mysteries and the hardcore bits because we some rain's fans are very hard course we had to account for them but other people I wanted also just have a lot of fun telling the stories of all these different Queens and seeing the possibilities now before I dig a little deeper I'm not gonna spend a huge amount of time on the technical bits cuz we need to focus on the pure white-hot advocacy that I'm beaming out into this room but people do ask me all the time how I approached writing these modular stories and by modular I mean the way that individual and even unrelated cards hopefully tend to always coalesce somewhat into mini or miniature arcs for each frame the answer to that is really it's as much about how we balanced it as it was about how I wrote it so real quick I wrote individual parts had to create the moment within the length of a tweet and each card had to offer diametric expressive choices as well as

clue the player about the potential effect of those choices and then I had to decide the result of those choices so every card has a weight a probability which determines how likely it is to appear I suggested the statistical impacts of choices as well as linked them up to other cards that could appear as certain consequences later so in addition to just having writing at my disposal as a utility I could also decide how this network of probabilities performed the words you read are only half of the narrative experience it's also about how it feels and behaves how its paced and luckily I had a expressive tools at my disposal the system that Francois Elio created which he used to make rains this is where I wrote the game it's in Google sheets not sure how well you can see it but you know as you can see we have the ability to designate the bearer who appears on the card what the questions they ask conditions that are relevant to the cards appearance statistical effects and then other outcomes like let's say a certain decision adds something to the deck or sets a new permanent condition people have asked like oh you should make like a rains card game like with physical

cards but hopefully this illustrates that that would probably in my view be difficult because it's not the cards it's the system in which the cards are performing so I could essentially you these numbers as well as words as tools to construct the story the statistical impact of something you do in the game gives you narrative information to use a heavy-handed example let's say the in this world there's a contentious relationship between the church and practitioners of magic and that could be communicated numerically by watching the numbers on the church decline when you do something that feels magical or feels rebellious so even though that that was a statistical assignation it was something I could use for narrative expression as a team you know friends so I had to do a lot of balancing for me because like you know I count on my fingers so we did a lot of adjustments as a team to balance the game and make sure it felt you know the way it was supposed to feel the gating was working properly hopefully you know everyone's experience is different every rain is different there's a progression but every rain is still different there are hopefully lots of harmonious and happy accidents and it becomes transpo flee it

becomes transparent enough that you feel a sense of direction but not so much that it's predictable ultimately it was like I liken it to doing knitting in a spreadsheet starting with moments and conflicts that I wanted the player to feel and then making them link up reference one another and loop back in in a way it was a lot like an if' authoring tool because all the great ones use the language of weaving like a knot or a skein or a thread in twine you know so great we have this system that can very effectively make you feel put upon disempowered and overwhelmed by choices and that inspired me to make a game about how hard it is to be taken seriously as a woman so that anyone who picks this up gets the chance to experience that get me my feminist advocate award right so although I have all been I've always been a great believer in the strength of interactive environments to help shift people's perspectives thanks to the great critical writings and games of designers like Robert yang or Anna Anthropy I've come to strongly believe that simply reproducing an oppressive system

so that others can experience how horrible it is is not a concession to constructive way to approach our work I think the options that we give players for how to consider or act on those experiences are much more important so even though I was conscious of the expectations that reigns Her Majesty should at least be trying its best to be a feminist work and I'll get back to that in a bit the social challenges that the Queen faces are hopeful only a catalyst for a broader and more ambiguous dialogue again the system is horrible we get it you know anguish portrayals of how bad it is for women or people are cut of color otherwise marginalized individuals and make white guys feel like they're being enlightened but for the rest of us on our end I think we're all much more interested in how folks like ourselves cope within the system how we comfort each other how we prevail and even how we act out so basically rather than write things that happen to the Queen the real story is in how she can respond generally we give yes or no choices cuz those are most functional from a design standpoint players tend to sometimes sweep swipe without reading they've known one way as

yes and one way is no but we went for total variety where possible just because sometimes it's so much fun to emphatically say nope instead of no to some incompetent guy and all the guys in rands for Majesty are incompetent like every character is ridiculous but the dudes are especially so and I gave them all like really ridiculous names because [ __ ] it thank you I also tried wherever possible to make sure that the binary choices were more nuanced then accept this or reject it or be nice or be mean I hope that rains too would also invite players to consider things like when it's appropriate to set boundaries versus tolerate whether it's better to be generous or self-serving or you know whether generosity itself can sometimes be self-serving you know I did not actually make the Queen's husband the King an abusive or tyrannical ruler he's mostly like a clueless one who's in your way and doesn't take you seriously but you can be tender to him sometimes if you want it's like being married to Homer Simpson so a good queen tries to please all her people most people tell me like is n against especially my woman

friends I keep dying because people love me too much I keep being trampled by my adoring fans because we're taught to do labor that makes other people feel good so a good queen tries to please all her people but there are a number of moments in the game that people pleasing for its own sake leads to consequences a lot of people say dying because everyone loves you is the most common death and I think that's probably an intentional result of the way I bound with the way we balanced it and there are moments in the game that you cannot unlock without being self involved or without hoarding wealth and that's not so much about empowering cruelty as it is about looking at the circumstances in which cruelty flourishes I also included a few other concepts that I thought would create an environment to kind of play with the issues we've been talking about the Queen gets involved with various magical women which hopefully taps into the idea that magic has been a form of resistance for oppressed people since the beginning of time but I mean like if she's the queen who is royalty how entitled to that vocabulary is she really are there gonna be consequences for her if she miss appropriate said so although you play through the lives of many different

Queens who share the same soul the one trait that she always has is that she's not from the kingdom from when she's come in order to get married like giving her some outsider status gives her something of a place to connect with the other characters in her kingdom who feel a sense of unrest under this gilded patriarchy and we have some romance options like they're small but they're important to people I'm hopefully developing those more soon you can be super gay in the game if you want there's an achievement for if you manage to get going something going on with all four romance options in one reign I hope that you know we can maybe bring that number up a bit why not so as I've been saying if we made a game that primarily a rewarded obedience or generosity or being good and where we punish Queens for being sloppy or self-indulgent or horny then we still suggest that there is an ideal route one single ideal route to power for women I didn't want to make statements on power I did not want to guess Queen this game I wanted honestly to explore a lot of these questions about my own privilege as well as be a being at the same time a

woman who wants change I wanted to create a flexible and nuanced environment for this you know for example the internet always says that self-care should be our first priority the better to have resources available for others but you know in a decadent Kingdom collapsing under unstable wealth we can rationalize almost anything as self-care and in light of that is it always for all of us going to be a constructive choice or just a constant temptation like do I just want to feel good about the fact that I bought all these [ __ ] gold sheet masks I mean this this these questions are what I wanted to express in the game basically when you design an oppressive system and also designed for the equally powerful desire to escape that system or to gain individual power as a disadvantaged person you create a lot of complicated space I really love what my interactive fiction Idol and will is short had to say about the feminism in the game I definitely did set out to make fun of a certain brand of feminism and the commercialization thereof but only as one of many ambiguously helpful roots for women trying to figure out how to

make their most ethical way in the world I don't know I mean after some of the experiences I had in video games especially trying to have a voice in the consumer space I came away suspicious of the very idea that we could make a video game feminists simply by having people play as a girl or anti-racist simply because it has representation um what I'm about to say may shock you but writing reigns her majesty was a job which I did for money I did it because I trusted the team and I had something to say sure but at the end of the day have I done advocacy or did I work on an app you know if you played raids Her Majesty extensively then you might know that there is some meta-narrative I attempted to put in there about how suspicious I am of companies celebrating women's experiences for money so if you've seen some weird loose threads to pull out in there that's what those are sort of leading toward and I'm so lucky to get to speak at GDC in the first place to advance my own ideas and and to access new opportunities but obviously as if we could forget this event is out of reach of most developers

my colleague Ramius Mel he's now running the one reason to be panel that Brenda Romero and I used to do and Remy has been trying to be started out just celebrating women and now we welcome the panel welcomes all kinds of perspectives and expertise that have been marginalized in the traditional industry which i think is ideal but over the past several months Romney's been having a really hard time having to repeatedly deal with visa rejections for the speakers that he wanted to bring here just sounds like it's been heartbreaking for everyone involved so there's a lot of always a lot of questions to be asked about our participation in these ecosystems about being here in San Francisco who really materially benefits it from expanding our audiences and marketing this idea of ourselves as progressive like have I been doing advocacy in this room or did I just give a narrative design talk like you know am I an advocate talking at my expensive industry conference about my Queen video game you know am I even adequate I don't know and for me that is more of an interesting narrowed the Matic space for me to be working in it's more interesting than any number of

slay queen empowerment fantasies maybe it can be more interesting to you to please pay me to write your games thank you thank you so much okay and thank you David I don't I didn't I don't think I left any time for questions I think it's that's the end of my time right yeah four minutes oh yeah I couldn't ask people can ask a couple questions if they're short um if anyone would like to come up to the mic hi so my question I guess would be do you feel like there is something wrong with the ask Queen empowerment fantasy because you know sometimes you really just do need to escape into that well no I think it's it's it would be wrong to dismiss any kind of person's fantasy unilaterally but what I mean specifically is the branded and marketed

version of the llenan brand of corporate women's empowerment like you know I have been if I had a daughter I would have bigger dreams for her than to become like a capitalist shitlord you know what I mean like so yeah of course yes Queen is fine but let's not like purchase the hats you know anybody else hi so you made a point about the the idea of an oppressive system of us is one that you can subvert and change in games and how we maybe need more more narratives about people overcoming their problems but how do you feel about games as a reflective tool in that sense I think it really all depends on the game like I said games do have the ability to reflect to others experiences that they wouldn't ordinarily encounter and the some of those have been valuable there's people whose lives have been changed by what we call empathy games but I think you know people that I know that work in that

sector as developers eventually felt used up by that space that they'd served up their experiences on a platter to educate others and then they did not receive any recognition of that work in any way so I think yes it's important games can be a mirror but you know for the sake of the creators and their experiences that's not enough you know to show people something that we want I want to know like when you've played this empathy game what are you going to do now about the state of the world you know what are you going to do now on behalf of the person who made it so yeah I think it's complicated thank you thank you so I'm like a woman study major and I want to I've been like doing a lot of women's ingame try to promote reminiscing game like the one you have and my biggest issue is when all my feminist friend I heard the word game like no I know it's patriarchy it's violent it's like destroying people and like it's really hard for them to play

like game like this when there's like kind of a bad reputation about what video game is and I wonder like if you have experience I like that and like what can we do as a kid is fine yes I have experienced that I spent I spent like the good years of my twenties trying to tell people about like anti patriarchal video games and the audience is so small and the willingness is so low and it is so depressing I think largely that's on the fault of the that's on the shoulders of the commercial games industry which has thrived on marketing this idea of itself as you know you know capitalist power fantasies for white guys you know and I think you know the larger industry is going to need to evolve before people are willing to give it another chance now on the other hand there's a lot of like scapegoating and moral panic about video games and how they like make people but you know there's a lot of stuff the categorization of the industry that is unfair and unproductive but I mean yeah I mean absolutely yes I feel you and I if I had an answer maybe I'd still be working in video games

criticism thank you um one more maybe oh sorry hi two things one is please stay in the industry thank you thank you it's just it's really good to hear like this sort of address so the other question is sort of about the triple-a industry in the console industry and I feel having been in it for long enough that we're getting better but I don't know being like a straight white male between the ages of 18 and 34 I don't know if that's actually a thing so what's your perspective on I think it's getting better I I do there are stuff that are shown at commercials that showcases now that like I wouldn't have dreamed of seeing when I was young and starting out it felt like a very hostile space to me when I was starting out and now you know some of it just it still feels like you know there's a lot more progress to be made but I actually I do think it's getting better I really do maybe I'm

being naive but I think it is possible for it to get better and I think it has been thank you um I think that's all my time [Applause]