Storytelling In mobile and VR – The new narrative landscapes

[Music] thanks for having me here I'm really excited to be here and be able to talk I'm really excited about this convention I'm Pocket Gamer connects I think is a great opportunity for us all to come together and we're in a really unique point in our in the in the industry where we can mobile games and VR games are really just on the rise especially when it comes to narrative and so I'm really excited about this opportunity to share some of the learnings that we've had it seismic on how to tell compelling narratives in mobile games just the clicker yes okay okay a little bit about myself before we get into it too much I've been in the industry for over 20 years now I've worked on a lot of games a lot of different kinds of games I've also worked on a wide variety of different licenses and major IPs as well as original IPs

and I'm a active screenwriter who's worked in both television and film so I have a bit of a unique perspective on writing for traditional media as well as writing and developing games in in different media's that within games currently on the chief creative officer over at seismic games we've got five projects that we're working on right now we're an independent studio working on two mobile games one vr mobile game a location-based ride and a mobile interactive game show we they're all unannounced so I can't really talk about it much but they're all with major IP then I hope to be able to share more about them in the next year or two as they become announced games but one of the things we talk about its seismic a lot is how to tell compelling narratives in mobile games and how to try to figure out how to bring out the most compelling narratives and mobile games now a lot of the assumption that comes in playing telling stories in mobile games is that it's pretty much impossible you've got a small little screen you've got a very distracted audience you've got a short

session length and you have very little time and a lot of very little tools to be able to tell compelling narratives and if you just take a look at the top grossing mobile games here you can see between candy crush and the strategy games and the casino games we're not exactly dealing with Shakespeare here we're not even really dealing with iCLASS to us here it's just like it's not exactly what mobile games are known for but there is a there are some exceptions to those rules the telltale games episode and choices just to name a few games that tell compelling narratives on mobile devices till feels a little bit of an exception to the rule you know they are a fair a lot more of a long format game they're not free to play and they're to be honest I feel like their best experience but that biggest green as you can get and in that on the headphones episode and choices are a little more in the true mobile experience they're free to play a short session length and designed with bite-sized content but they're focused around a very specific audience and what we're going to talk about a little bit is how to tell narratives and create

narratives in a broader sense of the scale into a broader audience take a look at some of the way games and narrative narratives are told in other mediums movies and TV obviously they have a lot going for it when it comes to telling stories they've got long session lengths and actors and special effects and seasonal arcs I mean for a TV show you've got an hour to tell a story you've got season to tell a story you've got multiple seasons to tell a story movies obviously have big budgets and captive audiences and they've been doing it for decades and decades so it's pretty easy to tell stories in there plus they have this amazing cinematic tool set to work from with cinematography and special effects and sound and 3d so they kind of get a pass on how to tell great more amazing narratives complem PC games utilize a lot of the same benefits that film and TV do with the high production cinematics and the long session length but they in great something that we can

actually take from mobile and VR which is the interactivity and the emergent stories and by interacting with the player while telling your story you're able to really get the story to be stickier because the player is actually experiencing the story rather than just passively watching it now BR when creating narratives and on the one hand has some amazing opportunities and tools that none of the other mediums have you've got full immersion we've got a real presence in the world of the player and you have the next-level interactivity where you can actually physically reach out and move your user body to tell the story this is both the good thing and a bad thing in some ways we can actually emotionally engage the player like we've never had before but we also are missing some of the tools that the traditional forms of media have and this can be kind of a hindrance but I'll get back to that in a sec when we were making Star Wars Battlefront what we set out to do was create a possibility engine what we wanted to do was create a toolset where players could experience the battles of Star Wars any way they want and the way

we always thought of it was creating basically a playset where you have access to every Star Wars toy at your at your disposal so we created the figures and the vehicles and the gameplay and the weapons and the environments and then we just empowered the player to create their own story we didn't want to retell the story of Luke Skywalker or of Darth Vader we wanted to let the players create their own stories and that's exactly what happened and really the team was left with this sense of wow if we could create this and use this tool these emergent stories that show up we might really have something here so we've kind of applied that into almost every game that we do the two other kind of stories I want to talk about are progression stories and social stories the three of these right now in mobile gaming have a real opportunity to bring the narratives in mobile gaming to the next level and we're really excited about that I want to tell story a little bit about kind of my experience and my with Minecraft as it involves emerging stories so I was playing Minecraft with

my son and we decided on the phone we decided to both build our the house that we live in and so we're like okay where did we split ourselves every went and built the house and then we decided to compare the houses and of course you know my house was like pretty realistic to scale and I put the door where the door is and you know and all this stuff and when I looked at my son's house it was it was way cooler than mine it had like a lava moat around it and us giant spire and trap doors and monster closets and we showed it to everyone and everyone agreed his version of the house was way cooler than mine and when he would tell the story of how he came to every decision and why he put everything where it was I just saw his eyes light up with the creativity it occurred to me that minecraft is really just this tool that it lets you let your creativity go wild and the story that you create as you take these relatively mundane tools and shape them into your own personal vision is really

kind of amazing and it was this emergent story that evolved as he created this and as a consequence now I have to build a lava moat in our real house in order to make sure that he's like gets his dream house when so I'm still working on that but the other kind of story that we're dealing with a lot is progression stories I'm not talking about progression stories from the character's point of view as a progressed through a game talking more about the players progression through a game and their experience and how they relate to their personal life so I'm a pretty avid galaxy of Heroes family and if you play this game you know that Yoda is a really hard chase character to get in galaxy of Heroes he only shows up like once a month and he only shows up for a little bit of time and in order to even try to get Yoda as a collectable character you have to have like five Jedi that are fully maxed in level level seven stars in order again and I determined that I was going to get Yoda on my team and unfortunately when the Yoda event

happened was exactly when I was having my wedding anniversary and so I was away with my wife for the weekend and I was trying to figure out a way to somehow get Yoda without my wife knowing that I was playing the game so I would literally you know every time she'd go to bathroom I like pull up a phone and I'd play for a little bit when she'd fall asleep I play a little more when she before she woke up I play a little more and I got through most of the weekend without her ever knowing that I was getting really close to getting Yoda up but I had kind of got to the end I was going to try my best to pull this off and we were in the middle of a play and I realized I wasn't going to be able to do this so then I heard to me that there's an intermission in the middle of a play and I'm going to go okay if I figured out how much money I had to spend and if I kind of faked it I could can pull this off so the intermission happens and I kind of picked a little bit of a stomachache and I went to the bathroom muted my phone went in stall and started

like spending kind of like crazy to try to get Yoda and the lights are flickering the symbol you know to signal that the play is about to go on again and I'm really really close and I finally do it I'm just like cheering in the bathroom as I like I get this character that I've been striving for and I was all excited and I didn't even bother to put my phone I to you know minimize the app I just put it back in my pocket run out back into the theater I sit down the plays about to start they so they remind you to turn off your phone so I turn off my phone with me on my phone and the play starts and it's all quiet and I realize too late that I had muted my phone when I went into the bathroom and so when I just reached in my pocket I had unmuted my phone and so as the play starts out of my pocket emanates this giant Star Wars music and the entire I was totally ratted out and the entire theatre kind of like slowly turns at me including my wife who's just giving me this death stare because she knows now that what

I've been trying to do this whole time I didn't really care because I got Yoda but and just as a side note - if you ever try to like use the Jedi mind tricks on your spouse with like that's not my phone totally doesn't work oh it doesn't work anyway what I realized about that a whole experience is that Yoda and Star Wars had integrated itself into the weekend and the story of my anniversary weekend and every time I play Yoda I'm reminded of my anniversary weekend in the game and so the two are kind of you know permanently linked as a negative experience in my mind and that's not all the story of my anniversary weekend but also the story of how I play this game and this doesn't apply this doesn't just apply to these kind of games I mean even if you talk about the casino games if you ask anyone who plays these kind of games how their day went in bingo blitz they will tell you every single number and how it showed up and the highs and lows of how it played they'll tell you about the characters they've unlocked they tell us they'll tell you about the environments

they've unlocked and for them they have their own personal story of eyes and lows and their experience because it's it's a it's a personal story to them the other kind of stories that we can explore in mobile is social stories and stories that involve multiple care multiple players and in particular I was a little late to the candy crush game and I started playing and as you do the first time when I was playing candy crush I scrolled up in the to see where all my friends were on there and surprisingly when I got to really high up on the candy crush ladder I saw my mom was sitting there has any you know of any self-respecting gamer I was like this is not acceptable I cannot have my mom be better than me in a game so I made it my personal goal to get better than my mom and candy crush and I started playing and she noticed that I was playing and so she would start sending me messages like voit votes of encouragement oh good job son you're doing great you know I'm like she would start sending me lollipops and and bonuses and you know like mom I'm not eight years old I don't need like candy

and he cheats in order to be able to beat you in candy crush but I took them anyway and it took me months but I was eventually getting up there and it was except ik thing and I finally finally beat my mom and passed my mom and candy crush and I was so proud Thanksgiving rolled around and I was trying to find a way to kind of work it into the conversation so I could gloat a little bit and I said oh you know plenty he's mentioned dessert because mom I just totally beat you in candy crush I'm higher than you now to which he responded oh son oh honey I don't play candy crush anymore I'm on to soda crush now and I pull out my phone and sure enough she's like way ahead of me in Soto crush and I have yet to actually beat her in soda crush and I've still determined to do it but that's that's my story of a candy question and has nothing to do with the creepy candy land and and all the characters that has to do with my personal engagement and a and a story

evolving me and my mom but there's also the competitive side of stories that come in and the last story I want to tell you is about my friends Jim and Troy and their clash Royale story so Troy my centruy is a free to play player he refuses to spend any money in mobile games and he prides himself on being able to beat any game and get to be the best in any game without having to spend he is the top the top ranked player in our clash clan and he does an awesome job my friend jim has no problem spending decent amounts of money in order to win and he came to the game late joined our clan and started working his way up and you know Troy was keeping an eye on him but as he every time you would hit a wall he would spend and spend through and get through and as inevitably you can expect Troy Jim started getting awfully close to Troy and then eventually at some point because he played and paid enough he passed Troy in the rankings now Troy

was pissed about this I mean he was like he took a few days off of work he just decided of like decided to devote himself to clash Royale until he beat and got a higher rank than Jim and he did it he came back to work old you know happy and proud of which of course Jim's only response was to be able to spend a little more money to get back ahead of Troy and when Troy actually has and this went on and on and on as they kind of went and competed over and over for like months and it got really ugly I don't think they like almost lost their friendship over this they were threatening to leave the clan and it was getting really really bad and luckily it was saved because clash Royale released 2v2 mode and suddenly now instead of competing against each other and yelling at each other across their phones Troy and Jim are playing together and it was the two of them against the world and their entire relationship and their entire dynamic changed

they were now one team working against everyone else and now that the season of 2v2 the summer of two V 2 is coming out on clash Royale I'm very interested to see what the next chapter in their collective story is going to be as they try to take on the world in it as a team so getting back to VR for a little bit one of the I was saying is that some of the things about VR that we have the opportunities are also some of its hindrances as far as it comes to telling collective narratives since there's no camera and since the player is the camera it's very difficult to tell traditional narratives because you don't know where the players looking you don't know you don't have any of the cinematic tools and cinematography to be able to guide the story also this innate sense built in with this immersion is this innate sense of the feeling that the player is themselves that they are physically there and that they are they feel the need for acknowledgement in their presence both those things plus the opportunity to evoke real emotions for real sense of vertigo real sense of

claustrophobia these real visceral emotions and VR are all the more reason why both VR and and mobile are able to tell these emergent stories these progression stories and these social stories because telling the story of actual real person experiencing something real in VR is much more visceral and emotional than telling a story where the player feels like they're a fly on the wall watching an interaction at the dinner it interactions happen in front of them and again in mobile these stories of the player as they play through and the days of law evolved the story the progression as they move through the game and the social stories involving other players are three opportunities that Mobile has to really bring narrative to the next level by creating tools and creating possibility engines by giving the doors and the keys and the environments to our players we allow the players to become the storytellers and ultimately by doing this we end up all making games together collectively and that's one of the

reasons I'm really sited about the future of mobile and the future of telling stories in both mobile and vr thank you thank very much that was great and actually I think that Lockbox were interesting for me the interesting comparison between the mobile and VR side is we're still dealing with the most personal device with a phone or a tablet with VR we're having to take a distinct choice to immerse ourselves into a space I don't wondering after you think that's going to be nuanced is different Tennant because of those differences of behaviour yeah absolutely I think that you know when you commit to VR you're committing to a longer session length you're committing to full immersion and no distractions and it's almost the opposite of mobile where you know the world is outside you while you're trying to play and there's constant distractions so in a way there are almost opposites for telling the story but in a way they're also the same and then they share this kind of both this need to engage the player and the

player's personality and presence in the story I'm in telling stories that both can be challenging no not that thing of the few people but you [Music]