Storytelling is a Team Sport

[Music] [Applause] all right then let's go uh how's everybody doing tonight good uh so real quick I just want to know how many writers do we have in the room that's a lot how many non-writers do we have in the room that's even more so cool awesome all right so today you've heard a lot about the craft of writing and you have a lot of these ideas you want to start to into your own projects now we're going to talk about how to work more functionally as a team with multiple departments so what do we mean by storytelling as a team sport well just like many aspects of game development the way a team works together can help to determine how successful they are they might be a great group of talented individuals but if they don't work well together you're going to have problems reaching your full potential go make it a little smaller

so you want your team to buy into a single vision and work together towards achieving a single goal as a team you also want them to understand what their roles are going to be while still feeling empowered enough to capitalize on opportunities to help Elevate the project when they present themselves so today we want to give you and your team some practical solutions to some of the more common problems that Pop Up When developing story and narrative content for your game so just kind of a quick introduction here my name is Ryan Beno uh I'm an environment artist it's a little different than most of the people youve probably heard today I've been in the industry for about 9 years now I'm currently at Insomniac games where I've been working on projects like Sunset Overdrive last year's ratchet and clink and for the last couple years I've been working on # Spider-Man PS4 uh I've also worked on the Call of Duty franchise as well as tell Tales Walking Dead and W amongus projects so

if you can't tell from my body of work I have a certain affinity for narrative driven games and I am Raina Anderson I am a narrative designer over at idos Montreal I've been in the industry for more than a decade now I've worked on titles such as CSI Dungeon Hunter and most recently DSX mankind divided uh before I got into the industry I worked in broadcasting and marketing and I have degrees in both psychology and communication and as it turns out both of those are super handy when you're making games because so much of making games has to do with understanding people and communicating with them so Ryan I Ryan and I talked about it and the problems that we found that we come up with the most are three the three bullet points so first we see different problems and different solutions because we all have different lenses the backgrounds that we've

studied that that we bring into the industry uh color our points of view two art and writing and design and sound we all have different tools and goals and jargon and they don't always align and three we are all passionate people who fight for our visions and because what we create is Art it feels very personal so if those are the problems then our solutions would ultimately be to be able to communicate story ideas quickly and clearly while maintaining the Integrity of the Core Concepts to find ways for departments to connect instead of clash with each other and three build a team Dynamic where creative people are comfortable being vulnerable so that's easy right we can just go back and do this uh an ideal environment would allow

us to collaborate communicate and check our egos at the door however when our team sizes balloon and the pressure is on people don't behave in ideal ways so the way that we've structured this talk is to go over what happens when each of these goals breaks down and we'll give you some Band-Aids that you can apply immediately and then some ideas that you can Implement to prevent them from happening in the future and most of these ideas apply to Team Dynamics in general however we want to look at them from our own personal experiences of working on stories and games so the first problem if you fail to maintain a cohesive Vision you're going to end up with different interpretations everybody can hear the same game plan from the director but end up at completely different goal posts so the problem is you either have a lack of a strong Vision holder or one who can't communicate their Vision

clearly regardless there is a breakdown in communication so when you have a breakdown in communication the first thing you should look at is the degree of difficulty of the language English tends to be the operational language in our industry but when you're dealing with sister Studios or Freelancers or contractors it's not necessarily the first language of everybody involved a recent BBC story talked about how anglophones who to be unilingual are the worst communicators compounding that problem is the fact that non-native uh speakers T are often scared of losing face and they pretend to understand even if they don't so make sure that you review your documentation for Clear language reduce the amount of jargon and use something like the Hemingway editor for only $20 this app you can put in any text that you have and then it will process it and give you great hints on ways that you can improve the clarity of your text

because you need to make sure that you can communicate clearly with your other departments uh another solution is having Gatekeepers in your group on large teams like the ones that Raina and I work on uh they're pretty crucial to have these people are the first line of defense for your story and narrative content Gatekeepers are best suited to solve problems immediately without needing large amounts of energy and attention from the rest of the team they understand the intent of the overall narrative vision and can articulate well enough to defend its Integrity they have strong connections with different departments to help bring that perspective to those who aren't involved directly in Key decision- Making but you also want these to be a select few on your team having too many cooks in the kitchen can cause splintering of interpretations so ultimately the goal of their role is to maintain narrative cohesion and continu continuity throughout the whole experience of the

game but more importantly throughout production to make sure content is consistent with the vision So speaking of vision let's talk about the ones who will be creating it you need a vision to go anywhere and you need a vision holder who can build it and maintain it these are your play callers for storytelling they build a foundation early and set examples for Gatekeepers and the rest of the team to follow usually the director and leads this is someone who has thought out the structure so carefully with a clear picture of its completed State they would be able to answer any questions about what needs to be done at almost any point that way if there are any issues that need to be ironed out there's already an idea on how to materialize it so kind of an example of this working in practice is uh during a scene in The Walking Dead the protagonist League gets stuck underground inside of a sewer and has to

find his way out there was a discussion about cutting large parts of this section particularly a puzzle where you needed to distract zombies to clear the way this came up because someone on the team working on that scene didn't think it was an engaging enough puzzle so what happened the episode's director came in and pitched us on his vision for that scene he explain how the sequence was served to significance by breaking up the pacing between large chunks of dialog heavy scenes and also told us how we as a team were going to build genuine moments of tension into that distraction section because he was convincing and got people to buy into that Vision the sequence ultimately stayed in the shipped game so we've already talked about using clear language but we also need to make sure that our document formats are clear as well documentation is going to be useless if nobody is using it however documentations are generally used as

reference material you can't expect people are going to read it from top to bottom and if you give them a wall of text they are not going to read it at all you need to make sure that you use bullet points and images and white space you have to make sure that your document has an index and that it's presented in a searchable format because people are going to use it to scan for that one piece of information that they need right then and there and share documentation that's AC accessible can prevent arguments from happening in the first place for example on mankind divided our director uh JF zuga created the environmental storytelling documents that we used and we referred back to them when there was a review of one area and we felt that there were too many police in a touristy District during the daytime uh the documentation clearly stated that there should we needed room to build to that later in the game so the level designers had no problem changing it because it was clearly

stated and having clear documentation keeps everyone on the same page another way to prevent misinterpretation is to make sure that everybody starts on the same page all departments need to understand the bigger picture you can have meetings to welcome new people and get them oriented with the project and you can also use meetings to kick off a new feature or phase and this gives you a chance to review narrative documentation art Direct ction sound design and you can see how everybody is going to fit into the final picture because in a team sport you might be executing your own personal move however you need to know how everybody else is functioning and you need to know that everybody's working towards the same goal and personally I get so much out of our multi-disciplinary meetings that we have especially when the directors are involved because it's a lot hard hard to question the angle a department is

taking on something when you know that all of the directors are focused on the same goal so after you've had your kickoff meeting and everyone's been well informed it's time to put that direction to the test applying all your key story PR key storytelling principles into content creation is one of the biggest challenges you'll face in development how do you coordinate all these people with different disciplines to contribute in meaningful ways and help your story or narrative content so it's important to realize that every discipline on your team has a capacity to tell stories for me as an environment artist I look at how to tell stories differently from how a sound designer might or a cinematic artist or an animator or a writer or a writer uh I see it in terms of how can I tell stories visually through the spaces that our characters their history and culture occupy because no environments would

exist without their influence on the world I'm constantly asking myself is what I'm making going to help achieve the narrative goals so what are some solutions to consider well I can start with what I was just talking about which is asking questions after you get assigned a task it's pretty common for artists to gather reference and do any sort of necessary research but this is also the time to ask if there's any specific narrative relevancy to it be proactive and ask questions like who is this character what type of space do they occupy what happened here how did the space come to be and what tone is trying to be conveyed for any artist asking questions about story and characters is incredibly important and we don't usually do enough of it to be perfectly honest it gives you more ideas and tools to play with when building spaces and creating props try not to settle for making quote unquote just a prop or or just a room

seek out stories that those assets can tell even though I'm just speaking for the art Department here a lot of these approaches to asking questions can be expanded to other disciplines as well be alert to opportunities to expand on narrative or character elements even in small ways so an example of this working was when we started to remake the environment art from the original Ratchet and Clank for the PS4 version one of the important things for us was to figure out what these spaces were originally meant to be when they were conceived on the PS2 we went back to original concept art and when available we interviewed people who had worked on the original game and worked on specific levels and what we learned was that many spaces weren't fully realized so we pushed for additional assets to help convey those ideas asking questions and being inquisitive is really about is

is really all about one thing though and that's getting to the core of your concept this needs to be the backbone of your whole narrative it's a central theme idea emotion whatever you want to call it that you are trying to explicitly convey you'll need this to answer questions like what message are we trying to get across or what emotion do we want them to feel this can also be really helpful when you end up getting stuck looking at smaller details in your story or plot that ultimately may not matter all that much but if you always keep in mind The Core theme and try to stay true to that you'll have a better chance of finding the answer that you're looking for it will help you to set boundaries and expectations of what kind of context and content you'll want so in a game like Sunset Overdrive that is this very colorful and bright and sarcastic place we also wanted to visually convey

smaller and grounded moments to emphasize that an urban apocalypse had just happened so when we did our set dressing pass we specifically called at the need to create areas that emphasized that like boarding up storefronts and placing burnt out vehicles or wrecked buildings we asked ourselves questions like what would a picnic look like in the middle of the outbreak and then we go off and build that in creating interesting set dressing we hope that some players might stop for a moment take in the scenery and be curious about events that might have happened in that spot but how do you get to the core if you only know your piece of the puzzle you need to be able to understand how all of those pieces are going to fit together and so we've talked about how all of these different departments have different languages one thing that you can do is learn the basics of another language you can read a book watch a video or even just go through and read the documentation from another department

Department can take it on yourself to learn something there are so many courses available online from all different kinds of prestigious universities and they're free you can learn the meaning of terms like cross cutting and environment mapping and ux chunking that might be frequently heard within a discipline but we might not hear that frequently outside also if we are the experts we can teach the others on our team we can share our information uh at uh idos Montreal we have this program called Square you um it gives the opportunity for us to make presentations within the company we can do it live in the theater and then rebroadcast it throughout the studio to everybody's desktops and then make it available in an online archive it also gives us a chance to practice our GDC presentations uh one presentation that had really stuck with me is when our animation director uh David duv talked about his time at DreamWorks and how he animated according a scene between two

characters according to not the dialogue that they were saying but on the subtext that was going on between those two characters and for a writer to hear another department talk about subtext that was pretty awesome and it makes it a lot easier to trust the expertise of your co-workers when you can understand the approach that they're taking with their work also we need to be able to get our hands dirty on small teams everybody is doing whatever it takes to get the job done everybody knows how to use your engine on large teams you end up in very specialized roles and you may only understand how to do your little piece of the work and you don't understand how everybody else on the team is using the engine to do theirs so everybody and absolutely everybody needs to get a crash course in how to use your engine it gives you a better idea and not just

the engine in general but how all of the other departments are using the engine for their jobs when a problem comes up you're going to be able to propose better Solutions because you're going to have an understanding of what's easy to implement how far the engine can be pushed and what kind of solution is just going to eat away at the team's time and become more of a problem so now that we know how to create together how do you give and receive feedback without destroying a lot of the good lines of communication that have been built up as a team how do you handle ideas that individually might excite you but may not be the best fit for the overall Vision these are the type of problems that will come up constantly mainly because we're all very passionate people as I'm sure everybody in this room is uh and we get excited about ideas uh especially our own but presenting those ideas and not getting any feedback or outright rejection can discourage others from introducing new ideas when they might be sorely needed

this is a simple and easy way to destroy creative morale by having people on your team feel like their voices aren't being heard how do you convey to your team the best ways to introduce ideas that are in sync with the vision but also how can you give constructive feedback to those ideas probably the most constructive way is presenting problems and weaknesses in the story to your team and asking them hey let's try to solve this together soliciting answers from team members is a great way to convey you are trying to encourage collaboration people want to feel like they are part of a team in a creative process and there will be points where you're probably going to need a different Viewpoint to solve a problem even when you don't think you need immediate Solutions don't actively discourage people from sending you suggestions people on your team want to feel passionate about the story you're trying to tell and getting them excited will motivate them to want to contribute in any way they can whether that's

through their work or through sharing of ideas ultimately you want to create a culture of openly discussing the story its strengths and its weaknesses people on your team who want to feel passionate about the story of your game and getting them excited will also help overall Morale on the project kind of an example of this working was near the end of development for The Walking Dead Season 1 our lead writer Shan vanaman sent out a companywide email asking people to read through the script and if they saw any way to punch up things like subtext or metaphor in the last episode to speak up and present them to the team he specifically shared an idea brought up by one cinematic artist at the type of example that he was looking for if you're in a decision-making position you need to give articulate reasons why some suggestions work or more importantly don't work when giving feedback we know that not every idea is going to be usable but making it clear

why those ideas don't work is also important to do try to turn the rejection into a way to strengthen communication but also highlight the ideas that do not get or that do get accepted excuse me and the reason why those ideas work help guide your team in the direction of types of ideas that work by being sincere and direct with them coming off as being dismissive can send the wrong message and create a culture where people don't feel their suggestions will be taken into consideration something a few of our designers and Insomniac started to do pretty recently was when they would give a suggestion and send out an email with their idea to the whole team they would usually reference and Link directly to a section of the existing script that was relevant to the point that they were trying to make this helps to immediately give proper context to their suggestions for the people that they are trying to convince however none of those bandaids are going to stick if you've already got

your hackles up before you even start getting the feedback in Psychology there's this concept called the negativity bias it means that we feel strong uh bad feelings more quickly more intensely and for longer than any good ones and this is a problem if we only have bad interactions with our team members because we begin to end up dreading interacting with those people and this is a huge uh blocker when these team members are the ones who must necessarily critique the work that you're doing scientists have found that it takes between three and six positive interactions just to balance out one negative interaction so it takes frequent small positive interactions like grabbing coffee together saying hello and being close with your co-workers going to improve the efficiency of your

team Clare newer who is the founder of learning as leadership worked with oil rig workers and oil rig workers are known for having a culture that keeps them from expressing themselves and she trained them to be lot more emotionally responsive and the oil companies found that this led to a huge decrease in accidents and a huge Improvement in efficiency so when we start being friends with our co-workers and being vulnerable and open with them and we're building this kind of community within our team we can get past that negativity bias and work on being more open open with our communication uh on mankind divided the side quest team worked really closely together instead of working within their own departments they function more as a Strike Team and in my opinion the quality of the work that they produced uh was is correlated with the closeness of the team members so just just to kind of recap everything that we've talked about today

uh it can be a two-way street when working with narrative in a game making sure the team is well informed enough to feel like they can be creative within the vision but also giving them one that's exciting enough for them to seek out ways to make it better within their own skill sets ultimately it's important to get everyone on the same page regardless of the team size maintaining communication and seeing true the core themes of what you're trying to get at are important and we take our work and the critiques on our work seriously it can be difficult to separate the personal from the professional and we need to keep in mind that we're all working toward the same goal and as such we need to trust the expertise of our team members by learning more about each other and about each other's professions we can create a team that is much more in sync which is going to improve whatever project we work on together and you'll notice that a Common Thread throughout all of our Solutions is empathy you have to have the mindset

of seeing the problem through someone else's lens you have to build this into both your pipelines and your team structures if you give your team the tools that they need to see all sides of the story you're going to end up with a stronger story overall these are some of the links of things that we've mentioned throughout these will be available in the slides online after so thank you very much make sure to fill out your surveys be available in the wrapup room well done well done uh yes so evaluations don't forget those wrap up room all very important mythical Place Riders hang out tonight be there if you don't know what I'm talking about ask around um uh just to take a quick moment uh to wrap this entire uh event up

there's a back back a long time ago when I used to be an actor and a theater director um sometimes um somebody would say to me that they would refer to acting as being The Art of Lying well um and anybody who's who's really who really has any training in theater knows um that that's actually not at all the case that acting is the art of telling the truth um and believing in the truth that you're telling at the moment that you're doing it and I think about that a lot and I think about empathy as these guys were just talking about um and I think about the fact that those are two things um I will offer as my opinion only that are in short supply in the world at the moment and there's not a ton that we as artists can do about that necessarily

but as narrative artists as narrative Professionals in this Medium as I've said before I think our job is to provide context and to provide meaning it is to tell truth it is to show and promote empathy and I think it's an important moment for us to think about the power that we do have in the choices that we make um it's a it's a responsibility it's also uh kind of a pleasure to have that and to be able to affect people's lives to have an emotional impact on people to um help to forge an emotional bond between the player and a game experience and and maybe even something even more meaningful than that um it's

not being too pretentious I think to suggest that that's possible uh so I've really enjoyed getting to meet some of you that I didn't know I hope you've enjoyed being here I do hope you will come out to the mythical place tonight make new friends um build relationships share empathy tell truth get better at providing meaning and context because there is no moment that needs it more from us than now on behalf of L chapelsky and Richard dansky and Mary deor and Susan oconor the rest of the board advisers for this Summit we are very grateful that you chose to spend your hard-earned money on this event we hope that you will join us again next year and we ask if you would do one thing for us tweet post on Facebook tell someone get another person to come next time so that we can grow this community and we can keep having this conversation

thanks thank you sirate it