The 2016 Narrative Innovation Showcase

[Music] good morning how's everybody doing okay it's great that you're here in the very first session of the day here you go welcome everybody uh okay oh uh I'm Matthew Weiss and this is clar Fernandez Vera and we are here to present the narrative Innovation showcase so we are game writers game designers we've been doing this for a long time now um and basically we wanted to talk about experimentation in narrative because when we talk about gaming experimentation people think about mechanics uh and at times the storytelling The Narrative is set aside and we wanted to actually focus on the kind of work that people are already doing uh we want to explore new forms of Storytelling games uh that also happen alongside design um there are people who are already doing it uh and we want to

highlight this kind of work uh all the games that uh our creators are going to talk about today uh come from a variety of backgrounds from academic experiments to uh to experimental narratives to commercial games so we have a nice range that we wanted to Showcase uh and show that this is already taking place so one of the reasons we wanted to do this is because uh game Nar game narrative has been around for a really long time it's been around since the beginning of games and uh there's talks all the time GDC and other events where people are always trying to say you know we learned this thing we just discovered this new thing and it's true new uh Innovations happen all the time but we also really need to build a strong uh understanding of where we've been so we can understand uh where we're going so we really want to use this as like the beginning of um you know the building of a real shared knowledge on this topic M so the format is going to be we have uh selected uh five speakers uh for you they're going to give five talks 10 minutes each uh

focusing on challenges and Native design and the focus is going to be on process uh how they they um tackle that challenge and uh there's not going to be Q&A we're going to go to the wrap-up room so that we have plenty of time to uh cover the topics that we want to um that we want to cover and our first speaker is uh Samantha Gorman talking about Pride hello everyone hello um so I'm Samantha I'm one half of the collaborative Duo tender Clause we've been working together for 10 years and we write design code film basically do a lot of different hats on our projects um all our projects argue that the way a story is told and interacted with is actually part of the story itself um so today I'm going to be talking about pry pry is part book part film and part game it was a finalist for for igf excellence narrative last year

and apple nominated it as one of the top 25 apps of 2015 we never speak of her I picture her between us right before it hit sometimes she looks back at me then nothing a wet red pain a spade slicing Like a Knife a hand [Music] reaching oo

[Music] cool um so pry is a character study it's an internal character study that's set during a specific time mainly the first Gulf War the player is a guest inside James's mind and through the use of the iconic pinch gesture priz apart his memories and thoughts so coming from an art background we're like okay as director's video is more consumed on a timeline by director's off authors where text is often consumed on the reader pace so how do we integrate the passive and active and text and video in a meaningful and compelling way how can we merge text elements in gameplay that feels integrated that keeps player agency and moves away from the cutscene or dvd extra and what we saw um we're familiar with the background of full motion video for games but this project was actually inspired by the ebook originally you know ebooks were like future of the book but then they were adapt print

conventions such as the page turn and a lot of media was very segmented rather than integrated um and we really pay attention to the medium of the platform we're working with so tablets are excellent devices for video consumption however a lot of early projects were simple branching narratives where the branch the branches weren't necessarily weighted in a satisfying way they didn't go to a a um a a conclusion that's felt satisfying for me as a reader um prize story was actually going against branching because it was really a process of someone coming to terms with their memories and the idea of the reader drilling deeper instead of branching outward so how do we integrate text and video um we usually do a two-pronged approach first we think about the story okay what does the story suggest it's a character that's losing its sight it's forcing open it's coming to terms with something there's an exchange of control then we think about the medium um the iPad what are the basic gestures the

vocabulary the ways of interacting that can be used for storytelling so combining those as well as bringing different Knowledge from different disciplines like theater film and installation we came up with different models to integrate text and Video in ways that we felt were more meaningful um one of the first ideas we kind of have this idea of the sympathetic gesture where the player is a privileged guess Inside the Mind and the player's actions and character's thinking are intertwined so the character gets AAL Bible from inherited from his mother if the reader our player indeed twins in her womb moves their fingers smoothly over the text the associations that the character has with their family indeed twins in her is more static it comes up whereas the first one came out red looking if the reader moves their finger slower then they get separate associations with their family during the war in this way we're able to remix um these the

memories of his two his families according to this text that's relevant to the story at a certain point um in the climax of The Narrative he actually gets a um he's trying to tell himself a story but of what happened in the past but he's an unreliable narrator at any point the reader can pinch open different lines and he'll they'll get information he'll go back on what he said or give alternative versions if it gets to a point where they he can't conceptualize the text anymore he'll get fragmented um thoughts or like kind of frantic pace of thoughts or images of video will open up that are associative with the text he's encountered there's about 45 minutes of video in this chapter alone and finally we wanted something that unlocked throughout that as the reader um went through the project and here there's a album that James encounters that's destroyed during the war it holds the memories of his mother and um one of his friends Jesse in the

pages but what remains are only obsessive thoughts of what the objects once were on the page if the reader Scrolls fast the objects become whole again otherwise on the large level it's description of literally what was on the page or on the smaller level memories or associations with the objects so these are some ways we tried to combine text and video and um have a system where we had very authored controlled um aspects where I'm controlling what the line say I'm controlling in the order but at any point the player can dig in and get more information it's very exploratory so these are the principles that guided us through pry um and I can actually highlight it in some of these mechanics one of the central mechanics of the story is this eye open chapter where the violence of the pinch gesture forces the eyes open but at any point in the um the timeline the player can do this closing the eyes will return to a default space where the thought thoughts update on what was just seen But however

there is a third layer to this where there's three spaces where um an inverse pinch will crunch down and it'll get more subconscious memories and thoughts and these three spaces work together however we as authors have used a timeline to plan out everything that happens according to Time code where we can take the time code and without the player necessarily realizing it manipulate it to make sure they see CERN and story Beats while leaving other moments exploratory for instance we can um if we want them to see like something that happens further on and they close the eyes we can make sure that the external World video pauses but the sound continues so they feel like they're in a continuous world when so that when they open the eyes next immediately that story beat hits um there's a very like complicated system in how we actually author the underlying structure to make sure that we're creating a cohesive narrative while still leaving open the exploratory

mechanic um one of the things we're also interested in is there's times when we invert the idea of text at a player place and pace and video at an author's Pace what happens to text when it becomes video what is watching and what is reading so uh the last slide is changing game narrative is not necessarily the goal here it's the evolution of game narrative is not one conclusion but a rich variety of approaches instead we argue for deeper attention to how interactions in story itself self resonate that story doesn't exist in a vacuum it originates from player and author effect and a combination of passive and active viewing thank you our next speaker is Aaron Reed talking about icebound all right hello everybody um so yeah

yeah I'm Arin Reid I'm a PhD student at the University of California Santa Cruz and also an independent designer um but I am graduating soon so this second part becomes more important um so I've been making Indie story games for more than 10 years now you might recognize one or two of these things um I've always been really trying to push at the boundaries of what interactive stories can do um I'm going to talk to my latest game uh the icebound concordance so we had this on the festival circuit last year it was here igf um and we actually won indic story award last year which was a huge honor um and I wanted to say that this is a really a true collaboration made equally by myself and Jacob garby who uh I think is not here today but it's going to be around GF GDC so if you see him say hi so the narrative premise we set out to explore with this game was this what if exploring an interactive story could feel like sculpting with Clay because the choice structures were're used to in game stories tend to fall into one of two imperfect categories so branching paths can feel kind of like being lost in a maze you

can't see the structure or where you're positioned in it uh and that makes choices feel stressful because you can't see the consequences of them what decisions will lead to the best story you usually don't know and you can't usually try again without starting over from the beginning mazes are also static you'll never do something that surprises the designer of the maze mazes are also hard to build for the designer because you might waste your time building paths no one ever sees but in practice this usually isn't a problem because most mazes are fake in games as we all know um there's usually only one real path through the story and collapsing branches is fine I do this all the time in my work so do all of us um but it's a trick and so with this project we really wanted to think about alternatives to that um so another Technique we often see in interactive stories um is uh feel sort of like customizing options in your new car right so you're offering decisions to the player that might have a cosmetic effect or might get aggregated into stats that the game refers to later on um but this uh these kind of decisions don't usually change the shape of the overall EXP experience very much and so this works too and

again I do this all the time in my games but sometimes not even the new car smell can hide the fact that maybe this isn't a car you would have picked out for yourself you're kind of stuck with it and maybe it's even more of a railroad car than one that you can actually drive around to explore in on your own so the sense of exploring is really what Jacob and I wanted to try with this game what's what's a different model that really uh puts exploring as a mechanic as the thing you're doing um uh front and center um genuinely exploring a story space and the story part of that is important too because we're both writers so we didn't want something that felt so procedural or generative that it stopped working as fiction so our challenge was to find a new narrative mechanic and build a game around it that allowed lowcost reversible decisions and the ability to make surprising things so that's kind of what we mean by feeling like sculpture so for extra fun we had some constraints we initially did this project for a art grant called future of the book that wanted a digital game that worked with a physical printed book uh which is right here uh and which we also

designed along with the game um as writers without a budget it need to be mostly driven by text and also this so we had some interesting constraints that might be different than the constraints uh many of you work with on your games uh so let me tell uh talk a little bit about the game we ended up with and then I'll go back and say how we sort of tackled these challenges so in the icebound concordance you explore a series of connected stories set at a place called Karina station a polar research based slowly sinking into ice each level of the game is a deeper level of Karina station and a story further back in time of people who lived at this remot remote Outpost as you reach each new story you see a map for that level of the station the map is filled with objects and areas that might become significant to the story if you choose to shine one of your virtual spotlights on them and we kind of like to call this idea check off's dollhouse so if you know the theater convention that if there's a gun over the mantle piece someone's going to shoot it before the end of the play in our game you're sort of choosing what narrative element has has that

significance what setups will lead to dramatic payoffs in your version of the story uh and I should say that the set of possibilities on each map isn't static it's in part procedural chosen from a library of content and winnowed down in part by the player's earlier choices so certain combinations activate more story fragments which you're seeing on the left side here uh events and endings these are second and third act style plot points implied by the setup you've created so for example loneliness plus romantic thoughts might lead to a love story but then if you add an element of danger it might give it a tragic ending all three kinds of story fragments can also be examined as longer texts which are altered based on the current state of the story uh such as other active fragments recurring themes and so on there's also a shimmering text uh that can be cycled through different Alternatives and sometimes a single word can really profoundly change the meaning of an entire fragment so while all this is happening you carry on a running conversation with the S of digital ghost the original

author of all these stories who's been resurrected as a virtual agent to resolve a story you need to convince the author that your version makes sense you do this by showing him pages from the companion physical book The icebound compendium filled with more layers of narrative the book acts as a kind of thematic controller for the story augmented reality recognizes which page of the book you're looking at and hidden tags determine whether a given page and your chosen story have any overlapping thematic ideas if they do those themes become strengthened and the next level you visit will have more objects and text connecting to those strengthened themes as you go deeper you're slowly bringing the narrative more and more in line with your own thematic preferences making the story feel more and more uh like something you contributed to so that was a lot to take in but the uh the core gameplay Loop is really kind of just this You're Building stories using a set of available fragments you're resolving stories by by finding a page in the book with a thematic

match and then those frag that set of fragments gets winnowed down based on those decisions um so that the next story you build has more fragments that connect to the themes you're interested in so how do we get to here um what was the solution to our initial challenge of wanting something that felt more sculptural well it turns out we took a couple significant ideas so rather than invent one giant system that could create the aesthetic we wanted we realized we needed uh to make the story dynamic in a lot of different subtle ways um so on the highest level choosing themes via showing the book pages helps shape the story in a big sense what's it about what's the big picture um the mechanic of moving the lights around controls the sort of major details which characters you're going to focus on what plot events are important um and then that zoomed in view of the individual texts gives you uh the player control over really small aspects words and phrases and at the same time this cycle is going on there's also things like the conversation with the central character who has a state that can change um um and how the player chooses to interact

with the printed book do they read it all at once at the beginning do they dip back into it as they're playing so together all these things really worked better than anyone's system for creating a dynamic that made the player really feel like an author and one of the things we've been happiest about um is to see this come out in reviews of the game so we got a few weeks ago this really nice piece from Rock Paper Shotgun where they said I'd feel some small but significant change Ripple through the game from a choice I'd made the icebound concordance is a game that more than anything else captures this feeling of editing so that's been really cool to see people pick up on that um we also did a lot of paper prototyping of narrative mechanics which is cool and you don't get to do that often um we did a lot of experimenting with ways uh we could break story up into pieces move those pieces around combine them um and importantly restrict those combinations so that they stayed narratively valid without restricting the player creativity so much that they felt railroaded another Insight when exploring a new space you need a map so we built a lot of visualization and authoring tools to help us understand the kind of huge combinatorial space

representing the different ways our story fragments could be combined and this is actually a doubly exponential space because each level has thousands of possible sets of fragments based on what themes are active but each of those sets has hundreds of permutations based on how the player has currently configured their lights so the tools we built really helped us discover how much content we needed to cover that possibility space and to find any holes or edge cases that might have taken weeks of play testing to emerge more organically um and another interesting Insight we actually needed less content than we originally thought we did so icebound has about 50,000 words of story and that's smaller than other projects I've done by a significant amount but we've seen in reviews and in play testing and stuff that players feel more like they're actually shaping the story and having a big impact on it uh which is a huge win for two overworked writers um so how does this change game narrative as we know it and sorry Clara that makes me think of this so I think I have less grandio conclusions than a Star Trek episode but um I think Jacob and I actually kind of

succeeded at what we set out to do we genuinely didn't know if we could make this work but we went out exploring strange new mechanics and seeking out new models of interactive story and we hit on something really special I think so if you're luy enough to be in a space where you can explore um an indie space an academic space a personal project space uh even a studio willing to take some risks you should be boldly going uh the rewards might be fame or possibly even Fortune as illustrated by this photograph of Jacob and I holding literally fives of dollars so finally uh I really believe that players are more engaged if they can build story not just choose story I've seen this in a lot of my own projects and I'd love to see more people building story engines that let players truly collaborate with us right let them use the storytelling skills that we all have as writers and narrative designers to help them tell their own surprising life-changing meaningful stories that they truly had a hand in crafting so you can find out more about our game at iash bound.com the book is actually here at the GDC bookstore which is awesome uh

and if you're interested in getting a hold of me that's my website thank you very [Music] much and next up we have Katie chonus talking about Elenor hi all so I am the I'm a game designer at Oculus by day and by night uh some friends and I work on Elenor um here's our trailer [Music]

so what is Elenor uh Elenor is a Time looping Shakespearean Adventure game set in the world of Shakespeare's Hamlet uh it's really weird and we're still honestly not sure how to elevator elevator pitch it ourselves so we're still working on that it's kind of like if you took Hamlet and matched it up with the time looping mechanics of Majora's Mask and a little bit of performance location based theater like sleep no more uh as ofilia who for those of you who slept through high school English is Hamlet's x uh and jolted lover uh one of the side characters in the original play you are attempting to stop the tragedy of Hamlet over the course of 4 days there are two catches

with this number one opilia is stuck in a Time Loop and she knows it so all the information that she learns between Loops is retained and number two the information that you do acquire sort of goes into this inventory of information that you have at your disposal and you can then present it at any given point in the timeline so uh you know obviously talking to characters about what your dad thinks has a very different impact uh on day one versus if he just got murdered by Hamlet so uh working with that has been really interesting um in many ways Elenor is sort of born of what if I most of us on the team work in in game development for our day jobs and we wanted to sort of explore this concept of tragic gameplay and you know you think of tragedy as sort of this concept of a group of characters or a tragic protagonist doing everything in their power to try and create a good outcome but because of some anate flaw or some Vice they have everything goes to [ __ ] and so we really wanted to take the concept of the traditional you know game which is structured around this power

fantasy right you're always supposed to be excelling and learning and and gaining Clarity and getting better and how can we turn that on its head and create something that really feels like playing a Shakespearean tragedy uh accounting for player agency makes this really hard uh you we tend to try and like turn things against players and so I'm going to talk a little bit about how we managed to make that happen uh number one is that you know giving players this arsenal of information at their disposal allows them to do completely reasonable things that Shakespeare didn't account for when he was writing hamlet in the 17th century so I you know for example players go up to Hamlet and they're like hey Hamlet like I noticed that you're feeling really stabby today what if you didn't kill anyone or conversely uh you know go they they go right up to Hamlet and say they say hey Hamlet I know for a fact that your uncle totally murdered your dad so here's all the evidence you need go get him tiger and so you know when you sort of allow players to attempt to solve the tragedy for themselves the puzzle becomes can they actually do it it seems

so straightforward right you look at Romeo and Juliet and you're like what if they had a cell phone oh my God this would have just cleared itself right up um uh and so writing to this and writing around this required digging really deeply into the source material and doing a lot of sort of reading about the original play what do Scholars think of it what do Scholars think of the characters and uh creating large bodies of new information and new characterization that did not exist in the original play so taking the example of Gertrude um again for those of you who don't know Hamlet she's the queen of Denmark uh for the most of the play she's kind of a background character she sits at her husband's side she rules the throne uh in Act five she gets poisoned and dies and that's her that's a large amount of her contribution to the play but you know what she is still a queen and she's still on the throne so what happens if the player goes and tells her on day one hey I have proof that your husband is a murderer and murdered your last husband right like how how would she react and so I it really required like sort of going back and and reading

through the play and creating new avenues of content that that move around that not to mention because it's a Time looping game we can see gertude in so many different situations we can see her you know at her Peak and at her lowest point we can see her when she's ruling on the throne of Denmark as a as a solo Queen after having disposed of her husband and when she's like about to commit suicide because she learned something that she shouldn't have long before um long before she was supposed to know it and so really uh the secondary Str once we had sort of created all this content around characters was okay how do we how do we bring it all to a nice close how do we take everything that we know and and create a tragic ending out of all this because you know if you sort of go with this theme of tragic gameplay we're trying to force players into scenarios where all of their best intentions are thwarted and the things that they thought would work out don't in the end so uh a large amount of this comes back to sort of uh writing around each character's tragic flaw uh we wanted to

basically like you know the the player will present information and characters will seem to move in rational ways according to that information until inevitably it starts to break down towards the end of day three and day four so a lot of day three and day four they start to go crazy they start to kill each other and um in a way it feels a little bit dirty as a game designer and a writer because I will see players uh come in and play the game and they're like hey everything was going really well and then it totally veered off the rail and went out of control and uh you know that's sort of the exact opposite of everything that you're taught to do in commercial game development which is kind of been really fun um the watching the gameplay sort of feels like a a back and forth between you know myself and and Conor designer and the players as they're attempting every possible Avenue that they think will lead to success and at every step of the way the game is saying no no you can't do that um so in the end I we've sort of seen players come to an

interesting conclusion which is that you know when when you're reading a tragedy the characters within the tragedy normally come to death or failure but when you're watching players engage with a tragic game they come to catharsis they sort of realize oh like you know it's it's not about solving it's not about winning it's it's about understanding who these people are and who these characters are and and empathizing with them and trying to you know befriend them in the face of the end of the world and so you know how does Elenor change game narrative I think that's a large question um to some extent I don't know as as the writer and as the designer it's not really my job to expound upon that um what I will say is that I think Elenor works best as an outlier I think uh it works best as you know in a world where there are games that empower the player and lift her up and allow her to you know Excel and to gain New Heights Elenor says [ __ ] you and maybe there's

some power in that uh we are demoing the game at the Indie Mega Booth every day this week if you would like to come and play for yourself as writers and designers and tell us how we're doing um thank you very [Music] much next we have Nina Freeman talking about cibil [Applause] hello okay so hi my name is Nina Freeman I'm a level designer at fbite right now working on Tacoma um my last project was Syble which I worked on uh with starm made games um and today I'll talk to you about vignette games which is what sible is okay so what's a vignette uh I really like this definition of vignettes from Ian bogost um I think it encompasses vignettes in the broadest s sense which is useful uh some examples of other vignettes or vignettes and other mediums

um that are not games are Mrs dooway if you've read that much of William Carlos Williams work who's a poet um or the movie Lost in Translation um in games some uh pieces that I consider vignettes are dysphoria The Last of Us Left Behind or The Beginner's Guide so just to give you some context about the kind of vignette that I'm talking about so here's a short vignette style poem just to give you like a concrete example uh by Frank O'Hara which you can read um much of my work is inspired by this kind of work in poetry and particularly by this poet and the other poets that are considered part of the New York school of poetry uh in my work particularly I've used vignettes as a guide to developing mechanics that enable the kind of intimacy that help players examine the wrinkles in individual human experiences so the vignette games I designed are character focused and focus on the specif specificity of human lives or moments in human lives uh they don't often try to make a statement or have a theme although they can uh they're exploratory or descriptive of a single

concise experience or character so I used this vignette approach when designing Cil a game that I worked on like I said with star made games uh I was the designer and writer it's a game about a relationship between two young people nah and Blake um sort of in their late like 19 early 20s uh and they're two people who met in an MMORPG like a World of Warcraft style thing uh that want to meet up in real life to have sex you play as Nina and exper exp ERI this situation from her perspective so it's a concise vignette game about this one particular moment in a larger relationship uh and here's the trailer just to give you a sense of what the game is like and how it [Music] plays morning what's up not much want to do a run together yeah [Laughter]

I kind of wish we lived closer yeah being on opposite coasts isn't the best for hanging [Music] out would you want to meet up with me like in real [Music] life that's how you spell sible people always ask me that so that's how you spell it um it's already out you can go to sibl game.com if you want to check it out later uh oh and it's in igf we'll be showing it uh on the Expo floor later this week um so the challenge in making Cil for me was that you know it's about

this romantic relationship and romantic relationships are full of complexity and Nuance as I'm sure most of us know uh how do so how do I tell the story of a relationship without overwhelming the player with information about like all these experiences that these people have had together that's like a lot of stuff so the the um wait I'm going to go back to the slide and say on it for a bit so um when I started working on the game I wanted to tell the story of this relationship and it's based on a personal experience so I had this whole deep complicated memory um that spanned over a few years and that's a lot of story to tell and I didn't necessarily want to tell all of it uh the entire relationship between these two people has many aspects how did they meet what was that like what have they bonded over what have they fought over Etc uh making a story that addresses all of these things with depth and Nuance would probably lead to a project of a larger scope than my team had the capacity for um four of us worked on it while I was in grad school and we all had other jobs

uh so even more importantly is every aspect of this relationship interesting to me as a writer potentially not so I asked myself how I could focus on the aspect of the relationship that I found the most interesting to write about and sort of like cut the scope down to that specific part of it in a vignette way so uh in my effort to focus in on one aspect of the relationship I developed the story within the constraints of a vignette the vignette of cibil focuses on the inperson meeting for sex between the two main characters given this constraint each piece of the game needed to support and contextualize how and why the couple decide to meet up each Act of the game consists of one conversation between the pair that contextualizes their meeting and ephemera to support the players's understanding of that single moment in their relationship so um so of course because it's a vignette about this one particular moment the game does not start at the beginning of their relationship it doesn't start like

when they met it starts sort of in the middle um so it doesn't depict that part of their relationship at all it really just focuses in on this moment so despite that the players still need some context to understand that the relationship has already begun to develop just for context so throughout the First Act the players presented with ephemera that refer to their interactions sort of prior to this moment um for example Nina's friend comments on how much she likes Blake in this email that the player can find it's just enough information to show the player that nah and Blake have already started down the path to becoming close without spelling it out explicitly or exceeding the scope of the vignette um so it's really like sort of context building so they can understand where this relationship is coming from so act one continues to build on this basic level of information and begins to explore the physical side of Nina and Blake's relationship the player finds pictures the two have been sending back and forth to each other while they overhear this flirtatious conversation in which Blake asks Nina for more pictures of herself this act shows that

the pair have become close enough to send real pictures of themselves to each other and these photos and what they imply about how Nina and Blake are feeling are a really important Wrinkle In This vignette of their oncoming sexual encounter uh these photo exchanges show the player that the two are becoming intimate in a sexually charged way um so finally the ACT ends with a short film of Nina taking a sexy selfie to send to Blake this is meant to emphasize how important intimacy and the physical body are to this moment in Nina and Blake's relationship so like I said before each Act is sort of meant to contextualize one sort of Wrinkle In This Moment so this first one sets up sort of the sexual part of it so of course all of this is conveyed to the player through emails and pictures and dialogue it's almost like sort of a gone home style thing where you're like going through a space and looking at stuff and learning about the characters that way instead of having them like tell it to you explicitly um so it's all pretty minimal I leave it up to the player to fill in the blanks I give them just enough information in order to paint a picture of where this

couple is at in their relationship without exceeding the constraints of the vignette by getting too much into sort of the history of it and the nitty-gritty of the stuff that came before this moment so I think this is an important example of how the vignette as a constraint helped inform the mechanics and storytelling inle vignettes are all about evocative detail details that tell a story in between the lines details that do not need to explain themselves or be spelled out the player plays civil listening to the brief conversation ation between the characters and understanding the context of those conversations by finding ephemera that relate to them within the game's computer interface so you're sort of listening to these conversations and understanding the context of them by clicking around Nina's computer and exploring all of this ephemera so in act two Nina and Blake are further breaking down the barriers between their digital and physical relationship as they come closer to having sex because they are becoming emotionally intimate For the First Time In This Moment in their relationship so in this act the two are doing a lot more than sending pics to each other it's no

longer just about sort of the physical like sex aspect of the relationship they're sharing intimate details about their lives so in this conversation for example nah tells Blake a story about how her mom and dad first met and Blake tells Nina that he thinks she'd really get along with his real life friends so these are just you know the sort of things that you tell to someone when you're becoming intimate with them these like personal stories so finally at the end of the ACT it's clear that they're intimate enough to be thinking about what it be like to meet and to talk on the phone and to be sharing these more personal stories with each other rather than like kind of just flirting and like sending sexy selfies to each other sort of another layer on top of that so all of these little details that add depth to the vignette can textualized their awkward conversation in act two that ends with them on the phone with each other and when they're talking on the phone they're sort of professing their Love and Desire for sex not because of the sexy pics but because they feel like they understand each other in a way and are growing closer to one of to one another at this moment in

their relationship so this act further contextualizes the vignette and gives the player a better understanding of how the meeting for sex came to be and how it developed to that point and the details of their relationship that support that understanding okay so finally in act three the player experiences the conversation between the couple that really ties up the vignette Nina and Blake decide to actually meet so Blake will fly to New York City to see Nina in person uh but the ACT is about that and how the two feel about it so it introduces some uncertainty illustrating Blake's particular uncertainty about this meeting and Nina's enthusiasm as you can see her enthusiasm is sort of expressed by this list of potential plans on her desktop that's sort of one of the first things you see in the act so you can kind of see like oh nah is off on her own like kind of planning this out and she's getting like pretty hyped up about it um and then that kind of contextualizes later in the act when she is really like hey we should meet like let's talk about this I'm kind of already making plans and you know that

cuz you see her plans so each Act consists of one detail about their relationship that ultimately contextualizes the final short film which closes this act Nina and Blake meet up in person and have sex in this final short film that closes the Final Act of the game The Player's experience of that final scene is understood through the lens provided by the details of their relationship as evoked by the previous three acts the sexy PS an act one the phone call calls in act two and finally the uncertainty in the plane tickets in act three so by the way I would like to emphasize that all of this I'm sort of explaining it in terms of the ephemera you find CU so much of that is there to really contextualize what's happening it's really not just about the conversations the conversations are so dependent on the player clicking around this computer and understanding what's going on in the background so that they can kind of feel like they know where Nina's coming from on a different level Beyond just what she says so um yeah it's really about those

details rather than a plot there's not really much of a plot to this game it's really just these three conversations and then they meet it's as simple as that um it's about the characters and the Nuance of the situation it's about the Snippets of conversations in the ephemera that contextualize them this is what makes cibil a vignette game it's not told through an elegant beginning middle and end it's one moment explored through the details that contextualize it it's an ordinary life story told through ordinary life things so the game does not explain the exact circumstances of this relationship that are not specifically relevant helping the player understanding the players's understanding of the focus of the vignette which culminates sort of in that final short film where they meet up the game begins in the midst of their relationship like I said earlier it explores how they came to meet up for sex and ends abruptly after this sort of sex Meetup happens I wasn't interested in exploring how the characters were impacted by what happened happened that would be outside of the scope of the vignette this vignette is constrained to

the circumstances and nuances of exactly how it happened and nothing more so the ending may feel unsatisfying because it ends at what many may consider the climax however the choice was deliberate in order to maintain the scope of the vignette and to evoke a character's the character's feeling of a sudden end to a sexual encounter the abrupt ending itself is necessary in order to express the ephemeral nature of this meeting between Nina and Blake so I would like to emphasize that tying up your story neatly may not always be necessary if abruptness evokes a feeling use it if the climax is the ending or the beginning then make that decision purposeful and use it if you're feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of a story consider whether or not you're really just trying to explore one concise part of it a vignette and try to focus on that explore your story through its details no matter how mundan and don't be afraid to cut the Cru even if it makes the story arc unusual every story has its own shape embrace it

[Music] thanks and finally we have Richard Rouse talking about the church in the [Applause] darkness I want to thank Matt and Clara for inviting me to do this and also thanks to all the other amazing talks we've had here today I'm sort of intimidated by this lineup um but as the other speakers have talked about when Matt and CLA proposed this session they they said well first state what your challenge was with the project um and I thought that was a really good thing to to think of a project in those terms and not enough projects maybe think about like what is the Big Challenge we're taking on with this game or with this project and when I I think a lot of really good uh you know directors do that sort of thing but maybe they don't articulate it to themselves or write it down or anything like that and I certainly didn't when I was starting this project and when I thought back about when I started on this on on working on the church in the darkness there were actually two challenges that I was taking on um and the first one was

I really wanted to make an action game with a with a changing narrative um you know I the reason I got into games was wanting to tell stories that would react to players and that would um allow them to express themselves and to see what would happen and I've had some success with that with games I worked on in the past like the first game I made Odyssey was a was a Ultima style RPG to the suffering horror games where the choices you were making in the present not only affected the future but also the past or most recently working a bit on state of K where an ongoing simulation produces a lot of of tricky narrative choices you kind of have to make under under time pressure but I was interested in some other games that I remembered back from way way back uh in the 80s there were several uh murder mystery type games that actually randomized who was murdered in the game and who did the murdering and you know this was sort of an interesting approach to adapting one of these things that made these games highly replayable or a more recent but still 20 years ago example it comes from the Blade Runner game that Westwood did in in the '90s uh where it randomized whether each character was a replicant

or not and obviously the choices you would have to make is the player would change uh dramatically based on that so the second thing I really wanted to do uh is was explore the nature of Cults um and I've been sort of fascinated by Cults for a long time um and and specifically how Cults often start off with these very Noble intentions of of really wanting to change the world or do something positive and then you know things sort of drift off and maybe go wrong um but maybe sometimes they don't and why does it happen sometimes and why does it not happen other times and how can you tell so the solution of course I realized was to combine these two things uh and that's what I'm trying to do in the church in the darkness which is the game we just announced and I'm going to show the trailer we came to the Jungle looking for peace America is corrupt it sends our children to die in Vietnam its system keeps you poor keeps you segregated keeps you powerless which told you our way was better living in socialism is God

intended and because we preach the truth they call us a cult so they hate us they want to kill us that is why we had to leave their sick country so we came here to South America to the Jungle to isolate ourselves to purify our community but still they hate us because our success proves that their society is wrong that their system is cruel that their way is doomed so they are coming for us they will infiltrate us they will sabotage us they will try to kidnap our people but we are ready we take up arms and we will have no mercy for anyone that violates our home attacking us will just show the world how corrupt they are so let them call us a cult because we we stand firm for what we believe we have God on our side and we

will not let them take a single one of us alive so if I had to give you the oneliner the uh the church in the darkness is a top- down action infiltration game set inside a religious cult in the 1970s uh where the story changes every time you play um the player is infiltrating this group the collective Justice mission to check on a relative uh and but the the is you don't know the true nature of this group you don't know you know are they a bunch of happy socialists just living their alternate life in the jungle or is there something more apocalyptic going on and the player has choice about how they interact with these people and what they do there uh you know you can be completely sney in your infiltration looking for the person you're trying to find you can use sort of non-lethal methods to take down opponents or you can kill anyone who gets in your way um so how did I come up with this how did I get to this point and come up with this design I really started with a lot of research and you know when I was prepping I told Matt well maybe I don't need to talk about the research and he was like no no you should talk about the

research people need to do more research so I love doing research um you know really going Beyond just what you find in the Wikipedia article or you know that cool movie you saw once with Denzel Washington in it uh you know if you're if you're on a budget like me I recommend the library they're still around they're still awesome go find that Dusty book in a quarter that no one has read and and read it and put that stuff in your game so when I was reading up on this I found that the 70s are really the ideal time for this sort of radical Progressive group um you know for in case the American education system has failed you you know the 70s were a time of great sort of distrust of the government and uncertainty like if our society was going to collapse at any time you know we had the ongoing struggles in Vietnam and illegal bombings in Cambodia you had ongoing fear of nuclear Annihilation um and and people were really not sure if Society was going to was going to make it and they started thinking well you know the the the peaceful protest movements of the 60s have kind of failed us and some people started actually going about things differently and and and threatening violence and some actually carrying it out um and so in this time period is

this very fertile period for these groups that were presenting a new way of life a new a a new way to approach having society that would work better and the interesting thing in reading up on all these groups that I found is that you don't join a cult because you're weak you join it because you're really strong because you're really strong willed that you want to do something different that whatever we're doing right now is clearly not working and I need to I need to try something else um and these these groups generally offer really great benefits to the people who are in them like help them with their their personal issues or or help them find a community if they're outcasts um and they also then tend to start to involve this US versus them mentality that we're right and everyone else is wrong uh and you need to be with us and the darker groups take that even farther saying well if you ever leave us we're never going to talk to you again your children are never going to talk to you again we may we may hunt you down and persecute you right and the leaders of these groups tend to take the the power that comes with leading this movement and you know that you know the absolute power corrupting absolutely happens and and sometimes bad outcomes happen but sometimes they don't interestingly

reading about so many of these groups you know they don't all end badly sometimes they just try something for a while and then it Peters out or sometimes you know some of these groups are still going today but they don't they don't get the headlines because you know no crimes were committed and and everyone didn't die so looking that wasn't intended to be funny I'm sorry um looking at how to put this into game form um I thought well the player needs to be an outsider you know he need to look at this group from the outside in order to try to figure out which type of group is this is is it one that is just trying to do their own thing or or or or is something um you know something bad going to happen you can think of it like one of those murder mysteries except the murder has not taken place yet if the murder is going to happen at all um so I thought an infiltration game was something that fits I wanted to to build on a on a a Bedrock of sort of known gameplay mechanics and things that I've worked with in the past you know unlike some of these other talks when I'm innovating I like to keep some stuff like that I'm familiar with and innovate in a few ways um because I'm

conservative in that way I guess uh I wanted I wanted something that felt like a good immersive Sim that we've that we've played many versions of that infiltration game before but that everything was completely grounded in reality that Stripped Away sort of the SciFi trappings or the fantasy trappings we've seen in other games in the genre um and where the player's choices in that world really have an impact on on what happens and I wanted you to soak up the narrative while you were playing you're listening to the to the cult leaders talk over the PA system the entire time you're filtrating their movement and what they say changes suddenly based on which type of group this is and you're finding documents and reading them and trying to to put together which type of group is this because the interesting thing about all these different groups as I researched them was there is a great commonality to them there is a lot of the Dogma they say is the same so a lot of the base of the game is the same and then these little bits around the edges change and it's your job as a player to seek those out and try to figure out what they are um so I thought you know we've we've and then obviously you have a choice about what to do with information as you get it you know you can think of it like this we've all played choice-based games before where you have a baseline

narrative and then players make some choices and then you have a number of possible stories that can result from that but if you think of the game as having several starting narrative States um that are that are change every time you play the game uh you then put your choices on that and then you have a much bigger possibility space for all the player stories that can be created and that was something that excited me about working on this game um so the final question they they posed to all of us was how does this Evolve game narrative and that was a very high futin question particularly for a game that is the farthest from Shipping of any of these um but since they asked you know I like to think that each storytelling medium that we all know and love each you know they each do something really well so for example books are really good you know novels are really good at putting you inside the the head of a of a given character putting you in with you know that one person and their their innermost thoughts you know Comics take the written word and add add a illustrative level you know that makes everything much more um have a specific style and and tone to it that's unique uh theater is great because it's it's I

think it's the most human because the people are right there acting in front of you going through this whole scene and you're you're right there living it with them and film is obviously in complete control of the experience the framing you know the lighting the music everything can be exactly what the director wants it to be so I think games can be a lot of different things but the thing that excites me about them the most is I think that we can we can ask the question what if right you know what if the situation was like this what would you do then how would your choices change how would that impact everyone else in the game you know what if your family member was in a religious cult but you didn't know whether that cult was really bad or not what if you found out the group was apocalyptic would you save you know your own family member or would you risk it all and try to save the whole group you know what if the group had no bad intentions but you still thought they were kind of creepy would you let your relatives stay there um and I think you know with subject matter like this I think it's really valuable to explore it in games because we can see more sides of the story cuz looking at the the story of all these Cults you know there's there's not just one and I read so many stories of

survivors and people who have left who say you know it's just not it's not as simple as everyone thinks you know we wanted to change the world we weren't brainwashed you know there was good along with the bad you know what if things had gone a different way and I think those are the interesting different sides to the story and telling a linear story of this you can only tell one version of that but telling it in game form you can look at multiple sides of it and show some more of the complexity and you know the player can make choices about how they deal with it and see just how many sides there are to anyone story so that's that's the game I uh if you want to follow along with development as we continue to work on it I've got a mailing list up at the website there or get on Twitter or something like that if you come by after I have some cool postcards you can take with you um and I'm doing another talk about Dynamic narratives tomorrow at 2:10 if you want to hear that's more broadly about a whole bunch of different games all right thanks very much all right so I hope that you were all taking notes cuz there was a lot of information and there's been a lot of

insights but we wanted to give you a bit of a summary of the things that we've learned today from listening to them but also from our conversations while we were preparing this so the first thing that we realized is that all of the talks here uh deal with games that go beyond genre fiction and I mean by genre fiction things like uh science fiction fantasy mystery and I love those but I think that uh going Beyond general fiction looking at histories of real people going to Shakespeare cult you know uh in the ' 70s uh they're going to challenges in the ways that we have to tell those stories that we have to create those stories so just by shifting to something that is not genre we're already innovating and finding new ways to tell those stories also fragmented modular narratives the vignettes um that we were talking about before uh are a great way to tell a story We tend to think of uh plot as uh being that's what a story is but really there's many kinds of stories

that are just little bits of information that you can arrange in any way or come across in any way and this is actually not a strange way of telling a story this is a very normal way of telling a story when you think about poetry and other forms and it fits in games very well and uh we often don't take advantage of it and it's a pretty simple thing to do in a lot of ways I mean in a way you're going to see uh actually in the narrative Summit there's a couple of talks about branching narratives and in a way we have to think Beyond branching we're looking at combinatorics we're looking at ways in which we can create new stories which links to the next point that we want to make which is living gaps and at times living gaps are ways to encourage players to interpret the game to explore to find out what is uh what else is there uh to figure out the the story for themselves and in a way what we do is less storytelling and more story building we are building the the story from those modules that we were just talking about but also we invite players to build their own

stories by exploring the gaps that we're leaving for them excuse me for them and surprise video is not terrible we just did it wrong 20 years ago uh you can you can use video or to a you know in a broader sense static media and still have Rich interactive uh experience it's just a matter of uh approaching it um in the right way so that's all from us you'll get emails from the GDC organization uh asking you to F fill out the evils please tell us nice things about us if you want to see more of this next year we'll be happy to come back and find more uh experimental narrative games for you uh there's no Q&A but we'll be happy to meet you at the wrap-up room on this floor all right thank you everybody and a round of applause for all the time [Applause]