The Dramaturgy of Video Games Theatre, Story and Empathy

[Music] thank you awesome hi everyone my name is Abby Sherlock greetings from Sunny Los Angeles to San Francisco this is the dramaturgy of video games theater story and empathy which is a part of the game narrative Summit so let's get this started so talking about why this talk how did this come to be um I saw the chat earlier saw all the theater kids in our audience sprinkling in uh this kind of came to me when I went to my first E3 back in 2018 and I realized when I was talking to Folks at different events so many folks had been cast our crew in you know theater plays and high school or they did a theater undergrad or they just really loved musical theater and they listened to Peaceful theater all the time in their car and we just talked about this shared love of theater so I was like there has to be something there about that

connection about Game Dev to theater Pipeline and vice versa so previous students see academic topics on the subject did talk a lot about immersive theater and LARPing but not really just too comparing and contrasting of the two different mediums and what they mean to each other and how they relate to each other and this was true for my own story and from my own path my most recent uh project was inspired by Tennessee Williams plays taking place in the rural South United States and then I actually do a lot of work on camera hosting which is so much like performing and acting it's basically the same thing and that was kind of a grew out of right I was at an event I had a broadcast producer who said hey Abby you can talk go on camera and I said cool all right here I am I guess and kind of that progression I've noticed happens for a lot with other people and actually my first professional experience was actually at the La Jolla Playhouse uh not in gaming but in theater so as an actor uh kind of again a rundown of why I'm so passionate

about this I've been an actor for more than a decade done Shakespeare Greek tragedy I'm staged combat certified can do swords knives ow getting hit hitting others trained at UCLA Austin University the American Academy of dramatic arts so this is really in my blood I would say at this point for the gaming industry I've interned kind of all over Wizards of the Coast some voice over stuff hardware and then nervous thinking Century yeah and just kind of what I've done in the space but talking about we're going to refer back to my project heirloom which is heavy work with performers and vo and I was a game developer on it but also a producer and the director right of those performers and It All Leads us back to how are these two places tied together right so I argue that empathy in games and empathy in theater are the only two forms of Storytelling that require active and I mean active participation from the audience or the player

so I again this is my hot take right that video games are the most highly evolved form of theater so we're using technology right as a conduit of empathy and storytelling instead of live performance again nothing I'm saying really is new but hopefully the framing of it can be used in accessible and productive ways for teams to enrich their stories what can we creatively steal from the oldest art form around so how is this different from books and film we love our books big you know we love reading we love movies but these are very different mediums and they require different kinds of Engagement With Their audience so for games right the player has to actively move something in real time unless a cutscene it happens on its own but even then you might have to press something analog to have something else happen but you have to actively move something if I want to go left I'm going to take my scroller and go left and then with theater right the audience has to watch actively in real time so that means I have to you

know I'm engaged I'm watching and then the performers have to perform actively in real time exactly kind of like players too and you have to be actively watching in these media that is changing as you're watching right you cannot stay static you have to keep momentum forum and you say how is this different Abby from a book or a film I watch that and it happens so if for the book if I'm reading a book and it says the character wit left and I'm like what if they went right instead they can do that in a game and then in theater theater metaphor time if I'm a performer and I'm giving a joke and I notice that the audience reacted differently I can change my joke right in real time to give the audience more space for laughter or it can go quicker if I need to that kind of active I'm like this activeness that's happening is special and again we love our books and we love our movies but it's not kind of the same right so the actor within player and performer and I'm going to use you know these roles right that the actor portrays character on stage that's our theater and then

games the player portrays character on screen so we both have characters but we have the medium being different and the role being different and I again argue that they are the exact same functions really and control screen but they are different mediums and again I use this with you know first person player that I am the character I am that character moving on stream and then acting I am that performer I we can talk you can talk about method later and I am the character versus portrayed but you are that character right and so when we're talking about empathy I broke this kind of down into three factors that I think really kind of sum up all of these kind of similarities between these two worlds biggest one I believe is empathy you know empathy the definition being the practice of feeling close to emotionally and personally to someone other than yourself and I gave this little quote of I might watch someone cry at a movie theater or be moved to tears myself but

I myself am not crying as the character within their specific situation like I would be in games or theater and so again that actor within character and player within character and this is a type of relationship that I have to emphasize that it's rarely able to be recreated in other mediums again theater and games unlike movies and books are not static and are active and I think this identification process is never so tightly wound as it is Within These two mediums because I think just the again activeness of their situations lend it to us of identification and again for all my d d players out there where you become the character or you're alive being and you become your character very similar very similar and I use this example here one of our favorites Mr Tom Hiddleston as Hamlet by William Shakespeare and then link one of our also one of our favorites from The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword I use this example of a Wii remote and this was uh the first Sky Resort

came out in the week before three release on switch I would use the Wii as the master sword an is link was making those cuts on those enemies and then the actor with Tom Hiddleston uh as Hamlet there is that fear right that he's making these cuts and strokes and we don't know where we hope right player safety I'm a stage Captain they're gonna be okay we hope our you know our Ensemble everyone all the actors are going to be safe but there's that you don't know what's gonna happen it's live feeder maybe what's gonna happen with the sword and that similar kind of what if is also in Legend of Zelda because if I don't put my arm right I might die right and so that level of I don't knowness is really important and potent and so another Factor we have empathy now we're talking about catharsis so it is a release of emotions for the audience or player so emotionally purging oneself is beneficial for humans and innate even if you don't know it what we look for in narratives so this

goes back all the way to funeral dirges and wailing within Greek Theater laments where you would just ah you would yell because there was nothing else you could do to get that deep emotion out of you right and again it doesn't have to be as dramatic as that but we are looking for some sort of release from our day-to-day lives and our stories and so it is again I said hopefully brings resolution right we're looking for our stories storytelling was used originally to talk with others share stories make sense of natural phenomenon but it also asks us to make sense of ourselves and how we operate right and the questions we need to ask ourselves through our stories and I think this is super important when you're asking for catharsis within your narrative what am I looking for what catharsis am I looking for within my narrative from as a designer standpoint and then also a player standpoint and I give these kind of very broad uh action verbs to escape to feel less alone to laugh to cry at a journey to feel um but they could be you know broken

down much smaller after that but kind of what do you want that player to feel what catharsis are you aiming for at the end of that experience like you see here strong emotional catharsis in both of these Ellie and The Last of Us too and then the Trojan women by euripides and then performance three so we have empathy catharsis performance someone in the audience maybe is saying I'm not performing Addie when I'm eating some chips and I'm laying on my couch in my living room playing on my game console that's not performance I'm relaxing okay we're gonna reframe it so the act of performing on stage is an actor within character and then the act of Performing within screen as player within character I always say this as uh you know friends with a lot of actors myself if they're by themselves in a room and they're monologuing they're still an actor and they're still performing even if they're by themselves so even if you're by yourself uh you're still performing right and they both do both of these mediums require the Willing suspension of disbelief to give

into these performances you enter into an agreement right that I know this world is not real but I fully will pretend that it is and I have to greet it with openness that I will be affected by what I am seeing in this medium I will allow myself to feel right and that kind of easiness into that is not always you know a given but if you again we want to embrace these things as with openness in our hearts for them to change us as much as possible uh and then I had to add as someone with a marketing background who's worked with influencers and talent and streamers that game platforms for streamers are performers role playing publicly I I shocked that we don't talk about this more like you see with Meg Mage here for cyberpunk 2077 playing it's so metal with twitch because you have a streamer who is you know I am performing for my audience for my twitch chat and a lot of streamers are also performers right and then they're also

this LARPing this role playing that's happening within the game right so it's a really cool phenomenon and then also some lovely performances in theater to see the great James Earl Jones and Cecily Tyson so cool Abby we talked about you know how are they similar how they beautifully cross over give me some practicalities help me out I want to you know incorporate more of this with my writing team I'm a small Indie studio and I just want my narratives to be stronger how can we use these principles of drama for game developers so dramaturgy as World building for game designers then we're going to cover structure plot and development and then my favorite probably after objective work within game scripts for developing stronger characters so dramaturgy is not um even in the drama world I would say is kind of like in the background people don't talk about it as much but it's so cool um I just I it's really neat not everyone is always super lucky to have a

dramaturg on their staff um in the past productions I've been in our second assistant director was also the dramaturk so some people can double it up but there are uh programs out there where you can get a you know a degree in drama turkey but it is its definition the study of dramatic composition and representation of those main elements on the stage so that that mean your dramaturg is a researcher right of your script in your world so it is adjacent to a writer they work a lot with words uh they're basically your lore keeper for all my nerd fellow nerds in the audience they keep your lore they know what the characters wants and their needs and how they operate and I'm gonna give some examples that if you're in you know game design you could hire a consultant for dramaturk work who specializes maybe in that genre that you are working in the theme or have individual people on your your staff that maybe have an interest in it or a background on theater has to do it if they're interested some examples here with shell games they did an awesome job where they are working on a food game food VR game right you have different cultures all different cultures have all

different cool Foods so they reached out to academic masters of their crafts on different food to kind of serve as dramaturgs on that subject for the game and then I personally knew much of the staff for how to defend yourself by Liliana Padilla which is about a group of women learning self-defense on a college campus and so what uh Liliana did is had a bunch of uh women since it was about Greek American Life sorority women ask them questions about you know what is the specific lingo you're using why do you have these practices and those women kind of acted as drama turds right to give Liliana the kind of lay of the land of how this world right which she didn't know much about how it operated and that made her life writing so much easier right so World building research and I give these kind of little bullet points you can write down um or just things you can ask yourself right internally when you're writing so as a dramaturg would ask themselves all

of these I should know all the rules and specifics of how this place operates politically ethnically socially culturally religiously one of the demographics what's the history all those who love backstories this kind of it works in right here I should know metaphysical expressions and specific lingo used in the world word choice is so important I I cannot emphasize that enough why people say the words that they say says so much about them and their character I think of the example of y'all I'm originally from South Carolina and when I hear someone use the word y'all I immediately think oh are they from the south where do they learn that do they have a family member and it sets you off on a path right and so word choice is important when I say that maybe it tells you a bit about me right and if you're doing your character there are specific word choice would tell you a bit about them so again why the sword Choice how could that word be used in different situations does it change meaning if it's used in different situations and also does it mean something deeper if

the word is used multiple times you should know the history and cultural importance of other comparables in the genre knowing what else is out there is going to be so helpful and knowing what's already been done don't remake the wheel you know and seeing what people have done really well and then how can we learn from the design of this genre and other developers what are the expectations are your players going to be angry if you don't have a specific you know UI element that's typical of that and there's all these but for character right you say are there expectations of how relationships operate if we don't give them that are they going to be frustrated and then again what these other comparables do well what did they not do well and I say this with no shade or shame of like oh not good but just being self-aware about what you like as a designer and what you're looking for um I think it's holistic right you want a holistic Viewpoint and so the second thing we've talked about the dramaturgy narrative structure so another technical Duty the dramature could do

to help the actors or director would be breaking down usually in a chart or some other graphic form is your emotional beats right and I personally someone ADHD if you can't tell uh I love kinesthetic graphs they're so helpful with sharing with other people with your Ensemble with your team kind of your emotional beats you can write about it you can talk about it but when you can show a graphic of it it's just really impactful so you should have a physical copy of the emotional beats or narrative track in a graph or visual form again this is something a director would know or a writer would know and I have this really great game project macro uh courtesy of Richard lamarshan one of my professors for my project heirloom but you can kind of see here how helpful this is because we went through every single moment in our script and our game and you charted it out so your sequence right so what is it uh characters encountered who are you meeting your brief description of events happening

the location of where that is the player mechanics so what is the player doing but this I think is our little Golden Nugget here is player goal so what does the player want in that moment music like little errors in my head and then design our goal what do I as a designer want to communicate in that moment right and they can be different things they could be the same thing but they could definitely be different things if they need to be but I think the most important is the emotional beat what is what are all of those elements leading you towards they should all be in focus of that and that's going to give you such a high level of control with your narrative if you're doing a linear narrative that you're just going to be in such better shape and then if you all do have scoping issues right or you're talking about like I need this to be shorter um you can look right at your emotional beats and see is this in service of right as a creative where it's hopefully in service of our projects and of you know making them the best that they can be assistance service of the project is this in service of the emotional being

that this moment is leading to you might need to cut then if it's not so again this can take many different forms a lot of y'all know already the cambillion hero's journey or uh classic rising action falling action just being able to track it in some kind of physical structure right so again structure of the holistic project I should know the writer's journey of the whole experience and be able to map it on a visual chart where is the beginning the middle and the end if it's an on Rails narrative does this make sense to player what I mean on reels I mean like now A B C or D choices you just got your one choice and that's it you're on the rails narrative captain now um and then do I know the flow and Rhythm of the piece right does it slow down at certain parts is it true Speedy what's pacing it needs to be intentional if it's really slow and everyone's like oh my gosh like it just keeps going and go then you're probably gonna need to cut something right because your flow

and rhythm is going to tell you a lot about how play testing is going to go too and then I I have to mention this because I have such respect for branching narratives but even harder if it's a branching narrative the acclaimed open world but does this make sense to the player through each separate storyline I know as a player myself there is nothing more frustrating than picking another path than maybe the most popular one and seeing that it's not as enriching right it's not super impactful as maybe that main path would be so how can we as designers make that path Less Traveled by more enriching and valid I think it goes back this emotional beat structure where you're going to need to iron out the emotional beat of every single path right and that's huge scope but it is something if you want to nail it down it's going to be really powerful and even if I said there's an ideal path I want as a player to feel like my choice no matter what is valid so again really good and difficult narrative design is when you can track each of these through a branching narrative and they all hit equally right

so our third thing we're going to talk about is character work so character work often an outside actor will do this once you give them a script you've written your script I'll get my scripts I'll write it up Mark it up as you can see in this lovely example of House Husbands by Keith Thompson if someone on your team can do this uh our performance director can usually they will automatically it can really help uh clarify when recording when I direct my script is I like I analog copies I don't you know I just want to feel it in my hand and I mark it off it is different colors lots of writing on it and you're using these tools of after study right to use Game narratives that can make characters richer and more thought out and andromature usually will also do this not you know again you're not doing the actor's job for them and you're not doing the director job for them but as writers right or as designers you are nailing down kind of the exacts of this

world you're making this this I use a Sandbox analogy you're using a Sandbox you're giving them the constraints of the sandbox so than they can go around and play it but you need to establish what the constraints are where you're just going to be I don't know we're not going to know where where you're playing it so psychological theories and objectives right so I should be able to go through the script and break up a character's changing objectives through each scene objectives objectives are super important afterwards because it means I use the example of hunger I was really hungry y'all when I woke up this morning my objective was I would like some food and then I had some food and then I was not hungry anymore my objective change that's a very simple way of tldr of using an objective right and so our objectives as humans and as characters are ever changing right um so usually I would go through and see kind of what are my objectives throughout the script so and this is super important I would say for

character work is what is their objective overall what is what's their big Grand Master Plan what would they love to have what do they see at the Pearly Gates what grounds them right so these are like these big life searching questions that are fun right as writers to discover about characters and then what are they motivated by it could be money love same family Etc what keeps their engine turning what makes them go and then this I think is almost the most important part that no one talks about as much is how all of character depends on the how how do they go about getting their objective and we really break this down into action verbs and Theater which is you use these action verbs within lines I'm going to do an example but you would have a line and you would have this you know with this line I want to do this action verb which is how I get my objective so if the line was I want the papers please let's try that with to

entice I want the papers please but that was enticing yeah and then we're gonna try to punch okay I want the papers please my face change your voice change audio change everything changed right and so action verb can be really helpful if you are small in scope on your team and you need to direct action verbs that's a great way to already like get you started on directing and then what's the subtext of a line you don't need to do this with every line again like I'm saying everything here is just a suggestion things to help you out more Tools in your tool belt uh but subtext of lines can be really important if it's a very intentional moment that a lot of hinges on that maybe that that dialogue so what I say versus what I actually mean another example we have a you're doing a great job honey it's a script so I actually mean it you're doing a great job honey oh she's so happy she loves honey sweet okay then she does not think honey is doing a great job you're doing a great job honey completely different right we're using

different resonators it's all different so subtext is super super important and fun to work out I should know the relationships between characters and why they are the way you are all my writers that they are saying oh my God my backstories work yes uh you typically would not give your backstory to an actor um because that would be like a lot of information like process but if you have a dramaturg that would be great or if the actor does have questions right and you do have that answered in your backstory that could be a good time to say well actually now that you ask uh so it could work out and then why are they this way this character this way where did they come from right before this scene started and where are they going this is so helpful when you're acting because acting is fantasy right and so this grounds you it lets you know what are the logistics of My reality and so knowing again where when is super important for performers so examples of performance practices for some of you game teams you have can you hold a read

through for your script right where you're going to read through the script but um wonder why they named it that but there you can do table work and even if you don't have professional actors please please please read it out loud I cannot emphasize enough how I think writers are like wow I didn't realize it sounded like that until you said it and so having someone else read your words as they are on the page is going to be so helpful because you can listen and take notes of what feels good and what's like a little awkward and we're like oh that needs to go or like ooh that could stay and so having that is just going to make your process so much easier and again does not have to be professional actors can be your friends can be your parents can be whoever would like to read for you and then can you record your talent together if you have voiceover actors please do this this is so cool um it's helpful for performances and it's really uh bonding and you can see the Ensemble building relationships their performances are more nuanced because they're listening to each other

and it's really hard right when we're remote Zoom but I just did this this past fall where I directed to voice actors in their own booths and they were listening to each other and we got great performances that were super intertwined because they just you know they could listen to each other IRL instead of you know being in the solitary Booth by themselves uh so if you can do this I know it's harvest scheduling I really would recommend it so there are some comparables within the space professionally that I had to mention right um this you know different like literally same duties different medium of you know roles within the industry that I just think are so similar or similar duties and different name of folks who are maybe a little different but we kind of do the same function right um I think when we recruit it from different spaces we're going to get diversity of experiences backgrounds and different sorts of folks I was super lucky that my program at USC I didn't really have a lot of game death background right I did a lot of marketing social media but I did a have a lot of Dev experience I had a lot of

theater experience and I feel really lucky for that opportunity to be in the space and I think I would love to see more folks right uh from theater if they're interested right and bring them in and diversity only makes the games industry better by having more folks of different intersectionality backgrounds and able to you know give us more feedback and different like perspectives on what we need and it's a designer a designer should always you know have many knowledge their fingers and many knowledge pools right because it's only going to make you stronger and so that was a lot of talking so we're going to bring it to our conclusion right is it solves my question when I was at that E3 hangout is why are there so many theater people in this industry is this like the natural path for all of this and I see all of you in the chat like wow there really is something here and I think it is that we literally have very similar roles or literally the same positions and practices and it is a path right that we should see as reasonable as computer tech uh or uh computer

science or Tech and like I said it would be just really cool to see read throughs at different places and just more carrying over at these practices because they're only going to make us stronger right so in conclusion thematically there is a reason these are kids flock to Game Dev it feels like home games are my favorite medium I think they're the most evolved art form possible they're more accessible to more people theater is not we love theater obviously if we're in this talk but it's not super accessible and games have the ability like TV did back in the 1950s to go into people's living rooms and be there in their heart in their home and we can make these games that make people empathize with each other more because that identification process right with characters is never stronger than it is in games or theater and we can make the world why I'm in games to make the world a better place right and so practically I hope all of you in the audience can maybe take some of these practice services and bring them back to your Studios your teams and make your game stories richer stronger and more impactful so I do have some future

resources and citations if you're interested if you were like we need to read more on this uh there you go there's a lot of these that I think would be really helpful I have to give a thank you to Professor Melinda finberg of critical drama studies Hannah nicholin PhD and Professor Richard lamarshan of game design at USC for his game design outline that we used earlier also a shout out to the mentors uh who helped me with this and the summit advisors of the narrative game Summit for making my first this is my first GTC talk thank you for selecting me and allowing me to talk about this and help others so that is it I have my website here my email and my social media we will not have time unfortunately for questions but if you do have questions please feel free to DM me um mostly on Twitter would be good but if you would like to stay in contact please you're I am I am looking for full-time roles uh with production uh directing or working with actors after graduation uh for in in May from USC but

I want to thank you all so much and I hope you have a great rest of your GDC bye [Music]