What Wikipedia Doesn't Know Can Hurt You: Writer Research Skills

[Music] hello and thank you for attending this presentation what Wikipedia doesn't know can hurt you writer research skills so a little bit about Who I am my name is Chris Hepler I've been writing professionally since the 1990s when I first got published in the field of tabletop role-playing games I then tried my hand at television for a CBS show called the agency I then worked at Bioware on projects such as Star Wars The Old Republic and Mass Effect 2 and 3 since then I've been working for story based mobile games first to the company called fable labs just down the street from this Convention Center and now I'm at CSUN incorporated on an epic fantasy MOBA called relics of gods now this list of credits doesn't have much in common that's kind of the point I've had to jump from techno-thriller to space fantasy to a game about the afterlife like hell and then to comedy aimed at

kids like the dread-nots kid and whenever I had to make those transitions I wound up doing research so why do I think you might need research skills I noticed a particular need for them during my transition from Star Wars The Old Republic to Mass Effect 2 well that's the polite way of saying it the real story is on Star Wars our lead writer kept telling me Chris stop trying to put science and Star Wars Star Wars isn't actually science fiction lightsabers don't work planets made of swamps don't work act like the humanities major you are the extent of science and Star Wars is direct quote blasters and turbo lasers and boom a year later I get a call from our design department director who says hi Chris you're gonna be working on Mass Effect 2 because three of our six writers just left and the fourth one broke his shoulder so we need you to write the galaxy map and the codex entries and I said sure I like space stories fine bring me up to speed how do I make a

planet and so they handed me this this is a table of the minimum molecular weights of gasses retained by a heavenly body you just figure out the density of the planet compared to earth and then a diameter in kilometers and you cross-reference the molecular weights of gases like hydrogen or argon which are on another page or you could refer your handy chemistry textbook and if you want the planet to support life you need to have a proper mix of nitrogen and oxygen and good god Chris get to the point already so I asked does your audience really care about this stuff and the answer was probably a handful of them do but more to the point this is part of what made Mass Effect 1 hard science fiction and if you take that away from players in Mass Effect 2 they're gonna complain so Chris can you write hard SF even though you've never done it before and I suspect well the questions like that will come up for some of the writers in this room because not every writer finds a niche in one genre and stays with it throughout their whole lives often writers get hired because

their dialogue samples were good and their list of credits are good or because they're good in a room and the writer has to learn on the job that means research and that's what this talks about so let's break the subject down by first examining types of research the first type I could think of is if you haven't just heard of your subject you've lived it say you're writing space opera and you've got a degree in astrophysics like Catherine asaro for those who were unaware dr. Sorrows a science fiction novelist who once wrote a book that used as its plot structure an equation for the behavior of quantum particles like the particles the characters get attracted up to a certain point then they repel each other and then they stay apart but they still influence each other the entire concept for the novel came out of her first-hand knowledge of subatomic physics you may not have that skill set but you might have something else in your biography have you traveled to Hong Kong so you can write it into your crime game were you in the army and drove a tank so your vehicle levels might be interesting you're practicing Druid and writing epic

fantasy or are you basically just a guy or a girl with an English degree because if you are you might want to consider expanding your first-hand knowledge some how so first-hand knowledge is great but like anything it's got pros and cons on the pro side you will know a wealth of detail about your subject so you're more likely to create a more original story than a writer who's just going by the numbers frequently you'll be able to win arguments with the rest of the dead team because you know what you're talking about and you'll have the perspective to know when something isn't important to the player experience your knowledge also won't depend on anyone elses schedule so if you need a urine production and you need a question answered it'll be right there lastly it goes with you any job you take you have your knowledge base to draw from disadvantages well you're highly unlikely to be a nuclear scientist / Navy SEAL / gang member / cowboy / medieval knight ii just because you know more than the rest of the team doesn't

mean you know everything you could have expertise as a cop because you were one for twenty years but if it was ten years ago maybe you don't know much about criminals using smartphones today third some knowledge comes with a price if you want to fly off to Ecuador for three weeks to research ruins for the next Tomb Raider you're going to need money you want masters and astrophysics from Harvard you're going to need a lot of money and also a few years for this last reason first-hand knowledge is a sort of thing you get well before your games in production during production your butt stays in that chair so the next obvious steps to dig up every friend of a friend you can to find an expert I tried to come up with a list that would help most John rusev game writers the list is just too long so I'm gonna recommend two sites one is the aptly named expertise finder it's free and it's dedicated to hooking up writers with university professors of many different subjects not only can you ask your opinions you can ask their contacts it's great to talk to a criminologist but don't forget the criminologist might be able to introduce you to actual criminals behind

bars so next up is a site called journalists toolbox and as much as we all boot journalists when they get something wrong about videogames you have to realize journalists are extroverted writers they are called upon to digest large amounts of information from experts and repeat it as back in as little as a day every day so their links can be your links lastly there are mailing lists and hobbyist forums on Mass Effect 2 and 3d saved my life one of the first things I did was create a new email account and hook it up to a group called SF consum or the science-fiction conflict simulation mailing list which is popped by hard SF creators they were a great help and never dismissed any of my concerns so the upsides of experts are fairly obvious first most productions that try to take themselves seriously try to have some form of technical consultant now there are some awesome productions out there that don't take themselves seriously but if you're writing games about cops or war or spies or a historical period piece

you should check in with an expert this also goes for writing characters that are out in for comfort zone maybe you're writing a character that has a different ethnicities from another part of the world or has a different sexual preference you probably want to run your ideas by someone before you end up writing The Phantom Menace experts are also usually free but at least on a in until you're at a large company and are trying to have somebody on staff all the time usually you can get all you need for from a free a free deal because if you say hey I'm writing a videogame please tell me about your job and I'll try to work it in most people are happy to talk for hours you give them a special thanks credit and everyone wins third like the first-hand knowledge experts can give you perspective what looks good on paper and in movies could totally not work in the real world for very elementary reasons if you remember the molecular weights of gases retaining table in plain English told by an expert that table answers a really basic question about space travel it's why you

can't terraform the moon if the heavenly body you're talking about is small enough it doesn't matter how much air you pump in doesn't matter how many trees you plan it's gravity is so weak all the air you get is going to float away into space downsides your expert may not be good about checking their email they could also be in a vastly different time zone sometimes questions pop up you can't get an answer you got to make a judgment call second experts aren't foolproof and they can disagree on Mass Effect I referred to a physics teacher of mine who now works for NASA and I asked him questions about technology based on string theory and his answer was string theory is bunk so either he's wrong or the whole sub-discipline of string theorists are wrong and I'm really not qualified to tell you which so we didn't rely on string theory for any of the tech in Mass Effect it also goes without saying you need to formulate your questions right in order to get accurate results from your expert lastly sometimes an expert will have conflicting interests with you this happened to me most prominently on the TV show the agency or our technical consultants for former CIA agents if

they gave away sources or methods and we put it on TV that means all the spies in the field couldn't use those techniques anymore so when we questioned these people who were professionally trained at giving misinformation sometimes we hit a wall and our fictional spies had to use public domain methods dating back to World War two then they're searching for reliable information online also known as drinking from the fire hose the reporters Maxim is to find two independent sources before declaring anything is fact that's usually plenty enough due diligence to get your argument a fair shot when you run it by other devs there are academic and scientific papers out there but you frequently have to be a subscriber to look at the actual data in things like the Journal of the AMA it's it was like 125 bucks or so every 12 months even when trying to come up with alien biology for mass effect I never needed the results of a paper that badly you know the summaries are usually sufficient television shows and reporters often make use of something called LexisNexis to research legal cases and news articles but their subject matters frequently cops and

lawyers and people who need to know what's going on in illegal cases right now it's much less frequent in video games unless you all want to make some video games about that go right ahead where video games rule is fan wiki's where they can tell you scads of details about all kinds of media properties and then there's the last resort which is flinging a question at Yahoo Answers and hoping some complete strangers passing by with the knowledge you need in the time you need you can usually do better than that so you're undoubtedly familiar with the power of electronic sources there are websites and enthusiast groups for almost everything they're extremely fast and convenient you can access most sources with your phone while you're sitting in the audience at a lecture hall listening some narrative designer tell you things you already know as for other advantages what more do you need I googled it I checked with the PDF boom we're done time for chocolate right now there are many downsides to

electronic sources because crawling down the rabbit hole is fun you can end up with a head full of TV tropes and info totally irrelevant to your game and you can make crazy assumptions about your subject matter with no one to call you on it you'll also get in the habit of searching for answers instead of working around your shortcomings Wikipedia in particular has a hidden trap it has enough editors working on it that if you find a fact put it in and then three months later you want to double check the fact you may find the fact is it disappeared and then you have to guess whether it's from an edit or if your memory is suspect this inevitably happens late in production when you're wanting to double check stuff before lockdown and you don't want to send spend time searching for a revision that may never have existed so watch out lastly I want to speak a little about Google Image Search since its Abel labs it was invaluable for trying to give references to our art department if you pick something out of the ordinary like pretty far out of the ordinary is your subject matter image search is not always going to be your friend at Faber labs our afterlife game like hell had characters from all different times and

places in history showing up in the afterlife and I wanted a major NPC Aqaba here to be from West Africa specifically the Ashanti of Ghana and I said she lived around 1895 in the late colonial period and then we're because we're a hidden-object game we I had to come up with the object images for 150 hidden objects from a cuba's house in rural Ghana in 1895 and what you get in Google image search if you're looking for a house in Ghana is photos of the colonial period in black and white so artists didn't know what colors to use wrong time period stuff modern westernized Ghana hi guys and Ghanaian cuisine and unsurprisingly if you look at the settings of our competition in hidden object games you get two settings you get twentieth-century America and Victorian London where there are mountains more image references I filled out my hundred fifty objects but let's just say there's more Pangolin soups in those scenes than anybody expected then there's books and magazines non-fiction books can be the

product of decades of labor and conveniently sum up hundreds of scientific studies in an accessible format print can also introduce you to subcultures that you didn't know existed if you want to find people who know what to do when you're playing goes down over Siberia and you have to make a bow and arrow from scratch so you can hunt on the tundra expertise finder won't help but I found primitive Archer magazine you can find it at newsstands not not in libraries newsstands so it led me to subculture of flint knapper and the hobbyists who make knives and arrowheads like they did in the Stone Age by banging moose antlers against rocks Far Cry primal anyone and then they're stealing from printed fiction lots of game devs will talk about what they saw on TV last night or at the movies but everyone's stealing from that already this is not just about being derivative it's about providing variety when I was coming up with the fanox canon codex for Mass Effect 2 I had to pick out a new weapon that improved on your ships main gun it had to have physics that worked but it couldn't be a laser lasers boring

it couldn't be a railgun or coil gun that's what it was replacing couldn't be a particle beam weapon we had one of those couldn't be a plasma weapon because fun fact plasma weapons don't really work and I didn't know a lot of hard science but arthur c clarke did and he came up with something called the Stiletto beam so i'm actually curious about this has anyone ever heard of the Stiletto beam two people cool it's similar to a railgun where you use magnets to fire the projectile except the project the projectile is molten metal it's a self forging fragment and you really don't want to get hit with it and it wasn't on TV last night it was published in a novel called earth light back in 1951 it's right there on the cover some print material becomes dated Newtonian physics not so much so fiction and nonfiction can be great but the bad news is they're slow at two points one is when you're searching for the ideas the other is when you're actually doing the writing and need to double check the details before your deadline relying on your

memory is not a good idea details get lost so mark the pages with sticky notes labels another strike against print is that it looks a Thorat ativ but some books that are marketed as the real deal simply aren't theirs for example the Hitman manual probably not written by a hit man Anarchist Cookbook don't try it at home if you found a book in the science section that's no guarantee that it's settled science and then there's just a mission you can read a book like codename mule a perfectly reasonable account of the CIA's secret war in Laos during the Vietnam conflict by a guy who was their analyst be generous probably not a lie in the book he just has to tell his own experiences but if that's the only book you read on the war in Laos you never hear all the other sources accusing the CIA of running heroin to help finance the war effort it's like the juiciest detail ever and he's basically saying the government party lying about it I don't know the truth about it I know just no books a single book should not be your only source

either so now let's try to get in some specific techniques to try to save you all some time the first step is the big strategic one I have encountered basically two ways writer team's approach research approach one is the research the writers research all they can and they write up a ton of lore then they build their plots and they pitch and design game levels based on what works in this universe approach to is you research only as needed you spit ball ideas for game levels once they sound entertaining you do the research to work out the details so both approaches work but the first one well it requires the writers to have enough power to Nix some level design ideas which is not a given depend on what company you're at it also means you're shutting out other departments at the concept stage the second approach will probably make you more popular due to more team input it's also faster time is money importantly lower is also usually easier to change than everything else downstream of the writer so lots of lower usually gets thrown out during

production anyway or at least revised the downside is that your finished product and could look patched together unless you are out there evangelizing to your team constantly okay now for the elephant in the room which is why are we so worried about getting it right sometimes it is actually more efficient to write in a way that doesn't require research I'm going to hit you with a wallet text here don't freak it's just broken down into two examples in the same scene let's say someone just got poisoned on our space opera and the dialogue on the left is fact-filled it mentions the name the poisonous officiate it draws parallel to fugu and her fish it says what part is and why and it says two rules for the IP that the other writers and the team now have to remember by comparison the rewritten example on the right just gets across the main point we have a poisson cru member then it throws in some humor and some sass and puts the pressure on the player to make a decision and it only really gives them the essential information everything else is characterization you're gonna look at that for just a

second okay let's move on okay sometimes you don't want to fudge it and that is where I personally use a technique I call one slice it's point is to impart one single fact to the player you serve the player that's one fact like one slice of pizza and you create the illusion that there is more in other words the rest of the pizzas up why just one fact because if you want to base any kind of plot structure on a fact you just want just one per scene so whoever you're most knowledgeable character is about the subject they communicate this fact they don't have to be a nerd they just have to have a stronger handle on the subject matter than whoever they're talking to other characters can doubt them but ultimately it proves to be true now when you research that fact you've given yourself a simpler task you now have just one fact to confirm rather than going on a fishing expedition the end result is less time waste on the internet and fewer emails back and forth with your expert so let's supply the one slice to a plot say we're doing a modern world setting and we need a clue for

your protagonist to find when they're on the trail of some robbers the robbers are tough smart opponents and at this point in the game you want a fact for your player to see they have military experience so we can have plenty of filler or dead ends depending on gameplay needs but the story advances when we hit one fact that our experts pick up on that screams military so let's say the robbers took out a guard silently with a knife because that takes training so we asked their technical consultants for our one fact and we find out this could actually be a good one because the way Hollywood shows it in every movie is different from the way Army manuals tell you to do it the Hollywood Way and I'm going to get more of it here it's so common we even have a hand gesture for it but in army manuals it looks more like this you sort of stab in and then you push forward so we have one key clue that our expert character may be a forensics guy you know the medical examiner or something like that or maybe somebody who's in the military their expert character recognize it which gives the expert the illusion of competence it's often that's all what you're that's all you're really going for the primary goal is not to

show that you've done your research the primary goal in commercial video games anyway is to entertain the audience not educate them our core fact is not therefore show it gives us a step forward in the plot because now that the protagonists have this clue they're closer to the antagonist mission complete vaccine so now we should get specific about some major pitfalls and in video game development starting with not this one this one chaos because video game writers are inevitably dealing with a team environment the rest of your team will be making content at the same time you are downstream from you so your facts and your lore rules better be learn about can you better be teaching them but wait you say if I codify lore rules before the art and game player created they might get thrown out but if I create them after the art and gameplay are created like in codex entries or in game books that get written after vo lockdown I can't teach them to anyone until it's too late yeah this is why writers need to evangelize

the IP to the rest of the team on the regular basis every week you go without evangelizing is a week of work that might have to get thrown out I find email blast saying IP rules created and a list of bullet points work okay anything longer nobody reads it this helps enforce your rules and if there's new hires halfway through the project you can open up your sent file and have a folder and send a Lemos to them bring them up to speed quickly otherwise well chaos if contradicting the team brings up a question how many rules of the universe do you really want to have everybody starts out saying our lower will be consistent but over time I see two schools of thought on the approach to law rules the first is what I call an exclusive universe exclusive universes try to build their lore with a lot of specific research rules saying we have no X because Y for example according to some research codex entries no one fires missiles at ships in the Mass Effect universe because the dominant ship technology in the future includes a system of anti-missile lasers so instead everybody uses weapons that

are incredibly high velocity guns so let me find my next image here oh yeah there's some people firing missiles at a reaper ship in the Mass Effect universe totally my fault long story point is in almost all future military IPs missiles are common rules of no missiles are not common having rules based in research that aren't intuitive can bite you in your exclusive universe by contrast there's the inclusive universe the universe where the guiding principle is yeah we have that too they have thunder God's next to dudes with spider DNA who were clones from an alternate universe and so on they just want to tell the tension grabbing stories and they do pretty well with them the problem is every now and then the franchise gets so bizarre is hard on new comers brains and you have to reboot it with simpler approach then there's the pitfall of becoming the unrelatable expert because you immersed yourself in a world to learn all about it and because you see that there's at least a handful of people that know about it you assume the fact is common knowledge

and it is for some people but not almost certainly not a large portion of your demographic this is compounded if the person who is your usual fit safety valve is a bigger nerd about a subject as you are in our industry there might be some nerds there so high likelihood of that I refer to this as a - enthusiasts effect how do you get around this well you remember the point of research is in case a player has done their homework but you can't expect them to do their homework and sometimes the bar for being an unrelatable expert is very low for example and this hidden object scene is from was very fun game agent Alice like every hidden object game I've ever played the hidden objects are kind of loopy you're in a casino vault why is there chameleon here and a Siamese cat and a gun and a golden spades symbol on the door and I think that's King Tut in the background so a table Labs as determined we're gonna make our game differently so I was

paired with an artist who loved a lot of my ideas we said our hidden objects would be based on a theme there would be narrative told through the objects if they didn't make sense we wouldn't have them and so I picked out hidden object for this chamber of science in which the player goes through the possession of the lost soul who is a chemistry professor in life and one of the hidden objects is a Florence flask so we use raise your hand if you've heard of a Florence flask not a ton of people I please raise your hand and or keep your hand up if you remember what a Florence flask looks like off the top of your head okay and if you can you spot the Florence flask on the table full of glassware okay there's our problem playtesters had no idea what the search image in their head should look like a Florence flask looks like this by the way in agent Alice when you find objects in the scene it's like go get your iPad boom boom boom boom find that one find that one boom boom boom boom boom cool and then you replay it for more points

it's like boom I know where everything is too because you can easily ID a chameleon a cat or a gun in our gameplay it was more like hmmm think okay maybe I should Google that one which which is what I did when creating it I did one google image search and became an unrelatable expert and the artist I gave the reference to his first exposure to the idea was a captioned art reference he already had his homework done for him so he couldn't be a stopgap as a matter of fact congratulations I think I just made you all and unrelatable experts as far as this scene is concerned so last research pitfall being imprisoned by the real world I talked earlier about getting in the habit of searching for answers instead of getting the habit of creating them knowing thing how things work in the real world I can start you down to being the road to being no fun at all for here resemble and excuse me if you remember that example I had a little while ago about the right way to

take out a sentry with a knife yeah the real professionals don't advocate that anymore melee weapons are pretty much obsolete in modern warfare and that's unlikely to change in the future this chart here from AI casualties org is for Afghanistan where over about 14 years knives and bare hands together came to 0.13 percent of US combat deaths most of the time modern armies don't need to take out a sentry quietly they go in with overwhelming force artillery sniper cover and special operations guys who have high alert likelihoods of sentry scenarios they commissioned this silenced pistol specifically for killing sentries because they want maximum results with minimum risk but in video games risk is fun melee weapons are fun sure I want a pistol like this in my future video game but I also want this and this and more to the point the combat designers on my team want them and if you say we don't do that the lore says so and I'm sticking to it when you get voted down

they're probably going to do it anyway and then you writer and law expert better retcon it or else you have inconsistent lore on that note I wanted to say that despite all your efforts you will probably at some point get it wrong fact become dated it's sort of the nature of many facts your name will be on something that has gone out wide and the error will seem glaring to a certain subsection of your audience to some degree this is normal name any franchise you want the more products it puts out the more chances it has to vary in quality and when it happens to you you will have the urge to get out your side of the story this gives you three commonly used options the first option is to try to stay above the fray this is a good instinct because fans take screenshots of dev posts and anything thrown out onto the Internet can be considered there forever including any attempt you make to retract your statement whatever the fan heat is it can wait a day while you talk with your coworkers and figure out how to present United Front it also means you can make a note to address the concern in your next product at which point you can

consider the problem in a sober manner the second option is to get out there on forums fan wiki's interviews convention appearances depending on which corner of the internet you go to your experience may be positive or it could entail entail a ridiculous amount of personal risk because these are fans and they have that enormous subject aside it does have some actual benefits to you as a researcher meeting fans will sometimes lead you to meeting new experts who have an interest in your material then there's the third option which I've tried the most which is to hide under the bed thinking you're a human garbage person I don't recommend this strategy mostly because the clearance on the most beds is actually about six and a half to seven inches and the average chest thickness of adult humans is nine and a half so bods are you won't fit in conclusion there's two recommendations I can really give you either know your craft well enough that you can tell a good story regardless of the fact or get out there and do some research in ways that you can turn into material there's hobbyists

out there who can teach you how to pick locks there are pilots who can show you how to land a plane when the engines catch fire there are survivors of cults who can tell you how they were indoctrinated there are nurses and patients will let you know what it's like to be locked in a mental ward each of these could feed scenes that have been in video games before but when you write them they could have a different focus or a clear ring of truth so tell the truth not the facts and when people play your scenes their experience might cause them to say huh I got it right thank you for your time and attention time for chocolate you