Writing 'Nothing': Storytelling with Unsaid Words and Unreliable Narrators

[Music] here we go thank very much hi okay so as just said turn your phone's up as loud as possible interrupt really often no uh okay hello everybody thank you very much for coming along here let's see if the clicker actually works excellent stuff my name is Professor mater haggis I have been making games for quite a while now I started off with things like burnout paradise quite a few years ago and Triple A side of things I was one of the writers on aliens vs. predator I've also done lots of indie stuff before that so I've been doing about 15 years I've had a couple of series is on mtv2 in Europe I've done animations and games for channel 4 and things like that back in my indie freelance days these days I'm actually associate professor at NH TV University in Netherlands one of the highest-rated games courses in Europe so if you're looking at games education really great place to go so my students in the room I'm also making a game at

the moment called fragments of him it's coming out on Xbox one and PC next month and later in the year on PlayStation 4 which is really really storytelling focused and what are we talking about today is a lot of the storytelling and writing methods that I've used when I'm making fragments of him using illustrations from classic literature and things like that you may have also noticed that I do talk really quite fast so I know we've got an international audience here so not everybody can always keep up which I get really fast and I talk like that so the most big important points going to be on screens behind me there's a lot of them so what I'm going to do to make this easy is I'm going to be building up a diagram as we go today do want to reassure you the very very last slide off said thank you and all that kind of stuff I will put the full diagram up on screen so you don't need to be constantly photographing if you think you're gonna miss this diagram it will be all there at the end you will have time to take it if you want to hopefully you find it interesting enough to want to take it so let's build up this diagram this is the

kind of the core part of it we're going to roughly build it out this kind of way that we start off with it before you even start writing like this why you would write like this what actually writing like this is and what I mean when we go after writing this I want to say bye like this is like how do we write less or how do we write the same amount but say more how do we kind of keep the compression but increase the complexity this is really what we're looking at here now there's three different methods I'm going to talk to you about today a lot of this is keying in with a lot of the other narrative design talks you may have heard over the last couple of days there's a lot of things that a lot of people are talking about and trying to build complexity in here go so but it's three techniques which are going to feed into that essential one there so the very first part I want to emphasize this before we even start doing this is don't compromise essential gameplay information it is really important to play nice period to understand what they're doing how they're supposed to be achieving these things with that in mind now you can start playing around with your writing so keep it obvious unless it's part of a game for people to not know but I'll leave it up to you to understand that so really what aiming

for here is adding value with story we want the stories to make the experience is more engaging the play more fun the world more immersive because really what story is therefore is additional investment into the play activities now those play activities might be shooting a robot in the face they might be saving a cat from a tree but why is it a robot why is it a cat if these things have emotional attachment in them already how do we build on that emotional attachment how do we make those actions feel more meaningful and this is really what we're looking here trying to achieve we're trying to make meaning within our games because basically we've got this situation we've got out all our players on one side and we've got our game that we've made here and sometimes it kind of feels like story is this wall in the middle between the two of them that you've got these cutscenes you have to watch you have to listen to this dialogue you kind of go yep okay when when does this story end when can I actually move on to the next piece that's not the world we want to be working in we want to be what work in this kind of way the way the game is right next to them all the time they're

fully engaged with this and then that kind of play experience is becoming something which is involved with all the storytelling is involved with that play experience on a moment-by-moment basis it's building out into more complex experiences and the whole story is into woven into the game so this is what we were really looking forward to get to this point we need what we called as active listening where the story becomes something that they're involved with they're not just going oh yeah more words being spoken than going hard these words are interesting this makes my actions more compelling this makes the world more interesting to play with so we want people to read between the lines we want people to be interpreting what's going on there what are the characters thinking is obviously one of the big questions here are they lying to themselves or are they trying to lie to others these are really big questions which that you can play with in your dialogue without having to add extra kind of gameplay mechanics and extra parts in there basically this idea of interpretation is a form of engagement storytelling doesn't have to be this

passive thing it's a form of engagement when people are trying to understand it trying to get into the heads of the characters so let's keep on going here the first technique I'm going to talk about is emissions in the text if want to move on with from this we've got a couple of characters going to be helping us today we've got a test and jammer they are that meet test in general were going to visiting them a few times Tess and Gemma are in a motel very nice for them except the motel is surrounded by zombies and so this is fairly classic gameplay situation got a couple people hold up there's guns and there's things to shooter we obviously want to have some good dialogue involved who's all this kind of stuff well I think we've really got kind of three options of how we want to go about this in terms of storytelling now one of the options is that we don't actually really do storytelling here will you just go okay bring those on B's through the door through the windows start shooting them and that's absolutely fine if you want to go for a pin to completely mechanics driven kind of game go for it I'm not insisting you need to have cutscenes or

storytelling or stuff like that if you want to make that game go for it but today we're gonna be talking more about the writing side of things and how we do this so option two is what people go for most of the time probably a fairly standard dialogue interchange so let's look at what sort of one of the things we might have here perhaps test is going to say something like do you think will make you through till dawn and generally might come back with I don't know but we'll try okay I know it's it's alright it's fine that's that standard dialogue for a video game that's kind of how we would expect to hear a lot of these things but this is this is kind of quintessentially really passive listening there's no there's nothing for you to really interrogate what's going one side their minds they've just told you everything and really that's just building a wall that's just a few lines of dialogue which are standing between you and the game on the other side and so you want your player to be more involved with that you want to have it a little bit more engaging so we need to look at this third option than we have available for us so let's go onto this point where I'm talking about this let's

go on to the emissions here now when I want to say emissions I mean that we are leaving out words or information from the text from the dialogue that's going on there I'm gonna give you an example of how this kind of stuff can work Shakespeare's King Lear this is one of my favorite plays ever written it's one of the greatest tragedies in history this is an amazing amazing play if you don't know it I highly recommend reading it starts off with the king there is these my brilliant sketches thank you and the King Lear has three daughters and to roughly paraphrase Shakespeare it starts off with him going something like tell me how much you love me and you'll all get 1/3 of my stuff roughly you like that and of course mine stuff of course you get two of the daughters gone around Regan who come back with this kind of response well we love you more than anything we love you modern stars the moon our husbands could all go screw themselves it's really this kind of over-the-top overblown just pouring these words of love outs to him the

Kings like awesome I feel very nice now you make you feel like a very good king excellent and then we get to Cordelia's turn Cordelia is the youngest Cordelia truly loves King Lear true that she truly truly loves him and that's a wonderful thing and the audience understands this she has an all sides the audience going how the hell am I supposed to say that often what they've said whatever I say is gonna sound wrong and so we have the King say what can you say to draw a third more opulent and your sisters speak nothing my lord nothing nothing nothing will come of nothing speak again it's my slight changes slow computers don't you just love it when they do that excellent I'm happy that I am I cannot

hear my heart into my mouth I love your majesty according to my bond nor more nor less this is wonderful she's only basically some point I'm gonna get married and I'm gonna love my husband probably more than I love you I'm gonna have children I'm gonna love them absolutely dearly and all of them will have a portion of my love I cannot say I love you alone because there are so many people in my life that I'm going to love this is a difficult situation for her and the King doesn't get it you've had these other two sisters go and everything is you and then anyone come back and go I can't pour my heart out like that and the audience understands Cordelia struggle they understand this difficult but the Lear does not until it's way way too late I mean this is a difficult position how can you express the inexpressible love beyond words how do you even talk about love in Shakespeare in circuit shall I compare thee to a summers day this whole sonnet is about how it's almost impossible to really quantify what love is and this is one of the greatest writers in history of language

amazing amazing words and he even says that I can't really do it so one of the ways we can do this is kind of by using contrast for example so we've got the contrast between the first two sisters and what they say and the true love the Cordelia fills which is almost inexpressible and the audience then has to kind of fill in the difference the audience begins to understand the difference between these two things what did King Lear here compared to what Cordelia said when she said nothing what did the King here on the other end of that and that's really engaging because there's an audience where we're second-guessing where we're going to end up here quick no I want to say if you're writing like this for your actors please please don't forget them they are people who need to understand what the hell is going on with your dialogue when you're leaving things out here so tell them what's left unsaid within your script when you leave a line on finished those little ellipsis is that you might love putting at the end of your lines don't forget to fill the actor in it's actually what's been missed out there

otherwise they're gonna get lost and you might get a terrible performance in the audio booth so do remember your actors when you're doing this kind of stuff also when I mentioned that implication is another form of omission the idea where you're implying lots of ideas this is a example use yesterday that's my excellent picture of Leia from Star Wars there and she says I love you to Harmon and Han he was kind of being smug and he he kind of comes very that I know he always feel I used to be like tink of like from his teeth when he says that it's a bit cheesy but the implication of what said there is actually much more powerful than if you just said I love you too which was in the script that whole breadth of their experience of of Leia going I'm gonna go to the end of the galaxy to find you I will save you no matter what happens here I'm gonna tell you I love you even though this is embarrassing almost to say in front of every single other person it's the worst possible time say it I'm gonna declare my love you right now and hand goes there's no way I can ever come back from that I really understand that you absolutely mean everything that you've just said in the implication of that I

know so much is put into those little words I think it's fantastic it's really nice writing so let's go back to test in German let's look at their kind of discussion here do you think we'll make it through to dawn I will try now that's that's nicer I think I mean you've got to fill in what's going on there so she hesitates unsure but then sounds determined and of course don't forget your actors I don't know is the implication there so make sure everything's there for people now if we compare that to the first version where is I don't know but we'll try I've only taken out a few words but it changes the meaning it changes the feel of that sentence a lot there's more emotions in there we've kind of doubled up on the amount of emotional content without really expanding a lot of what's being said in the amount of time I think that's nice of writing so that was kind of our main option three there that was a looot using emissions so let's go back to our original diagram and we're gonna fill that in over the side there any

second cool so let's go on to the second option we've got a Bey look for us this is apparent non sequiturs now you may know non sequiturs non secretarial also often used in comedy and stuff like that white of the crow why did the chicken cross the road fish that's a non-sequitur joke it makes no sense because it's a sudden change of tone or subject now what I'm talking about really is apparent non sequiturs so though it seems like there's no reason for it to suddenly change it actually is there's a deeper dialogue going on underneath there and the non sequitur is a way of to demonstrate in what that dialogue is so piece in x-files recently where Mulder was sitting there going oh yes the killer did this kind of stuff and Scully just goes yeah I'm not sure how long my mother's going to make it complete breaking tone of subject and it completely reveals without this big kind of conversation of like oh that's very interested we shouldn't think about that but I'm more interesting my mother at this moment you don't need this link between it just that contrast is actually sometimes a more powerful way

than trying to push these things together I think there's a nice example here in a Girl Interrupted Susanna Kaysen writes this it was a spring day the sort that gives people hope all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth suicide whether the tone is established and then that tone is disrupted violently breaking this making a powerful poetry at the character's internal state this is really really powerful writing and it's really short writing I mean it she could have taken pages to try and write that cathain kind of break there that same kind of emotional experience they're just doing that with couple of lines very very powerful stuff very powerful another one we got from a little bit more lighthearted is a Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett lovely lovely bit of work also mentioned so far in the conference lest you go on cheering I ask you a question AHA yesterday did you reply not a mere how's the carrot

that's fickle it's a carrot lovely I love Samuel Beckett it's really just weird stuff but it's it's it's got a lot going on in there it's got this kind of comic tragic kind of thing to it that you're asking questions it didn't probably get answered the first time and if you did they'd forgotten what that answer was and there's this kind of loss of communication going on they're here they're stuck in this meaningless loop of trying to find out the answer and not really knowing what the question was in the first place and that's basically the entire play summarized in two lines of writing that is really efficient writing a whole play in two lines I think that is brilliant that's the power that you can have if you use this technique correctly however with great power comes great responsibility it's the warning time hooray so they were you're a brilliant genius writer with your brilliant brilliant non sequitur in your script this is awesome and then you go to your producer and the operator who could do I don't think so no no so a lot of people think that

really really direct writing is the only way to go for games this is the only way to write it's like the really most obvious possible thing you could do I don't really agree with that I think a parent non-sequiturs are really really indirect these are possibly the least direct way of doing something possible but they're so powerful you're gonna get a lot of arguments about this so in every technique from this session I'm talking about today it is indirect writing it's giving story without saying absolutely what's in the mind of the people it's more powerful for that it uses their imagination but it's gonna trigger a lot of debates and I think this one is going to trigger the most debates out of a lot of them I think it's worth it I think it's a really powerful technique if you can get it right once again don't mess with gameplay information but if you get this right there's a really great insight to characters let's go back to Tess and Gemma so do you think we'll make it through to a dawn says Tess and Gemma comes back with I don't forget your coat

looks like rain in the morning nice I like this one it sounds unsure to begin with then she pauses for a moment she looks out the window at the sky above the crowd of zombies and in a conversational tone is clearly covering some fear she says don't forget your coat it looks like rain in the morning when everything else is going on that's the thing she says instead so if we compare this to the other options that we had we started off with that one down the bottom though I don't know but we'll try and that's fine as that's that's resolved it's very determined that's that's great if you go to the toilet or the next one it's scared but it's resolved we kind of doubled up on our emotional content so we're doing good work here and this third one well we've got fear we've got a little bit bravado doesn't matter oh I don't care about the zombies is this determination of yeah of course we'll make it there's a little bit of humor in there there's a little bit of fear in there is all these things mixed together and something that I think is really really really important to games even

games about shooting zombies in the place it's got a bit of love in there these people care about each other they they care about Gemma cares that Tess actually feels okay and she's put on a brave face for her friend or her companion or her partner it's I think this is a much more powerful way of writing and I think there's a lot more complexity with a similar length line as what we started from I think that's the power of writing like this and I think it's really worth looking into so let's go back here let's add that onto the bottom part there so we've got a change in tonal subject is disjunction really reveals the internal dialogues it's great for complexity it's great for being brief and it really gets right to the point without these overwrought links of going this to this to this to this the new subject it's a way of skipping out all that stuff and smashing them together and sometimes getting a much more powerful effect because of that okay so the third one I want to talk to you about is unreliable narrators I've got two major kind of

parts that I'm going to talk about here first one's actually really quite small so I'm going to divide them up here the first one's quite small on the left-hand side here which is honest mistakes fairly quick panel does give you a quick example of that the next section the big section really here is deception and within deception I'm actually gonna split that up into two pieces as well I'm going to talk about deception which is does it lying to yourself self-deception and we talked a little bit about ungrounded realities I think they're both quite important and I've got the sort of the last one which is the most obvious one which is lying to people deceiving others okay so let's start off with honest mistakes to begin with as I mentioned a start of making a gang called fragments of him in fragments of him there's many stories told and one of them is from the perspective of Sarah there's my awesome drawing of Sarah T know if you're watching this sorry your art works much better than mine sarah has a memory of her hurt I'm going on a date with a character who called will they went to a cinema now the player

actually has a choice of where to sit in this cinema they've got still in the middle front middle or back now that's weird if this is a memory because I mean how can they be play a choice if it's just a memory there's always got to be kind of one right choice and the others are gonna be wrong choices isn't that right it feels like that should be correct oh it's just an honest mistake maybe she did sit at the front and we chose sitting in the middle that's okay but whatever if she goes yeah that's that's fine we'll just keep on going with that because which seat was chosen doesn't actually matter to Sarah that bits irrelevant it's like saying well the person shot me with a gun which was red or blue it doesn't matter whether the gun was red or blue what matters was you got shot by it and you're pretty sure certain about the being shot bit so you can understand the priorities of the characters by giving some uncertainty other in other parts of this so where we sat play a choice that's kind of fuzzy it's not important to Sarah but what

happened when she sat down there that's certain that's very important and so you get these ideas of priorities and what max is most of the character inside don't head so those little simple mistakes they're tricky to use in your scripts tricky using a dialogue because it could seem like hard to clue it's a clue they made a mistake they said this but it was really that so being really careful using these they can fit in there they can complement things but this is why I just said this with one of the smaller sections basically active listeners are rewarded so with character insight from the contrast between the certainty and the fuzziness and they kind of go oh so they didn't care about that but this that they're really certain of it intuitively using this kind of really emotional driven thinking they understand intuitively that's the bit that matters and I think that's a nice thing is getting peep good character insight just with a couple of lines of dialogue so let's move on to the next section there self-deception lying to yourself and ungrounded realities so one of my favorite games of all times the game called prince of persia sands of time I think it's a brilliant piece of level design combats a little bit puzzle design is absolutely brittle but the

storytelling it is genius it is so so nicely done if you've not played it I highly recommend it it starts out with a very talented a very petulant prince who thinks he's awesome he's gonna go steal his thing and he's gonna do the thing over there and I was going to save the day and invade a city and he's kind of really full of himself he really is quite full of himself like a lot of game characters to be honest from now on I trust no one but myself is one of the things he says to himself for the start of this it's okay you know it's fine but to be honest as the Prince is lying to himself constantly it started this and as people listening we're kind of going yeah that's not going to stay that way for the whole story of it and we're all sitting there knowing this we know he's lying to himself and is helping us feel smarter we are actively engaged in going - no that's not true no you can keep saying that Prince but it's still not going to be true no matter how many times you say it to yourself and isn't that lovely that we're listening to dialogue and engaging with it it's interactive dialogue without choices

without branching structures it's interactive just by the nature of interpretation of dialogue that's the power of good writing and the player can enjoy anticipating the prince of self-discovery towards the end of it as gameplay his self-deception adds to the fun of the game the writing adds to the experience and that's what we were world to do without writing and the players work is repaid by the end of the game he's saying come with me please he fills the meaning of love he needs companionship he recognizes there is a world outside himself brilliant character growth demonstrated with really nice kind of part of self-deception and then I kind of veil falling away as the story goes on Mary Shelley also used this in Frankenstein this kind of stuff so we get a slightly different version this and kind of ungrounded realities here so every aspect of the story is framed but for us we never really see the truth there's no kind of authorial structure sitting outside there omniscient Lee looking down ago this is the because we've got this lip version of reality now reality exists outside of

this but reality is actually framed by character wallet Robert Walton who is writing Frankenstein the story Frankenstein to his sister in a series of letters the things Robert Walton is actually writing what he was told by Victor Frankenstein so we've got Robert Walton interpreting Victor Frankenstein's letters when he's writing to his sister the thing is Victor Frankenstein is actually sometimes telling Robert Walton what he was told by the monster and so we've got all these different layers coming in here for all we know Robert Walton just thought we his sister with a bit ill and she might fancy a factor called story it could all be lies and we never know we never know where the true reality of this is the reality gets squished and squished and squished until it might all be true but we really don't know I think that's really really powerful kind of way of doing it we only really see through the reality that they see and I think that's a really interesting thing because always questioning what that is this is used in a lot of other things so things like movies like Fight Club American Psycho of course is a big one

we've got other games of course we've got things like eternal darkness really great game used to sort of see the world through the eyes of the characters you're never quite sure entirely what is really Grand Theft Auto five Trevor's hallucinations it's very clearly signposted you're seeing the world through Trevor's eyes you don't think that all the gang members have got dog heads all of a sudden in the game SpecOps the line of course that's a whole game which plays with the unreliable narrator it's a brilliant brilliant experience if you've not seen the talk from DC in 2012 we look it up on GDC vault is really really great talk but I spec ops the line brilliant brilliant story about that one and of course Batman I'm really really big fan of what was done with Batman Arkham Knight I think this is fantastic because really in reality the Joker is dead there is there is no doubt about this there's there's no question really what's going on here but the thing is Batman's reality isn't quite that one he slightly moved sideways from reality in this game we only see the world through

Batman's eyes and in that reality the Joker isn't quite dead I think that's really interesting as a player we can kind of think about this it's very very engaging to try on to stand what's going on in these what is actually real in Batman's world what's the hallucination is any of it real and also does it even matter and that's a really nice question as well it's like is this her loosen a ssin is that a person who we think it is are they not am i attacking the wrong person here what's going on I think that's a really really nice kind of dialogue for your players to engage with in that game so that's that one that's our kind of self deception and the ungrounded realities when you're stepping away from what is really true looking now at deceiving others lying I like element Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights there's a nice example of this one again we've got a couple of framing minorities going on here we've got Nellie who's talking to Lockwood who's then recording his version of it and there's a sense that Nellie might be kind of embellishing her story she seems to enjoy telling this story Sheehan seems to enjoy making a bit more interesting and there's a sense that

maybe she's adding some stuff in but why is she adding her stuff in it she bald is she looking for attention is is she frustrated with her life why is she adding this stuff in and what is she actually adding there were scenes where it seems like it would be really weird for Nellie to have been there but she says she was but also maybe there's stuff being taken away so what do we see what don't we see what does this tell us actually about her as a character because the speaker is unintentionally revealing their true selves by the lies that they tell and the things that they make up and I think that's a really nice player plainness we see what concerns them we see what they're trying to hide by the lies that they create really really interesting stuff of course this is this is a great thing interesting what is real it's a really active kind of listening mechanic is a great way of playing with these it really rewards players who think about reality outside the frame of the game that's been presented to them they kind of go this is the reality of Batman and it's a reality of Nellie this is a reality of Lockwood or Victor Frankenstein what's

going on outside there what is the true reality beyond that thinking outside that frame is a really really powerful thing for your but for your players to do and a really great way of engaging them so that was our three options there and let's go back and have all yes I don't let's have a war again because of course immersing everything explained here this is also Bly to your players I'm just telling you to lie to your players what's inspire your characters to question the reality that they're in players need Clues though to begin speculating that not all is as it seems this is a really really important part don't forget to let people come in on this one because you don't always have to be subtle about this either you just need to make sure people understand what's going on here so for example batman arkham knight this is not very subtle in telling us what's going on here it starts with the Joker's cremation you literally have pressed a button and set the Joker on fire in a coffin the Joker

is very very definitely dead at this point he's not coming out of this one but bats still sees the Joker this is really really a big clue that the reality is quite subjective in this game because he's still seeing him still see in this person who we know is dead so give clues to what's going on here all it's just unintelligible lies and that doesn't add anything if people can't tell this lies people can tell is deception they're not to be actively questioning that right so let's add that last little parts are there and it's gonna have one quick more section down at the end there which is going a little bit further this into Clues clues are a really simple kind of part here guide plays with well-written dialogue but if possible the best results go beyond script so there are many many tools that you can use for storytelling in games you've got how the world looks environmental arts a very mental storytelling of course how lines are spoken acting don't forget your actors tell them how to do this stuff how characters move the animation get your

animation team on board for the story interactions interface what kind of player do how does the player know how they're supposed to do it all of these things are ways you can tell your story and of course please please please don't forget your audio team they are really really important in telling your story and also I would also say just don't forget your marketing team there's actually a lot of storytelling you can do outside your game to give hints to give clues so alternate reality games books trailers there's ways of giving clues about your story outside of the game as well so please get them involved with that kind of side it so just going through this very quickly at the end here that's going beyond Scripture the last part in so just to summarize this and there will be a final screen where all this is nice high resolution a moment for you before you get cameras out thank you don't compromise add value with the story because that's really our goal here look for active listening this is really what we're trying to achieve here leave some words out sometimes that could be a way of adding a bit more depth a bit more complexity changing tone in subject and

quickly quite quickly can be a really powerful way of creating a sense of internal dialogue going on there unreliable narrators are framing reality in their own way the player has to question what that reality truly is and in the end of it once you've achieved all these things think about going beyond script find out other ways to support this and one really really important question we can assure you or don't know is the test and Jemma did survive until dawn that's what's very very important they didn't need their coat because it didn't rain so yeah I hope this looks pretty inspired you for active listening in your audience thank you sometimes you can say more by saying nothing thank you very much for listening everybody thank you don't forget to fill in the feedback as promised there you go ooh nice so many cameras Wow awesome thank you listening everybody