This is the transcription of a lecture given initially at Game Camp France, in Lille. To attract people, I called it "How to get rid of your writer and their huge ego"
Around this provocative idea we will partially explore the world of text generation and see some unexpected perspectives.
Imagine you’re a game creator and you’ve delegated the narrative to a writer. This is a good thing because they’re a professional, but now you have problems because their ego overrules your decisions (as a writer myself, I know all about that).
The role of the writer
What is the purpose of a writer when creating a video game?
The first things that immediately come to mind are: background, scenario, mythology, interaction, dialogues, descriptions ...
But we rarely think about the “textual environment". If you have a sound designer in your team, you won’t try to make your own sound for a button: you ask your sound designer to do it.
However, in many indie productions (if not all) in which I’ve participated, all interface texts were written by the UI manager, the graphic designer or the GD. After all, an "OK" button doesn’t need to be handled by a writer, right?
But in truth, why not? It's their job, their skill. For the textual interface environment, there are sometimes conflicts between the interface expert, who wants a clear and meaningful text, and the writer, who will try to stick to a context and try to tell a story.
In Out There that I created with Michael, I designed a button labelled "Encounter Life" for when a player wants to explore a planet and approach its inhabitants.
The wording is rather clumsy and English-speaking players may have guessed that it was simply a bad translation. In truth, in its French version, it’s even more clumsy: "Meet the life". The intention was not to be clear, but to be mysterious, solemn and evocative.
An interface must support the gaming experience but also transcend it. If your game is narrative, give your writer a little freedom with your textual environment.
AAAs, stuck in their quality processes, will not do it. Indies can do it and, as only they can, they must.
A crucial second aspect of the writer’s job is the one of "gameplay texture".
Writers often complain of being relegated to the background in the VG. There is indeed something to complain about. How many times have we been presented with a game, for example a tactical finished at 90% and we are told "well, can you make us some story for this game? ". We would have liked to be there from the beginning, in order to bring some kind of elegance, combining ways and means, instead of just making up a story because a VG is supposed to have one.
I wouldn’t say that when the writer's work is required (we will try to eradicate the writer from the process in a minute), it is more important than the rest, such as the code. I will say it is just as important, no more and no less.
However, incorporating it in the early stages of design can be an asset in developing unique gameplay.
Recently, I had to do the GD and narrative work for a spy game called The Sigma Theory. If I only worked as the GD, what would I have thought? Spies, Jason Bourne, car chases, double agents, secret documents ...
My role as narrative designer has meant I’ve learnt a lot about geopolitics for developing a scenario: I discovered the ambiguous relations of states with terrorism, cryptography, the importance of drones, interpreters, diplomats, the very special personality of each great power ...
Of course, all these new ideas have greatly fueled my GD work.
In GD, the golden rule is: "Know your universe perfectly, the rules will emerge on their own. "
And who knows your world better than the one who’ll be writing the background?
Some aspects of textual narration
Localization
The most important advice I could give is to not to write too much.
I could develop this advice on many philosophical and artistic levels, but the fact is that the deployment of your indie game must take into account the localization costs.
In our productions that are very narrative and textual, we limit the volume to between 35K - 50K words. At €0.10 cts/word, this represents, say, €4000 per country.
Localizing a French game into English, Russian or Chinese is obvious given the size of the markets. But into German, where the majority of population is able to speak English? Into Italian, where the market is not that big?
The excellent game 80 Days does not include a French version. It has 500,000 words, which makes it equivalent in size of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. If a French (or Italian) translation is ever envisaged, a return of at least € 50K on the territory concerned would be needed. A careful balancing act ...
Text as a vector of subtlety
Many talented creators (that have a fat budget for this) try to convey complex emotions or feelings through 3D cutscenes.
It’s a complicated issue. It’s often unbalanced, more or less mimicking a movie narrative which is a heterogeneous field of storytelling. They pay the price of being pioneers.
Meanwhile, a simple text can convey concepts that are difficult to illustrate otherwise. Text alone can convey a feeling of accomplishment, happiness, determination, and most elusively, the thing around which the whole world is focused and which is so absent from our productions : love.
The text - interface
We saw that an interface included text and that this text could set an atmosphere.
Now the text may be a full-fledged interface component, describing something more appropriately than another means, such as an icon.
The rogue-like ADOM for example suggests you create a hero with a race and statistics. At the beginning of the game, it synthesizes the player's statistical information to make a biography. For example, a character who grew up in the fields will be tough.
Similarly, the Ultima series generated a character and stats based on questions like "what would you do in this context". These questions, asked by a mysterious gypsy, set the atmosphere and combine relevance and elegance.
Plunging deeper into the fractal nature of the meaning of the text, the font also tells a story: Oblivion's Caroline places us in a context of medieval cities and battles of lords, while the icy-white Helvetica condensed from Skyrim reminds us at all times that we are surrounded by snowy mountains.
It's a bit like a Freudian interpretation of a dream: when we talk about text, everything might mean something.
Grammar
American and French players today have different experiences of the same (textual) game, largely due to the grammar.
(I’m not talking about adjectives. I have a note to make on French language: as a French writer I prefer the phrase “orange flowers” (des fleurs orange) to “white flowers (des fleurs blanches)”, because orange is strictly invariable (it doesn’t take s in the plural form), while white (blanc) not only takes a plural s, but in the feminine form it turns into blanche. Red (rouge) does take an s in the plural form but stay rouge in the feminine form. Coding French flowers is coding exceptions!)
We inherited the grammatical forms of the 80’s games : "Talk to" in English and "Parler à" in French.
What does an American think when they click on “Talk To”?
Are they ordering the hero to go and talk to that person? Or are they adding an implicit “attempt” because they more invested in the character in the first-person? I don’t know.
In French we have a very neutral infinitive meaning "talk to" whose translation in English would be "To talk to". We establish a list of neutral instructions: the avatar essentially undergoes a form of programming. We have a more analytical than emotional relationship with the game and it is the result of complex grammar. If we used the imperative "Prends" (Take!) instead of "Prendre" (To take), we would expose ourselves, in text parser games, to difficult situations, simply because the average French player hasn’t fully mastered the imperative tense for all the verbs.
Using "talk to" and "parler à" in the creation of our games for the last 40 years I sometimes feel like we’ve been eating the same dish or have been making love the same way for 40 years.
The future, the past, the third person singular ... why not use these conjugations, these modes and these times to offer a unique narrative? There’s still much more to be done!
Procedural generation
Combinatorics
A common strategy for generating text is to use combinatorics, if possible under conditions.
When in Skyrim a guard comes to you saying "Hello Orc, can you help me enchant something?” we have three parts in the sentence:
“Hello” or “good evening”, related to in-game time
“Orc”, related to the player's race
The following sentence is related to a player's skill. If they don’t have one, the guard can always tell them about a knee accident ...
What can we conclude from this example?
First, we can create many sentences using little basic material. Our dream of getting rid of the cumbersome writer is progressing.
There is a real "wow effect" the first few times. The game reacts passively to the identity of our character, and it's impressive.
However, we are talking to players, humans who can read patterns in the feedback of a game, for some it might even be their main skill.
As such, there is a transparent systematism in such a combinatorial application that paradoxically leads to a loss of immersion. This supports a larger idea, which we will see later, which suggests that a character must be written or at least give the illusion of being written, even in a world that wants to be systemic
Finally, and this is perhaps the most delicate point, the information transmitted is weak. The Skyrim guard is a mirror that evaluates my progress, and nothing else. In this particular case, there are many ways to improve it.
In the end, the exercise of the combinatorial sentence can be condensed into a single rule of quality: "Am I transmitting new and coherent information as part of a corpus large enough not to tire the reader? "
Sheherazade
There is a technique based on the balance of the story, which I call "Sheherazade" and which combines soap opera techniques with more classical show architectures (like X-Files).
Imagine that you are a writer for a crazy video game creator and they ask you to write one million quests because, according to them, the balance of the game depends on this number - and you don’t want to go through a procedural generation system.
It’s possible to give the illusion of a game that offers 1,000,000 quests by writing a rather small number of them, let’s say 800, and using various techniques, this number can be lowered even further (400).
X-Files (or Star Trek) has an interesting structure: it’s composed of a
