Why We Need to See Ni No Kuni 2’s Kingdom Building Mechanic in More Games

I’ve just popped back to the idyllic ship-building town of Capstan-upon-Hull to see if any juicy new quests have become available. Sure enough, I spot a telltale ‘I’ on my minimap. A young lady asks for my help tracking down her father. He’s gone missing, but somehow she can pinpoint the exact location where he is. RPG trope: just go with it.

I hop on my airship, sweep to the marked location – a dusty cave – and trot in to find this guy. I’m ready to save him from a group of baying monsters, or perhaps have to fight him as a result of a misunderstanding. But I don’t. He’s dead.Continue reading “Why We Need to See Ni No Kuni 2’s Kingdom Building Mechanic in More Games”

In Someone Else’s Shoes

Do you commute into work on the train? If not, you should do. It really is an eye-opening experience: the rush-hour train is a microcosm of contemporary society.

The other day, the morning train I usually catch was cancelled. This in itself isn’t a rare event. More unusually, every subsequent train in both directions was cancelled or indefinitely delayed. In short, the whole thing was completely buggered.Continue reading “In Someone Else’s Shoes”

The Alternative Travel Guide: Bruges

I’ll admit up front that the very concept of this blog series is fundamentally flawed. I travel so infrequently that writing travel guides makes about as much sense as a video game critic only reviewing top Xbox exclusives. Many thumbs will be twiddled.

But I feel obliged to share my travel experiences; to provide an alternative guide to some of the most popular and maybe some of the most unremarkable places in the world. Rather than regurgitating the same spiel about must-see attractions that the internet is stuffed with, I’ll offer frank insights on aspects that are rarely covered.

And so we start with Bruges.Continue reading “The Alternative Travel Guide: Bruges”

‘Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty’

There are a handful of luminaries who I happily follow on Twitter with zero chance that they’ll ever follow me back. One of Pixar’s leading directors and screenwriters, Andrew Stanton, is one of those people.

The other day, I saw one of Stanton’s tweets commenting on a TED talk that he conducted back in 2012. The presentation is so incredibly insightful, and contains so many inspirational nuggets of storytelling advice, that I thought it would make a good blog topic. The talk itself is certainly worth a watch in full, though. Here it is.

One phrase in Stanton’s talk stood out to me in particular. It comes courtesy of British playwright William Archer: ‘Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.’ Stanton calls the quote incredibly insightful. Drama is at the heart of all storytelling, alongside love, as Michael Hauge teaches. So let’s break down the quote.

First: anticipation. To create a good story, you must make the audience want to find out what happens next at every point of the tale. As Stanton explains, storytelling isn’t far removed from joke telling: you must know your ending – your punchline – and everything that occurs prior to the ending must feed into this over-arching goal.

Early on, you should make a promise to the audience that your story will be worth their time. As Stanton explains, “a well-told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot, [that when released] propels you forward through the story to the end.” To back up the promise, you need to make the audience care. It’s crucial that they’re emotionally, intellectually, or at least aesthetically invested in the story.

Easier said than done, right? Well, Stanton explains how crafting the superb, largely-silent WALL-E confirmed a belief that he’d had for a while: that the audience are satisfied when they’re working out the story and its themes. Importantly, Stanton advocates, they just don’t want to know that they’re doing it. In other words, you shouldn’t spoon-feed the audience the story, but arrange its elements in such a way that grabs attention. They can anticipate what’s going to happen, but they can’t be completely sure, and they’re trying to work out how you’ll get to the end.

As Stanton neatly summarises, “it’s this well-organised absence of information that draws [the audience] in.” He and fellow Pixar writer Bob Peterson rather grandly call this approach the ‘Unifying Theory of 2+2’. Essentially, the premise is that you shouldn’t just give the audience “4”, but should give them “2” and “2” and allow them to put them together themselves. Of course, the audience often won’t be certain if they’re getting it right until you fulfil your promise at the end.

It should go without saying, but story is far more than just plot. It’s a culmination of plot, themes, dialogue, and characters. Stanton focuses on characters as a key proponent of change in stories, itself a fundamental requirement. As he explains, if a story becomes static, it dies, because life is never static.

All good characters have a “spine” – an inner motivation; a dominant, subconscious goal – that drives them. The character’s spine should dictate the decisions that they make. They may not always be the best decisions, but they must be consistent with the character’s personality. Stanton gives the examples of Michael Corleone in The Godfather: his spine was to please his father, even after Vito Corleone’s death.

Finally, Stanton reveals what he thinks is the key ingredient of all great stories, and one that is rarely cited: the ability to evoke wonder. Stanton calls it the “secret sauce”, and I don’t think anyone could argue against that given Pixar’s uncanny ability to produce heart-warming tales time after time. Unfortunately for us mere mortals, it’s not the easiest thing to imbue our creations with wonder!

To conclude, I’ll leave you with this quote from Stanton taken from the TED talk. He refers to characters in a story, but it’s equally applicable to all of us as we seek for meaning in our lives: “A major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you, and to take the wheel and steer it.” Whatever we wish to achieve or create in life, it won’t happen until we understand why we want it, and actively go after it. Andrew Stanton has done just that, and become one of the most respected storytellers in the world as a result.

A Writer’s Thoughts – Part 5: It’s Alive!

Being a suburban lad through and through, every time I head down to the supercharged mass that is London I have to tell myself I’m going on a mission or an adventure. That way I mentally prepare for the chaos.

A few weeks back, I headed down to The Big Smoke on a mission of utmost importance: directing the voice over (VO) work for Seven: The Days Long Gone. I met up with my co-directors Jakub and Karolina, the Project Lead and Quest Designer, respectively, and we made our way to the PitStop Productions recording studio near King’s Cross.

Unfortunately for the voice over artists we had chosen to voice Seven’s main characters, I took to my directing role like a dictator to brainwashing. I’m confident that these highly-experienced actors appreciated my relentless input. Not that confident, mind you, but it’s too late for self-doubt now! When I jumped into the booth and had a little go myself, naturally I found that it’s much harder than it looks.

Seven VO

It may be a cliché, but it really was surreal to hear many of the lines I sweated over brought to life by these talented voice actors. When I write, I mutter every word to myself, particularly when it comes to dialogue. It helps me to check the lines feel natural, and that punctuation crops up where natural pauses occur. It’s not very scientific, admittedly, but it works for me.

Even with this process, however, I didn’t always appreciate the intricacies of a line because I didn’t always imagine the character speaking it in context. The voice over recordings were a timely and pertinent reminder that in-game dialogue is far from the end product. That may sound obvious, but it can be hard to keep the bigger picture in mind when writing; imagining the state of the world at that particular time, and everything the character may have gone through. These considerations are further complicated by the fact the player may have acted in a variety of ways up to any given point, so there often has to be an element of neutrality to the line. They may have forced the protagonist to start an impromptu open graveyard, for example.

I enjoy storytelling in many of its guises. In addition to working on Seven, I’m currently writing a long-overdue short story entitled Kellen’s Plan, and working on my first screenplay, called The Henchman. I realise that by dabbling in all of these different forms of media I risk spreading my time too thinly, but I think the potential rewards outweigh the risks. I want to immerse myself in every facet of storytelling, because I’m increasingly finding that core story principles are crucial regardless of the format. The primary goal is always to elicit emotion, stories are always metaphors for life, there always has to be conflict throughout, and the protagonist has to go through a metamorphosis of some description.

Despite the storytelling core running through all of these media forms, there are of course major differences between them. One of the most significant is the way in which the story is enjoyed. In video games, the stories that are created have to serve a greater purpose: they have to feed in to and enhance the world created. The writing is brush strokes of one colour on a vibrant, many-hued canvas. Films and television shows constitute an intrinsically visual medium, so screenwriting must enable the reader of a script to visualise how the words on the page could be brought to life. Writing literature is one of the more closed-ended of the forms, in that the writer tries to convey exactly what they wish the reader to experience. Even this requires interpretation, however; as Stephen King says, description should start in the writer’s imagination, but end in the reader’s.

The whole process of bringing lines to life in the VO recording session reminded me of the importance of keeping in mind where your words are destined to be next in their journey. It never ends with whatever you chuck on to the screen; whether it’s the voice actors who breathe life in to lines for a video game, or the director transforming them into fluid action for a screen show, or the reader taking the seed of your prose and letting it bloom in their imagination. In short, don’t forget that your aim is to write something that shows your imagination whilst appealing to someone else’s.