I’m almost afraid to post this; this talk was given by David Freeman, a man who is apparently one of those Robert McKee types from Hollywood who has had a hand in coaching an obscene amount of script writers. As per usual the videogame industry gets sloppy seconds (but we’re not complaining). His sessions have been attended by people like David Jaffe, Lorne Lanning, Chris Metzen, Mike Morhaime, and Scott Miller.
During the talk he wanted to make sure nobody was recording, which leads me to believe that reproducing his gospel in any way will result in my throat being slit while I sleep.
But really, he seemed like a nice guy, so I’ll take the chance.
His talk at GDC Canada seems to have skimmed the surface of what would normally be a several day long workshop, but the fundamentals he touched on were still interesting, and I think I learned a few tricks.
As is the case with all these GDC notes, they are in point form — I’ll do my best to stretch it out, but what you’re getting here are the little bits I thought deserved some ink, and not much more:
To start off he explained his techniques create “emotional depth” and “scene deepening”. This as opposed to other methods of attack that don’t focus enough on the right spot — that spot is characterization.
These are the aforementioned “Six Layers”
6. Character deepening
5. Empathy techniques
4. Character arc
3. Quirks and eccentricities
2. Character diamond (a character trait graph)
1. Truthfulness (accuracy, profession research, etc)
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The character diamond is a four pointed graph in the shape of a diamond that simply helps visualize the rough number of necessary character traits needed for a character and how they jive (and to clarify, these are not for player characters but for NPCs.) He notes an NPC should have a minimum of three traits and a maximum of five.
Traits are clarified as character-defining descriptors; for example a character’s favourite beer tells us nothing about his character, so it is not a trait.
You don’t want cliche traits, you want unexpected traits that go together.
He cites the princess in Ico (Yorda) — she is a vessel for powerful magic, but she is also weak because she cannot control it. Now you have an original character because she contains two traits that are seemingly at odds.
It is also possible to make a cliche character with one unique trait, thus making him or her familiar but original.
Traits can be manifested without dialogue such as with actions or through a fighting style. My own observation of this is in the downloadable Watchmen game: Rorschach fights with a loose, rough-and-tumble (brutal) wrestling style, while Night Owl fights with a stiff karate style that seems to minimize damage done, like Batman.
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His showcase example was of the Oracle from The Matrix film, which he classified as a Gandalf character, an example of taking a familiar cliche and tweaking it just a bit.
Here he used a pentagonal graph with these traits at the points: Serenely powerful, revolutionary, insightful/prescient, wry wit/ironic, motherly. So she’s effectively a fortune-telling Gandalf disguised as the stereotypical wisecracking old black woman.
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He notes a very comforting problem with developing non-cliche characters — it will always be hard to hear their voice in your head while you’re writing them. That’s not because you’re a failure, it’s because the character is original and you have no basis for a voice. While you’re writing the character the voice should eventually develop, and you’ll start naturally hearing this sub-vocalized voice that has developed along with the character.
For those unfamilair with this sort of writing quirk, often writers will sort of sanity-check their dialogue in their head by repeating the line mentally with the “right” voice. If you’re writing a line for Gandalf you’ll try to make sure the line sounds like something a wizened old man would say.
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Now, when he said you need to put uncommon traits together he did not mean to put opposites together. That doesn’t fly.
The princess from Ico is not Timid/Brave. She is Timid/Powerful.
What you want to achieve is “skewed opposites”.
Here is Batman:
Just/Good, Powerful/Frightening, Graceful/Weird
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He calls all of this “emotioneering”. Emotioneering adresses the subconcious.
For instance Yorda cannot control her powers, but when she is led to a gate a crackling energy escapes and opens the gate. Later on the player gets a weapon with the same crackling power running through it. It just makes sense to the player.
The better your work is, the less people will notice it. The more natural everything will seem.
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On to Quirks. These are little things that make the character interesting. They are not traits, although they could be tied to them in some way, such as a character’s clothing reflecting their emotional state (ie. a goth girl).
This is unrelated to the character diamond, and they are not traits manifested in action.
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Something called a “Slam” is a character’s confrontation with their own character flaw.
Indiana Jones in the snake pit, etc.
There are lots of different ways a character can respond to a slam.
Unless they are a tragic character, they can overcome the slam.
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Empathy techniques. Here he cites the obvious Wall-E references; how they surround this inhuman robot with human things and giving him human habits and needs, and human traits. He’s lonely and he wants to hold hands, etc.
Everyman techniques are used to make you liken him to a person; he has normal human frustrations.
A standard up/down, good/bad plot graph shows how building a plot with consistent dips and spikes helps to build emotional attachment with Wall-E.
He talks about turning empathy upside down by making the audience/player empathize with the villain.
An example is the lovable killer, the hitman who loves kids, the environmentalist who wants to destroy everyone to save the world, etc.
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Character deepening. He didn’t go very far into this; I assume this is the bread and butter you would work with at one of his workshops where he has more time. What you can take it to mean here is that these are some of the paths you can develop to attach people to a character, make them feel natural and involve the audience/player with the plight of the character.
1. Pain
2. Humiliation, shame, regret
3. Aesthetics
4. Understated or angled spirituality
5. Wisdom/insight
6. Responsibility
7. Self-sacrifice
8. Mystery
Visit David Freeman’s site here, so I don’t get my throat slit.
It’s Good To Be The Saboteur?
Posted in Game Preview, Industry Comment, Opinion with tags history and games, Pandemic, The Saboteur on April 25, 2009 by nickhalmeNo doubt you’ve seen the new screenshots for The Saboteur. When I first heard about the game, where you play as an Irishman fighting with the Free French in Nazi occupied France in WWII, my interest was piqued. With how it’s going about its marketing though, I’m not sure it’s what I thought it was.
See, in real life the saboteur was William Grover-Williams, an Irish racecar driver born in France who returned to work for the Special Operations Executive — a British espionage and sabotage network initiated by Winston Churchill himself. Grover-Williams and men like him were responsible for organizing the French Resistance, maintaining spy networks and conducting sabotage and guerilla warfare.
Grover-Williams was captured and interrogated by the German Security Service and sent to a concentration camp where he was later executed along with another top SOE operative in 1945.
That would be some game. I’ve read some similar stories about members of the SOE, and the stuff they did was truly heroic — it was also extremely dangerous and thankless.
In reality, while the French Resistance has received no small amount of praise, their struggle was paid in blood: it’s estimated the Resistance killed around 2,000 Germans while suffering somewhere around 5,000 casualties — as well 10,000 French civillians were killed in German reprisals along with 6,000 “collaborators” which is assumed to mean members of the networks men like Grover-Williams constructed. While the picture painted of the French Resistance in the media is often of the militants slitting the throats of Germans and Nazi collaborators during the liberation of Paris, the real story is much more somber. Which, speaking as someone familiar with creative development, is actually a gem of a chance — in this sort of story is the chance to create a meaningful experience with a basis in reality. The punch to the gut that good drama and tragedy delivers is always that much stronger when the audience is aware that something similar actually occurred.
But the man running on rooftops with an STG-44 killing Germans in their houses, zip-lining all around the place, and enjoying the company of scandalous women is a gross misinterpretation which can’t claim to be based on the life of Grover-Williams any more than it can be said to be based on the actions of any man in WWII.
The sort of espionage these SOE men and the Free French went about were finding the locations of ammunition depots and launching raids on them, attacking supply routes, providing information to the Allies and eventually staging all-out attacks on German positions on D-Day. There was a divide among capitalist and communist Free French (even going so far as to operate separately) — the majority of assassinations were performed by the communists.
But Pandemic is making an action game. There is a mechanic where the player can raise the “Will to Fight” bar in different areas — a low will to fight means more German soldiers and no military assistance from the population. A high will to fight means that soldiers will only congregate around military installations and the French population will…er, fight with you.
Sorry, but that’s incredibly incorrect. Forgive the stick up my ass, but games like these are how many young people who are disinterested in reading up on history glean their historical accounts of the past. I would be fine with it if it didn’t claim to be representing historical actions, but it is. There is a reason for the American Special Forces mandate (inspired greatly by the actions of British operatives in France in WWII) “winning hearts and minds”. The goal of setting up a resistance network is not to have a shootout, because the resistance will lose, and people will die. The Free French were composed of volunteers from the population who were trained by soldiers. People did not spring out of their houses and attack Germans who were for some reason patrolling their neighbourhood.
Even the supposed plot of the game has the main character exacting vengeance on the Nazis because of the murder of his friends. As if murdering “high ranking German officers” is a way to cripple Germany — the real life Grover-Williams helped destroy Germany’s infrastructure in France, and not for some childish personal vendetta.
What I foolishly thought would turn out to be a thoughtful and chilling game of espionage is, I now find, actually “just another videogame”. Shoot shoot, bang bang, kill the bad guys dead and you get the princess. Really, enough of this already.
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