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.
The Conundrum of the Multiplayer Mindshare
Posted in Game Theory, Industry Comment with tags game communities, mindshare, multiplayer on November 4, 2009 by nickhalme[Cross-posted on my Gamasutra blog]
Recently I was attempting to write a review for CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars — it’s a quality arena shooter with some new ideas that work well, and was released for XBLA on June 1st. When I got to the point where I felt I had to stop and wrap things up with the conclusion, I froze. Why should anyone buy it? It’s a fun game, but nobody plays it online. Of course they don’t — what sort of caveman would be so bereft of online shooters to invest time in a downloadable console arena shooter?
So why was it made? I have no idea. Surely it could have been foreseen that the players would not be there waiting for it. Right?
It’s long been touted as a fact that demographics exist; these fuzzy statistical groups who help determine who a game is marketed to, and to some extent made for. I don’t know much about that, and my stance is skeptical, but common sense alone at least dictates that fans of something will respond to fan service. The Dawn of War franchise serves several different groups of fans that coagulate — Warhammer 40k fans, Real-Time Strategy fans, and Relic fans. I like to think that, mixed in there somewhere, are “fans of awesome shit and big guns”, people who aren’t 40k fans but have been attracted to the IP through Dawn of War’s presentation.
To conceptualize that, I’d like to use the idea of a large single-celled organism — multiplayer gamers. The organism is made up of many different elements; different sorts of fan groups with their own tastes. Every so often when a new game is released some piece of the organism breaks off and becomes its own thing — its own community. It will probably bring lots of different types of fans with it, but they’re all multiplayer gamers.
Thing is, this organism doesn’t just split down the middle for anyone. If a game has enough gravitas it will cause a split — Dawn of War has grabbed a small chunk of the organism, while Call of Duty 4 has requisitioned for itself a very large part of it, which still cowers before the super-organism that WoW has since developed.
Yet games are made that have little influence over this organism of multiplayer gamers. Section 8 sought to steal Tribes fans, but the servers are dead. CellFactor was released into a void rather than into the writhing hands of fans.
You don’t have to be an established franchise to serve fans, by the way — fans existed before games did. I’m not sure anyone is a fan of generic, middling science fiction and nameless gunmetal machineguns, but make a game about zombies and you’ve got a starting point.
What I’m trying to say is, it’s a shame that some creators seem to be unaware of this multiplayer organism, because most of these games are good if not great. I believe even a small community can foster a game and its developer.
As a kid I spent hours playing Raven’s Soldier of Fortune II, playing in clan ladder matches and playing as a regular on several clan servers. It was at a time when, to my peer group, the choice was simply Counter-Strike. I chose to devote more time to SoF II, along with thousands of others to Counter-Strike’s hundreds of thousands. The community persisted for some time and I believe that sort of following helped solidify Raven as a quality developer in the eyes of fans and other developers. Even if it turns out they didn’t make a fortune, they survived and with good marks.
Soldier of Fortune II served a niche, that’s for sure. That niche was probably filled with different fans; maybe it was as generic as “online shooter fans”, but these certain people were attracted. Me and my clanmates shared a definite love of the game’s level of violence, dismemberment, randomly generated maps, weapons with kick, and cutthroat arena-shooter speed. We all gushed over it — it was made just for us.
Now, Section 8 was made for Tribes fans — maybe Battlefield fans in actuality. But it failed to be a better version of those games; the quality here still matters, and so does market saturation. Battlefield fans have a Battlefield game to play right now — your game will not get those players. As for Tribes fans, you will not get those players if you don’t live up to their high expectations, if you don’t really aim to be a Tribes-like game. Section 8 served fans a lukewarm meal while someone else had already prepared a hot meal for them.
Fans are out there, and I want to believe they’re eager to split off and find new games, to join new communities and learn new rules; get better at new games. I believe all gamers want this. Don’t give them something fake, find a real niche/demographic/group of fans and attack it — more importantly the developers should be part of that niche, working to fill it. That’s when the best games are made, you can tell. Multiplayer games require more time and investment than a single player experience, so it has to be something especially special and it has to last.
Developers should not be wasting themselves on games that people, honestly, are never going to play in the current or predicted multiplayer environment. Woe is the multiplayer arena shooter who competes with Call of Duty for multiplayer mindshare. But Left 4 Dead will survive, and so will Red Orchestra, Counter-Strike and I’d like to think Dawn of War. Because those are fans that wanted something and got it, and they don’t feel like leaving yet.
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