Gadgetory

I'm Cameron Harris I'm senior editor at by were Montreal can everybody hear us in the back cool and i'm moderating this panel inside story player participation within narrative so first we're going to do introductions of the panelists then you can imagine the slides that we will have and we will describe them and then we're going to dive right in but we're going to leave plenty of room for questions at the end so the worried this I'll tell you who I am my name is Dan amigo I'm the creative director for project untold which is a series of visual novels I'm making in collaboration with giant space cat out of boston and i'm here to talk to you guys about a back story hi I'm Jessie school I am the creative design leave for wizard101 family-friendly a memo hi I'm a Malayan writer if I were montréal I meet girl bonding or we fill in denial for ebony entertainment as the store eating major is my actual title of a sensual am kind of her charterparty story stuff slides it yes so so this panel when we were trying to decide what we were going to talk about we realized that we didn't understand ourselves what we meant by some of these terms we were throwing things around like emergent gameplay versus emerged of storytelling we decided that it would be very helpful if we let you know what we meant and you say those things so essentially what we're talking about is making room in the game for players to have their own experiences and tell their own stories and there's a couple different ways they can do that obviously when we're talking about emergent gameplay we're talking about things like game mods any of you guys seen the the cat apocalypse grinding level 4 40 0 to 14 for girls to you guys I am Laser cat right so that's sort of an extreme example of that you know it's just an achievement map that people go into to grind but someone took that idea and ran with it and created this just insane godlike cat that shot these out of its mouth and like sound picking with lasers it was basically unkillable it was absolutely memorable you should look at the video if you haven't seen it and that's that's the extreme end of the emergent gameplay but letting players do what they want with the game and create their own content that's loser cat I wish you could see that picture it's gorgeous there's also things like the home instances and mmos in Skyrim for example you can collect whatever you want there and some people would chord cheese's or you know different armor and completely fill their rooms with it now if they had decided that they were the cheese board or they made up a whole story about that that would be emergent storytelling but just collecting the cheese the emergent gameplay and the same thing in gone home someone took every single collectible in the game and gathered them into one room why I don't know I don't know what the purpose of that was but that's how they chose to play that game and so that would be again another example of the emergent gameplay now in terms of storytelling MMOs and RPGs do this really well you know you have games like guild wars 2 that let you pick your own storyline at the very beginning and you choose your profession your race or whatever and then that sort of blocks out a certain path for you in the game you've already you know gotten rid of a lot of content that you're not going to see because of those initial choices and bioware very famously has their conversation system which influences your relationships and your path to the game so again these are ways that you can tell your own story with a new framework of the existing games yeah oh yeah and journey this is a pretty much it's really funny it's the snow and the little journeyer is during the heart and the snow at the end of the game sorry spoiler and that's just a way that you really can't communicate with people at all in the game except through peeping through these symbols then they gave you this blank canvas at the end where you can write whatever you want to communicate with the other player and it was a really thoughtful way to to allow players at a little bit if their own story within the game so that's what we mean when we're talking about these things and this is by no means a comprehensive list is just to give you an idea of where we're going to go with us so just see what are some of the ways that you either use typically or you as a game designer leave room in your game or aching in four player stories you know I think a lot of it is trying to remember you'll keep foremost in mind that the players action what they bring to it is what makes the story live right what keeps us different from other forms more passive entertainment you know a lot of my work the last few years has been in MMOs from wizard101 to city of heroes and these are games where in a lot of ways you don't want to put the player as the chosen one although to be fair it was when we kind of do that but but it's it's a game leads you know large player spaces are games of many one and recognizing that giving players kind of some of some tools whether it some character creation or large public spaces gives them I think the sense of empowerment a sense where they're able to fill in their own kind of stories and ideas to them to other characters and when they are put in these shared spaces in kind of public spaces other players they want to kind of create these stories together they want to kind of tell each other about their characters and that helps beginning that process yeah so that process as you say it's expensive in terms of development time source and so on and you know since we work for bio work maybe you can sit a little bit about why does it matter why do we do that what what do we get out of it what is the player get out of having this emergent space to play it I'm speaking specifically for working on an RPG because it really depends on the the jar of game you're making and what the tools you have our are we come at this from an emeritus environment to start with we also offer you know quick path narrative we offer a lot of story about squad maze to basically give you what you have to play to get through the game and then we add as much as we can that is optional and most players will go and explore and as soon as you hit exploration or just letting people determine how they want to interact with the world that's where they start making their own stories and it doesn't matter we just had the top echelon and she was talking about players personal experiences will influence how they perceive story and it doesn't matter how you intend for things to be perceived as soon as you put something there every single player will bring a different aspect to it and a different interpretation to it so and that's the richness of great because then after that you get to talk to people about it people exchange about their experience and they may have played all the same choices and come away with it with a totally different impression of what was going on what happened or how they felt about it and that's where the richest I comes in cool I'm just been a good at more questions that everybody gets one me just jump in so Mickey when we were doing prep for this panel you said that you would like to talk a little bit about how remedies specifically you know your experience there well how does the development process and when the writer comes into it like influence how much emergent storytelling gets into a game you speak a little bit about that sure just together it wants it back briefly one big difference between the kind of thing we make it remedy and the kind of games they make it quite work for example is that we are mostly working on like a line a linear kind of environment or you know you go from A to B to C and you can't really devious run a bath too much but one of the things we try to do is start to still make the world as responsive as possible so even though you or not you don't have that come to explore you can't really affect the outcome that much most of time we still try to make sure that there is enough room for you to kind of see 13 bits of the road that may not be directly relevant to the actual you know mission your own at that given moment and the way we kind of approach the thing is right from the story this is a little unusual I you know the sort of like classic game development space that we provide receipt right from the beginning like there is no situation or label design has just come up with a level by themselves of any kind of court for Natalie it's more like we're in a large cases writers are kind of right in the beginning of the pipeline and that means that we are very much in demand an hour bottle language but which is not a great position to be but but and it makes everything a little slower that's one reason why our games that would usually come up in just a couple years but yeah like one thing that we really try to do is create opportunities for players to kind of put the death together there's a lot of stuff that that is in direct relevant what's happening and we try to place as much content in the environment as we possibly can and that may be something to discover it might be written text or it might be an audio clip or it might be you know I seen that place if you're all if you do is early you know she bunch of things or something like that but but but or inquiries as I said something I see what just you know there's like a pro the puddle of water talks on wall and you can figure out what that means if you just take into clues but but that's something that we kind of try to build as careful as we can because otherwise it's very easy for a leaner game to be just about the character intro playing and everything else in the world is just kind of a variant thing set dressing and that's not really something that you want to have in a game like that if you also want to communicate this idea of a world that exists beyond the experience that you're hardly having so that's something that we've really spent a lot of time on it that also means that we iterate a lot and we're creating things just keep going over the same things over and over again at that that is very slow but also every war ii want to be actually hurt in college anyway so that that means very well as the first free for all questions everybody can pop in fill up your game show host prizes there's always prizes when I moderate pens so you talked about linear narrative I does giving the player space to make their own stories does that detract from the story you're trying to to sell to tell two players like is their attention there and you know it's a secondary when is it useful to have a story on rails so to speak and insert away some of that narrative space the players that players can create well I think for us it's I mean all of our games are you know they're even named after the protagonist like you get Max Payne or you get Alan Wake and they're very much about a specific person in a specific situation and it's not really the kind of thing where you're but we're not trying to let you create your own adventure rather trying to construct an adventure that is as cool as we can possibly making that kind of take you on this very you know well crafted right and the Guru thing about that is that that we can control the experience and then we can really we can time things the way we want to time gonna make sure that you really get the you know the optimized version of that experience which is very cool but but it does mean that some things like replay value kind of aren't necessarily require too much I mean there are people watch movies over and over again and then there are people who play your games or Korean for most people I think it's a continued play to it once and then you had that experience whereas something like I think we do lose something in in the whole thing we're in say Mass Effect you may want to play us you know the asshole Shepherd or the sort of you know pure-hearted Shepherd and you get very different experiences I mean the sort of grand story is pretty much the same but but the wake unfolds very different and that's that there's a lot of value that I think one of the downsides of that approaches that you also need a lot of people creating a lot of content and in terms of macgruber remedy is a fairly small studio oh yeah i think around 131 employees at this point and add that further very linked it so how much contact we can actually creating a game and i think that's something that now that we are bigger to be used to be we made em awake with run 50 60 people and that was much more ok no we're good want to break we actually do have more branching country there just because we have more people working on the content so you do get a little bit more in the way so above or better I know like affecting the experience but i but i think still for us it's something that we we kind of want to see on the range of the experience like we don't go that much for your kind of thing really if never observed like a create your own story of anything with us natalie is not yet although we have it but that sort of thing to quite a bit so so for us for wizard101 pyro one the replayability comes from not the linear story which had certain chapter breaks until we're able to get more content but it's from that shared space with the multiplayers right and so some of that starts going to in-game where people find their own things to do they may hang out in the pet shop and they don't know yet how to patch a pet so somebody more experienced player comes along and it kinda walks them through it and then often friendships that kind of formed out of these things you know and then it expands i think like city of heroes at the kind of its height did a ton of user-created content where people could write their own missions and that kind of build that and that's you know very much a way of doing it but even before that happened you know players got so into it you know good friend of mine who is a very experienced writer and he would go out his way to write basically city of heroes fiction for us to publish you know and he did some great superhero stuff with that and then I think you go even beyond that instead of filling up the downtime replayability and you these connections become with real-life connections with people is calm you know hang out their guild mates to people who you know I've heard stories people who I guess was in EverQuest they spent so long doing the same kind of nitrogen raid you know over and over camping that they became not just good friends but they became a romantic relationship I mean it's it's a difference or storytelling but it all kind of has these groups of what do you bring to this game what do you bring to this play space how is it in rich in your life and nothing that goes also to the you know it's expensive why do we do it well you know from the kind of bean counter perspective the more people engage with your game and and kind of tie into it you know the more they're willing to spend on it right and as game designers and storytellers the more you know they kind of fall in love with your world and characters and you have this kind of cool shared experience with them the other downsides aight having the emergence space to having the emergence pacers haven't loved rails well I are again I wouldn't when the game is on wheels and you know you are just following one character through the story it's a tough sell sometimes if the characters are likable like we have that I've worked on a game called Murder soul suspect and everyone he needed appertain character I mean he was a real jerk and he swore a lot he was a bad person it was all about his redemption in the afterlife and he in hourly focus testing people just despised him I mean he was dressed in like a fedora and investors do not home hella gave a douchebag and you know if it's a really unfortunate and so we had to do a lot more we had to change his lines way to take out some of those where and we had to do a lot of stuff to make it like a fool because that impression is what people were going to have to live with route the game and they weren't bringing anything to run to and they were just following his story and if they didn't care about his story then you know they're does the entire game so that would be the downside to the rails um actually a counterpoint to that like this is going to be Skyrim yeah I guess Skyrim I played at one percent of the crib and I just feared and went right off into the wilderness that's where i spent about 50 hours i have to go back to the creek that i didn't care about it but I was having tons of fun in the game yeah but there are there people where you get that friction we're laughing shadows are more which does really really cool stuff on the kind of emergent gameplay kind of crashes into the narrative and there's certain points where it says no we're going to drag you back onto this and I can get why that is done from you know the design perspective I know people who that's turn them off of it wait no i don't i don't care about that story I want to do my oh damn I have to do that he hit the next level up ok screw it i'm done i'm going to choose something else if there's a one thing we have a valid way of course that character is engine take it in sport I mean listen to who he's had a lot of personal troubles he's got substance abuse issues and things like that and he's trying to get better but he's not bitter yet and that's something that that was really interval to the story is a guy who is this darkness inside him and they look as many physically in the real world around him and it's more complicated than that but that's kind of the core of you in some ways and that is something that there was a lot of concern about before we actually came up where is this guy too much of an ass on this is kind of before today so pretty bad or shows like that cell so you know the idea of a very protagonist who is not necessarily that likable but it's still relatable it is something that that wasn't that well sort of established it at that point um but I remember there were things like you know I think Eurogamer did this compilation or two minute video just that that just called out babysitting it slightly different moments where he just goes around just shouting at people who try to help you more or you will get conversation like no impulse control and just you know things like that but at the same time so something that I think gave me a lot of its character and it's something that that our people have enjoyed about it I mean there are people who don't necessarily like the character that much but they like to see what he becomes or and they like to see how he you know I got sort of the moments of I don't know an alignment that he has every once in a while not just like always strong to be a better person and that's something that I think changes a little bit like when you're watching somebody do that passively like you're on a TV show it's a little easier to see them do horrible things because like nobody really wants to be Walter White I think like that that these pretty much like the worst person you can imagine and if you actually have be like that changes things for people a little bit and that's something that is a little bit difficult for some people to try to kind of accept that just looking now I'm not a good person and now I have to do with these horrible things I'm granted like Alan way doesn't do a fraction of the horrible things that met Walter White does so each other with easier but but I think that that's kind of something I would like to play somebody who is like utterly morally compromised and he's just not capable of handling I always just gotta scramble to get by I think that's interesting is something that when you do that in an interactive environment I think it's something that that you can even if you don't really explore the focus of that eat something that for a player easily in their head kind of spins into something much larger and I got little things that they do that don't let the game doesn't really acknowledge in any way kind of easily turn into like a large narrative in the inside player can say hey like about how much more horrible person / I think that's something you can do for example in Skyrim for you can do all sorts of horrible things if you're playing like like character is not nice the game doesn't really understand that you're doing them like the idea that you're taking I'd say shoplifting cheese from a poor man like I'm sorry not a pig binding cheese from poor manage is throwing in the world just your 12 cheese but you don't want the other back to have a tiger and the game doesn't understand what you're doing but you do and then it just going ok now I'm a horrible person yay and that's something that that a lot of games that aren't really designed to act on anyway laws but still have a lot of opportunities for that like I know people who work played like gauge where they just want to get asshole then they just go and shoot out the windows of what give you some people that that's going to cost you a thousand bucks yeah I think that as people create interactive experiences it is given that no matter how much we try to put the experience on Rails it's just not going to stay that way when you're writing a novel we are in charge of the whole experience right up until the point where you that goes up the door even at that point it's no longer your own because other people's interpretations and your audience's interpretation is going to come into the midst when we're doing games we're trying to generate emotional investment from people or trying to create emotions that people will feel and we can't control what those reactions emotions so while we're creating the experience we can try to codify it and say hey this is a story on Rails this is what we want you to experience we just can't force people to do that which is why the skyrim is a great example of it's like yeah there's a crit path somewhere over there but everyone just goes and do what they want when we're doing RPGs we have these you know these these complex narrative for crit paths but we always make a point of adding a lot around it till now players the room to make the experience their own and I think as long as we have created a space where someone can just either go through experience and invest in it the way we meant for them to do or find a room to putter in and collect cheese and be happy we've done our job done something good there's also headcanon like somebody can have the exact same choices through for example mass effect I did everything that my friend did but we had completely different experiences because it like that this is what my shepherd was like yeah it's basically you know as writers we go this is what we meant for it to be yeah but we can't tell people so this is how you have to interpret it we have to allow for them to go no this is what I see in this character so say you wrote a straight character and some goats going to that characters totally in the closet awesome that's what you're seeing like it no my personal preferences right of students to go as long as you're punching up not down when you're doing those interpretations applause but i can't even dictate that stricter and also you know fanfiction I was just telling this point like so how do we feel about fan transmedia I've been fiction deviant art etc I mean does that does do any of you let go out and find that get examples from and think like oh that's how they interpret the character interesting I'll remember that for the next time or do we avoid it I'm going to be a link we jump right out there start of a fanfiction long before I became a professional camera I think it's awesome I think it's absolutely awesome i avoid everything related to the i pan working on for legal reasons yes you can't go in there i'll look at fan art that's okay but all of the writing i just have you stay away from it and that's it i love talking with players about their experiences in their head canon i love seeing would they care about and i will go and look at the fanfiction of other IPS because yes it's so cool and there's a lot of there's a social you know looked down on the nose of fanfiction under the impression that it's bad it's not true they're really excellent writers in the world fan fiction and you're missing out if you're not checking it out yeah listen go to everything to mind the good stuff let's just remember Jim Butcher started as a writer and floristic there's a lot I guess I declare do we know the Laurel as the unint inheritance of Gant fiction here she would tell us yeah so I mean what about the rest of you I project untold has its roots in the fan fiction in our community I went and I sought out these communities to see what they were doing and I found them what they were they were creating spaces for themselves within these that we're boring them largely so they would play a game and there weren't any you know clear characters or characters of color in it so they were going off and writing their own stories and creating their own art sometimes manipulating videos and stuff to make that game world in that game story what they wanted it to be and I found some really interesting like some communities that were being exploited in some ways like you'll be talking about kpop sometimes but that is that is a an industry that understands how to use its bands I mean they have them you know watching a video 5 million times and all the fans get out of that is you know an extra 30 seconds of footage of their favorite idols but the company gives endorsements and money and awards from YouTube and stuff like that and it's a huge money making thing for them to channel this power of the bands and so I was looking at that and trying to think how I could take that creativity and energy that these people had is this need to tell their own stories and what could we do with that and that's how untold with for more like we need to get these people writing their own stories and to give them the tools to do that and so that's what it's all about so I'm one hundred percent in favor of the in fiction I think it's a great way to get you know players engaged and you know into your ear game and your space as I said you know with city of heroes we would solicited stories four players and we would take the best and publish them either in the city or s comic or on our website with with wizard it's much less of that again partly for the idea of one any kind of you know for legal reasons in it and not be too tired taken off the path of what we're trying to do but but it also kind of I think one way branches out into YouTube streamers and you know I never had a real sense of how i could watch people play our games before and now you know I'll watch a couple than when we release like a big chap urn and you know they're not being sort of a serious into the story and yet it's still really cool when they like hit a moment that's cool too mechanical and they respond to it you know whose or prior oh my god I can't believe that guy or whatever but it's a really fascinating way of actually seeing people take our stuff and how that's being experienced people to have a witness at almost firsthand I'm kind of conflicted about fanfic in general I I wrote from started fabric when I was like 15 or 16 so I environment I have fired at my own sort of penance for that though but like he's like I always have this envelope if you guys are into the running order to write something that's your own stuff and at the same time if somebody were to come to me like i do want to write like 10 issues of Batman applause yes dot yes hurry that differently I need something like Batman is my character what if anything we're even if I got that chance like nobody would imagine that over now is like that gets back Malik so I don't know I like I did it a bunch of stuff said to me every once in a while on what people said me fanfic and stuff like that it's a little bit different for me because you know just feeling Jersey special education happy so I can look at that stuff and not but it immediately source you don't believe you but um it's it's it's kind of weird for me because I I'm kind of ain't all about what consistency and then just like you know the canon of all things especially when something that I'm working on so so it always just like roads that we're cognitive dissonance in view if I see something like that also a lot of porn 30 forest is what effect if it's at all so it's interesting on how far some people like they haven't this internal idea of what these characters where you are for example wake has his best friend a friend who is this like annoying dude named Barry and and he you know but and also I waves on this mission to kind of like like figuring out what happened to his wife and that's kind of what the only thing that really motivated me is just kind of fixing slips away Gettys know what what marriage back together let's god that's kind of the row of it and saying I get these people were absolutely no he's gay don't we do we get thank you okay there's not a lot you can say that's like it doesn't take anything away from me but it kind of feels like you're maybe ignoring like eighty percent of the character's motivation here so we got a question from the hashtag and this will be our last before we open up Q&A so spare tickets so thank you to gamers Nexus how do you facilitate a player's decision to deviate from plot without detracting from the quote above core experience so how do you have you facilitate that and still get the core the core story out to players I don't know that you can control that I mean it's like what they were saying you have the critical path in there and they can choose to take it or not I mean I guess you could you could strip away everything but that and like channel them down but I think even in that case players are still going to play the game they want to play and get with a one out of it things like environmental clues like you guys were discussing I got no a guild wars 2 there were a lot of areas that we set up very deliberately with just sort of a sketched in scene had to sort of fill in the details yourself and we would see people role-playing never lie like you find like a grave with an inscription on it as someone weeping nearby and you know just enough to let you could form your own conclusion and people would do that all the time and those were just sort of deliberate set pieces for role playing so that's that's one thing you can do I think it really depends on those aren't game you're reading but speaking from our beauties India is pretty no example of that where there's a crit path there are certain throttle points where you're forced back into manera but other than mine you can explore as long as you want there's a reason why at the start with ti amo well you know everyone I've ever seen get out of the hinterlands it's be able to brush their right and that's a lot of port that's you just allow for people to explore and then eventually go back to the crib path that that's when you take over sometimes but that's I'd a badge do what you want and we're quite there yet in some ways I think some games like a crow fall which I don't know if you guys know about it's an upcoming Kickstarter thing out of Austin may have something that plays in lad I'm in there their idea is that you have a persistent character these eternal heroes but the worlds that will die they will you know and you'll have to kind of come back into a new world so they're doing a lot of territorial stuff a lot of you know you stake out your claims and you're trying to make yourself the biggest toughest guilt you know on the world but then the world's going to blow up and you have to start over again and you're able to take some of your experience you know forward and I adding things that are more sandboxie obviously give you that chance but any time there's just a strong narrative sorry there to the blood game goes on extra cultural generations which is based on that constant right you basically each generation you get to take some stuff with you to the next generation but you basically decide where you take that to you at and play to get I can get to be relieved smaller here I like to say real glad to see this for us it's kinda different we normally do open road stuff and the reason we don't do it was actually supposed to be a noble title the beginning and the reason we made it linear was mostly just that we wanted to do something that was like a tennis trailer kind of thing and it's run in order to maintain that if the player can just wander off the path you know the kind of things were you know picking leprechauns you like we're going to kill your wife you don't show up with that you know this pot at the night midnight and then okay but I'm going to go fishing okay and of course lucky there we can't actually do the thing where you know the kidnapper falls to on that because there is I mean damages go back to check one or something and that's a thought of fun for anybody so it or you can do things like let's say that you have like like like a secret meeting you were supposed to be really quiet and everything is going to be like on the down low and then you show for a meeting in a monster truck which is something you can do in an open ball game and if you know it's something you just can roll with but what if you're really trying to do something that is really really tight to taste and really atmospheric it just kind of you know just concentrating on whatever momentum players in at the moment then you do lose our freedom so for us most of time if the player doesn't want to follow along on the story that pretty much means that they are and just going along the path at all I'd like there to stay in that room or maybe going you know backtracking to a certain point but if they keep going to the only against place that's really available them and sometimes we do gotta make that wider but it never gets so wide that that you can kind of see the other edge of the path so to speak it's very different for us so but we kind of fail the player that's what I guess sorry they know they're getting it issued I'm afraid we're out of time but we will stick around answer more questions um so thank you all for coming we all have twitter handles I believe I'm at Camp are with you ours it's my barbarian thing and that's taxi at school Mickey's Twitter my Fernando a spastic making a mic aki party there you go okay