Everything I Needed to Know About Game Writing I Learned From Star Trek 120
Evan Skolnick has been writing for comic books and games for a good, long while now. He thinks that the most important elements to good games writing can be found in one of the touchstones of nerd culture: Star Trek. In an hour-long presentation at GDC Austin today, he discussed some of the most important lessons that can be derived from the Star Trek franchise as regards storytelling, character development, and the importance of not starting a story with "all we have to do now is wait." Read on for notes from his equally informative and humorous look at crafting a great tale.
What can Star Trek teach any writer? Five simple things.Start with a Bang - It's vital to hook the audience almost immediately. It was important in 1966, and it's even more important today. The teasers at the start of the original series episodes were prescient. Today's 'finger on the remote' television watchers and game players have even less patience than 1966 audiences. All the movies got this right, even the slow-as dirt 'Motion Picture'. Next Generation didn't get it right in the first season or so; but they got better. He shows us clips from TOS and TNG to contrast. The TOS clip has a tense feeling (thematic music, red alert notice), with only a few clues as to what's going on. It immediately grabs the viewer and has them questioning what's on the screen in front of him. TNG's clip, by contrast, starts with Picard saying there's nothing to do but wait ... and then passes to a thrilling discussion between Geordi and Data about a model ship.
For game writing, starting with a short (emphasis on short) and gripping scene is the best way to get a player hooked. Focus only on the 'need to know' info. Don't cram the tutorial into the first minute of play. Delay the release of expository information as much as you can, keep them guessing without frustrating them. When you do have to release that information, have the player asking questions that can be answered by actually playing the game.
Defy Expectations - The original series was completely different than many other shows on television; even Spock was controversial. There was concern among the mainstream television folks that he 'looked like a devil.' They actually modified promotional stills to avoid the appearance of 'devilishness.' There was also concern that a rational, unemotional point of view would be uninteresting. Uhura is more obviously controversial; a female African American woman on the flagship of the fleet was pushing boundaries. They originally wanted a female first officer, and the character became a lieutenant because the studio 'sort of' won.
Specific episodes call this out more. "Devil in the Dark", with the tale of the Horta and her eggs, was very out of the ordinary for the time. The 'pure energy' Organians in another episode, facing down Starfleet and the Klingons, turned expectations on their head.
The move to Next Gen defied expectations in different ways. A French guy with an English accent as captain of the Enterprise? He was physically and temperamentally different than Shatner's character ... despite them hedging their bets with Riker. Data was an attempt to capture the essence of the Spock character while also turning things on their head. Spock has emotions but doesn't want them, Data doesn't and wants them. It allows for new interactions and possibilities, something expanded even further by having "Klingons as allies?" They were the fire for a lot of conflict in the original series, and things needed to be retconned in order to make the new vision of the race fit. The Borg were out of left field, completely different from almost any other thing seen in TV science fiction (except maybe the Daleks). A huge amount of fodder for the series, but something you wouldn't have expected if you look at the original series.
Game writers need to look at their work, then, with a critical eye towards culling cliches. Try to surprise your audience, and avoid leading the player on a straight and unwavering path to a goal. Avoid plodding 'missions' that lead to a goal they've seen for hours. Is there some way to change the mission midstream? The only catch there is that while players like to be surprised, they hate deus ex machina; make it come from the gameplay.
Externalize Internal Conversations - The Kirk/Spock/McCoy triumvirate is a great way to do this. Spock's superego vs. McCoy's id makes for entertaining television and allows Kirk's ego to come to a decision. It allows conversations we have in our head every day to be played out on screen.
When you make characters, ensure their personalities are well-differentiated. Games only have a limited amount of time to establish characterization, and people will muddy the lines between too-similar NPCs. This allows you to void clumsy narration, and provides the opportunity to have entertaining, sharp banter. It also allows for the chance to relieve stress through humor.
Use Classic Structure - The original series stuck very closely to the Aristotle idea of story structure. Setup, confrontation, and resolution makes for a nice graph of the tension during the story. Older stories tend to have a slope up from the baseline; starting with a bang has tension starting high and then dipping before coming back up over the course of the tale. The Monomyth of the Hero's Journey is also a very widely understood component of storytelling. Archetypes and the 'universal framework of stories' is something that is used by many authors across media. From the safe and sound setting of the 'Ordinary World', past the 'Supreme Ordeal', to the 'Return with the Elixir', it's something we've all seen before. (Quick screenshot of Star Wars points out that this has been used before in science fiction.)
Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan is the best example of this in Trek. Starting from the world of Kirk as an instructor at Starfleet, we're taken through the trials of Regulus to the 'death' of Spock to resurrect the Enterprise and Kirk's youth.
You don't have to use this pattern directly, but understanding the pattern is helpful as a guideline for writing good stories. Non-linear storytelling makes things more challenging, but the Hero's Journey is always helpful as a template.
Focus on Character - The hero should be a force within the plot. He should be a way to spur on the plot, to create conflict. Kirk is decisive, action-oriented, and takes risks. It's also important beyond these simple elements to ensure that the hero has something personal at stake. Conflict isn't meaningful unless there's something actually at risk. Finally, the hero should solve their own problems. Deus ex Machina is always disappointing; don't let 'luck' win the day.
For games, the player *is* the hero. They want to be the primary character in the tale, they want stuff to do, action. They want to feel like they're facing risk and danger. They also want to make decisions that have meaning; be the one that changes the world.
The villain, on the other hand, should be the flint for the hero's steel. Conflict should be created by their interaction. They should be more than a match for a hero. Heroes that beat wimpy villains look wimpy. Modern villains should not think they are the villains; in his story he *is* the Hero. He needs a believable motivation for doing what he does, on that note. At the end of the day, there needs to be a direct confrontation between the Hero and the Villain; Khan is a great exception to the rule.
Game writers should take time to view the story from the villain's point of view. Write the game's story from that POV as a useful way of looking at things differently. Make sure to examine the villain's behavior for internal logic and consistency. Are they needlessly crazy?
Perfect Trek Episode - You'd think the perfect episode would be one with space battles, fighting, and space babes. Instead, "City on the Edge of Forever" is often lauded as the best episode ever. Why is this? It defies expectations by placing things in the past as opposed to the future, and stakes Kirk's personal views deeply in the story. Contrast this with the two big favorites in TNG. "Best of Both Worlds", the Borg two-parter, has all the usual stuff. But the other one that everyone lauds quite heavily is "The Inner Light", the story where Picard lives an entire lifetime in a few moments.
What Inspires You? - The takeaway should be: everything can inspire good writing. Look at what you see as good work, and ask what makes it so. Ask what could have been done better, what you can do better.
To sum up: (Score:5, Funny)
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(That may be taken as a flame, but other than Timothy Zahn it's just the sad truth. Nerds will buy anything to get another hit of their favorite universe.)
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Borg == space zombies (Score:2)
Re:Borg == space zombies (Score:4, Interesting)
The theme of the ravenous revenant goes back further than Night of the Living Dead. Dracula was one of the ilk. The revenant stories belong with those fairy tales about things everybody wants but cannot have, like endless riches or immortality. The basic ideas is that if you knew what it would take to get those things, you wouldn't want them. People who fight becoming revenants aren't fighting for survival, they are fighting for a prolongation of their mortal state.
This makes a pretty good framework for telling a story, you just have to be creative about decorating that framework.
Now, what makes the Borg interesting is not that they are space zombies, but they are zombies with an ideology. That's a new wrinkle as far as I know. Zombies bite people for the same reason people scratch mosquito bites. It just feels good to do it. The Borg assimilate people not because of instinctual drives, but because of group aspirations.
And since they have an ideology, there is the possibility -- or perhaps the inevitability -- of hypocrisy. The Borg want you specifically your individuality. However you are not allowed to direct that individuality or benefit from it. Instead it is absorbed into the whole and used for the good of the whole. It is a form of radical egalitarianism, except that at the top everything is the queen who is allowed her exercise her own egoism freely. As such it is a metaphor for state socialism -- in fact for any social or political hierarchy where the people at the top control things for the "good of all".
Revisionist Borg Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
The original Borg kicked ass. Despite the range of Star Trek aliens, most of them amounted to humanoids with face paint. Even the plasmas and gases acted just like us. The Borg were different. They were collective. They couldn't be reasoned with or argued with. They couldn't be effectively attacked, because there was no one thing to attack. You really didn't even exist to them. They started chopping your ship up before they might even notice you. And when they did, they attacked and adapted and attacked again until you were assimilated. And they did it without fear or anger or hate or any other emotion or attribution that we could understand. That is what made them so creepy and cool as enemies.
The Borg became an instant success and rose to the top of the Star Trek food chain and the writers faced with a new popular antagonist turned the Borg into just another individual, reasonable, talkative character that made for easy writing.
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I watched a documentary which drew similar comparisons but with rape added in there too. Nasty aliens indeed...
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Cybermen came before the Borg (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cybermen came before the Borg (Score:4, Insightful)
However, the Borg are a collective where individual Cybermen can and do act independently. Personally I think of the Borg as a mix of zombies (convert you and your fellows to them), ants (hive with little individuality), rampaging robots (they have advanced teck and for the most part just walk all over Starfleet). IMO it's their organic / zombie nature that really messes with you as they are not going to kill you so much as eat your brains and send your body off to collect your friends and family. Because it's one thing for an intelligent toaster to attack someone it's another thing for the family pet to get rabies and attack you. Add to that the somewhat seductive nature of the "Borg queen" and it's IMO a fairly unique mix.
Lilly put it best... (Score:2)
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They tried all female borg ship but when they all got on the same cycle, the ship's plumbing got royally fucked up and the ship exploded.
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These guys should have taken a look at what a real scary robot looks like. [bitsofnews.com]
Starting with a bang in the first hour (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, I hate to tout my game review site, but this is exactly the thing I've been focusing on lately. Every week, I've been playing the first hour of different games from different genres and judging them entirely on this notion. I whole-heartedly agree that the first few moments of a TV show (Battlestar Galactica or even comedies with cold opens - like The Office - have been pulling this off pretty well lately) and the first few minutes to the first hour of a video game is crucial to capturing your audience's attention while developing the foundation for the rest of the experience. I've reviewed games with really good first hours like God of War 2 and Indigo Prophecy and games with really awful first hours.
Some of the best first hours of video games that I've played throw you right into a boss encounter: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Beyond Good and Evil come to mind immediately. This is almost as good as you can get when trying to start your game off with a bang.
http://thefirsthour.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
There you go if you're interested.
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As long as they're not framing the story. Nothing is more annoying to a viewer than overusing framed openings. Star Trek Enterprise did it all the time, which was REALLY annoying. The last season of SG-1 was going that way too. Now BSG is trying to horn in on the action by also forcing "drama" with framed stories.
Note to writers: If you can't build up the suspense by letting the story unfo
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Re:Starting with a bang in the first hour (Score:5, Interesting)
This technique makes a lot of sense in some stories. Especially stories that maintain a sense of intrigue by slowly revealing past events through flashbacks. But as of late, it's been abused to no end. Did SG-1 really need to open with the Stargate being zapped away? Did the Enterprise episode "Singularity" really need to open with everyone unconscious?
If the writers can't open the story without framing it up front, then their story probably isn't that interesting. Or at the very least, they're telling it wrong. (ex. Ent. Ep. "Similitude" was very similar to the Voyager episode "Demon". Yet "Demon" did not need to be framed in order to keep the viewer in suspense about the crew members having duplicates.)
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I agr
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Like Myst did... (Score:2)
Think of the opening dialogue in the first Myst [youtube.com]. You're hearing a narration from someone who's obviously in the midst of some sort of cataclysmic decision lamenting that something has been left open, and the potential for something "unknown" to happen. You (the character) investigate a thud, see something amazing and wonderous and suddenly.... you
I'll agree too (Score:3, Interesting)
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So I guess what I'm trying to say is: kudos. Maybe a review site can get that idea out of more potential victims' heads.
Thanks for the kudos. I'm not really expecting my site to make any waves in the industry, I guess that would be great if it did but I'm more just writing and reviewing because I like playing and writing about video games. I've also started writing my own game story (monomyth...) and I've realized how dull my first hour would probably be. It's gonna need pretty much a complete rewrite but if it is ever done I think it will be that much better.
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Wasn't this the case in KOTOR as well though, it's several hours into the game before you get Jedi powers etc.
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You just can't count on Cats to mod properly.
(which is why I'm posting, to undue the mod)
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And replying to GP, the first hour of a game is definitely not a total solid indicator of the overall quality of a game, but it's usually pretty accurate. There of course, some great exceptions.
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I think you missed something.... (Score:5, Insightful)
For the same reason that the best Outer Limits episode is "Demon with the Glass Hand" and one of the best 80's Twilight Zone episodes is "Shatterday": because Harlan Ellison wrote it. Good sci-fi starts with good writers.
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As Harlan Ellison often used to write, "it all starts with the word."
I don't know if you ever got the chance to read Ellison's original teleplay for "City On The Edge Of Forever". It was really good, but not the right length. Roddenberry was correct in asking Ellison to either cut it down to an hour, or lengthen it to two hours so they could make a two parter of it. Ellison was a little too full of himself to do this so the story had to be rewritten to fit the hour long format.
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I know that, that was my entire point--your point, while true, completely missed the crux of the topic.
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Instead, "City on the Edge of Forever" is often lauded as the best episode ever. Why is this?"
For the same reason that the best Outer Limits episode is "Demon with the Glass Hand" and one of the best 80's Twilight Zone episodes is "Shatterday": because Harlan Ellison wrote it. Good sci-fi starts with good writers.
Except that the final script for "City" bore almost resemblance to the original, so much so that Ellison asked to have his name removed from the production entirely. So perhaps good sci-fi starts with good edits to overrated writers.
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The City on the Edge of Forever is a classic Greek tragedy:
The hero is going to lose.
The here knows he is going to lose.
The hero knows there's nothing he can do about it.
We like the hero, and share his pain in an impossible situation. The result: gripping drama.
Generally, I find there were only a few clunker TNG episodes, while more than a few TOS episodes are clunkers 40 years later. A few just plain haven't aged well; others were silly to begin with. But the best ones remain excellent to this d
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a female African American woman (Score:2, Funny)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nireah_Johnson [wikipedia.org]
(among others)
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"all we have to do now is wait" (Score:5, Funny)
I think Samuel Beckett would disagree
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Waiting can work if you do it right. The problem is that most writers don't. Good writers can get away with anything. Bad writers would do best to stick to the interesting bits and keep the action going. I've read really badly written books that were still entertaining because the author knew he'd better stick to his few strong points.
And if your plot hits a black hole... (Score:1, Troll)
Moral of that one is, the story's gotta END. (Score:2)
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In a crime story, I enjoy trying to guess the culprit before the detective comes to the conclusion. Christie usually presents you a ton of suspects, each of them with an equally valid reason to be the murderer. One of them, most often the most credible one, gets murdered too somewhere after about 2/3 of the book.
Then, somewhere in the last 5 pages, she pulls some clue out of her hat that nobody but the detective could get, eit
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It's not that studios don't understand, it's that they would go out of business. There's a reason why high brow diverse movies don't sell as well, the population is just not interested. Writers wouldn't have jobs without the studios. And in GAMING the game itself being fun and looking good is the more important elements.
Nobody's going to care about the great story of a shitty game, the job of developers is to combine those el
Why Star Trek? (Score:2)
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IIRC, the old DOS graphical adventure Trek games (25th Anniversary Game, Judgement Rites) were relatively good. And who knows; maybe some of the newer adventure ones were too, like A Final Unity. But that's not surprising, since (being adventure games) they were heavily based on the story.
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Hey, they could be relevant in 2007 if somebody ported them to PDAs (and the low graphics resolution and point-and-click interface would work well on them, too!).
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Somebody mod the parent of this post up. (Score:1)
However much I love Star Trek TV shows and movies, Star Trek video games suck.
great (Score:1)
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Star Trek in many cases created the cliches, and then kept using them.
Besides which, most of the plot devices used in Star Trek had already been done many times over in written scifi previously.
Re:great (Score:4, Funny)
Yep, they sure dodged that bullet.
Sure, and that leads to... (Score:2)
I really, really did not like The DaVinci Code. It struck me as profoundly stupid and irritating. However -- I understand why it was such a huge hit. It's diabolically crafted to keep a reader with a short attention span turning the pages. Each page is thoroughly larded with plot twists, exotic locations, and arcane "facts".
The open
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Perhaps this is why video games usually make lousy movies.
No, thats just because of the lousy film directors screwing up the story so much it becomes nothing like the game.
Take Doom as an example, the story was easy to understand, my 5 year old cousin could grasp it:
Humans create teleporters, they test them, some weird stuff happens (people coming back screwed up, screaming etc), demons come through and kill everyone, you are sent in to check it out, all the team is killed but you, you need to kill the demons and turn off the teleporter.
Yet, the film was pretty d
Khan is no exception (Score:5, Insightful)
Direct confrontations do not always involve fisticuffs (although with Kirk, they usually do).
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I have to admit that this movie is the movie that made me fall in love with Trek at the time, even though I hadn't seen the episode from TOS where they first meet Khan. This movie is all about the showdown, and it's got a climax that very few Trek movies or episodes were able to live up to. The one movie that I think lived up to that kind of a climax was "First Contact", where Picard is on a mission to destroy the borg
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Utter brilliance.
Re:Khan is no exception (Score:4, Funny)
http://khaaan.com/ [khaaan.com]
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There was one thing that really cheesed me about Wrath of Khan: they kept harping about Khan's intelligence (which he was), but the writer's gave no good example of it. The surprise attack on Enterprise only happens because of a mistake on Kirk's part, not due to Khan's intelligence.
For example, it would have played better with Khan hacking the Enterprise's control systems to cause them to lower shields. Of course this was the early 80's so I'll cut them some slack there.
It would have been better t
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I agree about his intelligence though. And the 2-dimensional thinking thing is a really good example.
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I don't like being the centre of the universe (Score:2, Insightful)
Some people like that, I don't. I hate it when I play a game only to realize that everything that happens in the game revolves around me. I guess it makes the story interesting for the player, but it doesn't make it believable, because that's not how
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One of my favourite aspects of escapism in computer gaming is the exploration of whole new worlds - for instance, I loved Half-Life 2 not for the fact I was Gordon Freeman, but for the ability to (albeit briefly) visit this subdued, subtly descr
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While the player certainly partakes in the lion's share of the important actions (and let's face it - a game where you spent the entire space-war flying crates of socks and replacement spark plugs between depots would be boring), it is always from the perspective of being 'just another pilot'. You get medals and awards, but you're always part of a unit and briefed as if you are nothing particularly extraordinary.
Even though you
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A good example of this is the classic game Star Control II, (now available as opensource awesome [sourceforge.net]) which was a marvelous space epic. But what it did really WELL was convey the feeling that the galaxy was proceeding along, whether or not you did anything or not. Now, if you didn't do anything, it would proceed right along to a lot of planets being blow
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Sweet! (Score:2, Funny)
Specifically, most FPS online multiplayer shooters and MMORPG-with-PvP duplicate that episode with the ghost creature thingie that "fed on emotions of anger!"
The crew and some Klingons were trapped on the Enterprise, killing each other over and over again, only to be revived and restored to go back into it again.
Oh, and Kirk's solution doesn't work. Tried it numerous times in Quake CTF way back when. Nobody listens. They just kee
Does that include game endings? (Score:2)
I absolutely love Tre
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Oh yeah, the highly effective "if you don't do what we want, we'll kill ourselves!" threat that's apparently an important feature of Starfleet training. I thought only TNG used it, but I recently saw a TOS episode that did exactly the same.
"All we have to do now is wait" (Score:2)
Absolute rules are crutches. Everybody has them, but br
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Daleks and Cybermen talking smack to each other in the recent series had me in stiches. I was waiting for the Dalek to deliver a "Yo' momma" joke and the cyberman to say "Oh no you didn't".
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