Laying the Groundwork for Great Narrative, Part One
By Ed Kuehnel, Mobile Game Doctor Narrative Director
A number of factors must come together to ensure you don’t waste time and money (or worse, generate chaos) integrating a narrative into your game that will attract and retain players and set the game apart from a crowded field in its product category. Thankfully, all of these factors are under your control. In this series of intermittent blog posts on narrative in games, we’ll cover the processes and personnel decisions that need to come together to lay the groundwork for success in storytelling.
We’ll start with choosing the right kind of writer for your project.
Stephen King’s On Writing is partly a memoir and partly advice to aspiring writers. In it, King divides writers into two broad categories. To paraphrase, there are World Builders and People-Persons.
World Builders
World Builders tend to be introverts (even more so than the typical writer). Their tastes lean toward epic stories, usually fantasy and sci-fi, and they thrive on creating lush settings: planets, universes, cities, tribes, alien races, kingdoms, dystopias, and all the systems, societies, and large-scale conflicts that make them tick.
The characters World Builders create often feel at home in these worlds but come across as one-dimensional in more realistic story settings. Dialog is not where these writers typically shine, as they are less energized by human interaction in general and don’t excel at conveying emotion on the page. However, World Builders are often great at writing lore. They would rather create an interstellar ark carrying its multi-generational occupants through the void of space at sub-light speeds, pursued by a mysterious “Centauri Society,” than make sure the protagonist’s love interest isn’t underwritten.
Remember that friend who introduced you to Dungeons & Dragons and spent weeks planning campaigns, complete with intricate maps and TONS of flavor text?
That’s a World Builder, alright.
People-Persons
People-Person writers are the World Builders’ more annoyingly extroverted cousins, whose relative emotional intelligence usually pushes them toward drama or comedy, two sides of the same coin. They are nonstop people-watchers, and discovering eccentric individuals, places, or things that aren’t already well known energizes them, because those discoveries become building blocks for great fiction later. This sort of material, whether it comes from real-life interactions, documentary footage, or stumbling onto someone’s bizarro YouTube channel, is considered gold by People-Persons. Using it to inspire settings and characters adds the realism needed to give those story elements an aura of authenticity and, above all, helps the People-Person “avoid cliché like the clap.”
Even when writing for ex-special forces mercenaries with axes to grind and chips on their shoulders, it’s important to People-Persons that the words coming out of those characters’ mouths sound like something someone would actually say. Dialog like “Damn it, Johnson! I’m too old for this” or “Tell me what I’m doing here, MacVickers” is kryptonite to People-Persons, especially if someone has already decided the head merc should look like Jason Statham, only with different-colored hair, and that his name should be “Lance Strikeheart.”
Given the topics and content of his novels, John Irving, the well-known author of The World According to Garp, is very likely a People-Person sort of writer.
So, which do you need?
As you might suspect, the type of game you’re creating determines the sort of writer you need.
World Builder
If your game’s story can be described as high fantasy or hard science fiction, if it features characters, settings, and stories of an epic nature in which dialog takes a back seat to interesting scenarios, technology, kingdoms at war, or nations in conflict, or if the world you’re creating is a sandbox for players to tell their own stories in, you’re likely better off with a World Builder who has the stamina to imagine these worlds on a grand scale and write it all down for you.
People-Person
But if your game relies heavily on comedy, drama, or romance, and you want players to identify with your characters rather than see them as a power fantasy, you’ll need a People-Person.
Of course, both types of writers can work together beautifully on a project that requires the talents of each, as long as their roles and expectations are clearly defined and your quality-control feedback loop is finely tuned to funnel their work to the appropriate editors (more on this to come).
Regardless, having the right type of writer on your project is paramount to its success. It’s one of the many reasons small studios working on a variety of games are smart to outsource their writing: they can match each project with a writer who’s a good fit. Getting this wrong is like hammering a square peg into a round hole and then asking the rest of your team to design a game around it, a costly and morale-squashing mistake.
