Readers and critics often talk about plot holes, those spots in a story where the writer didn't explain how the characters got from the crashing airship to the top of the volcano without getting hurt.

Recently, I spoke to a group of people at my work to explain how you write a game story, and it felt a lot like writing intentional plot holes into a story. I went with Little Red Riding Hood as an example. Of course, this has already been made into a game called The Path, but I haven't played it so this isn't about that one. Here is a rough transcript of my short talk:

As a writer, sometimes my job is to decide whether the made up word “dino puffle” is hyphenated, or whether Captain Rockhopper is actually a pirate or just an inveterate liar. But mostly, my job is (in collaboration with dozens of other people) to create a place for stories. Which is a little different than telling a story. Think of it as trying to trick a player into telling you a specific story.

Let's use Little Red Riding Hood as an example. You are allowed to tell the player what they are capable of, where the story takes place, what the other characters are doing; but you can't tell the story. How do you make them tell you the story of Little Red Riding Hood?

In games, the star of the story, the main character, is the player. But you don't know your main character, not even their gender or age. So our story cannot start, “Once upon a time, there was a girl named Little Red Riding Hood that went into the woods to see her Grandmother”. Instead, our story starts, “Once upon a time, there were woods, your Grandmother lives in them, and there is a path to get there.”

Game stories are often told through details---art, sound, and other elements of the world reinforce the story that we want the player to tell. Our Red Riding Hood was told that she must stay on the path on the way to her Grandmother's house. So when our player/Red Riding Hood comes to the shortcut through the woods, what does it look like? Is the art foreboding and dark? Does the regular path look a little boring from here on out? Can we use music to bring up some tension at this point? These details are incredibly important to giving the player what they need to tell their story.

Another key part of stories is the driving reason for action. The thing that makes this particular part of these characters' lives worth telling. Why does it matter if Red Riding Hood gets to her Grandma?

It is a very different story if I say “Red Riding Hood was out one day picking flowers. On the other side of the scary woods, her grandmother was sick. Her grandmother died." It's still a story, and one driven by the player, but we don't want to tell it. So, we give our player the information that Red has medicine and food for her grandma.

Consequently, our player's actions must affect the world in ways that we set up. When she gives her the medicine and food, and Grandma gets better. We wouldn't want to forget this facet, and leave Grandma simply standing there, freshly arrived from the wolf's stomach.

If we give our players the setting, and some characters, and some reasons for action, will they tell us the story of Little Red Riding Hood? Probably something similar, but each one will be a little bit different. Each one will be their story of saving Grandma from the big bad wolf. Though I'm the writer of the game, I am not the only one telling a story. The players will tell the stories, and I work to make them as compelling and rich as possible.

Bonus! - I've described this as a single-player game. But I'd be curious to see how it would change as a multiplayer game or an MMO. If anyone feels like tackling that, post it in the comments.

Hello. These Side Quests will be small posts in between the longer weekend ones.

I saw a neat article at Quarter to Three about a character that is in the background of Assassin's Creed IV. It's very short, go read it :)

I love that the author of the article creates a little story just from some snippets of animation. I thought it was a cool example of how character can be developed in subtle ways.

Also, I highly recommend Brandon Cachowski-Schnell. He has a very unique, funny voice and his more personal articles, like this one, are fantastic. In addition to Quarter to Three, he also wrote for No High Scores if you'd like to read mor

So, as I mentioned in my post about tabletop games, I've been playing RPGs since I was a kid. This has waxed and waned, but it's certainly been going strong for the last few years. In the last couple of years, I've been trying new things. Despite "D&D" being used as short-hand for the entire medium, they are thousands of different systems to use. The most popular games are ones that follow the trends set by the ubiquitous Dungeons & Dragons. You and your friends play through the stories of heroes in a fantasy world. But there are tons in other genres, from the expected (like space opera), to the prosaic like a game about fire fighters, to totally off-the-wall ideas like a game about playing a living Twinkies on a post-apocalyptic Earth.

But there are many systems that don't use any kind of setting or genre, they only provide a framework in which you play through whatever stories you make up. My favourite of these is Fate Core. Fate was one of the first games I tried outside of D&D and I stuck with it through a few different variations. It was a breath of fresh air to have something that allowed so much freedom. And that's really where Fate shines, it lets you take all kinds of ideas and turn them into a game. Hence, the mish mash of heroes they use on their book cover (the image above).

From this point on, I'm getting into the nitty gritty. If you're not into RPGs, it may not make sense, but I'm putting this here as fair warning :)

The one big innovation in Fate is the aspect system. Aspects are short descriptive phrases that are an attribute of important things in the world (usually characters). So, in a Fate game about cowboys, a player's character might have the aspect "Fastest draw in the county". That is chosen and worded by the player, not selected from a pre-written list. It is true, and it will come up in game.

And that's why aspects are so interesting to me. We all find ways to describe our characters in RPGs, but in Fate, your description becomes a functional part of the character. In many ways, it breaks down the barrier between the narrative of the character and his mechanical actions (fluff and crunch, in RPG gamer terms). Because a player can literally direct the story using their aspects, it entices players to make "meaty" aspects, ones that have external story built in. The above aspect could be changed to "An even faster draw than my father". Now the character is still a quick gunslinger, but he also has a rivalry, either open or concealed, with his father, who was also a renowned gunslinger. Considering each character gets several aspects, it means that they  can have a lot of pull in the story.

However, if you had a whole party of characters constantly pulling the spotlight onto their own personal story (and for the most part, players love nothing more than a little spotlight on their character), you would have a very disjointed narrative. The system limits this in play by using a resource called fate points, and it tries to head this off at the pass (following our Western motif) with collaborative creation.

Each player gets a few fate points at the start of each session. They can use them to power an aspect to do something for them. If we go with the previous example of "An even faster draw than my father", we can see that this would help the character in a duel by giving him a bonus to his Shooting roll. But it could also be useful if he needed a contact in town. The player could invent one that knew his character's father and pay a fate point for it. Now, if the player is out of fate points, his ability to pivot the story around his character is gone. But, and here is another lovely bit of design from Evil Hat, if the GM uses an aspect to complicate life for the character, he gives him a fate point. For our gunslinger, this could come in the form of a band of outlaws looking to prove themselves but killing the prodigy in front of the whole town. It rewards the player for coming up with an interesting aspect to hang a story on, and as a GM, I love anything that gives me more direct hooks to the player. It prevents me from calling story and conflict down from the blue.

Now, before the game even starts, there is the collaborative creation. Your first session of Fate begins with the GM and all the players sitting down and coming up with the key parts of your game together. That includes both the characters and some starting locations or stories. This is such a great part of the game. When it goes well, you all feel connected and driven to play through the story that was created. The GM and the other players don't have to worry about the game getting derailed to follow one character's quest to see his sick grandma -- That quest, if it is important, will spring from that initial creation session. The creation is structured according to a process in the book so that each character has already met and interacted with a few of the others, they share common ground, and they even have some aspects that are inspired by these backstory crossovers.

After creating the characters and the setting together, the fun of the game is in watching it all play out. The system is fairly light in terms of tactical decisions and it uses a lot of abstraction in conflicts to make them go by simply.  This means that you can usually get to the heart of the story quickly and see how it all pans out.

Now, Fate isn't a perfect game. It certainly has drawbacks compared to some of the other systems I've played in. It doesn't handle long-running campaigns as well as something like Pathfinder or 13th Age. That's because there is little mechanical change from the early game to the late game. Character's capabilities can increase, both by getting higher bonuses and by getting wholly new skills, but it'll still feel much the same in terms of gameplay. Also, it requires creative buy-in and a desire to see a unique story play out. If you want a story and setting ready-made for you and your group, there are better games for that.

And, that core concept that I just gushed over (aspects), may not be what you want as a player or a GM. But as a writer who loves games, and who loves when mechanics are story are inextricably linked, I think it is amazing. I suppose it's no surprise that a game that rewards creatively worded phrases is a hit with a writer. I suppose if there was a game that let you draw for bonus points most artists would dig it as well. I will say that if you feel like seeing how a particular kind of story will play out (and you really are interested in the story), there are few better games for it.

For those who want to hear more about this, I'm going to write a post on how to get the most out of that collaborative creations in a little while. For a different kind of game that I also really enjoy, look for an upcoming post on 13th Age.

I knew that Bastion was something special as soon as I saw a trailer for it. (If you haven't played it, here is a good clip from of the opening). The player's actions were narrated by a gruff old cowboy voice that oozed charm. This one simple thing made me both incredibly excited and a little heartbroken.

On the one hand, it showed how easily strides could be made in game narrative. And this is something I already knew intuitively, but it provided a great concrete example. I mean, video games are very young as a narrative form. You would think we'd be coming up with cool ways to tell stories through them all the time. But, though there is always movement, it isn't the breakneck pace we might expect from a new medium. But, this lovely little conceit of having the players actions narrated in real time was a definite step forward. Every game that used that tool after it owed a debt to the creators of Bastion.

And this brings me to the heartache. It was an undiscovered trick that had been revealed by someone else. When it was made, I was still working in QA, spending my free time trying to find ways to create actual games as opposed to scripts that might maybe someday be in a game. I saw the trailer for Bastion and felt this pit in my gut. It let me know that there were some very creative and brilliant people that were way ahead of me when it came to game narrative. It was probably one of the biggest motivators for me to work on my game writing.

Now, if the conceit had been the only thing going for the game, or it had been badly used, it would have faded away both from my mind and those of other gamers. But Bastion succeeded due to some clever decisions.

The first was the voice of the narrator. It was deeply rooted in the world of the game. From his first gravelly words, Rucks lets you know that this game is going to be stylized, but serious. It then comes as no surprise when the world starts forming around the player's character (The Kid) and you're confronted with strange creatures like windbags or gasfellas. It all flows properly in this kind of fragmented but beautiful post-apocalypse. And it was kicked off by the art and Rucks' voice.

The second is that Rucks will never repeat a phrase. The first time the player smashes a bunch of boxes looking for items (or just because smashing stuff is fun), Rucks makes a comment. After that, you'll never hear it again. This is nice for the player because it prevents him from hearing a line over and over. But more importantly, it maintains the illusion that Rucks is a real person. He is a character in the world, but if he were to repeat the same phrases each time the player did a certain action (like falling off a platform), he would quickly become just an extension of the game's mechanics---and an annoying one at that. With him saying each line only once, it feeds into the fiction that he is telling a story, and not belabouring details that we already know.

I highly recommend this game for people that like challenging action games or great storytelling. I believe it's available on basically every system from last gen (there is even an HTML 5 version), and I'm very excited for Transistor, the next game from the same team (Supergiant).

This is a story I've recently come back to after having written the intro years ago. I still really like the introduction, but I'm not sure I know where to go. I've rewritten what comes after a few times, but it's a lot to tackle.

This was originally planned to be a short story for Here Be Monsters. If I do complete it, it may end up being on the long side of that format. Or perhaps I can find a way to establish a sci-fi universe in just a couple thousand words.

Anyway, here it is so far:

Remigrants

At first, space was filled with young people. It was the bold, the foolish, the restless that felt Earth was too constraining to really find yourself. It would be hard to blame them, then, for not keeping up proper records of what was going on at home. Certainly, many of them had that nostalgia of an emigrant, but did any of them bother to write more than a few wistful blog posts to be archived onto the ship computers? It seems the first travellers were unconcerned with where they came from, almost desperate in their attempts to establish themselves as the new humanity, one that was untethered from the nations of old and belonging only to their ship, or their colony, or perhaps nowhere at all. And this generation raised the next, the first humans that were born on other worlds, looking up at different suns. They were told of Earth, but I don't believe they understood it as an actual place. It was a land in the mists of history, a world of societies perpetually frozen at whatever time their parents left it.

It seems some wished to see their true homeworld, and made the dangerous and long journey back, but there were very few. After all, what discoveries could be found on a planet that had been painstakingly mapped for centuries? Most were finding ways to push themselves beyond the limits that even their parents had come up against.

A third and then fourth generation were borne to the star-faring humans. And, in the slapdash society of shipmates and survivalist colonies, there was little schooling, and almost no one became what would have been called a teacher. By the time I was growing up, the Earth was impossibly far-off and mystical. It could not really exist, we thought, not as our parents spoke of it. I think we would all have wanted to go there given the chance, but its location was in only the most archaic of databases. Even then, no one had bothered to map it to the new navigation systems. It wasn't quite a lost planet, but it was certainly hard to find.

All this, I suppose, is just a listing of excuses. Because, when the time came that it was imperative – absolutely essential – that we get back to Earth, we could not or would not. I wonder now, if it was because we were deeply afraid. What had become of the planet in our absence? And what would they think of us, the descendants of the young men and women that abandoned them?

-- From the journal of Anthony Ipswich

It's one of those last phrases there that has been repeated by the social-viruses since The Call. It was often paraphrased into “What has become of Earth? And what will they think of those who abandoned them?” It was a kind of anti-anthem to the Returners, whose bravado-tinted nostalgia was urging people to join their convoy back to Earth. But, even those that were willing to go back had been tainted by that crystallization in Ipswich's now-public journal – we'd already missed that boat. The goal was simply contain the damage before Earth's infected masses could follow us out and stumble upon our oldest cities.

The thought of Markhesh being bombarded by the un-spliced humans of Earth was enough to make my skin crawl. Some Returners were hoping to reason with them, but I was certain of what awaited them.

Once, I'd touched down to help some people out of a colony that was being overrun by an aggressive spore-thing. At first it was just one family, but then another came aboard. Even as I realized what was going on and rushed to lift off, more and more piled into the hold. I shouted to back away, but they were already past reason. They were just stampeding with the absolute terror of those on a dying planet. It is a special panic when you know that there is no place in the whole world where you can be safe. I started the engines while they were still clambering on the hull from the outside. The shockwave killed most of them instantly, I hoped, because that was better than the creeping demise of the spores.

People like that is all they would find in the Sol system. They would hear no reason. They would simply beach themselves upon the shores of Markhesh or Asp and spew their plague onto our people.

There were scientists working on a splice to protect us, but we knew that the Earthlings would have worked on that as well. And, having failed, would have made the disease nearly impervious to further attempts.

Others tried to determine the origin of it. The feeling was that it was no accidental creation, though whether it was made on Earth or another planet wasn't clear. But even studying the disease was a kind of concession to inaction. After all, unless you were prepared to go to Earth and get proper samples, how much headway were you going to make?

I took advantage in my own way, ferrying people from the baseworld of Asp to points further out. For two months, I spent every day in transit, never staying in port longer than it took to fuel up and take supplies. It was gruelling but lucrative. And, part of me felt that moving people away from the dangerous zones was all I could do. I was simply a transport ship. Some of my colleagues had signed on as Returners, but that was a one-way trip as far as I was concerned.

“Do you ever wonder what it will be like after the Earthlings hit Asp?” I asked Cassidy.

“I don't even know what it will be like when they get there. And I plan on being far away from Asp when that garbage rolls in.”

“Well, exactly. The only people getting off-planet are those with ships, and the rich people we're hauling. Imagine it, Cass, Trellis is going to be full of managers, business owners, and theory-cranks from the uni-collective. Who the fuck is going to feed them? Or build their homes?”

“Ha, can't say I'll be sorry to see a few of those Viva-Tech guys get their hands dirty for once.”

“I know what you mean, Cass, but if they don't get spread around -- hell, maybe even if they do -- they're going to drag the planets down just the same as the refugees. I get a feeling there won't be much reason to haul once that hits.”

“Oh, shut it. You're always waiting on the next thing that's going to ruin your business. You should keep a blog about it: “How to run a successful shipping company by being a total fucking pessimist.”

Firaxis' remake of the classic PC game XCOM was a huge title for me when it released in 2012. I was a big fan of the original game, and found the new version to be an incredibly fun spiritual sequel. There is no better way to experience the thrill and terror of an alien invasion.

It contains a reward loop that digs its hooks in, tense tactical battles, and a moderately deep strategic level. It does all of that stuff well. But what it does amazingly well is make character death an exciting part of playing.

Now, there is a caveat to all of this: Ironman Mode. This optional mode makes it so that you cannot reverse the choices you make by loading a previous save. You have only one save file, and it is continually auto-saving so that all decisions are final. I firmly believe that the game is at its best when played like this. You could, of course, play it like this without turning that mode on. But it's there because you'll want to revert a decision at some point. You will regret something when you play this game. Ironman makes you move on despite the regret.

And that's the crux of what I love about it. You feel like your choices matter. Your squad of soldiers from around the world is thrown into bizarre firefights with horrific aliens where lots of things can kill them. If you fall behind in the arms race with the aliens, they die. If you move them to risky positions on the battlefield, they die. If you don't know your enemy's capabilities, they die. Despite the random number generator the game uses to decide what hits or misses, the ball is almost always in your court. And, until several failures pile up, you live with your bad calls. A failed mission is a setback, but maybe one that you can fight back from. Maybe it was what you needed to rethink your strategy and renew your attack. It's both stressful and exhilarating.

It stands out against the vast majority of games in which the only way to progress is to succeed. In a standard single-player game like Uncharted, if you fail at a challenge, the game stops. It seems to make sense (why wouldn't you want to succeed at a challenge), but it creates a very flat experience. It creates a story in which the character always succeeds (since the deaths never happened in terms of the final game story) except where the designers of the game dictated some kind of setback.

Now, other strategy games do what XCOM does and have been for many years. But there is a difference between losing a unit of infantry in a Total War game and losing Jake Smith from Australia in XCOM. It goes to great lengths to make you care about the characters. Even though they can be replaced (apparently XCOM has no problem with recruitment), there is a feeling of loss each time a soldier dies. And the methods the game uses to foster that connection are pretty clever. Every soldier has a name (which you can change) and a nationality. They also gain new abilities, speak in a variety of voices, and (as of the Enemy Within expansion) are awarded medals. All of this helps establish them as a specific soldier as opposed to one more grunt on the front lines.

The Souls series (Demons' Souls, Dark Souls) also use this concept. Those games build failure into the game, making a death a part of the experience as opposed to a simple game over screen. I think it's one of many ways those games have found of creating an engaging narrative. But, in the interests of keeping this post manageable, I'll speak about those games later.

This creates a story that is much more varied. Sure, I was able to defeat the aliens in New York, but I lost Jean-Luc Lamy, the French support soldier that had been in every mission since the start of the game. And now the next mission isn't just another bug hunt outside a crashed UFO, but a shot at vengeance for Lamy's comrades.

This kind of player-created narrative (often called inferred narrative) is one of my favorite things in gaming. And while it would be possible in any game with random events, the emotional connection caused by the high stakes, personal investment, and humanization of game characters makes XCOM really excel at it.

So, go get some fine soldiers killed and enjoy the hell out of the game.