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Everything I Needed to Know About Game Writing I Learned From Star Trek
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.
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.
"Stick to a formula ... but change everything! Also, I like Trek."
They weren't completely new after all. That's not a bad thing, because zombies are cool. Borg even eat your brain, in a metaphorical way.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Start with a Bang - It's vital to hook the audience almost immediately.
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/
There you go if you're interested.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
"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?"
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.
As opposed to all those female African American men.
the importance of not starting a story with "all we have to do now is wait."
:)
I think Samuel Beckett would disagree
...invert some kind of particle beam or pull another deus ex machina out of your ass.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I mean, honestly... If someone learned everything they needed to know from Star Trek, it'd stand to reason that someone would be able to release a good game based on Star Trek.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
What about the large percentage of Star Trek episodes which were cliched, overly formulaic, or just poorly written?
I'll agree too. Some of the worst videogame implementations of the Monomyth (since it's mentioned in the summary) went and made me do boring, mundane tasks for hours on end, apparently for no other reason that the Monomyth said they must start with the hero as an everyman Joe. So, same as an action movie starts with showing you the hero for 10 minutes being an ordinary father and good cop (or good soldier, or guy on a trip, or whatever), some games seemed to feel a need to stretch this proportional to the game's length, and made me go through hours on end of doing mundane, uninteresting, un-heroic things.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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 opening paragraph is simply "Plan 9" awful, but it is full of colorful action, key to hooking people who aren't likely to make it through the first page. It compares with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's opening to Paul Clifford:
Amusing as it is, you can't keep this sort of thing up long enough to fill an entire book without the story becoming really, really pointless. But it is a hook. Perhaps this is why video games usually make lousy movies.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The Borg you describe were not the originals. The Queen was an invention of the movies. "You," Casper the Friendly individual Borg and all that other Unimatrix Zero Voyager back story came crap along later.
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.
Direct confrontations do not always involve fisticuffs (although with Kirk, they usually do).
Writers (good ones, anyways) understand this; sooner or later, the pool of dramatic possibilities for any set of characters and situations runs dry. Good writers bring the story to some form of closure, leave it behind, and go on to other plots/settings/characters. Studios are constitutionally incapable of understanding this dramatic reality ('cause they're not in the business of telling stories, just in the business of maximizing income); they insist on The Next Generation or Son Of Shrek 5 or The Phantom Menace or Rocky 17 or whatever sorry drivel, because there is still a pool of interest in the story, which eventually dries up as the third or fourth variation on "Alien Virus Infects Starship Crew And Makes Them Act Weird/Change Allegiance/Crumble Into Powder..." wrings the last cent out of the franchise and wrings moans or yawns from the declining fan base.
Either the story line comes to a conclusion, or the story line dribbles to a halt as the ideas run out. A. Conan Doyle recognized that, that's why he threw Holmes off a cliff. Agatha Christie recognized it and offed Hercule Poirot (although that may well have been more for dog-in-the-manger reasons).
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
"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."
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 real life looks. I hated that in morrowind, they created this huge world... where nothing happened if the player didn't come along. Obviously, creating a truly living world is very hard, but you can at least try to convince the player (me) that the world will go on without them. Morrowind utterly failed at that, and by this advice, that is apparently a good thing.
Similarly, I hated the Kirk character. Partly because he was way too stupid to feel like a true captain, but also just because the world seemed to always revolve around him. Nothing ever happened that was completely unrelated to him. In TNG, this was not the case. Sure, Picard ended up in situations where he could change the world, but these moments where very rare, and he wasn't the only one.
Okay, maybe that's taking things a bit too far, but you get the idea.
The character of Lilly in "First Contact" put it best when she called them "bionic zombies". The Borg were an excellent, if not particularly original, creation, but by about 4th time they were used, it got old. The character of the Borg Queen was interesting, but it just pointed out the absurdity that 99% of the Borg were male humans. The only non-male Borg were 7 of 9 and one or two of the assimilated crew of the Enterprise from the movie.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Think of the opening dialogue in the first Myst. 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're somewhere else and have to figure out what's going on.
That hook was (IMO) one of the biggest reasons for Myst's popularity. It (combined with the immersive -- for the time -- environment you found yourself in) got people involved with the game's situation right away.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
When I read this part "Heroes that beat wimpy villains look wimpy" I immediately thought of the Prince fighting the Vizier in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time How true.
> Everything I Needed to Know About Game Writing I Learned From Star Trek
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 keep fighting.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I think my favorate version of Cybermen was (I think 2nd) the ones who had the high pitched voices.
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".
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
It's amusing and profound.
However much I love Star Trek TV shows and movies, Star Trek video games suck.
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
You, and other people (this article's writer included), are missing one key reason WHY television shows use this kind of frame-work: If the first 2 minutes do not "grab" the viewer, they might change the channel. So in that light, opening with everyone unconcious is NOT bad story telling.
I seriously hope the author isn't including the cliche Deus Ex Machina endings that most Star Trek episodes have. (i.e. The starship crew end up in an impossible situation, until at the last second (or five minutes of the episode) someone reverses the polarity of the reflector screen/engineer increases power by 103.387% to the engines to hit Warp Factor 12.2/Q comes along and snaps his fingers and everything is back to normal/We're human, you're not and that makes us worth not killing.)
I absolutely love Trek with the social issues and technology it brings with it, but... gah! So many times the endings have little consequence and wrap up just too perfectly. The best Trek episodes (and BSG pulls it off much better) have endings where you question the end results or the result causes a profound change.
The end to City on the Edge of Forever has impact because Kirk is forced to make a decision to let someone die because of the impact it has on the future. In Enterprise, there was an episode where the crew steals a reactor from another ship and strands innocent people in the middle of nowhere; a choice that leaves you questioning the result. Heck, Star Trek III works to a certain extent because the theme is "Can the need of the One outweigh the needs of the Many?"
Last thing the gaming public at large needs is yet another 60+ hour game with a tacked on 3 minute ending without any real resolution. As other posters have said, Star Trek works because of good writing that works across genres.
He lived 35-40 years of a man's ("Kamen's") life, but not the whole life. Also, it was not "a few moments." The first thing he asked when he 'woke up' was "How long?" and Riker responded, "Twenty, twenty-five minutes."
That's a lot more than a few moments.
It's a sublime situation. Hoping to hang on long enough to be rescued (by others or by circumstance), when you have no idea how long it will take, having no possibility of saving yourself, is a different emotional situation and one that belongs in gaming. Beginning a story that way would set a really bleak emotional tone -- but hey, Half-Life 2 set a bleak emotional tone from the beginning, and it wasn't exactly a failure, critically or commercially.
Absolute rules are crutches. Everybody has them, but bragging about them doesn't make any sense. All they do is define your limitations: what the next generation will rebel against.
It's kind of like he was the CEO of the Enterprise.