Author Archives: David Mullich
Learn Too Write Good Even If U Want Too Werk In Gamez
Gamers are very good at using digital interfaces: controllers, keyboard macros, heads-up displays, and graphical user interfaces. When playing a fast-paced games, they need to issue command quickly, precisely, and clearly. However, to be a professional game developer, you also need to be good at human interfaces; that is, you need to be able to communicate well with other people.
Game development is a business, and all business is communication:
- Publisher to Customer
- Developer to Publisher
- Boss to Team
- Team to Boss
- Team Member to Team Member
In most cases, team development is a team sport, not an isolated activity. Game developers are constantly communicating with each other: across cubicles, at the water cooler, and in meetings. Yet not all communication is spoken, much of it is written. If team members are not co-located, much of their communication is done through instant messaging or emails.
Now, when you are sending an instant message to a fellow team member, you can get way with the informal communication style most of us use when texting a friend: for example, “Tried uploading file, no luck 4 now. Will try again l8r. Sorry!!! ”
But when writing to a potential employer, client, or publisher, you need to use proper spelling and grammar if you want to be taken seriously. If you send an introductory letter or email that begins with “Hi, Id like to meet u & talk about werking in gamez & stuff,” that is not communicating and the only think you will get in return is their disdain.
When engaging in business communications, you’ll find that many people turn into “Grammar Nazis,” taking each misspelling and grammatical mistake as a sign of your carelessness and lack of seriousness.
Here are some tips I suggest you follow in your business correspondence:
- Capitalize the beginning of sentences, names, game titles, and the word “I”
- Use proper spelling and punctuation
- Put a space between punctuation mark ending a sentence and the start of the next sentence
- Don’t use “u” for “you”, or “&” for “and”
- Don’t confuse “its” and “it’s”
I can tell even from this side of the screen that you’re rolling your eyes at me, but I’m quite serious. A friend of mine who runs a boutique development studio had hired a marketing person who was great in every way — except that he kept confusing “its” and “it’s” when writing his materials. After a few warnings, my friend felt he had to fire the guy over this one mistake. His concern that such carelessness in the marketing materials, even with such a small mistake, would give his customers the impression that all of their work was careless.
Poor writing skills is obviously a deal-breaker for people involved in marketing, writing, and design, but what about programmers or artists? As long as they do their job function well, do they need to be concerned about how well they write? Well, at times, they do. Programmers and artists are often called upon to write reports and prepare preproduction documents, especially when they move into leadership positions on the team. But if they send in resumes even for an entry level position that is full of misspellings, hard to decipher sentence structure, and poor formatting, those resumes may wind up at the bottom of the stack or even in the wastebasket.
Remember: attention to detial. It matters.
[sic]
How Important Is Story In A Game?
As the entire planet now knows, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice premiered last Friday with only 29% of the film critics polled by the Rotten Tomatoes website giving the film a favorable review. (To put this into perspective, the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score earned by a Marvel Studios superhero film was Thor: The Dark World at 66%). Ouch!
While many critics praised the film’s action sequences, the main complaint about this clash between the two greatest superhero icons of all time is that there were too many jumbled storylines, none of which was adequately developed. Yet the film went on to earn $166 million in its first weekend at the box office, the seventh highest opening weekend of all time. Now that may be a testament to the film’s marketing campaign, but it did get me wondering about how important the quality of a story is to an audience. More specifically, how important is a story to a game?
Well, let’s take a step back and look at the hierarchy of narrative elements for a game.
First is Theme; that is, the location or time in which a game is set. Now, some games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers don’t have a theme. These are called abstract games, ones in which the game mechanics and social interaction between players are what is engaging.
Yet by adding a theme, the game mechanics are given a setting that gives players a sense of immersion, a temporary suspension of disbelief that they are another person or in another place. Sometimes all that is needed to provide theme to a game is simply to depict the game objects as characters, such as the Pac-Man character and ghosts in Pac-Man.
Alternatively, a game can be set in a universe that is already well-established in other media — for example, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or DC Comics — bringing into your game all the associations players have formed from experiencing the universe in other media. A familiar universe, including a historical or contemporary real-life one, can make a game’s mechanics more playable for the user. One doesn’t need to explain to the player that a revolver in a Old West game can fire only six shots or that wearing the One Ring in a Lord of the Rings game will cause the player to disappear.
Second is Premise. Premise establishes a game’s goal within the theme. For example, in Space Invaders; the premise is to protect the planet from alien invaders. Without a dramatic premise, many games would be just too abstract to allow the player to become emotionally invested in their outcome and make the game experience richer for the player.
Finally comes Story. Now, in many games, story is limited to backstory, an elaborate version of the premise. The backstory gives a setting and context for the game’s conflict, and it can create motivation for the character, but its progression is not affected by gameplay.
However, in many games the premise is followed by a series of story-based complications for the player, eventually leading to a climax, the resolution of which satisfies the goal defined in the premise. Such stories can be very simple, or they can be very elaborate with many twists and turns in the plot.
Stories allow players to experience both novelty and predictability through the surprises of the storyline and the familiar structure of stories. Players can role-play in the make-believe universe defined or interpreted by the game designer as well as engage in self-expression by coming up with creative solutions to the complications presented by the story.
While stories aren’t essential to a game, they can satisfy many player’s different needs for engaging in play. However, where there is a story, it should be a well-told one, otherwise the story premise is merely a marketing hook that may draw the players in initially but will not keep them engaged.
David Mullich 