A Narrative Designer’s Toolkit [WfG 2011]

September 13, 2012 Aram Zucker-Scharff — No Comments |

With Ken Rolston

Descrip: The road to success as a narrative designer is long and arduous. But you don’t want to hear that. So Ken Rolston, Executive Design Director for critically acclaimed Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and former Lead Designer of Oblivion, Morrowind, and other light classics, reveals the carefully hoarded treasury of cheap tricks and short cuts that enable him to achieve respectability while avoiding Real Work. In this fast-paced and charming presentation, Rolston spreads out his tools, illustrates their use in the production of his Great Works, and shows you how to project a shallow but persuasive mastery of the craft of narrative game design.

Who is Ken Rolston?
“Internationally Celebrated Game Designer Ken Rolston designs Big Huge computer roleplaying games. Executive Design Director and “Visionary” [No. Seriously. “Visionary”] on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning™ for Big Huge Games and 38 Studios, Ken was formerly lead designer for Bethesda’s award-winning The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Previously Ken was an award-winning designer of paper-and-pencil roleplaying games, including games and supplements for PARANOIA, RUNEQUEST, WARHAMMER FANTASY ROLEPLAY, AD&D, D&D, STAR WARS, GHOSTBUSTERS, and STORMBRINGER. Ken served as roleplaying director for West End Games, Games Workshop, and Avalon Hill Game Company. Ken is also a Sage, Folk Singer, and Bon Vivant, a member of SFWA, holds a Masters Degree from NYU, and has been a professional games designer since 1982.”

YOU can now find Ken Rolston’s presentation online at http://aramzs.me/wfg6.

 

  • Possibilities to aspire to:
    • Game pros
    • Academic pros
    • Creaters
  • What we are talking about:
    • Tools
    • Extended rants
    • Game writer role
    • More about tools
    • Questions and disputation.
  • Moby Dick – too big, too incoherent. There’s going to be a lot going down in presentation.
  • Tools – pick something that means something to them.
  • The enthusiasm for which you approach communication. Be enthusiastic.
  • Books!:
    • Bernstein’s Reverse Dictionary
    • Rhyming Dictionary
    • Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words
      • Having funny words gives characters a particularity that makes them unique.
  • Draft.
  • What are tools good for?
    • Making stuff
    • Priming the Pump
    • Primping professional pride
    • Tangible currency of quality.
  • What do tools look like?
    • Physical artifacts
    • Virtual artifacts.
  • Also don’t underestimate having sweets for low blood sugar emergencies!
  • Virtual artifacts
    • Sort well
    • Have a good structure for storage.
    • Everything that keeps you inspired.
    • Store manifestos.
    • Game proposals and pitches.
    • “You don’t have a lot of stuff you’ve made, so go steal it, harvest stuff from the internet.”
  • Graphic design:
    • Use whatever comes to hand.
    • Game writers should use whatever tool comes to hand… even text, where nothing will serve.
    • Fonts are important.
      • dafont.com
      • fontcraft.com
      • fontcraft.com/fontcraft/ancient-and-arcane-fonts/#axzz1rIHr4jzm
    • Artifact presentation
      • Fonts!
      • Facsimiles.
      • Restoration Print culture.
  • Quotes are important to collect as well.
  • “At these words, my eyes filled with tears … and sunk in profound melancholy” – create emotions in your consumers.
  • Search, find and download facsimiles – look for things that look old.
  • Role playing games, when good, create a sense of melancholy. A sense of place.
  • Web and Print game guides and wikis.
  • Tabletop RPG Supplements & Scenarios.
  • The Morrowind Prophecies [from docs; inspired by…]
  • Might and Magic IV: Mandate of Heaven Game Guide.
  • Go and read Juvenile Books – good themes
    • Gods
    • Death
    • War
    • Magic
    • Exotic
    • Extinct
    • Melancholy
  • Paper RPGs:
    • Gods
    • Death
    • War
    • Magic
    • Exotic
    • Extinct
    • Heroic
  • What can game narratives look like?
    • Computer games
    • tabletop roleplaying games
    • LARP – the impossible dream
    • Boardergames
    • Collectible Card Games
  • Glorantha – extinct tabletop roleplaying game that is significantly similar to game design docs.
    • Setting exposition spoken in the personal voices of the setting.
      • Who are you
      • Who are we
      • What makes us great
      • Where do we live
      • How do we live
      • What is important in my life
      • Who rules us
      • What is there to do around here?
      • etc…
    • There is a Glorantha iPad app.
    • Glorantha is built for games!
    • Looking at combat as a text only idea.
    • Tells the stories you need to tell.
  • King Arthur Pendragon – a great game that needs to be looked at and exploited by narrative designers.
  • Call of Cthulhu – paper RPG
    • Very hard to win!
    • Classic campaign presentations by Larry Ditillio, former exec story editor of Babylon FIve.
    • You do always die, but you get to go crazy first – FUN!
  • Cthulhu Lives…
    • Free brilliant artifact props
    • cthulhulives.org
  • Put artifacts that look like they belong in the world for people to pick up.
  • Show don’t tell, use artifacts to really show what’s going on for the PCs and the universe.
  • Mythos – Call of Cthulhu Collectible Card Game
    • Creating adventures with cards.
    • Story deck
    • People act in character
    • Using and collecting cards.
  • Grey Ranks
    • Roleplay resistance teens in Poland.
    • FRPs do heroic escapism. Rarely do they do tragedy.
  • “Leap gazelle like in the direction of weird stuff and try to make it cool.”
  • Choice of the Dragon – http://www.choiceofgames.com/dragon/
  • Creating general objectives – let people fill out the rest and build some stuff in with people they already know.
    • Create gating for these quests.
  • LARPs
    • etyries.com/moonson/index.htm
    • etyries.com/moonson/yolanela.htm
  • Do something no one else has ever seen before.
  • “Nothing is cooler than untranslated languages.”
  • Stockpile Quotes
    • Bartlett’s familiar quotations.
    • Whole Grains
  • Build Lists
    • the 400 project – rules of good game design
      • theinspiracy.com
    • What makes a good game — nineteen good game features
    • List design goals for a game.
      • Graphics and code ideas too.
    • Gordon Walton
  • Use being energetic and cheerful to crush those that oppose you.
  • Tactile – look for opportunities to show your character feeling things.
    • symbolize things.
    • Morrowind character holds up his hand when it is windy to block the wind.
  • Game Design Documents
  • Game pitches
  • Study examples to learn?
    • Look at good student documents
    • Student portfolios at guildhall.smu.edu.
    • Susan O’Connor documents
      • Act of War writing sample
      • No longer online anymore 🙁
      • a screenplay for a game design.
  • Summery
    • The background
    • The enemy
    • The Action
    • Character biographies
  • Defeat their expectations of frustration
  • Dialog blows:
    • interfaces are slow, awkward.
    • Dialogue is very on rails, doesn’t make good gameplay
    • Fun per unit time
      • When in the dialogue interface fun per unit time drops like crazy.
    • Chunky method
      • Break things up, have people interject.
    • Dialog is about pace, not about words
      • Needs to be fast or avoided.
    • Characters can lie to you! Lying is done really bad in games.
    • There’s always a story, even when there is no one to tell it [Myst].
    • Text is Mighty! eg Elder Scrolls Books.
    • Freeform exploration of setting and theme.
  • Brute force – “if brute force isn’t working for you, you’re not using enough brute force.”
  • Start sucking soon and revise. Expect to fail, fail violently.
  • Construction Sets and Wikis
    • Wikis tell you how games are made.
    • geck.bethsoft.com/index.php/Main_Page
    • cs.bethsoft.com/constwiki/index.php/Main_Page
    • Understand the scope of the domain
  • A good narrative designer: “Someone who understands the person he’s talking to … and if you know the problems and the language they use to talk about them.”
  • Use graphics that are labeled. (And tools that make them)
  • Anything that has subtitles on a DVD – download the dialogue via downloading subtitles.
    • .srt files.
  • Use screen captures.
  • “If you don’t know what you like, I don’t want to talk to you … I want [my game designers] to know what they think are good.”
  • Learn by example and Teach by example
    • If you really want to get good at something you have to teach it.
  • Katamari Damacy – greatest narrative design of all time.
    • The king of the cosmos is such a refreshingly oblivious character.
  • Marketing is designer duty – be able to do it.
  • Identify features and target audiences.
  • Go to conferences!
  • Look at the stuff from PowerPoint.
  • Be a narrative designer – not a writer.
    • Understand the language of design.
    • Narrative Designer is the person who talks to everyone else, figures out the language of fun.
    • Be able to write system design.
    • Learn as much as possible about game design
    • Team memeber
    • content creator
    • leader
    • marketer and publicist
    • Embed with the team
  • Literature is not just the text! It is the Text + User!
  • “Always design for what’s going on in the users’ head.”
  • There’s no such thing as a generic gamer.
  • Share models as team’s common language.
    • Fighter
    • Wizard
    • Thief
    • Pilgrim – the explorer, just doesn’t want to die.
  • “Make yourself crazy!”
  • Product pitch models
    • Archive whenever you find them.
  • Bioshock pitch document – http://irrationalgames.com/insider/from-the-vault-may/
  • Planescape Torment Vision Statement – http://www.rpgwatch.com/files/Files/00-0208/Torment_Vision_Statement_1997.pdf
  • Keep the pitch and vision simple.
  • Illustrate with graphics.
  • Kickstarter pitches – they’re awesome!
  • Find pretty pictures.
  • Personal reference image archives.
    • Things that happen in the world are awesome. Use them.
  • Maps.
  • Book from the Sky
    • Made a book with nothing but characters in it that cannot be understood.
    • Xu Bing
  • Artifact inspiration
  • Xu Bing – New English Calligraphy — “Square World”
    • English letters that look like Chinese characters.
  • Rongorongo – The Twelve Pages of the Jaussen List
    • Famous for making no sense.
  • email him – krolston@bighugegames.com


Q&A section

  • A game about finding documents and talking about what you think the story they are telling is.
    • The writer comes up and says what he had in his head and the stories he liked.
    • A texture of failure.
  • Be able to speak in the language of games
    • Screenplay examples
    • Charactrs
    • Settings
  • Make a mod and then make a front end for it, the page that advertises for it.
  • You have to be able to trust the characters with which you have agency (and you need to have agency).
  • Demonstrate the rules of the world by having other characters talk to each other. Show one NPC lying to another?
  • Don’t be afraid to explore, even if you can’t make money off of it.

 

YOU can now find the presentation online at http://aramzs.me/wfg6.

 

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