by Clarke,Neil
Oh, and despite having played every shooter since Doom, I was unfamiliar with the PS4 controller when I first played the game, so I too walked over walls, off cliffs, and into the arms of the Fallen more times than I can count. I’m probably the lowest-ranked Guardian in Crucible. But I Know Things. That’s the one shred of dignity I can cling to as I’m getting fragged by some pipsqueak Hunter half my age . . .
E. Lily Yu: It’s an incredible feeling, coming from print media, to see your words or descriptions or suggestions visualized either in 2D or 3D art, in characters, in actual game events, sometimes only days after you send the idea around. Probably not as astounding for former TV and movie writers, who’ve been there and done that. Also, I’ve done placeholder audio on a couple of different projects, when it’s too early for voice actors (thanks for inviting me that first time, Clay!), and it always cracks me up.
Yoon Ha Lee: With a text/narrative-based game, I can’t get away from my writing! It’s the primary means through which the player forms an impression of the world or decides upon actions. I remember when I was playtesting Winterstrike myself, I would go cross-eyed staring at the text looking for typos. (I had other playtesters, of course . . .) It got to the point where I was looking for (logic) bugs (I also did the coding for this game using StoryNexus’s platform) and stopped actually reading the text because when you draw the same card three hands in a row, it gets old real fast. There was probably a point where I had most of the content memorized. I was greatly relieved to hand the project in and stop playtesting because that feeling of going cross-eyed was not fun. I can only hope the experience was more fun for people who played the game . . .
How has your video game writing informed your non-video game work, if it has?
Seth Dickinson: I learned a lot from game writing. Some simple skills, not always mandatory, but good to understand—brevity, economy of effect, a mind for the cognitive capacity of a reader who’s probably either deep in trance or very distracted. That came from figuring out how to write in a way appropriate to games.
But I think I stole a couple bigger ideas from games, too. One is the magic of skyboxes. If you surround the theater of action with hints of distant, marvelous things, you can create a sense of awe. Another is the idea of a tight, satisfying action loop—here’s a problem, here’s a set of skills, I apply the skills, I solve the problem, I check out what new problem emerges. Players and readers both love to feel like they’re gradually discovering things! I did a lot of work on The Traitor Baru Cormorant trying to create that cycle on a sentence-by-sentence and chapter-by-chapter level.
I like the idea of a reader gripping the logic of a story, then using that logic to understand and feel what happens next. In a game the logic might be “stay near cover” or “do spectacular things.” In a story it might be “place your trust carefully” or “love shouldn’t silence you.”
On Baru I tried to organize the world’s peoples and politics in a vibrant, colorful way that lets readers imagine a game board with elegant rules. On a story I’m shopping around right now I tried breaking the narrative into three threads, then adding a little progress header on each thread—so a scene in the Nagari thread might open with “Nagari 4/6.” I know players love making little numbers get bigger. Maybe I can create some of that sense of satisfaction and progress? Maybe I risk leaning too heavily on an extrinsic reward, instead of the intrinsic joy of the story.
Yoon Ha Lee: Honestly, I’m not sure. I do remember the one big lesson I got from video game writing, which is that players take things really personally in a way that readers don’t always, due to the issue of agency. In Winterstrike I have an NPC that is an agent of entropy (actually an alien life form) and while I had some players that loved it, I also had one player come to my blog and let me know in no uncertain terms that it was not fair to set them up with a cute pet that turned out to be a death-dealing alien of DOOM. In static (non-game) fiction, I can get away with more terrible acts/constructions in the sense that the reader doesn’t have to type in KILL BABY for the game to proceed, which people find upsetting. I am thinking of a particular text game from IFComp 2010, Jason McIntosh’s The Warbler’s Nest. It’s a good game, but there’s this point at which you-the-player have a choice to treat a baby as a changeling and kill it, and it infuriated me when it looked like I might have to do that to proceed. On the other hand, I can read from the viewpoints of rapists and serial killers without batting an eyelash because I’m not being asked to “perform” the act as the reader, just to be carried along by the narrative.
Karl Schroeder: Writing for Destiny has reminded me that the writer is a tour guide to the reader’s imagination, not to their own. It’s the reader (or player) who actually has the experience you’re trying to create; your job is to help them have that experience, not to have it for them. To put it yet another way, we’re midwives. So there’s this balance between what you say (and show) and what you leave to the imagination that’s absolutely critical to get right. If you over-tell, over-show, and over-explain, you drain the life out of the experience for the reader or player. It’s better to simply point and let them use their imaginations to fill in the details. I think this is what Seth means by skyboxes: underdetermined spaces are not laziness, they’re a gift to the reader/player’s imagination, and properly done they can vastly expand the dimensions of the experience.
In writing this translates to being economical, spare, even. Baroque detail is fun for its own sake, but two or three choice details can do the same work, or even more. The real ‘game engine’ in literature is the reader’s imagination.
Robert Reed: Two benefits come to mind:
With Bungie, one of my jobs has been writing tiny stories that might or might not be buried inside Destiny today. (Not everything makes the cut.) It’s an education, trying to make every word carry a heavy knapsack. Can I drop that “that”? Can I squeeze two insults into one pithy phrase? And how do you end the scene that has barely begun? When you find yourself pining for the days of fat, thousand-word epics, you know you’re working in new ways.
The other benefit has been more direct. I’m planning a sequel to my Great Ship novels, The Memory of Sky. What I’m building—only in my head so far—is a joyful, hyperviolent landscape where nobody truly dies and most of the citizens are nearly immortal children.
Now what game does that sound like?
Also, I should point out that while playing Destiny, I’ve been writing stories set in the Destiny universe. Nobody has asked for this. My head does what it needs to do, applying knowing voices and twisted plots to the very beautiful mayhem.
E. Lily Yu: “Daedalum, the Devil’s Wheel” came directly from conversations with an animator. Besides that, game writing taught me the discipline of sitting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard for eight hour stretches and creating at will, as well as the incredible generative potential of talking across disciplines. I’m much more aware of design principles, of the presence of the reader/player, and of the constraints and possibilities of different formats: audio, action, text, mobile, website, controller input, haptic feedback, VR headsets, and so on. And I haven’t done it yet, but writing nonlinear narratives that could be encountered in any order seems like it would translate well into experimental print fiction.
If any of your own stories or novels could be made into a video game (with an unlimited budget), which one would you pick, and why?
Karl Schroeder: A lot of people have told me they’d love to see my Virga books made into a massively multiplayer online environment. It would be a zero-gravity steampunk mix of pirate adventure and Homeworld-style fleet engagement, No Man’s Sky exploration, with a little bit of Thief and other RPG elements thrown in. Who wouldn’t want to fly around a boundless, weightless shirtsleeve environment on a wingless jet engine with handlebars and a saddle? Circle forested asteroids or dive into spherical lakes? Have sword fights in freefall? Dance in micro-g? Or coordinate an armada of wooden prop-driven warships festooned with
cannons? The possibilities are endless and I really hope somebody makes it.
Robert Reed: A digital version of my Great Ship, complete with Marrow boiling at the core. That’s what I want to walk through. Strong visuals. A sense of claustrophobia and Deep Time. Think of the upcoming No Man’s Sky, but the action takes place on and inside one Uranus-sized starship, and there are thousands of alien species in residence, and you’re one of the captains who has to keep a lid on every beast and religion and goofball political force that comes across your dragonblood desk.
Make me an offer. The Ship is for sale.
Yoon Ha Lee: I love reading up on game design (both tabletop and videogame) and I’m keenly aware that differences in media, as well as technological difficulties in generating NPC AI, would make a straight-up adaptation hard. That being said, I would be curious to see an RTS or turn-based strategy take on the world of “The Battle of Candle Arc,” which is also the world of my forthcoming novel Ninefox Gambit. I used computer games as one of the models for the space opera “magic” combat in that system, so it might be workable, and the formation effects could be pretty.
Seth Dickinson: Oh man! Blue Planet was a game first, a fan-made sequel to the cult classic FreeSpace 2. That turned into “Morrigan in the Sunglare” here in Clarkesworld. I guess it’d be interesting to see that turned back into a game again, a full-fledged production—but you said an unlimited budget, and having a lot of money can be really confining. I’m not sure we could take risks and experiment if we were worried about making back our investment.
The thing about games is that the player can choose how to explore the story. You can leave as much esoterica, exposition, and emotional perspective lying around as you like, and you can trust your player to chase it if they want. That’s not like standard prose, where you have to be very careful about your linear architecture. And games can implicate the player in their own events (like Spec Ops: The Line). I think good game stories do something with that.
I’d love to see a game for Robert Reed’s Marrow and Yoon Ha Lee’s “Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain” in which you’d have to select your targets very carefully—maybe you could even set up asymmetrical competitive multiplayer, with each player issued a different one of Arighan’s weapons and an objective. It’d be a system-driven game, which is the best kind.
I guess I’ll confess that I’d love to see a social board game for The Traitor Baru Cormorant, something like Archipelago or the Battlestar Galactica game, in which players have to superficially cooperate to manage the world while secretly pursuing their own agendas.
E. Lily Yu: Ha, fun question, but no way. If I were making a video game on my own, it would have a dynamic pronged narrative that evolved in response to player choices, lots of environmental storytelling, and unexpected flips of player expectations that don’t exist in print. I don’t think anything I’ve published would work.
About the Author
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is the co-author, with Robert Silverberg, of When the Blue Shift Comes, which received a starred review from Library Journal. Alvaro’s short fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Analog, Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex and other venues, and Alvaro was nominated for the 2013 Rhysling Award. Alvaro’s reviews, critical essays and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, SF Signal, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, and other markets. Alvaro currently edits the blog for Locus.
Another Word:
Hipsters of Zombieland
Emily Devenport
Even before Night of the Living Dead was released, zombies had their fans—and I was not one of them. Not even when I was nine years old. At that age I wouldn’t have told you that the nihilistic tone of that movie (and many of the ones that followed) really turned me off; I would have said they were boring. I suppose that’s the same thing, but my earlier assessment was devastating in its clarity. It summed up a fatal flaw of the zombie genre: if your characters have nothing to hope for, the whole thing is just an exercise in self-pity. (“A boring exercise!” my nine-year-old self would say.)
My interest was piqued when I learned something about voodoo and the original zombies. The idea that you could enslave the dead and set them to do your bidding was interesting (while also being both sad and scary). So you would think that emancipating zombies and setting them free to shamble around on their own would be an improvement. But those early zombies weren’t up to the challenge. All they could do was wander listlessly and conduct a slow chase of the living. Back in those days, you didn’t have to run away from a zombie, you could walk.
Granted, they had a tendency to overwhelm people through sheer persistence. Eventually you’d have to sleep. If you got surrounded by them, they could overcome you with numbers. Once they started biting, you were done for, even if you managed to get away. They’d infect you with the zombie flu, the not-so-secret subtext of any zombie story. Eventually everyone gets it, and the world comes to an end. Everything we ever built, hoped, loved, or dreamed comes to naught. Who could resist an inspiring message like that?
I could. And I was pretty sure most other people could too, because the winning formula in adventure fiction is that the heroes are facing overwhelming odds, but their perseverance and cleverness is going to help them solve at least some of their problems (once they overcome a bunch of scary and interesting obstacles). Defeat looms large, but—HUZZAH! Victory from the jaws.
In the old zombie stories, there’s no huzzah, just plenty of doom. I was surprised to learn that young readers were happy to wallow in that, until I realized a couple of essential things about the Zombie Apocalypse: 1. Zombies aren’t human, they don’t even think—so you don’t have to feel guilty about killing them. This is a perfect way for disaffected people to vent their frustration, and 2. If the world comes to an end, you don’t have to go to work (or school) anymore. What’s not to like about that? End of the World fiction has always carried that appeal with its audience, even without the zombies.
But, my god, did it have to be so tedious? It wasn’t until Shaun of the Dead showed up that anyone began to think of more interesting possibilities for zombies. Back then, one of my young coworkers at my day job had a dream that we all had an employee meeting right after the Zombie Apocalypse so we could learn techniques for selling books to zombies. “Just because they want to eat your brains,” he said, “doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give them good customer service.” (As it turned out, soon after he had the dream, our customer service philosophy did take a turn in that direction.)
So humor helped the genre a lot. And people began to look at the mechanism for zombification as a plot point. Was it a virus? How would it spread? Would it kill you and drive your dead body around, or would it keep you alive and hijack your brain? If it kept you alive, could you be cured of it? Would it eventually burn itself out and leave you to face the consequences of your actions?
Could something rescue you from your zombie state? That idea was examined in Warm Bodies, the first zombie movie I actually wanted to see. The main character can dimly remember his old life; he’s driven to collect things that remind him of it. But what sparks life in him is a girl. He falls in love with her. The theme of this movie is that people can be dead, but something may make them to want to live again. I like that theme better than “Yeah, everyone is going to get the zombie flu and die.”
Another idea I liked in Warm Bodies is that if zombies eat the brains of living people, they can share the memories of those people. This is explored in one of my favorite new TV shows, iZombie. Its main character uses her memory-eating talent to help solve murders. And she doesn’t “live” in a vacuum; her actions and decisions have consequences that spin off in unpredictable directions. Best of all, a peculiarity of the strain of zombie flu that infected her is that it doesn’t take her intelligence away. She’s no dumb shambler. Her kind could eventually win the right to vote and to get legally married.
Does that mean all futur
e zombies are going to have to be intelligent memory-eaters to be interesting? The movie World War Z took them in another direction. Its zombies are the mindless, hungry, attracted-to-sound variety that we’ve all come to expect from shows like The Walking Dead, but they have a horrifying behavior that brings the term zombie swarm to a whole new level. They behave like army ants, building bridges and towers out of their bodies so others of their kind can scramble up and over walls, up buildings, even onto hovering helicopters. They’re as fast as cheetahs, and because they’re dead they have no sense of self-preservation. The virus that’s driving them only wants to spread itself around.
The best thing about the movie version is that they try to think through the concept of the virus. If nature has orchestrated an extinction-level event for human kind, is there a way to outsmart nature? And they come up with an answer, a reason to hope.
I’m not interested in pitiless depictions of mass death. If I’m going to watch people fight for survival, survival damn well better be possible. There’s no hope doesn’t cut it for me. And if recent developments in the zombie genre are any indication, the zombies of the future are only going to get more interesting.
[NOTE: The fiction department at Clarkesworld recoils at the suggestion that zombies are in the least bit interesting. This article should in no way encourage people to write or submit more zombie stories. They are a plague upon the genre and must be put down, just like the zombies they feature.]
About the Author
Nine of Emily Devenport’s novels were published in the U.S. By NAL/Roc, under three pen names. She also has been published in the U.K., Italy, and Israel. Her novels are Shade, Larissa, Scorpianne, EggHeads, The Kronos Condition, Godheads, Broken Time (which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award), Belarus, and Enemies. Her newest novels, The Night Shifter, Spirits of Glory, and Pale Lady are in ebook form on Amazon, Smashwords, etc.
