Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  Yager’s art director, Mathias Wiese, ran with the idea and drew concept art showing Dubai half buried beneath the desert. There was no reason behind it; he simply thought it looked cool. Normally, that would be enough to make me hate it. Cool is one of those meaningless terms that get tossed around during development. It is nothing and everything—cultural dark matter. Its parameters are subjective. You could almost argue it doesn’t exist, except for the fact its proof is all around us: the clothes we wear, the games we play, the music we love. Coolness is the lifeblood of mainstream entertainment. As pop-culture artists, we live and die on our cool. That’s why cool is the most dangerous word in video games. We chase a concept that cannot be defined, terrified it will elude us, and in the grip of our fear, we are easily controlled.

  In this case, however, I had to admit, a sand-covered Dubai looked pretty cool.

  Taking that image and the Fox’s directive, I wrote a one-page story proposal riffing on Apocalypse Now, a film that military shooters had somehow not yet ripped off. The concept was centered on a US Army colonel who goes rogue and seizes control of an abandoned, sand-covered Dubai. A trio of Delta operators is sent into the ruined city to find the Colonel and take him down.

  When writing one-pagers, I never come up with characters’ names. At that point in the process, there’s no guarantee what you’re writing will make it to the final product. Anything and everything could end up on the chopping block, usually sooner than later. It’s like working at a cattle ranch—you don’t name the cow you’re eating for dinner. This being a military story, it was easy to explain the plot without naming my characters. Everyone was referred to by rank. We had the player’s character—the Captain—the two Squadmates, the Lieutenant, the Sergeant, and finally the villain, the Colonel. That would have been the end of it, except for one problem: I am a fucking glutton. I love to eat, and not well—the junkier, the better. Fried chicken is a particular passion of mine. If I see it on TV or on someone else’s plate at a restaurant, I have no choice but to get my own or else spiral into seething jealousy. This made it difficult for me to type “the Colonel” over and over. The further I got into the document, the more my mouth began to water. Instead of finishing it, all I could think about was driving to the nearest KFC and sacrificing my digestive tract on the altar of that white-suited Kentuckian. My story proposal would be completely lost on the reader, if they happened to love fried chicken nearly as much as I did. The Colonel needed a name change, or else my efforts would amount to nothing more than fast-food propaganda.

  When it comes to naming things, I’m a devout follower of the “I Spy” method. If I can see it from where I’m sitting, it will eventually show up in one of my stories. That day, it just so happened, my copy of Heart of Darkness was sitting beside my keyboard. I glanced at the author’s name—Joseph Conrad. It seemed too on the nose. I needed to make it less obvious, so I swapped the C for a K and voila! Problem solved.

  I said a silent prayer to our Mortal Kombat, whose victories art flawless, toasty be its name, and thanked it for teaching us K would always be cooler than C.

  I emailed the proposal to the Fox and headed home.

  “Hey,” he called out as I walked to the door. “This is brilliant.”

  The shock must have been clear on my face, because he quickly backpedaled. “I mean, it’s good. It’s not bad. I think it’s workable.” His praise grew fainter with every sentence, but none of it registered. In his enthusiasm, the Fox had fucked up. My proposal was brilliant, ergo so was I. He sent the one-pager to Yager. I went home, confident they would love it. I was going to write this fucking game, and no one would be able to deny me.

  * * *

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, I sat in Yager’s conference room, staring across the table at the writer they had hired to turn my idea into a script. We’ll call him Mr. Sunshine.

  I was rambling, as I always do when I first meet someone alone. Socially, I am a naturally shy person. I have to meet someone a few times before I’m comfortable enough to be myself. Professionally, I don’t have that problem. If I’m talking to someone because of my job, all of my insecurities disappear. It doesn’t matter if someone dislikes me; we’re there to work, not make friends. To get these conversations going, I developed a form of rambling that would help break the ice.

  I’d start with a comment about being tired, which I always was, and then slide into a series of self-effacing anecdotes about food, film, and guilty pleasures. When the conversation inevitably stalled, I would return to an earlier topic and use it to segue into a personal story about one of my many irrational fears. It was all nonsense, which was the point. The other person felt comfortable because I was clearly an idiot, and I felt comfortable because after going on like that for twenty minutes, there was little I could do that would embarrass me.

  Mr. Sunshine smiled politely as I went through my routine.

  “I did the math, and it turns out I spend almost thirty hours a month floating over the Atlantic in a giant hunk of metal. It sounds crazy when you say it out loud. Flying used to be so amazing to me. I’d wake up in one place, and a few hours later I’m on the other side of the world. Now, I feel like I’m living on borrowed time. Tempting fate, you know? Anytime the plane hits turbulence, my brain says, ‘Guess this is it!’ Then I pull out my iPod and find a suitable song to die to.”

  “What song?” he asked.

  I feigned hesitation. “. . . ‘For Crying Out Loud,’ by Meat Loaf.” That wasn’t a lie. Track seven on Bat Out of Hell was my go-to dying song. The only reason I feigned hesitation was because I’d noticed the admission landed better if I came across as slightly embarrassed. I don’t know why, since the musical stylings of Mr. Loaf and Jim Steinman are a goddamn national treasure, but whatever. You have to play to your audience.

  “I think it’s good that you accept it so calmly,” said Mr. Sunshine. “It means you’re at peace with death.”

  “You know what’s funny, though? I think my plane is about to crash, and I’m fine. But if a spider ran across this table right now, I’d lose my shit. What’s up with that? It’s like I’d rather die in a fiery crash than look at an itsy-bitsy eight-legged abomination.”

  With no trace of humor or sarcasm, Mr. Sunshine looked me in the eyes and asked, “Have you considered the possibility your fear of spiders comes from a genetic memory sent back through time by your descendants who live in a future where arachnids have evolved into mankind’s primary predator?”

  That shut me up.

  I couldn’t get a read on this guy. He had those blank, empty eyes shared by sociopaths and idiots. It’s possible he realized I was rambling by design and decided to throw a verbal wrench in my spokes. Or, he was crazy. I don’t mean that in the ablest sense. Genuine mental illness and self-destructive tendencies—I understand these. But there is a type of crazy that can only be described as a willful denial of the world around us. I had no idea what Mr. Sunshine was trying to do, and it scared me to death.

  * * *

  THAT AFTERNOON, I CALLED a meeting with Mr. Sunshine and some of the team leads. I thought it would be good for us to kick-start the week by defining who our main characters would be. It was the first meeting I had ever organized at Yager, so I started off by rallying the troops with a boilerplate pep talk.

  “We have an opportunity to make a game unlike anything else. If we do this right, Spec Ops could be the most important war game ever made.” I remember thinking I was nailing it, because one of the leads was smiling and nodding along.

  “This is the moment we decide to be different. I think we do that by setting out to make a game about people instead of war. That won’t happen if our characters have names like Gunn or Brand. They need real names so we see them as real people. A good name speaks to the nature of a character, like Norm from Cheers, the guy at the bar who is always there, in the same seat. If we brainstorm about who we want our characters to be and then find a name that embodies that, it will inspire us even more as
we flesh them out.

  “Let’s start with our player character, the Delta squad leader. Who is this man? What type of person do we want him to be?”

  The team said nothing. All they did was stare.

  “It’s okay to say whatever you’re thinking. This is brainstorming. There are no wrong answers here.”

  Not a goddamn word. Even the nodding guy had forsaken me.

  “No one has any ideas about who our main character should be?”

  Mr. Sunshine stared at me with those dopey, blank eyes. He had a lot of opinions on spiders, but nothing about the character he’d been hired to write.

  I threw my hands in the air. “Well, I guess our main character will do a lot of walking in the game, so how about we call him Walker?” I wrote it down and kept going. We can change it later, I said to myself. We never did.

  “Let’s move on to the members of Walker’s squad.”

  The blank reactions continued. There were a few Americans working at Yager. If one of them hadn’t been in the room, I would have believed my words were getting lost in translation. But no—either the team was too afraid to speak their ideas or they didn’t have any yet. Whatever the reason, I was too annoyed to brainstorm new names, so I just began naming my friends from the air force.

  “Personally, I feel it’s important for our game to have a diverse cast. There’s three guys in our Delta squad. I don’t see any reason they can’t be Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic. The Hispanic guy’s name could be . . . oh, let’s say John Lugo. And the African American guy could be Alphonso Adams.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Mr. Sunshine. Apparently he did have opinions about names. “It’s not realistic for a character’s first and last name to start with the same letter.”

  I leaned forward over the conference table. “What is my name?”

  “Oh—”

  Before he could continue, I began listing off my coworkers whose first and last names also started with the same letter. Not my best idea, since there were only three of them, but luckily Mr. Sunshine backed down before I had to start naming comic-book characters like Peter Parker and Bruce Banner.

  For someone I was inclined to dislike through no fault of his own, this guy was managing to hit all of my buttons. What had started out as petty jealousy was already nearing genuine loathing, and it was only our first day together.

  * * *

  OUR FIRST TASK WAS writing a script for the game’s vertical slice. A vertical slice is an internal demo that will serve as a quality benchmark for the rest of the game. The script for the vertical slice mainly would serve as context for the action beats. Aside from that, it was expendable. Once the game’s full story was agreed upon, the vertical slice script would be rewritten and integrated with the larger narrative.

  Every writing team has disagreements, some more heated than others. That’s what happens when you get a bunch of show runners together in one room and ask them all to cede control. Everyone has their own opinion as to how certain things should be written. Over the years, I’ve become more diplomatic about how I navigate these disagreements. Back then, however, I was young and cocky. I wasn’t looking for diplomacy; I was looking for the quickest path to the finish line. If anything got in the way, I’d steamroll it and move on.

  Mr. Sunshine didn’t want the characters to use vulgarity. He was adamant that professional soldiers wouldn’t swear when speaking to one another. It was a silly argument. Of course soldiers swear; the phrase “curse like a sailor” exists for a reason. For a soldier, a bad day at work means getting shot at and possibly killing someone. That is not a job for people who find vulgarity to be unprofessional.

  This fight went on for weeks. I couldn’t understand why it was such a sticking point. I cussed all the time, and thanks to a contract I signed when I was eighteen, I was technically an ex-soldier. I was living proof of my own correctness. Mr. Sunshine wouldn’t budge, though. Finally, I just ignored him. When we wrote a scratch script for the game’s demo level, everything I wrote used vulgarity. If Mr. Sunshine wrote something, I added vulgarity to it, usually right before the actors recorded it, and always without telling him. This did not go over well.

  On the one hand, what I did was not out of the ordinary. When you have multiple writers on a game, someone has to review all the scripts to ensure the character voices remain consistent. There was no time for feedback and iteration, so I did the rewrites myself. Plus, it’s worth mentioning, I was right and he was wrong.

  On the other hand, it was a dick move.

  When you’re in a collaborative industry, everyone must work toward the same vision, or else everything will fall apart. To swear or not to swear may not seem like an important issue, but it directly informs the personality of your characters. The language we use when communicating with other people tells a lot about who we are. This is why dialogue is so important. When thoughtfully crafted, it can reveal untold depths. As the saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words.” But the actions we’re comfortable performing in front of others do not necessarily reflect the feelings and personality we hide from the world. To know someone, you must hear them speak when they are most vulnerable. It’s our accidental words that reveal our true selves.

  Here’s the thing about swearing—everyone does it. Even if you go out of your way to say “dang” instead of “damn,” you are still swearing, just in a family-friendly way. A curse is an emotional exclamation. Your body produces an emotion and in response, your mouth forms a word meant to convey that feeling. The severity of that word will vary based on numerous factors—upbringing, vocabulary, native tongue, age, social norms, and most importantly, the intensity of what you are feeling. Everybody swears, some more crudely than others.

  The thematic journey of Spec Ops was one of descent and denial. The main characters struggle to maintain control in a situation that is already out of their grasp. Had they maintained a constant level of professionalism by not swearing, they would have exercised superhuman control over their emotions, which would have been in direct opposition to their actions and story.

  I could have compromised by writing a vulgar draft and a clean draft and then having the actors record both. The problem is that’s not a compromise; it’s a deflection. Appeasing both sides would only have prolonged the argument and pushed a resolution to a later date. Even worse, by recording a clean draft of the script, I would have given my opponent the ammo necessary to win. It would have been very easy for Mr. Sunshine to say, “It’s already recorded, so let’s put it in the game and see how it feels”—at which point it would never have been removed. I wasn’t going to let that happen. The game deserved better than that. Also—and I can’t stress this enough—I was right.

  * * *

  AROUND THIS TIME, YAGER’S development producer went on maternity leave. If you’re an American, and therefore unfamiliar with how other civilized nations treat maternity and health care, it might surprise you to learn German maternity leave can last up to three years. This is what’s known as quality of life. Germans have it; we don’t.

  Three years is a long time. We could conceptualize, build, and ship the entire game in that time. The game was already in production. Processes were in place, wheels were spinning. All we needed was a producer, someone who could drop in and take control without missing a beat.

  Back in California, there was just such a producer: Bonnie LaFramboise. She had cut her teeth at Looking Glass Studios, the legendary studio that went on to spawn Irrational and many others. When Looking Glass shuttered its doors, rather than move to a new studio, Bonnie chose to leave the industry and build a new life for herself as a baker and midwife. Luckily for us, she’d recently dipped her toe back into the development cesspool.

  The way I imagine it, someone took a helicopter south from Novato deep into the business-park jungles of Redwood City, California. There, they would have found Bonnie engaged in a stick fight with some uppity young designer who’d gone over time and
budget.

  Bonnie would have heard our pitch for old times’ sake, but that was no guarantee she’d be willing to take on a job like this.

  “This mission’s important, Bonnie.”

  “Do you really think it’s gonna make a difference?” she’d have asked. “It didn’t before.”

  “That was another time . . . You said that your war is over. Now, maybe the one out there is, but not the one inside you. I know the reasons you’re here, Bonnie, but it doesn’t work that way. You may try, but you can’t get away from what you really are—a full-blooded development producer.”

  Basically just like the opening of Rambo III.

  I don’t know what they said to convince her, but it worked. Bonnie LaFramboise arrived in Berlin fully prepared to get production on track. In our first meeting, she asked me to fill her in on where we were with the story. It was just the two of us, alone in a conference room. I launched into a foaming rant about Mr. Sunshine.

  Without raising her voice, Bonnie looked me dead in the eyes and said, “You do not yell at me.”

  I liked her instantly.

  * * *

  AFTER THE VERTICAL SLICE, it was time to create a detailed story summary. Yager wanted Mr. Sunshine to take the lead, so it was up to him. I gave him the one-pager I had written, along with directions for what his summary needed to include—a full story outline, backstory for the game world, character bios, proposals for missions, possible locations, and a list of key moments. It was a substantial amount of work, but it was still a first pass.

  “I’ll need a month,” he said.

  “Really? I’d have thought like a week and half.”

  When making a game, the first idea never survives. It is the sacrificial lamb whose innards will be used to divine the game’s future. Think of it as a form of hepatomancy, the art of reading omens in the entrails of animals. Disemboweling a first idea is bloodless, but not painless. The more time spent doting on your first idea, the harder it will be to see it sliced from tail to sternum and flipped inside out.