write what you know

I am writer of code.  I am not a writer of literature.  Once I wrote and illustrated a piece of underwater adventure fiction — I was in 2nd grade and my teacher pinned it to the hallway wall outside the classroom.  In the many games I’ve developed I have written tutorials, tooltips, item descriptions, even some character dialogue.  I’ve read a lot of books, but couldn’t tell you anything useful about writing one.

How, then, am I supposed to create my own world, with its own characters and its own stories to tell?  I’ve heard this axiom before, “Write what you know.”  I came across it recently in an interview with Ubisoft’s Tommy Francois.  “It’s not a cliche, it is the meaning of life,” Francois says.

“The guy who writes a book should be able to inspire himself, and he is alone with no tech. Anyone who writes and has not lived, I would probably not want to read his book.” –Tommy Francois

How am I supposed to write what I know, when I don’t even know how to write?  I’m starting to realize that maybe this is the wrong question to ask.  As a game developer and a programmer I write in the language of game design and game mechanics, not in dialogue and story arcs.  Maybe a better question would be: Can “write what you know” help to inform game design and mechanics?

Thinking in this context immediately brought me down the road of the evolution of game mechanics.  When designing a platformer you should probably be fluent in the mechanics of Super Mario Bros.  When designing an open world adventure you should probably be fluent in the language of The Legend of Zelda.  Certainly you can innovate and have a total departure from the play styles established in these games, but you should learn the rules of the game before you decide that you can break them in coherent and interesting ways.

So the first milestone I established for my procedurally generated game was to essentially create an experience with the look and feel of The Legend of Zelda, but deeply infused with procgen.  Maps and dungeons are randomized, enemies start out dumb but can learn from their mistakes.  This sounded great, and right away I started thinking about the details of my combat system.

And I was stuck.  I lost my inspiration.  After working on my game or my blog for at least a few hours a day, every day, for a few months, I had hit a wall.  But this wasn’t some sort of writer’s block.  I knew exactly what I wanted to do and I knew exactly how to proceed.  But game development, especially indie development, means sacrifice.  What other parts of my life am I willing to exchange for time to work on my game?

Was I going to spend less time playing with my kid so that I could work on a Zelda clone?  Was I going to miss what would turn out to be some of the most epic baseball games ever played on the Chicago Cubs’ run to the world championship while I tried to figure out what was the best input control scheme for murdering monsters?  The answer, at least for a few weeks, was no.

During this time I started to notice a trend on game news sites and blogs (see grep –week 47).  There’s a growing movement of developers with a desire to move away from everything we think we know about video games.  The subtext seems to be that if we don’t figure out how to expand our range as designers to be more inclusive of the majority of humans who find nothing of value in our craft, we risk becoming obsolete.  There’s plenty of rhetoric that games are capable of being just as powerful and important as books or tv or film as an agent of change or as vehicles of empathy and emotional introspection, but anyone who follows the industry should know that the evolution of our medium is slow, and possibly stalled altogether.

Tommy Francois proclaims, “I am sure that someday someone will create a GTA with no guns.”  The interviewer deftly responds, “If we can make these sumptuous, realistic, open worlds with a range of inventive ways of murdering people, why haven’t we done one without the violence?”  To which Francois replies, “The easy answer is that the original games were made by testicles for testicles.” — And the industry has been stuck in that rut ever since.

There’s a clear pattern emerging here.  Game developers are all very similar people — having worked at eight different game studios I can verify this.  We have similar backgrounds, similar tastes, and we grew up playing the same games, so naturally we tend to make those same types of games for ourselves.  There’s enough of us out there as consumers that the problem isn’t apparent to most developers or publishers.

If and when consoles finally fall off a cliff under the weight of their murder simulators, what comes next?  Mobile games have been devoured by free-to-play, reaching the end of the genre life cycle in record time.  There’s a push by Apple to resurrect premium games, and maybe with the entry of Nintendo into this space there’s hope for that yet, but the form factor of mobile devices generally doesn’t allow for immersive experiences with deep storytelling — not to mention Apple’s extreme wariness of any software that promotes contemplative or progressive thought among its players.  Like all big publishers today, they want to play it safe as long as the money keeps rolling in.

So what’s a developer to do?  For me the answer is to pivot hard.  I’ve given myself a new challenge: design a game with the look and feel of The Legend of Zelda, but without violence.  Can such a game have as much of an impact on its players as the original Zelda did for me when I first played it?  I am certain that it can, but now I have to prove it.