Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 744: The Screenwriter's Guide to Video Game Writing with Robert Denton Bryant

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IFH 744: The Screenwriter's Guide to Video Game Writing with Robert Denton Bryant · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to ifahpodcastnetwork dot com. Welcome to the Indie Film Hustle
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  Podcast, Episode number seven forty four. We all make choices, but in
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  the end, our choices make us anonymous. Broadcasting from the back alley in
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  Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to
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  survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz.
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  And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode of
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  the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari.
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  Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your independent
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  audiobook. If you want to order it, just head over to www.
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  Dot filmbiz book dot com. That's film bizbook dot com. Now, guys,
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  today on the show, we're going to discuss something that we've never discussed
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  on the show before or even on the website, for how a screenwriter transitions
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  or starts to write for video games. And that was an area of the
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  industry, of the writer of the screenwriting industry that I was very curious about
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  because I knew absolutely nothing about this topic. Which generally speaking, when I
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  speak to a when I speak to a guest, I have some understanding of
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  what they've done or because it's all within the film industry and I've either gone
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  through it or known someone who's gone through it. But when it comes to
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  video games, I knew nothing at all. So I brought on Robert Denton
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  Bryant, who co wrote Slay the Dragon Writing Great Video Games with author Keith
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  Gigelow. And Robert comes from a screenwriting background. He worked in marketing and
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  production and as a writer in Hollywood for a long time, then he slowly
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  made a transition into video games. He has been a publisher and a developer.
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  He knows the ins and outs of the video game industry. He's been
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  in it now for many, many years, and him and Keith wrote this
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  amazing book which is basically a guide on how a screenwriter transitions their storytelling process
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  to video games. And as you will find out in this episode, it
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  is very, very different than writing a standard screenplay. We break down the
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  no act structure of video games, writing great video game characters, making gameplay
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  emotionally meaningful. And one of the great quotes that Roberts says in the episode,
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  which I thought was wonderful, writing a video game is more like designing
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  a theme park, not like writing a television show or a movie, but
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  designing a theme park because you have different stories going on all over the place
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  at the same time, and there's a consistent storyline that goes through the whole
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  piece, but then there's these off subplots that kind of go on, and
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  then those have endless changes because the player is playing that person or that character.
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  And it's just so fascinating to watch Robert talk about how you write for
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  this world. And I think at one point he was talking in the episode
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  and I just I'm just excited about this. You could tell that they actually
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  printed out the script for one of these large, large, very popular video
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  games, and it was like forty thousand pages or something like that. It
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  was like literally just stacks. It's stacked up like six seven feet tall.
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  It was insane. So it's a completely different way of storytelling, but it
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  is a very emotional way of storytelling and powerful way because it is touching hundreds
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  of millions of people around the world every single day. So as a storyteller,
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  if you want to get your stories out there, video games might be
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  another way for you to do that. So, without any further ado,
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  please enjoy my conversation with Robert Denton Bryant. I like to welcome to the
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  show, Robert Denton Bryant. Man, how are you doing, my friend?
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  Hey, how are you I'm doing? Oh? Man, I'm excited
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  to have you because we're going to talk about something I've I have no idea
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  about. And that's like I generally have some reference point to a guest that
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  I speak to, but I am a complete and absolute newbie when it comes
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  to writing for video games. And I wanted to have you on the show
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  because you worked in you've worked in Hollywood before, and and your co author
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  Keith has as well. So it's it's not You're coming at it from a
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  perspective of my listeners, which are screenwriters who got roped into writing for writing
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  for video games. So, before we get going, how did you get
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  into the business in the first place? And then from there how did you
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  get side? Not sidetracks, but how did you jump into the writing of
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  video games? Okay, so so the business you mean film, the only
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  interactive entertainment, the only business which is the film business. Obviously the industry.
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  It's top of mine too, because I'm I'm playing around in doing a
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  deep dive in HBO. Max's giant catalog of really great old films. It's
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  like going to film school, you know, for fifteen dollars a month.
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  It's a grit. I was so delighted as how deep that catalog was,
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  and sudden it came up and I just watched it randomly two nights ago.
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  Was the player. Well, well, of course, of course, amazing
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  film. Yeah, and so it was. It was a It was a
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  throwback because that's when I got into the business because on a lark, I
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  was trained as a journalist. So I was working as a business reporter in
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  New Mexico, where I'm from, and on a lark because I read a
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  Time magazine article where the cash and EPs the Top Gun guys, right,
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  one of them was sitting in his den in this lounge chair and his feet
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  were up on this stack of screenplays find out where the titles hadn't been written
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  on with sharpie. And the article said, you know, Top Gun is
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  the first script they sold that's been made. And so the gist of the
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  article for me is that even if the movie doesn't get made, the writer
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  gets paid. And so I figured, well that's a good job. So
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  on a lark, I applied to USC Film School and I got in and
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  that's like getting in a Harvard law you know, drops everything, you just
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  go. And so that was lucky enough. And then like and it was
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  scary for me because I'd never been to a law Los Angeles. I didn't
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  have any family. I you know, just kind of said well, I'll
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  just live on campus and go from there. So I got my dorm and
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  I got my tuition squared away, my classes and I'm like, okay,
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  go find a job. And I went to the job board, which back
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  then was you know, three by five cards on bulletin boards, and I
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  was just looking for a bartending or a waiting job. But they had this
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  miscellaneous section. I'm like, well, I have some office skills because I
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  used to be a reporter. What do they got over here? And says
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  wanted a college marketing, college promotions person for film studio. And I'm looking
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  around, I'm like, it can't be this easy. And so I applied
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  and I got hired. You know, day four in Hollywood at a film
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  studio. Right sounds it happens, it happen, It happens all the time.
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  Here's the asterisk. The film studio was Cannon, Oh it's so awesome.
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  Oh that's actually now you just got a couple more credit points with me
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  just because yeah. Yeah. So I was a Cannon right at the right
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  before for about two years, right before they finally they've been they were circling
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  the bowl and then Peretti flushed them. But yes, great, analogy,
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  by the way. Great. And then so I actually the first movie I
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  worked on was something with Albert Pune called down Twisted. But the second movie
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  I ever worked on it was Masters of the Universe, the motion picture,
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  fantastic piece of cinema, sir, Yeah, right right, and uh.
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  And so I was in marketing for two years at Cannon. While that was
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  a full time job. By the way, we'll be right back after a
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  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. While I was
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  going to graduate school, remember graduate school, and so it was exhausting and
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  brutal, but it was a great place to be because in film school I
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  learned the mechanics of the making of the films, and at the studio I
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  was learning the selling of the films, right, and all of that sausage
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  that you know most filmmakers, you know, most filmmakers like a lot of
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  game makers, the operator under this of dreams fallacy that if I make it,
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  because I made it, and my mother says, I'm cool, Pete,
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  go buy this thing that I'm making. And that's not the case,
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  right, And so that gave me, even though I was selling stuff like
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  Missing an Action three and death wished for the crackdown, it gave me a
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  respect for the need for marketing, for how lack of marketing is brutal.
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  No, but I do have to ask you, though, did you did
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  you work on Superman for a Quest for Peace? No, no, no,
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  no, no, that was one of them. That was one of
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  the I didn't work on that, or Cobra that they had this side deal
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  with warners. Those weren't distributed by us. Those went out through Warner Brothers,
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  and uh, you know, made lost even more money because of the
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  additional print advertising costs. Right. So okay, So so you have this
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  amazing you have this meteoric rise in the industry. And then so I'm assuming
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  you got work and you started working in Hollywood as a screenwriter. No no,
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  no, no no no. I wanted to finish graduate school and I
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  was hustling, you know, because Cana was killing me. On many levels.
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  And so I just quit folks on a graduate school and so I worked
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  in a restaurant of Beverly Hills. But I got PA work from you know,
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  producers who were in there, and so I started working. Uh you
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  know, did a one eighty, and I started working on sets, and
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  I was a PA on like music videos and commercials, and uh uh was
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  a story editor and I worked with like TV movie companies. I would coverage
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  and i'd worked with the producers when they bought the life rights. I'd helped
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  them shape it into the X or five X or whatever the structure was for
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  what we used to call then a movie of the week. Uh. But
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  my love, the reason I went to film school is I always wanted to
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  write. And uh, you know, my story is familiar to a lot
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  of screenwriters. H I came there. I was just like sashion nets.
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  I came this close, so close, except my footstool of unproduced screenplays are
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  both unproduced and unsolved, right, which makes them even more special. But
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  you know, I made the rounds and I did meetings, and I got
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  really closed and I got attachments. You know, Kevin Pollock is my favorite
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  stamp up comedians of all time, because after one read, he attached himself
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  as the villain, kind of the comic villain to one of my scripts,
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  and I'm like, yay, And I was able to sort of parlay that
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  into yet another failed deal. But thank you, Kevin. If you're watching,
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  and you know, you just have to hustle, and you have to
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  have an iron skin, and you have to focus on the work and actually
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  do the work and put your tushy in the seat. I was looking at
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  the website. You've had some major guests on here. One of the people
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  you've had on when I'm honored to be in this group is Can Atchety,
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  right Nick. Then you know, I read his book years ago, A
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  Writer's Time, and it's one of the few books on writing that I'm like,
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  this helps me because he talks about process and he talks about put your
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  tushy in the seat, right. And so you know, I'm writing,
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  I'm trying to get stuff. I'm doing day jobs. But here's the problem.
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  You have to love your day job, right, And I wasn't.
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  And so at that point I was doing marketing for like a real estate consulting
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  firm in like downtown LA, And so I did that thing that you're not
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  supposed to do. Don't do these kids. I quit my job without another
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  job in front of me because I had the love of a good woman.
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  She was like, you gotta you're miserable, you gotta do something. And
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  all I knew was I wanted to work in computers. Right, this is
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  the late nineties, right, there was this cool new job that I thought
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  was really sexy. Webmaster. Right. I thought, I want to be
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  a webmaster. That sounds awesome, right, It's like a dungeon master.
• 15:07
  It's like a dungeon master, but different. I want to be a web
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  master. And uh so I just found a tempt firm across from my gym,
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  and I walked in there and they looked at my resume and say,
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  oh, you know power Point. That's kind of multi media, right,
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  And I'm like, yeah, well you can embed sound clips and stuff.
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  She's like, all the time, that's a that's a term I haven't heard
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  in play sometimes. Were you working in there? Were you working with micro
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  macromine? Were you working with macromin director a second? In a second,
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  yeah, Because they said, well, the power Point it's kind of multi
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  media. We'll send you to Mattel where you can test CD ROMs, and
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  I'm like, people get paid for that. That's almost as cool as web
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  Master. Is there a cloak too? And so I started at Mattel,
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  the toy company, in their little CD ROM division where most of their stuff
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  was developed in Macromedia director testing in quality assurance. I was a tester making
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  certain everything worked right, and if something didn't work right, I'd write up
• 16:22
  a little bug report and then we get sent to the developer to be fixed.
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  You help, And that parlayed into my old second career, where I
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  rose up through the ranks of QA testing, moved over to product development where
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  I was a producer, where I was a project manager, And after three
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  years of Mattel, I moved over to Crave Entertainment that was doing first PC
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  and then a lot of console stuff. And so I think after year four
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  or five from that very first job at Mattel, I became studio director at
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  Crave, where I was sort of the guy green lighting all of the projects
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  and listening to pictures from developers and giving interviews like this one from the booth
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  at E three and stuff like that. Matt your mileage may very kids may
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  be a very different path, but I just again, I got incredibly lucky
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  and uh so, yeah, so I worked in Tames having had this Hollywood
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  background. Right, So part two of the story is I hired Keith,
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  my co writer on Slay the Dragon, Keith Gilio, because he and his
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  wife were they're both SAG writers and there was a strike was in was it
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  ninety seven or ninety eight, two thousand eight, so they were on strike
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  and I needed a writer because I just been hired by yet another toy company
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  to head up an in house interactive studio that was building a really big open
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  world game. And I thought, wow, this is really cool, and
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  I'm the I'm the exec producer. I can hire whoever I want. So
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  I hired Keith because I knew he had daughters, and I knew that he
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  had played video games. But more importantly, he and I had collaborated.
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  I compare us to David Bowie and Iggy Pop, right, always would collaborate,
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  always would be the first one to show new stuff too, and everything
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  like that, and a lot of you know, Keith and I came out
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  of different film schools. He went to NYU, I went to this but
• 18:48
  at the same time, and so we both went through very similar screenwriting eras
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  where it was all about structure, right. And you know, Keith taught
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  me about fifteen page sequences and when you get eight of those put together,
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  whatever it is, then you have a screenplay. And so I hired him
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  to help me write this really big, open world game. And that became
• 19:15
  an exercise and frustration for both of us, mostly him, because he'd sit
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  in his office and come up with a cool idea. He'd run into my
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  office and say, hey, can we do this, and I'd say no,
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  because it's a game. You can't lock the player down and just push
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  story at them. The player wants to have a hand in the frame.
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  The player wants to have some agency over her own experience, right, And
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  so he'd grumble. He'd get it, but he grumble. He got off
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  to his office. About twenty years later, he'd run back into my office,
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  say hey, can we do this? And I say, no,
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  we can't. It's a game. We'll be right back after a word from
• 19:52
  our sponsor, and now back to the show. And so that frusha.
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  I mean, we've known each other for decades. Were like brothers. He's
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  like the brother I ever had. We were grinding each other, but in
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  a collegiate way. And then finally he walked into my office one time and
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  I cut him off. I'm like, it's a game, Keith. He
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  says, no, listen, I've been teaching an UCLA extension. He's been
• 20:22
  teaching screenwriting for a time. What if we took this frustration we have and
• 20:27
  turn it into a class, right, What if we discussed this friction between
• 20:34
  what the player wants and what the storyteller wants to do? Right? And
• 20:38
  so he pitched that to UCLA Extension, And so we taught our very first
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  class. It's been over ten years ago, and it was a one day
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  kind of traffic school class pitched two to your point when you began the segment,
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  screenwriters who don't know anything about games, who think that they can go
• 21:02
  into games, like you know, there's there's gold right right funny in games.
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  But it's very humbling. If you're an established screenwriter or a non established
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  screenwriter, you're still used to the paradigm of the beginning. The creative seed
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  comes from my skull. I'm going to tell my story, and that's not
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  how the way games work, right, And so it's very humbling. So
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  what is the so, because I'm again such a complete newbie and green in
• 21:33
  this entire world of game producer, what is the hierarchy of game producing?
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  Meaning like in films there's the executive producer, producer, director, writer,
• 21:45
  DP. What is it for game producing? Just the general big heads.
• 21:48
  It just you know, it depends on the type of game. But an
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  exec producer, which is the title life held the most frequently, is especial
• 22:00
  the money guy. Okay, an exec producer is the deal guy and he's
• 22:07
  the one who shepherds the contract through the process and has to you know,
• 22:11
  make the relationship with the developer. Game publishers or games studio are like movie
• 22:18
  studios. They finance and market and distribute. Right, So when you hear
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  me talk about publisher, think movie studio and the exec producer. It tends
• 22:30
  to be the studio guy who's managing the developer. And when I say developer,
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  that means a company that actually makes the games. They're the ones that
• 22:41
  hire the programmers and the artists and the voiceover talent and everybody. And that
• 22:47
  relationship, that contrastual relationship is stressful. It's stressful because every time you make
• 22:53
  a game, you're making that game for the first time. Right, Hollywood
• 22:59
  has an almost one hundred year head start on getting technology sort of perfected,
• 23:07
  which mitigates surprises on the technical end. Right, you know what causes production
• 23:15
  delays in Hollywood is stuff like you know, star egos, or weather going
• 23:22
  bad, or you say, have some very rare catastrophic accident on the set.
• 23:26
  But for the most part, you know, ten shoot days in ninety
• 23:30
  shoot days is ninety shoot days. Right. With games especially, it's getting
• 23:40
  better now with game engines, but for so long you'll commit to, yeah,
• 23:44
  we're gonna have this feature, in this feature, in this feature,
• 23:47
  and then you actually start to do the R and D to try to code
• 23:51
  the thing and move it into the flesh and deliver on what you promised.
• 23:57
  And the risk, both technological and creative, are massive, Right. Games
• 24:03
  take a much longer time to make, and so that relationship between a developer
• 24:10
  and a producer is very stressful, and our executives are very stressful. So
• 24:18
  over here on the developer side, you know the production company. Those can
• 24:25
  be structured in anyone of a number of ways, but what there isn't generally
• 24:30
  is a director where there's one creative person who sits at the top of the
• 24:33
  pyramid and calls all the shots. Okay, there's one or two creators that
• 24:40
  have sort of possessory above the title credit, like Sid Meyer or Hideo Kojima
• 24:47
  who does the Bettlegear solid games. But they are the exceptions rather than the
• 24:52
  rule, because games are made by committee. You've heard, you know,
• 24:56
  it's the oldest cliche in Hollywood that film is a collaborative media. And that's
• 25:00
  true, but that's nothing compared to games. Games are super collaborative because they're
• 25:08
  so vast and because they're so specialized that all the teams have to be in
• 25:15
  constant good communication with each other to deliver their stuff interconnectedly. And so games
• 25:27
  are sort of managed by a producer, a project manager, a team of
• 25:33
  producers, and some of them may be more or less creative in terms of
• 25:40
  working with the art director or the head of narrative right, a game writer
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  in a writer in games that sometimes called a narrative designer, right, and
• 25:53
  the gameplay designer. And and there there's heads of departments, there's heads the
• 26:00
  departments, and you as the producer have to make certain that everybody is on
• 26:07
  the same page. And so it's a very very very collaborative, very diplomatic.
• 26:11
  You have to listen as much as talk, and you have to be
• 26:15
  patient. And you know, there's a reason that we have a very deserved
• 26:23
  reputation for crunch time in the industry because the best laid plans. You know,
• 26:30
  you can have the best plan and the best documentation and the best people,
• 26:34
  and still things go wrong on a day to day basis. In the
• 26:38
  schedule slips, and it was worse twenty years ago. It's gotten a lot
• 26:44
  better in the last ten years, but still there's this expectation that if we
• 26:51
  start to slip too much, we just have to cancel kids' birthdays and start
• 26:56
  working eighteen and similar to VFX in the VFX world, yeah, there's there's
• 27:03
  this twenty four hour day just turn around sometimes just to meet the deadlines.
• 27:07
  That's what happened to Cats. They literally shipped it without visual effects, some
• 27:12
  shots missing, and it's brutal and it's it's but it's that same technology.
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  It's it's that same tech culture. You just have to go. Electronic arts
• 27:23
  used to have this freight uh saying we have to go Egyptian on this,
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  meaning we just need to have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of peop building the
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  pyramid working. And there's a fallacy there because in project management it's like,
• 27:41
  uh, you're you're constantly worrying about person hours. You know, how long
• 27:45
  is it going to take this one person to do this task? Right?
• 27:49
  And uh, it takes a woman nine months to make a baby, right,
• 27:55
  produce a baby? But uh, too often we think that well,
• 28:00
  if we hire, uh, if we hire eight more ladies, we can
• 28:04
  have that beauty in one month. Right. It doesn't work, right,
• 28:11
  it doesn't work so well, yeah, go ahead, So what are the
• 28:15
  so I mean, obviously we've studied, you know, screenplay structure and there's
• 28:21
  multiple different acts and structures in the hero's journey and and all sorts of different
• 28:26
  theories in regards to how it is structure a movie. But generally it's a
• 28:30
  ninety page script. There's there's certain points that hit and Sidfield basically laid it
• 28:37
  out years ago. What are the different structures for video games? And I
• 28:41
  know that depends on the kind of video game you're playing as well, correct,
• 28:45
  right, right? And uh, you know, even when we talk
• 28:51
  there's so many words that we use in common in film and games. But
• 28:56
  have different meanings, right, Like genres in film tend to reflect the mood
• 29:03
  in the audience, right, comedies or horror or whatever. And even though
• 29:08
  we have a genre in games called survival horror, the genres tend to be
• 29:12
  grouped around actions the player takes, right, a shooter, a sports sim
• 29:22
  where you're modeling the behavior and athlete on the field, feel like in Fifa
• 29:26
  or Madden, or a puzzle game where you're moving stuff around and trying to
• 29:33
  ligne stuff up and or solve a puzzle. So the genres are based around
• 29:40
  mechanics rather than moods, and those mechanics kind of define or combinations of mechanics
• 29:48
  kind of define what sort of gain it is and what sort of structure the
• 29:55
  story should have if it has a story. Be right back after a word
• 30:00
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Right. I'll be
• 30:08
  the first person to tell you that not every game UH needs a deep,
• 30:15
  involving story, but all games are improved by having some type of story,
• 30:23
  no matter how light UH to give the gameplay some type of content. So
• 30:30
  like so like Super like Super Mario Brothers has a very thin storyline, it's
• 30:36
  fairly thick Ramsel, the Damsel from the from Bowser. But then you look
• 30:41
  at Link or Zelda much more, much more complex, and then and it's
• 30:45
  become its own world after the whole Zelda series. But then so it all
• 30:51
  like I remember this is I'm dating myself. But like Castlevania, the original
• 30:55
  Castlevania, like Contra Contra was pretty pretty straightforward story. It's not really high
• 31:03
  that high. But then they would. I started seeing that even in those
• 31:07
  early Nintendo games that there was, they were starting to add more story.
• 31:12
  I remember Ninja Gaidian and those kind of stories. They started adding more story
• 31:18
  elements as even Super Mario Brothers they started to add more and more stories.
• 31:22
  Nothing compared to these what we have today, but you can start seeing that
• 31:26
  where there. I mean, obviously they must have been writers, right,
• 31:30
  I mean, well, in the early days, the writer was was the
• 31:34
  designer was the artist? Was the program yea. In the first in the
• 31:40
  arcades, the first consoles generation, you had crews of one or two people
• 31:45
  making a game, right I'm I'm dear friends with selling the original and television
• 31:49
  developers Matchell's console system in the eighties, and you would have one or two
• 31:56
  people and they would be the arts, the designer, the programmer, the
• 32:01
  sound designer. And as the eighties advanced and the games began to get more
• 32:08
  complex, you and you would see writers, especially over on the C side
• 32:19
  of things with PC games where you had very text heavy like Zorks right sorts,
• 32:27
  or the text parsing games, or the Dungeons and Dragon style computer RPGs.
• 32:32
  Those had full on stories because there were pages and pages of texts and
• 32:37
  they were dialogue scenes and everything like that. And you can see that same
• 32:40
  deep structure on a game like a Fallout or a witch Er three or what
• 32:45
  I'm playing right now is Outer Worlds right now from its obsidian and uh,
• 32:52
  you know, the the visuals are amazing, but the deep structure of I'm
• 33:00
  gonna do this stuff and I'm going to talk to these people. I'm gonna
• 33:04
  choose from dialogue trees, and that's how I'm going to experience the story through
• 33:08
  interacting with characters and through the world building, rather than me sitting down and
• 33:15
  being told a lot of stuff in a little cinematic Right, So, what
• 33:20
  so what are experienced story? Huh? So? Then what are the different
• 33:23
  story structures. Let's say, let's pick a let's pick a genre if you
• 33:27
  will, it justs okay, still picking a genre, right, So like
• 33:30
  a puzzle game, it's all world building, right, if you think of
• 33:35
  Candy Crush Saga on your phone, the story, the structure is just an
• 33:42
  endless series of levels, right, But there's still a world there, right,
• 33:49
  there's still a context of you know, essentially this candy world, anthropomorphic
• 33:57
  candy world that you have to release all the candy and get the stars and
• 34:01
  move to the next level and thing like that. I'm playing a game on
• 34:06
  mobile right now called Homescapes, which is a little family drama about a butler
• 34:12
  helping to fix up his parents dilapidated mansion. But that story is completely tangential
• 34:17
  to the core gameplay, which is essentially Candy Crush Saga. You know,
• 34:22
  align all this stuff and clear the state. But they added but they added
• 34:27
  a heavier storyline to it than they should have. They had to then they
• 34:30
  needed to. And yet part of the reason it's successful is you get really
• 34:37
  engaged with these characters, right. And he's such a you know, he's
• 34:42
  a middle aged man, balding, and yet he gets very upset when his
• 34:45
  parents start fighting with each other. You know, it works on many levels,
• 34:50
  so that's a puzzle game. But you know the other problem, the
• 34:57
  reason it breaks down when you talk about structure is that a screenplay is ninety
• 35:04
  you know, a movie is ninety minutes two hours, right, It's finite
• 35:07
  in duration, and a game can be infinite. And I'm not even talking
• 35:12
  about replaying the game now that you finish on a higher difficulty. I mean,
• 35:16
  we live in the era of Fallout and Grand Theft Auto and Witcher and
• 35:22
  Red Dead Redemption, these giant open world games that there's different levels of content
• 35:30
  you can engage in. There's the main story, but there's also side subshote
• 35:38
  sub stories are yeah, sub stories, little side b lines, and then
• 35:43
  there's the story of there's also the story of you just running around in the
• 35:49
  world getting into trouble. Right. One of my favorite games from ten years
• 35:53
  ago was Grand Theft Auto four right, which was set in fake New York
• 36:01
  and you play this really tough Eastern European guy who uh ping pongs back and
• 36:07
  forth be called between all these factions of the New York City criminal underworld.
• 36:14
  It was a great story, really involving with a great anti hero that you
• 36:17
  play as named Nico. Bellick, and I was enjoying the story. I
• 36:22
  was enjoying the game. And then I went online and I saw that if
• 36:27
  you steal a car and run at a forty five degree angle into a swing
• 36:32
  set, that car, that swing set will ack like a trebishet and shoot
• 36:37
  you hundreds of feet into the air. Okay, at that point, to
• 36:43
  heck with Nico Bellick, I want to play Bob flying through the air on
• 36:49
  my swing set trebishet. Right. And I did that like four hours.
• 36:53
  I was like a kid with an I was literally a kid with a new
• 36:57
  toy playing how far can I go? I wonder if I can go across
• 37:02
  the Hudson River into the Bronx in my car in a trap launched like that.
• 37:07
  Right, And you can still find videos on YouTube of this ridiculous bug
• 37:14
  in the game that they found. They reported, and the producers decided,
• 37:21
  you know what, that's pretty fun. It doesn't crash the game. The
• 37:24
  player can have fun with this. Let's leave it in. Let's not fix
• 37:28
  the button. Right. So you do that, and that's you playing as
• 37:34
  a sort of a pure video game player. You're in your own story,
• 37:38
  and the story is you the gamer doing this cool thing. Right. And
• 37:44
  so there's always this tension between and we describe it in the book as Aristotle
• 37:51
  versus Mario. Right. Aristotle is the story that the storyteller wants to tell
• 37:57
  and Mario is whatever the player want wants to do, right, And sometimes
• 38:01
  those are a complete opposition to each other. So is it more because I'm
• 38:08
  just trying to write my head around it from a story perspective. So if
• 38:13
  you're if you're gonna sit down and write, you know, a new Witcher,
• 38:19
  let's say, and say you're gonna you're gonna write a Witcher, you're
• 38:23
  very much into world building first and foremost. So there's there's there's sore sub
• 38:30
  story, subplots and stories about this little town here, that little moat there,
• 38:36
  what that dragon is over there that he's got to say, there's a
• 38:37
  backstory on that. So there's just a lot of writing regarding the world.
• 38:43
  Then tons, so there's that writing process. Then the main character, then
• 38:50
  the main villain or multiple levels of villains villains, and then there and then
• 38:54
  you've got all of Joseph Campbell in there. You've got the trickster, you've
• 39:00
  got the mentor, you got so it's like storytelling on a massive, open
• 39:06
  scale where the screenplay is a very defined highway. It's literally the road is
• 39:14
  gone and anything your I can see is now needs to be kind of filled
• 39:20
  as a game writer. Is that a fair assessment? It's fair, and
• 39:24
  you know you're absolutely right. And another way of thinking about it is it's
• 39:30
  not very useful for very long to compare a big budget video game to a
• 39:34
  feature film. It is fair and much more useful to compare a big budget
• 39:38
  video game to either a theme park or a television series, like a big
• 39:45
  epic multi season television series, because it's because massive. It's so massive as
• 39:52
  scale, story stelling like Games of Thrones for Games of throws. Yes,
• 39:55
  we're allowed to still talk about games. We'll be right back after a word
• 40:02
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Yeah, but that's
• 40:12
  a great example. I mean, what the reason that works as a book
• 40:15
  and a film and a TV series until it didn't is that there's something for
• 40:22
  everybody. Hey, you're tired of this character in this plot line, be
• 40:27
  patient, because we're going to do a complete gear change geographically but also in
• 40:32
  mood and tone to where like the best of dramatic television, it serves that
• 40:42
  short detention span you a little into the story, but not too much,
• 40:45
  and then there's a scene shift and now we're picking up on it. It's
• 40:51
  like eating at the buffet, right, you get a little of this and
• 40:54
  a little of that, a little of that, like oh scampy. Instead
• 40:59
  of a feature film, you're locked in to one story, maybe to maybe
• 41:04
  a couple of subplots, but you have the patience because it's only two hours,
• 41:09
  right, right. So with games, were where you can compare the
• 41:17
  three act structure to kind of the meta structure of how you as a player
• 41:24
  approach a game you've never played before. The first act is the tutorial where
• 41:30
  you learn how to play the game, and part of learning how to play
• 41:34
  the game is the exposition of the game world and who are you playing as?
• 41:39
  And what can you do? And what can you not do? How
• 41:43
  will I succeed in the game? And then you go off into an infinitely
• 41:49
  long second act if you will, right, And that's you playing the game,
• 41:54
  And then there has to be some sort of ending. There has to
• 41:59
  be in most genres, especially in most narrative genres story genres, there needs
• 42:07
  to be some type of conclusion to the story. In an abstract game like
• 42:12
  Anny Kressauga. No, there doesn't need to be, you know, I
• 42:14
  mean, it's part of the business model. This will go on forever,
• 42:17
  okay, because we want you to keep buying lives. But in even like
• 42:25
  the last Zelda Breath of the Wild, which was an amazing game. It's
• 42:30
  the first Zelda I'd played in years and years and years, and I did
• 42:35
  not want it to end. But it finally got to the point where finally
• 42:38
  I got to throw down with Gannon, and it was an epic fight and
• 42:43
  it lasted a long time, but I finally got to return, you know,
• 42:47
  peace to High Rules. So there was a resolution, and I felt
• 42:52
  like all this time I'd spent in the game wasn't wasted. I mean,
• 42:57
  of course it wasn't wasted. I was amused, I was enjoying myself.
• 43:00
  I was diverted. But I feel like I accomplished something in the digital world
• 43:07
  that I spent so much time with, as opposed to like actually accomplishing something
• 43:12
  like folding my laundry in the real world, which is mundane, right,
• 43:15
  So so like World of Warcraft, which is these these kind of online worlds
• 43:22
  that are essentially endless, like they they never there is no conclusion. There's
• 43:28
  just it's constantly just about building, it's about selling stuff and making money.
• 43:32
  Well, well it's about it's about you and your relationship to your character.
• 43:37
  Characters and the people that put Warcraft together do come up with storylines. But
• 43:49
  and there is there is always talk about the end game. But like history,
• 43:57
  it never ends, right, And so Warcraft is sort of you can
• 44:02
  compare Warcraft to a cable network and then whatever this year's expansion pack, because
• 44:13
  you know they're constant seasons. Yeah seasons, Yeah, big long seasons that
• 44:19
  take two years to develop, right, And I mean Warcraft. I know
• 44:23
  I'm too familiar with Warcraft because my ex wife and I played Warcraft solid from
• 44:30
  like two thousand and four when it came out through our divorce in two thousand
• 44:34
  and nine. Right, are you going to see the problem I secraft.
• 44:37
  I do not have children. I have a level one ten Warlock, but
• 44:43
  I don't have any children. Is it very similar to that episode of South
• 44:47
  Park when they were playing Wark? No, no, we would take potty
• 44:52
  breaks, well at least, but yeah, I mean it's it's it's it
• 44:59
  is like like many many good and lucrative video games. It's addictive. I'll
• 45:04
  go ahead and tell you it's addictive. But what so what is it?
• 45:07
  So you know I've I've played video games, I haven't played them in a
• 45:10
  long time because I have other things that because I know when I played video
• 45:15
  games, I played video games. So my first I mean, I hadn't
• 45:21
  shout out to Burger time on in television, so I my in television was
• 45:27
  the first game system. And then I bought myself a Nintendo system when I
• 45:30
  was in the high school and I worked at a video store which rented video
• 45:35
  games. So I just had this non stop I mean, I still remember,
• 45:40
  if I may, if I may tell a short story, I remember
• 45:43
  when I got Mike tyson S punch Out, which was amazing. I beat
• 45:47
  Mike tyson S punch Out in five days, which was a feat that was
• 45:52
  straight twelve hour days. On day six, my eyes went blurry and I
• 45:58
  thought I thought. I woke up in the morning and I was blurred.
• 46:01
  I called my mom. I'm like, oh my god, I've gone blind,
• 46:05
  and she's like, no, no, you've got ice ring. Just
• 46:07
  calm down. So I don't play as much as I used to, but
• 46:10
  I'm fascinated with these stories of hearing how like people literally died in like Korea.
• 46:20
  The guy who died playing while I was in China, and he just
• 46:22
  he didn't take a potty break or a food break or a water break,
• 46:27
  and he just expired playing the game. And this is terrible. You know,
• 46:30
  no one wants It's not like the people at Blizzard were like, woo,
• 46:36
  you know we killed one. Like no, it's not, no,
• 46:38
  no, no one. As a matter of fact, I mean from early
• 46:42
  days, warcraft was, you know, on the loading screens. You occasionally
• 46:46
  have to stare at a loading screen, and they would put tips and tricks
• 46:52
  on the loading screen, and one of the more frequent one was remember to
• 46:57
  go out into the real world and explore outside the world of warcraft, you
• 47:02
  know, like, hey, take a break sometimes, guys. So so,
• 47:06
  what is so with with a screenplay? With a with a movie,
• 47:08
  it's a screenplay. So you you're handed a ninety two page book or screenplay.
• 47:15
  What is the thing? And what is the what I mean, is
• 47:17
  it what's the format? What's the like? What's the thing you hand to?
• 47:22
  Is it a thing? Is it like? Is it like scripts like
• 47:24
  on a TV series. We have new episodes every week, like, how
• 47:27
  is it work? Okay, so there's no standard format that we're getting there
• 47:34
  and there are some that's amazing. Yeah, but there's no standard format because
• 47:39
  because it's not driven by uh, because the deal isn't broken over the script,
• 47:45
  right. The deal is brokered over a demo okay if you're lucky,
• 47:51
  and sometimes over a design document. You know, at Crave, I would
• 47:57
  sometimes do contracts based on the track record of that developer and a design document,
• 48:04
  which is essentially a long memo. Yeah, very much like agreement,
• 48:08
  but about the overall player experience and a component of that, but just a
• 48:15
  component is the story. Right, so uh uh. You know, the
• 48:23
  where games come from is from developers coming up with cool things for the player
• 48:32
  to do, and then the writer comes along, you hope, very early
• 48:38
  days, to come up with a great context so that those players can do
• 48:44
  that. Right. A good example is Electronic Arts released Apex Legends about a
• 48:52
  year ago, and essentially it's a Fortnite clone. I hope I'm not offending
• 49:00
  anyone. It's a successful Fortnite clone, but it's a Fortnite clone. It's
• 49:04
  run around and kill kill the other forty nine people on the map and good
• 49:07
  for you. There are feature differences, there's a story difference. The tone
• 49:14
  is very different. Fortnight Fortnight Fortnite is very whimsical Battle Royale murder sim and
• 49:22
  Apex Legends is a little more, a little more gritty, little more adult,
• 49:25
  a little more post by ecalyptic. And there are feature differences in terms
• 49:30
  of the way you do things, the way you can more easily, say,
• 49:34
  make teams in Apex Legends, all of that. None of that relates
• 49:43
  to no. Sorry, So it's not like you pitch just the core gameplay.
• 49:52
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
• 50:00
  to the show. Pitch gameplay plus narrative context, plus new features and new
• 50:07
  technology play. You know, it has to be this whole at plus developer
• 50:12
  track record. It's a lot easier for you to get a contract your studio
• 50:16
  to get a contract if you've put out something, rather than if you're four
• 50:22
  kids with a server in the garage saying, hey, give us a million
• 50:24
  dollars so we can make this game. So unlike the screenplay, like the
• 50:30
  movie can't be made well, arguably can't make a movie without screenplay if you
• 50:34
  really truly want so you could do it out of a script, and you
• 50:37
  could do a script mentor there's there's successful stories movies made with but generally speaking,
• 50:43
  movies without a screenplay doesn't get made right. But video games could get
• 50:46
  the ball rolling very comfortably without a specific guy blueprint right away as far as
• 50:53
  stories concerned, well, as far as stories concerned, yeah, or even
• 50:59
  even as far as gameplay is concerned, because so much of it is you're
• 51:02
  trying something, you're testing it. Is it fun? Is it not fun?
• 51:07
  Okay, let's make some tweaks, let's test it again. Is it
• 51:10
  more fun? Is it less fun? And then you're filling it in around
• 51:15
  you know, the you've heard that cliche about building the airplane while it's in
• 51:20
  flight. That's very much like game development, right because, and Keith is
• 51:28
  very passionate about this. Keith makes the argument in the book that the sooner
• 51:32
  you have a writer in the room, the better, because historically what's been
• 51:39
  kind of creatively a problem with a lot of games is the head of programming
• 51:49
  who loves him some Star Wars thinks that that makes him an expert on the
• 51:55
  hero's journey and science fiction and character and dialogue and plot instruction and so the
• 52:07
  sooner you can have an actual writer in there whose sole focus is to kind
• 52:13
  of see what the gameplay is developing into and saying, oh, well,
• 52:17
  you're doing this sort of player has an opportunity for this. We could tease
• 52:22
  a really cool quest line out of that particular aspect of it. Right,
• 52:28
  and or that you're having the character. You're having the player character have this
• 52:35
  sort of a group of actions that tells me a little bit about what their
• 52:42
  personality is like. Right, you want somebody in the room or a couple
• 52:45
  people in the room that can take everything that's being done on the gameplay side
• 52:52
  and kind of use that as hooks to start building the story out and start
• 52:58
  developing you know, the things that are going to be the you know what
• 53:05
  we now refer to as the narrative design of the game. Now, how
• 53:08
  is dialogue treated in gameplay versus? Because I'm assuming there's no Quentin Tarantino's in
• 53:15
  the game world where their dialogue is so snappy that they're like, oh my
• 53:21
  god, I have to play that game just to hear the dialogue. Okay,
• 53:23
  well no, because imagine playing, oh, I don't know, the
• 53:31
  Hateful a the video game, right, all that dialogue in it. You're
• 53:37
  sitting there with the controller and you're listening wishing these two people would just shut
• 53:44
  up. Okay, no disrespect to Quinton, but I have a controller in
• 53:51
  my hand. I want to do. I don't just want to hear Samuel
• 53:58
  Jackson and whomever, you know, and they're witty banter, right, And
• 54:02
  so dialogue, you know, we do have. We do have what we
• 54:07
  call cutscenes or cinematics, which are mini m I NI small movies that have
• 54:15
  dialogue, and those are written as conventionally as possible, and the scripts for
• 54:21
  those look like pages from screenplays. But there's the bulk of dialogue comes in
• 54:29
  either like interactive where I choose, you know, in an RPG, or
• 54:34
  in a certain types of action or adventure games where I'm going up to a
• 54:40
  non player character and I'm having a conversation with them and they'll say something,
• 54:46
  and then I can choose different responses on the bottom, like a choose your
• 54:51
  own adventure. And so that sort of branching dialogue is another sort of much
• 54:58
  more complex way of interacting with all the different people you need to interact with
• 55:04
  in a big game. And then the third type of dialogue is what we
• 55:08
  call barks, which is procedurally generated dialogue. That is, uh, the
• 55:16
  player or you know, the bad guy I'm sneaking around will say based on
• 55:22
  the situation, right, and so uh, the the all this, all
• 55:28
  this video game dialogue is we're talking about format is either written in or eventually
• 55:35
  makes its way into Excel. One sentence, one line per row in Excel,
• 55:43
  and then voice talent has to sit there in the booth with headphones on
• 55:46
  and go line by line and read every one of those lines discreetly, and
• 55:53
  it's caught up into its own little sound file so that the goon number twelve
• 56:02
  when you accidentally hit the controller and make a noise, even though you're can
• 56:09
  say, hey, did you hear something? Right? Right, But he
• 56:14
  can't just record that one line and be done. The problem with barks is
• 56:19
  you have to come up with six or seven or eight different ways of saying
• 56:23
  did you hear something? Because if not, every time he's hit it,
• 56:27
  it's say the same thing and to get repetitive. You don't want it to
• 56:30
  be repetitive. Yeah, and so it's it's I went to a cool presentation
• 56:35
  at the Writers Guild several years ago where they had all of the nominees for
• 56:42
  Best Game, for Best Game Writing, and they were all in this panel
• 56:46
  of the Writers Guild and I had the guys from Fallout New Vegas there and
• 56:52
  somebody said somebody asked him how big was the script? And the guy did
• 56:57
  like this, like here to the floors. As you know, on a
• 57:00
  lark, we decided we were going to kill some cubes of paper and we
• 57:04
  printed out the entire script and it was here to the floor. So how
• 57:08
  many thousands of pages? Seven thousand pages, eight thousand pages? Well in
• 57:14
  excel, Oh my god, that's even nice. So there's no descriptions.
• 57:20
  So there's no descriptions in the stories or in the I mean in a treatment.
• 57:24
  I guess that's something that's getting better. Okay. One of the things
• 57:28
  that has frustrated me for decades, because I come from my background and I've
• 57:34
  worked with actors and I respect what they do, is when fanboys or critics
• 57:43
  that don't understand the process will say, oh, this is a fun game,
• 57:46
  but the voice acting is terrible. Stop. It's not the voice actor
• 57:52
  that's doing a bad job. It's that the voice actor hasn't been given enough
• 57:57
  information to work with to or they can craft a performance. Yeah, and
• 58:01
  how and how do do you have a director there like a video director.
• 58:06
  Yeah, yeah, you have, you have a not a film director.
• 58:09
  But do you have a creative director or ahead of sound or a head of
• 58:14
  dialogue whose job is to understand the story context of all of these characters.
• 58:22
  And very often you'll have you know, you'll have the line of dialogue and
• 58:27
  excel and then the next field over in the same row. There might be
• 58:30
  a bit of stage of direction, like a parenthetical in a screenplay, right,
• 58:37
  And in screenplays we know that nowadays we don't put a lot of those
• 58:42
  in because the director and the actors want to craft the performance. You just
• 58:47
  write the dialogue screenwriter, right. Well, you do that a lot in
• 58:52
  games because you want to contextualize the line because it's just a line of dialogue
• 59:00
  to sell. You don't know where the scene is. Necessarily, you don't
• 59:04
  know what the context is. Necessarily, you very often, even though you
• 59:08
  should know what the triggering action that's going to trigger the character saying this line,
• 59:13
  right, And so that director has to be responsible for giving the character
• 59:20
  as much information as they can, and so they have a very very very
• 59:25
  big responsibility, and the good ones are very good and will come into a
• 59:30
  voice session armed with as much information, including like character sketches, so that
• 59:37
  the voice talent the actor can know what she looks like, this person,
• 59:44
  who she's going to be reading this long, long list of very often interconnected
• 59:50
  lines. It's also super rare that you have, unlike say animation. We'll
• 59:58
  be right back after a word for our sponsor, and now back to the
• 1:00:05
  show where you have two characters in the same booth to where they can react
• 1:00:10
  against each other. Sometimes if it's a linear like a mini movie like times,
• 1:00:16
  you do that, but the bulk of it is me alone, reading
• 1:00:22
  line by line, and it takes days. The size of the role.
• 1:00:27
  Yeah, it's brutal. Now, So I mean, I'm gonna ask this
• 1:00:30
  question, but I have a feeling that it doesn't apply, but I'm gonna
• 1:00:34
  ask it anyway. How do you write a compelling hero? You know,
• 1:00:37
  because it all depends if it's a one kind of player thing. But like
• 1:00:43
  the New Star Wars whatever Battlefront or whatever it was, I just saw a
• 1:00:46
  commercial for you could be you could be All be Won, you could be
• 1:00:51
  Darth Vader, you could be a Yoda, you could be a stormtrooper like
• 1:00:54
  that, and those are different storylines and different perspectives and different everything. So
• 1:01:00
  let's say, just for argument's sake, you have one hero, how do
• 1:01:04
  you write one that people really connect to? Because obviously what Mario is Mario,
• 1:01:08
  but Link, more specifically in Zelda, is a little bit more relative
• 1:01:14
  to what I'm talking about, right, So we No, it's a very
• 1:01:21
  good question. You have to ask yourself again. It relates to what type
• 1:01:24
  of game is it? Right? And Link is very often what we call
• 1:01:30
  the mute hero. Right, He's sort of this defined sort of but because
• 1:01:36
  he's mute, he's kind of the tabula raza, right, And he's sort
• 1:01:39
  of generically good, and he's going to do heroic things because that's what the
• 1:01:45
  player wants. Because the more heroic I am, the more risks I take,
• 1:01:50
  the more rewards I get. And it's an adventure, right, I'm
• 1:01:53
  not having very much fun as a player if I just cower in the corner,
• 1:01:59
  right, I want to go out. So you have mute heroes like
• 1:02:05
  Link or like Mario Freeman in the Fallout, or well, Mario, they
• 1:02:10
  gave Mario lines starting with Mario sixty four, so he had dialogues Mario,
• 1:02:17
  Mario got a better age. Wait, what is a snake from Metal Gear?
• 1:02:22
  Snake? Yeah, yeah, like a solid snake. He's he's very
• 1:02:27
  verbose and you know it says all kinds of cool, tough guy lines.
• 1:02:32
  So he's a defined character who is not mute, and and so he's more
• 1:02:38
  like a action hero or like a cinematic character that we want to follow.
• 1:02:45
  Laura Croft, right, has lines. You know who Laura Croft is.
• 1:02:50
  So when I choose to play tum Raater, I know who I'm playing as.
• 1:02:52
  It's Laura Croft, and she has this backstory and this trauma in her
• 1:02:57
  life and matter of facts of this or like Drake's fortune. I was playing
• 1:03:00
  through the Nathan Drake series for the Nodding died. That's you know, it's
• 1:03:06
  like a boy. He's a male tomb raider, kind of very different,
• 1:03:09
  very American, very sort of cynical, but I know who it is.
• 1:03:16
  Then there's a third type of character. And this happens in open world RPGs
• 1:03:22
  quite a bit, where you the player get to help define who you are,
• 1:03:30
  right, and so outer Worlds is like this and Fallout is like this,
• 1:03:38
  where broadly your character is somebody who was born in an underground vault in
• 1:03:45
  this post apocalyptic world, and for whatever reason, you're sent out into the
• 1:03:51
  vault and sent out into the dangerous world where they have mutants and giant scorpions
• 1:03:59
  and every thing and have to do heroic deeds in order to solve the mega
• 1:04:05
  quest across the whole game. But you get to define who you are.
• 1:04:11
  You get to play the way you want to. It's a role playing game,
• 1:04:15
  so very much like Dungeons and Dragons, you get to define your character.
• 1:04:20
  You get to play as a kind of brutish warrior who kicks ass first
• 1:04:28
  and ask questions later, or you get to be a very persuasive, congenial,
• 1:04:32
  kind of barred character with a lot of charisma who doesn't like to fight
• 1:04:40
  and likes to trade and engage people that way. And so those are two
• 1:04:46
  very, very very different characters. It would be really hard to do a
• 1:04:53
  game based on Fallout because even though it's a popular game series makes millions of
• 1:05:01
  dollars, very very popular, there's no one central character that everybody has in
• 1:05:06
  common. It's very much like World of Warcraft, right, there's yeah,
• 1:05:11
  but Halo, but Halo horrible. Even though it looks great and it was
• 1:05:18
  a lot of answers. I was a fan. I felt like I was
• 1:05:23
  seeing the world of az Aroth, but I had no idea who these characters
• 1:05:29
  were in this story because that story is not my story playing the game way?
• 1:05:33
  Is that why there are rarely, if ever video games that translate well
• 1:05:40
  to to cinema. It's like, I can't I can think of I can't
• 1:05:45
  even think of maybe a handful and trying to lose lose escapes me. I
• 1:05:49
  know, Lora Croft tomb Raider the first one. It's fun, but that's
• 1:05:54
  very specific because it's just we know who lower Craft does and then just write
• 1:05:57
  a new adventure, very black lack Holms. But why is like Doom and
• 1:06:04
  God, there's so many bad ones Warcraft? I think I think I think
• 1:06:09
  there's a lot of reasons for that. I think that with World Warcraft.
• 1:06:15
  Uh, you know, first of all, that was Duncan Jones uh directed
• 1:06:18
  that. You know, they David Bowie's son. You know, he came
• 1:06:24
  off of Moon, which is a great little you know, it's a little
• 1:06:29
  thing, little anything, and you know, it's like what Hollywood did to
• 1:06:32
  Josh Trank. He does his great little Anie things like here, let's give
• 1:06:36
  him too much money, and he and and all the expectations with that money,
• 1:06:43
  and they will get into trouble. I think that, Uh. I
• 1:06:46
  think that there are good video game movies. I haven't seen the Sonic movie.
• 1:06:55
  Love the Sonic Movie felt satisfied. They felt like it was fun,
• 1:07:00
  and it felt like But it's a character though that like, and that's it.
• 1:07:03
  Sonic is not a very deep character. And you're defining in question even
• 1:07:10
  further. You know, you asked video game movies, and that was a
• 1:07:14
  video game movie found a giant audience. I think, yeah, but then
• 1:07:23
  we have Super Mario Brothers. Well we no, No, that happened so
• 1:07:31
  long ago. That's why we don't have a Zelda movie now. It's because
• 1:07:34
  of that movie. It's why people you know, look, it's an evolving
• 1:07:40
  This is an evolving medium, and we as filmmakers have been trying to figure
• 1:07:47
  out how to adapt video Well. First of all, we're trying to figure
• 1:07:51
  out what is it that makes this game so popular and what can I distill
• 1:07:58
  out of that to make it create natively successful movie as opposed to just a
• 1:08:02
  marketable movie where I'm just borrowing the IP right, right, And that's what
• 1:08:09
  doom. That's what all of the ones that you know, the famous kind
• 1:08:13
  of failures. You know, is, hey, this is popular with the
• 1:08:17
  kids. We're trying to sell tickets to kids. So let's make street Fighter
• 1:08:21
  the movie. Oh hey, Mortal Kombat, though it doesn't age well.
• 1:08:29
  I've never seen those, but those were some of the better ones. Oh
• 1:08:32
  no, Mortal Kombat still, but Mortal Kombat first one does not age well.
• 1:08:38
  So if you watch it now, you'll go, what is that?
• 1:08:40
  But but still has the greatest opening theme song for hell, I have to
• 1:08:49
  finally watch it. I mean, the theme song is where and then trust
• 1:08:53
  me, they let you know because they play it seven or eight times in
• 1:08:56
  the movie. They just constantly are playing it. I think that what I
• 1:09:00
  think that ultimately I answer your question. I think that what we're finally learning
• 1:09:04
  is that what makes these games popular and can translate into a creatively successful movie
• 1:09:13
  creatively and commercially is either the central character or the In Sonic, it's the
• 1:09:20
  central characters, right, I want to have one with all the sass of
• 1:09:24
  Sonic, right, or in the case of Detective Pikachu, I mean,
• 1:09:30
  it's Ryan Reynolds playing Pikachu. That's funny. But also I got to finally
• 1:09:38
  see the world where the Pokemon live side by side with the humans, and
• 1:09:43
  that was such a delight as somebody who you know, I played Pokemon twenty
• 1:09:47
  years ago with my wife. It's why we don't have children, but we
• 1:09:53
  have all the Pokemon. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
• 1:10:01
  and now back to the show. So it was great for me to finally
• 1:10:08
  see in beautiful, fully rendered three D all of these Pokemon existing next to
• 1:10:13
  human beings, kind of as has always been the promise of those games,
• 1:10:17
  right, And I kind of compare it to when I was in film school.
• 1:10:21
  We were always told that B novels make a movies, Right. Some
• 1:10:28
  of the best, most beloved movies were based on kind of B novels,
• 1:10:32
  programmer novels of James N. King, Right, Postman Always Rings Trice and
• 1:10:39
  stuff like that. Not a high literary novel, but a pot boiler,
• 1:10:44
  something that's a page turn something work. It's very plot driven and it's got
• 1:10:50
  a lot of twists and turns, and you know, a yard those make
• 1:10:56
  good movies, not ulysses by James Joyce. Why don't we have our Ulysses
• 1:11:02
  movie, right, Okay, right, you follow, And so we're slowly
• 1:11:10
  kind of figuring that we're trying to figure out what is it about a movie
• 1:11:15
  that's gonna we can pull out those elements and create something that doesn't just service
• 1:11:21
  the fans of the game, but also makes the world apprehendible and enjoyable for
• 1:11:28
  people hard fans of the game. Two of my biggest disappointments is I would
• 1:11:32
  love to see a great Halo movie, right, and Misoft has been trying
• 1:11:36
  to get a Halo movie done for years and they keep you know, Neil
• 1:11:40
  Blowcamp was attached to Peter Jackson. Yeah, maybe Peter Jackson, and that
• 1:11:45
  would have been awesome. And also, you know BioShock, which is you
• 1:11:51
  know, if you have not played a game in forever, I would send
• 1:11:57
  you right at BioShock because Jane like Ulysses by James Joyce. It's one of
• 1:12:03
  the first games I would point to nowadays as saying this is art. This
• 1:12:10
  is a very interesting dystopian sort of action adventure game. But it's also on
• 1:12:17
  a meta level, a commentary about the relationship, the manipulative relationship between the
• 1:12:26
  game designer and the game player. Okay, so it has layers, it
• 1:12:30
  has a philosophical element to it, and it stays with you. It's really
• 1:12:34
  interesting, and you experience this not by watching a lot of movies, but
• 1:12:40
  by actually playing the game and experiencing this world and going through the twists and
• 1:12:45
  turns of the levels and the plot. And I would love for there to
• 1:12:50
  be a BioShock movie, but I just said to you, part of what
• 1:12:56
  makes BioShock great is the experience of playing it and being passive and watching I'm
• 1:13:03
  actor or actress going through the story is not going to be as emotionally.
• 1:13:09
  In fact, pactful is not going to approach what triggers me to call it
• 1:13:15
  art as much as actually playing the game. So I want to ask this
• 1:13:19
  question because even I that I mean, I'm again, I'm not very deep
• 1:13:24
  into the video game culture as I was back in the day. But Metal
• 1:13:28
  Gear and the creator of metal Gear, I even know about that guy.
• 1:13:35
  It's almost mythical, right, He's almost mythical at this point, like when
• 1:13:40
  they make movies about game designers. He's the archetype, you know, like
• 1:13:45
  and like there's so much myth around him. And I remember playing metal Gear
• 1:13:49
  one on Nintendo and I think he was part of He's always been part of
• 1:13:53
  Metal Gear right, right, So it's like this story that's continued even from
• 1:13:57
  the back in the Nintendo days, all the way to these things. And
• 1:14:00
  every time there's a Metal Gear movie show that comes out or a game that
• 1:14:02
  comes out, it's, you know, everybody's dying to play it. What
• 1:14:06
  makes it so beloved as a story because on a story standpoint, what makes
• 1:14:13
  it so beloved or is it all gameplay? I think it's you know,
• 1:14:17
  he's an interesting character. I mean, this is a great question because I
• 1:14:23
  didn't play the early top down metal Gears. My first Metal gearstal metal Gear
• 1:14:29
  Solid on PlayStation, which was you know, the First Move, the first
• 1:14:34
  game, not one of the very first games where all of the guys that
• 1:14:42
  I worked with at Mattel and they played every game like, oh man,
• 1:14:47
  this is this is finally a movie that you play. And Kojima is very
• 1:14:53
  vocal and very transparent about how he loves movies and he's a kind of a
• 1:15:00
  frustrated film director, and so he tries to make his games as cinematic as
• 1:15:04
  possible. And so I bought Metal Gear Solid. I put the disc in
• 1:15:09
  bah blah, blah blah blah. And it begins with Snake fucking to his
• 1:15:16
  handler over the radio back at headquarters while he's being injected into the dangerous space
• 1:15:23
  and he has to infiltrate this base and it's happening very slowly in real time,
• 1:15:28
  and we're seeing credits during that opening sequence like we would in a movie,
• 1:15:33
  and we're seeing very carefully selected I mean, all of this stuff is
• 1:15:36
  storyboarded by Kajima and his team to seem as cinematic as possible, and they're
• 1:15:45
  you know, I haven't played many of the later Metal Gears, but part
• 1:15:50
  of that brand is the dialogue, to your point about dialogue, And even
• 1:15:56
  in Melgear Solid, most of the time you are Snake and you're in the
• 1:16:02
  bass, infiltrating the bass, so you're taking out bad guys slowly because you're
• 1:16:08
  sneaking around. It's a spy game. It isn't a run and gun game.
• 1:16:13
  But what makes it seem like a deep story is he's always talking to
• 1:16:18
  his hand on the radio, to his handler or his mentor or you know,
• 1:16:27
  the old krusty colonel who has seen it all, done it all,
• 1:16:30
  or the technical person who's going to advise him on technical stuff, and there's
• 1:16:36
  every one of these characters seems like a fully motivated, dimensional character, and
• 1:16:45
  Snake starts flirting with somebody, you know something young girl in the office and
• 1:16:48
  everything like that. And so it's kind of like you're playing a video game,
• 1:16:51
  but you're also listening to a radio play, even though the dialogue is
• 1:16:57
  represented by the text play up on screen and two little semi animated vignettes of
• 1:17:03
  the character, so you can keep track of who's saying what. But you
• 1:17:09
  feel like you're, I don't know, in a movie, but you're definitely
• 1:17:13
  involved in a drama, you know, a radio drama with visuals, and
• 1:17:19
  that's something that he's been able to deliver on that level of narrative engagement for
• 1:17:29
  twenty years now, twenty five years now, thirty years going back to the
• 1:17:33
  metal gear. Yeah. Yeah, So so you know, he's he's one
• 1:17:40
  of the people that has launched he's been so creatively successful. He's launched an
• 1:17:45
  entire generation of people that want to make video games just like ogimas on and
• 1:17:50
  just as story driven in just as cinematics. He's the Spielberg, He's the
• 1:17:55
  Kubrick, he's the Scorsese, he's close. Yeah, he's one of those
• 1:17:58
  guys. He's he's on he's on Mount Rushmore probably yeah. Yeah, and
• 1:18:03
  now it's so he's been able to combine. So the reason I asked is
• 1:18:06
  because he is one of the more the most more passionate players. Really like,
• 1:18:14
  if you love metal gear, you love metal gear and you follow it,
• 1:18:17
  I mean you go back to play the original and you follow it all
• 1:18:20
  the way to where it is today. Because there is a storyline that's continued.
• 1:18:26
  He seems to have combined one of the one of the few that's combined
• 1:18:30
  the cinematic experience with awesome gameplay. So it's the best of both worlds.
• 1:18:35
  But the way he does it is very unique, Like you're saying, he's
• 1:18:40
  talking to someone and it works within the genre of game, like that wouldn't
• 1:18:46
  work in another genre, or it could be difficult. Yeah, I think
• 1:18:50
  that his choice of game and story genre. The game genre is action you
• 1:18:58
  know by film of the story genre is espionage thriller like Tom. You know,
• 1:19:04
  he's in Tom Clancy territory. And I think that that works. But
• 1:19:10
  it's not a it's a it's an experience that's informed by cinema, but it
• 1:19:15
  is not purely cinematic because in video games you have what we call HUD heads
• 1:19:21
  up display or ux UI user interface meaning and I'm not just talking about like
• 1:19:30
  the health bar around the edges of the screen, but early days, the
• 1:19:36
  bad guys, the patrol guys that he was supposed to get around, they'd
• 1:19:42
  be patrolling their path and if they heard you, they would get this exclamation
• 1:19:47
  point. That doesn't happen in real life. I tried, We'll be right
• 1:19:56
  back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 1:20:04
  And yet we buy it because the surreality of the video game, right,
• 1:20:10
  We accept that because we need that information because it helps us play the game.
• 1:20:15
  It's just on a story stell on a storytelling standpoint, it seems to
• 1:20:18
  be a really interesting combination of more traditional narrative storytelling mixed with really wonderful,
• 1:20:28
  wonderful gameplay. So so I have to ask this question. So I'm a
• 1:20:31
  screenwriter. I've I'm writing screenplays and I want to write video games. I
• 1:20:39
  want to get into the business. How do I go about it? What
• 1:20:43
  do I what's step one? Besides by your book? Besides by your book,
• 1:20:46
  obviously, thank you, thank you for Amy yeah, by Slay Dragon.
• 1:20:53
  I got my copy right here. Story. Okay, there we go.
• 1:20:56
  Now we're SYNCD up for It's also available in China, so I've Actually,
• 1:21:02
  it's cool, Keith and I have written a book I can't read.
• 1:21:04
  Nice but no, if you know that very first class how this whole book
• 1:21:14
  started was Keith and I taught a class at UCLA Extension. That class was
• 1:21:18
  filled with mostly screenwriters who had that very same question. And it's tough because
• 1:21:27
  you can't Okay, if you're already an established writer, Okay, if you're
• 1:21:35
  signed with you know, one of the big agencies, you can ask your
• 1:21:42
  agent to go set them up with the interactive agent and have that conversation.
• 1:21:46
  You can announce to your agent you're managing a creative team. I want to
• 1:21:49
  move into video games. How do I get this down? So it is
• 1:21:53
  possible, if everything works right, for you to get a lubricated path there.
• 1:21:57
  But for the rest of us, it's a challenge because if I'm a
• 1:22:03
  fledgling screenwriter, I can take my specscript and enter it. What the low
• 1:22:11
  hanging fruit is festivals, right, I can go into screen festival, contest,
• 1:22:15
  screen around contests and festivals and do some things to try to get some
• 1:22:19
  heat around my screenplay and hope that I get representation. So with games,
• 1:22:27
  the good news is you don't necessarily need representation. There are jobs for game
• 1:22:30
  writers, but they're going to be looking for samples of work. If you
• 1:22:34
  don't have those samples, writing a spec game is first of all, that's
• 1:22:39
  off the table because remember, you need to right and it's too much,
• 1:22:45
  it's too much of your time relative to what the person is going to need.
• 1:22:51
  So there's a couple of things you can do there are leveled. First
• 1:22:59
  of all, if you're expecting to play to get a job writing games without
• 1:23:03
  having played games, forget it playing Okay, you just need to you know,
• 1:23:10
  it would be very arrogant for me, as somebody who's been working in
• 1:23:15
  games for years, to go to Hollywood and say, well, I've never
• 1:23:19
  seen movies, but please hire me to write a movie, right, okay,
• 1:23:24
  So start playing games, you know, and we have a list in
• 1:23:31
  the book of like you know, here's here's where you should begin your journey,
• 1:23:36
  right and the So, first of all, start playing games, and
• 1:23:45
  you're gonna you're not gonna like every game, just as if you're gonna be
• 1:23:50
  a screenwriter's not gonna you don't like every movie, right, you don't even
• 1:23:56
  like every type of mute movie. You're gonna like the stuff that you're payingquestion
• 1:24:00
  about. There's going to be stuff that you're not interested in. Lean into
• 1:24:02
  the stuff that you're interested in, and depending upon the game, there might
• 1:24:09
  be a level editor, or there might be some path to creating content for
• 1:24:15
  that game, and some of that content can be narrative. Okay, I
• 1:24:19
  don't know that this is true anymore, but there used to be a game
• 1:24:26
  called never Winter Nights and for years BioShock that developer. If you wanted to
• 1:24:31
  get a job as a writer for BioShock, that'd be like great. Go
• 1:24:34
  download never Winter Nights, which was a Dungeons and Dragons based of RPG.
• 1:24:43
  Play the game, then download the level editor, and put together your own
• 1:24:47
  little dungeon crawl. Okay, using all of the tools, all of the
• 1:24:53
  assets. What you're going to add to it is what happens when you're going
• 1:24:58
  to script the le meaning you're going to create the story the way a dungeon
• 1:25:02
  master in D and D is a storyteller. Right, You're going to create
• 1:25:06
  that, put that together, send it to us and we'll take a look
• 1:25:10
  at it and we'll see if you've done anything interesting or not. I don't
• 1:25:13
  know that that's available anymore, but there are games where you can create your
• 1:25:19
  own content within the game engine that the uh that the actual developers did,
• 1:25:28
  so you can. It's kind of like, uh, the analog analog.
• 1:25:31
  There's like writing a spec sitcom episode of your favor right right. They want
• 1:25:36
  to know, do you get the world? Do you get the characters?
• 1:25:40
  Can you write jokes in their voice? All of that? Right right?
• 1:25:44
  Or there's there's a program and it's free called Twine t W I n E.
• 1:25:56
  And it's essentially an engine for doing branch path stories. Right. That
• 1:26:03
  is an extremely exciting tool. It's what I use for my interactive storytelling class
• 1:26:11
  that grew out of the of the book, and it's something that has a
• 1:26:16
  application applicability right now, because we're seeing Choose your Own Adventure multiple path films
• 1:26:26
  now show Networks. Okay, you know we haven't talked about Vandersnatch or its
• 1:26:31
  forerunners or the latest one in Timmy Schmidt's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which was a
• 1:26:38
  delight, right, It's just amazing, And that's a proof of concept of
• 1:26:45
  something that you know, I've heard people talk about it. I've been talking
• 1:26:48
  about it since I was in grad school, which is like, when are
• 1:26:53
  we going to have an interactive movie? Well, now, thanks to Netflix,
• 1:26:57
  we have and they put a lot of money into the technology and now
• 1:27:00
  they're just waiting for content. You know, we are now we have viable
• 1:27:06
  proofs of concepts of what's an interactive movie or an interactive TV episode? Like
• 1:27:13
  right, the best of the best I am told is the Minecraft Interactive Story
• 1:27:19
  because that one goes on for a long time. You can get through the
• 1:27:24
  Kinney Schmidt in about a half hour if you don't do a lot of backtracking,
• 1:27:29
  even though they do backtracking for you for comedy's sake. It's hilarious.
• 1:27:35
  The is the Minecraft. Just just search on Minecraft in Netflix and you will
• 1:27:44
  have this very deep interactive story in the Minecraft universe that really feels like you're
• 1:27:51
  playing an interactive game. It's amazing that same sort of choose your own adventure
• 1:27:58
  branching path and aerator if you can do tonight with Twine, this is a
• 1:28:02
  plug. There are a just Google Twine. I think their website is twinery
• 1:28:08
  dot org. Is it a free service. Is it free or no,
• 1:28:12
  it's free, it's free, and then just add into your mind stuff like
• 1:28:16
  that. But the this is absolutely free, and so you can get going
• 1:28:20
  for free. And there are other sort of interactive tools like that. But
• 1:28:25
  Twine is sort of like the Big Daddy and just putting together a little story.
• 1:28:32
  Okay, because you're a screenwriter, right, you can do pros.
• 1:28:36
  You can do a dialogue scene, do that, but give me some branching
• 1:28:42
  path and make it meaningful. You know, we all, especially people of
• 1:28:49
  a certain age, look back at the Choose your Own Adventure games as Oh
• 1:28:54
  they were such fun. Yes, because we were kids and we didn't no
• 1:28:58
  idea better. But I mean, in terms of deep storytelling, the genre
• 1:29:03
  was in its infancy, and the whole point was to kind of you know,
• 1:29:08
  you were playing kind of a book as a toy. It's like,
• 1:29:11
  okay, well I'm going to go to the left path. You were eaten
• 1:29:15
  by a tiger. Oh well, go back to the beginning. Right.
• 1:29:17
  There wasn't a lot of meaning there. Yeah. No, Now, well
• 1:29:24
  now twenty years later, three years later, how can we use this medium
• 1:29:30
  of branching storytelling for something that's meaning full, that has an emotional impact on
• 1:29:38
  the player, right or the viewer right. And so if you can put
• 1:29:43
  together a you know, essentially interactive short story, put two or three of
• 1:29:48
  those on your portfolio site. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 1:29:55
  sponsor, and now back to the show. There are there's a places out
• 1:30:10
  there that where there are readers that love to read this stuff. Building yourself
• 1:30:15
  a following on like fan fiction sites, they have interactive fiction sections where you
• 1:30:23
  can put that, or you can just you know, sit in as a
• 1:30:27
  sample. You don't have to publish it. You can send it in as
• 1:30:30
  a sample. When there's a game writing or a narrative design job, or
• 1:30:34
  another job you can look for is content designer or a quest writer. You
• 1:30:40
  know, they're looking for people that understand interactive storytelling on top of linear storytelling,
• 1:30:48
  right. And you know, the the reason that I got so passionate
• 1:30:54
  when I got into video games is I felt like I had a handle on
• 1:31:00
  screenwriting traditions and what criteria we use to tell an engaging cinematic story. Let's
• 1:31:09
  see if we can't bring emotional engagement and the storytelling parts of video games up
• 1:31:15
  a little bit and make it meaningful, make it moving right, And that's
• 1:31:26
  at the end of the day. That's it. You know, do you
• 1:31:28
  have something interactive doesn't have to have graphics attached to it. That's not your
• 1:31:31
  job. But can you do something in that basic choose your own adventure format
• 1:31:38
  that if I spend ten minutes, you've surprised, You've surprised me, you've
• 1:31:44
  engaged me. You know, you've done all the things that a good screenplay
• 1:31:49
  should do if you want to get noticed. Right, fair enough, Now,
• 1:31:54
  one last question before I ask you a series of questions. I always
• 1:31:57
  ask Oregon Trail, is that like the first narrative story and when did that
• 1:32:05
  come out? That was? Like? That was early dots. It's one
• 1:32:11
  of the first, and it's one of the first, you know, on
• 1:32:13
  purpose constantly educational gits of software. But probably the first story game is Colossal
• 1:32:24
  Cave Adventure or Adventure was the name of the name of it when I played
• 1:32:30
  it on a mainframe computer. Part of the problem of being my age teaching
• 1:32:35
  history of games is I have to do a lot of table setting with college
• 1:32:40
  kids today who don't know what a mainframe computer is, don't know what a
• 1:32:45
  teleprinter is, right, they barely know what a CD RAM or a floppy
• 1:32:51
  disk, is right, But that was the one that was the text parsing
• 1:32:56
  game where it had kind of a a medieval fantasy is kind of saying,
• 1:33:02
  yeah, you know, you you see a tree with a door in it.
• 1:33:06
  Look door that I don't understand what that means. Look door, you
• 1:33:14
  know, and you have to tell the computer and basically play a guessing game
• 1:33:17
  as to what words it wanted to know that would unlock the next little chunk
• 1:33:23
  of story. The door magically opens. It's dark inside, but you see
• 1:33:28
  a lamp on the table. Light lamp. You don't have any matches,
• 1:33:31
  you know, and you cannot get people to play this game thirty years later
• 1:33:38
  because it's so absolutely frustrating. The back in the late seventies where we had
• 1:33:43
  nothing but time waiting for the bombs to fall, you know, you had
• 1:33:47
  the patience to like have this conversation with this computer to try to have it
• 1:33:54
  tell you a story bit by bit, and an Oregon trail came through for
• 1:34:00
  five years later. All right, So I normally the first question I always
• 1:34:03
  ask us, how what advice would you give a screenwriter trying to break into
• 1:34:06
  the video game business? But we've already kind of covered that. So what
• 1:34:11
  is the lesson that took you the longest to learn, whether in the film
• 1:34:14
  industry, the game industry, or life. Well, jeez, doctor,
• 1:34:20
  how much time do you have? Yeah, I think it's I think it's
• 1:34:28
  to trust myself right, because I have really good instincts when I don't get
• 1:34:34
  my own way right. And so that whole it took me years. But
• 1:34:41
  I stopped like writing something, and then I couldn't wait to show it to
• 1:34:45
  somebody because I needed a paddle on the head. I needed validation. I'm
• 1:34:49
  getting much better about yeah, objectively, this works or this doesn't work right.
• 1:34:57
  And I did that through a lot of painful theory that was very expensive
• 1:35:00
  over years, but also just you know, listening to podcasts like this one
• 1:35:06
  and reading articles about writing process right, and I remember I wish I could
• 1:35:15
  remember who it was and give them credit, but they said, no,
• 1:35:17
  I won't read your goddamn screenplay or something, because you should know, you
• 1:35:23
  know, if it works for you, if it's working, send it out.
• 1:35:27
  And so I even stopped having like my girlfriend right now, the only
• 1:35:31
  the only person I ever sent something to to read, because it's just become
• 1:35:36
  a life habit is Keith, you know, and part of part of the
• 1:35:42
  joy of writing this book was collaborating with him finally instead of just you know,
• 1:35:47
  him logging at my stuff for me giving notes on his stuff. But
• 1:35:50
  yeah, just trusting yourself and three of your favorite video games of all time.
• 1:36:00
  That's like asking your three favorite children. Yes, each special in their
• 1:36:04
  own way. BioShock, BioShock is one of them. BioShock. Yeah,
• 1:36:09
  okay, we'll go with BioShock and the Fallout franchise, because Fallout one was
• 1:36:17
  brilliant when I played it when it first came out twenty years ago. But
• 1:36:25
  Fallout three I really spent a ton of time in and just loved that world
• 1:36:30
  and found that story very poignant. And Liam Neeson is the is your dad,
• 1:36:36
  and the whole mega quest is your dad abandons you as a child and
• 1:36:41
  you need to go find out why, and so probably that And then the
• 1:36:48
  third one, believe it or not, is not World of Warcraft. Even
• 1:36:53
  though mad respect for World war Craft. It's this amazing thing that has gotten
• 1:36:58
  so big that in order to be a viable Warcraft player, I just can't
• 1:37:02
  do all the other stuff I have to do. Right, You're pretty much
• 1:37:06
  in that Warcraft lane is StarCraft. I played the heck out of StarCraft because
• 1:37:17
  I played Warcraft too. These are real time, real time strategy games.
• 1:37:21
  They're basically army raising and building strategy. And StarCraft had because I'm a science
• 1:37:30
  fiction fan. StarCraft was Warcraft in space with such you know, and Blizzard
• 1:37:35
  Entertainment did such a great job of world building. They're great pasty shores at
• 1:37:43
  Blizzard, or they used to be, where nothing they do is original.
• 1:37:47
  What's original is all the ways that they've combined all these different bibs and bobs
• 1:37:55
  and so creating these three distinct races humor colonized humans way far out in the
• 1:38:01
  galaxy, and the Zerg and the pro Toss, and coming up with backstories
• 1:38:06
  and war for all these three civilizations, and having a really compelling story with
• 1:38:15
  characters with twists and turns and backstabbing and reversals, and and you know,
• 1:38:21
  it just it really got. I loved living in that very dangerous world playing
• 1:38:30
  the game, but also reading the tie in novels, right, And there
• 1:38:35
  were comic books, and I would read the comic books and stuff like that
• 1:38:39
  and got expressed in a lot of different media, and so and I still
• 1:38:45
  haven't finished Fallout excuse me, StarCraft too, believe it or not. Part
• 1:38:49
  of the reason is it was released in three big chunks over a number of
• 1:38:54
  years, but also is like I kind of don't want to because I kind
• 1:38:59
  of don't want the story to be over right, So probably that now?
• 1:39:04
  And where can people find you and then get the book? Okay? So
• 1:39:11
  I'm I'm I'm on Twitter at uh at foam Candy is the most direct way
• 1:39:20
  to reach me. And if you're ever in Austin, I'm in Saint Edwards
• 1:39:27
  University. Is the director of video games and video and Development Animation. We
• 1:39:32
  have a brand new animation major that we're launching in the fall and I'm excited
• 1:39:39
  about that. But the book is available on the Michael Easy Productions website.
• 1:39:45
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the
• 1:39:54
  show. And it's discounted and I think free shipping sometimes if anyone you order,
• 1:40:00
  But it's also on Amazon and all the ones it's on a d E.
• 1:40:06
  It's never Barnes and Noble Pals still kicking in the crisis and so there
• 1:40:14
  the you can order for pals if you're in the right region. Half Price
• 1:40:17
  Books has it, so yeah, it's it's super available online. Or you
• 1:40:21
  can go to uh uh slaythedragonbook dot com, which is Keith and I little
• 1:40:29
  website for the book and there's all sorts of sales links right there. And
• 1:40:32
  Bob, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for just taking me
• 1:40:36
  on this kind of mini masterclass in video game writing and video game history.
• 1:40:45
  And I feel like busting out my old, my old Nintendo I'm super Nintendo
• 1:40:50
  and start playing was it gold Goldfinger, Goldfinger, Golden Night, GoldenEye,
• 1:40:56
  gold Night Night. Yeah? Is it? Why is that? Why is
• 1:41:00
  that such a legendary game? Because it was one of the first console three
• 1:41:06
  D shooters. You know, Doom and Quake had been around on the PC
• 1:41:11
  for quite some time, and this was the first implementation. Thanks to the
• 1:41:16
  N sixty four could do pretty good three D on the cartridge and that controller
• 1:41:24
  where you had a lot of control. It wasn't like a mouse and keyboard,
• 1:41:27
  but it was close enough, and the developers just did such a great
• 1:41:31
  job of translating that very early FPS kind of mechanics and making it work on
• 1:41:42
  a console. With James Bond, I mean, you get to hunt down
• 1:41:45
  an odd job and shoot him in the back for crying out loud. That
• 1:41:48
  was cool, But yeah, no, Goldney is a legend just because it
• 1:41:54
  allowed you to be able to have that FPS experience without all the expense of
• 1:42:00
  a land party where you had to connect computers in the same room. All
• 1:42:03
  you needed to do there are four control for four controller parts on that in
• 1:42:10
  sixty four and you and four people could be you know, playing in security
• 1:42:15
  camera mode on one quarter of your TV screen s, have that great deathmatch
• 1:42:20
  thing, you know, and from that experience. YadA YadA, YadA,
• 1:42:25
  YadA, fortnite, YadA, YadA, YadA, YadA, fortnite. Bob
• 1:42:31
  Man, thank you again for being on the show. I truly appreciate your
• 1:42:33
  time, my friend, my pleasure. I'll talk to you soon. I
• 1:42:38
  so want to thank Robert for coming on and dropping insane knowledge bombs on the
• 1:42:44
  Bulletproof Screenwriting Tribe today because, like I said before, I had no idea
• 1:42:48
  about this process and I'm so excited to be bringing this information to you guys.
• 1:42:55
  It's just another way that you can generate revenue and hell stories with your
• 1:43:00
  writing. Just another way to think about the storytelling process and I highly recommend
• 1:43:06
  you pick up Robert and Keith's book Slay the Dragon Writing Great video Games.
• 1:43:13
  It is the bible when it comes to transitioning from screenwriting for television and for
• 1:43:18
  film to video games. And by the way, guys, it doesn't have
• 1:43:23
  to be either one or the other. You still can do both. You
• 1:43:25
  could also write novels. You could also write short stories. You could also
• 1:43:29
  write ad copy, you could also write so many things. It's just another
• 1:43:33
  way to express yourself as a writer and hopefully generate some revenue as a writer.
• 1:43:40
  So if you want to link to that and anything else we spoke about
• 1:43:43
  in this episode, please head over to the show notes at any film also
• 1:43:45
  dot com, Forward slash seven forty four, and if you haven't already,
• 1:43:49
  please head over to Filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe and leave a good review
• 1:43:55
  for the show. It really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank
• 1:43:58
  you again so much for listening. Guys, As always, keep that hustle
• 1:44:00
  going, keep that dream alive, Stay safe out there, and I'll talk
• 1:44:03
  to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at indiefilm
• 1:44:09
  Hustle dot com. That's I N D. I e f I, l
• 1:44:12
  M h U s t l E dot com