Studio Lead at Die Gute Fabrik
This blog posts covers the talk delivered by Hannah Nicklin, who is an accomplished writer and studio lead at Die Gute Fabrik with her working on indie game titles such as Mutzione as lead narrative designer and writer. Her talk covers her personal story of her love for writing and entering the game industry, her personal opinions on writing in games and translating typical methods of storytelling such as the hero’s journey into a video games narrative.
Did a drama undergraduate degree
Found an interest in play writing
Did a masters in play writing?
Wrote a play about an MMORPG player passing out and coming face to face with their in-game avatar, this play made her realise that this wasn’t the space she wanted to write stories in and wanted to move to the interactive media of video games
You should separate the difference between personal and career goals, personal goals should be for self-improvements and be transferred into how you will adapt these achievements into your career goals.
Exploit perks of studio as much as possible they’re most likely going to exploit the number of hours and lack of pay from you so you should aim to try and get as many new skills and benefits as possible from that work of place
She believes that games aren’t important and aren’t anything special at a base level and its what you make of them
Communication with other departments as the writer matters you need to press to the creative director or the lead programmer because parts of the story are so important
Narrative design is not writing, it is designing a game in which the story is at the centre of it
Writing isn’t storytelling, story telling can be told by areas of the game that have zero writing at all
She goes on to break down the multiple story structures from writers such as Aristotle and Horace
She then leads on to say how all these base writing techniques such as the hero’s journey aren’t the best when being applied to a games story as it brings up difficulties in how a world would be presented or gameplay structure
Goes on to say other points along the line of how the hero’s journey has other issues as she feels its focused around a “white cis male” gaze
Another problem with using story structures meant for mediums such as films and plays is that these pieces of media have a set time frame that fits this structure with the around 2hr mark, this cant apply to games as the typical exspirenece comes close to 6 – 8hrs with some game wildly exceeding that time frame.
She goes on to come up with other structures of storytelling that can be more fitted to the storytelling of a video game such as ones seen in ensemble cast tv shows such as Star Trek DS9 and Game of Thrones, as these stories don’t focus on a single character and instead have chapters fleshing out different characters and the overall world ( I think this is a valid point and can be seen in games such as Skyrim and the Witcher series)
This story telling method also tackles the issue of no false jeopardy seen in stretching out the hero’s journey where the middle of their story would be filled with filler to pad the game out taken out the feel of agency (Personally I feel like this relates to fallout 4 where the player is given an urgent task in the story but then given freedom to explore cause ludonarrartive dissonance)
This structure allows you to tell more varied stories with the inclusion of more fleshed out individual characters.