Steam Story

A piece of terribly photographed concept art by Xue Au

About a year ago, Paul Murray, the now head of the Northeastern Game Development Club, pitched a game tentatively called "Steam Story" and said that he needed more people for certain roles in development. One of them was a writer, so I decided to go for it. I got in contact with him and showed him some of my writing, and he decided to bring me on as the head writer.

By the time I got in, there was already some basic story and character design done. One of the first things I did was to propose my initial thoughts to Paul about the design that was done so far and what I thought the story could be. Unfortunately, the game had to be put on indefinite hiatus, as the scope of the game was far too large for a group of active college students without development experience to take on. That in itself was a good lesson to learn, but the project also gave me a lot of experience with thinking and writing about game narrative.

Here is the document that I wrote to discus possibilities for Steam Story narrative design:

Tone? This is something that's going to have to be decided fairly early. Based on the backstory and the two different takes on the beginning, it seems to be pretty unclear. I think that simply choosing between "light-hearted" and "more serious" is too general of a distinction. 

The term "light-hearted" has some sort of playful and lackadaisical connotations, which I find, in games, often translates to "boring and lazy". I just tried to think of some examples of games that go for the all-out light-hearted tone, and it was surprisingly difficult. Probably because most of the games that do that aren't very memorable. Unless your story/world is something incredibly unique, making the story "light-hearted" just ends up making it seem like the story is not that important to the game, which is something that players will recognize almost immediately. 

Some might cite games like the Zelda series as being a successful take on a light-hearted story, but, when you think about it, Zelda games aren't necessarily that light-hearted. And they certainly are never light-hearted throughout the entirety of the game. The Zelda games use a light-hearted tone as a setup. It juxtaposes with the darker or more serious parts of the game so well that it makes those parts even more effective and memorable. 

One way to make a game sort of light-hearted without making the story hard to care about is to give it a satirical edge. I think this could potentially work really well for SteamStory. It's mixing all these different well-known themes and styles together in a really clever way, but it's going to be hard to make the vastly different nations and such not feel...manufactured. I worry that it will feel like it's just trying to appeal to as many people as possible by throwing all of this stuff together. Someone at game dev club mentioned "steampunk pandering" during your presentation. I personally think that steampunk is pretty much just awesome always forever, but there are some important things to take from his comment. Not necessarily about steampunk specifically, but about any style. The more you throw in elements of a very specific style into something, the harder it is to give those elements a collective depth and substance. The more "steampunk-y" it is, the more it'll seem like a world created for the sole purpose of being steampunk, rather than a believable, naturally-evolved world. It's certainly not impossible to make a world like this believable, but with the wide variety of stylistic elements that are intended to be included in SteamStory, making Welt feel natural will be an incredibly difficult undertaking that will not really be worth the effort. (p.s. the name "SteamStory" doesn't really help to discredit the "pandering" argument. I know it's not super important right now, but it should probably eventually be changed if you aren't super attached to it.)

Now, I'm definitely not saying that the world should be changed. I love the idea. But, if you want the story to be taken seriously, something is going to have to be done to get around these problems. Making the story satirical is a perfect loophole to allow the world to remain manufactured without that having a negative impact on the story. Now, satire is definitely more of a scale than a solid definition. There are many different levels of satire. It is entirely possible to create a story with satire that is still very serious and meaningful. It is also totally possible to make the story more of an outright comedy. For examples, think of the difference between...well, the first things I can think of are the TV shows The Daily Show and True Blood. The Daily Show is very comedic, upfront satire. True Blood was (before it started taking itself WAY too seriously, which is a common problem with satire) a satire of supernatural fiction that still had a serious story within it. Subtle, self-referential and self-deprecating humor, if executed well, is all it takes to keep a story from becoming annoying unbelievable. 

If you definitely don't want ANY satire at all, there's still options. What I'd suggest in that case is to give the world a lot more mystique. I know there's no magic, but mystical doesn't necessarily equal magical. Keeping a consistent mysterious tone about the world allows a player to allow for much more unanswered questions. It seems counter-intuitive, but actually leaving out more details can make the story more immersive. I've seen it done really well on several occasions. Take Bastion for example. We hardly know anything about what's happened to the world, and we're slowly given tidbits of information throughout the game. But the story maintains its "you're not supposed to know what the hell all this is and that's okay" tone throughout, and makes the lack of knowledge a part of the story. Another great example is Bioshock, which is as much about discovering the world of Rapture as it is about the character’s personal story (it’s also a big reason why Bioshock 2 wasn’t nearly as good. Yeah, the story was well-written, but the world was no longer mysterious and exciting.).

One of the most important lessons I've learned in story telling is intended to be specifically about dialogue, but holds true through all parts of storytelling, especially in games: A player will never imagine bad dialogue. What that basically means is that it is not possible for something that is left to the imagination to be bad. Shove bad exposition down a player's throat, and he'll always remember it as being bad. Subtly imply something, and they'll fill the rest in themselves. Most of the time, people won't come up with a concrete idea to fill the void...I've found that people’s minds doesn't usually work like that. What happens is that the player will create a sort of nebulous cloud of ideas to fill in the blanks; they won't know the details, but they'll know the feelings that are tied to it. And, if given enough information to feed that nebulous cloud of imagination, it'll never be bad feelings. The risk with this is, of course, not providing enough information, or not providing that right kind of information, in which case the player will just be frustrated and confused. 

Another less obvious example of this being done really well (for me at least) is Phantasy Star Online. It had hardly any exposition at all: you're sent on a ship to find another ship that was supposed to find a new planet to colonize and has since stopped communication. You find the planet, and there are signs that people were once there, but there are no signs of human life anywhere. The story is fleshed out through recordings of one of the members of the first ship that you find scattered about the planet. The visuals were also used to spark the imagination and provide story clues. As PSO was meant to be an online game in which people repeated content often, I don't even know if the development team even really intended for this to happen (if the horrible story from the sequel is any indication, they didn't even realize they had done it), but it really worked for me. I was an explorer! My mind was constantly racing about what could have happened to these people and what had caused the native creatures on the world to become so hostile. Honestly, if any of those questions were answered (I think some of them were), I don't even remember what the answers were. But it doesn't matter, because it was the mystique that kept me interested. The success of the TV show Lost is almost entirely due to this. However, they made the mistake of taking the mystery too far, to the point where everyone was just pissed that they never answered anything and kept introducing new mysteries...then they ended it horribly. But I won't get into that.

If this is the route that you think we should take, then some changes will need be made to the story. First of all, I think that Thomas should not be John Malakov's son. Or, if he is his son, he shouldn't know it. It gives him too much status, power, and knowledge right off the bat. The biggest issue, though, is that if you want the story and world to be mysterious and unknown to the player, it has to be to the main character as well. It won't make sense if our character knows so much about the world and we do not, so it will make this type of story impossible. 

In addition to this (and this is for either type of story, really), there should be much less dialogue in the opening scenes. Save the long conversations and speeches for when we're already invested in the game. I've played countless RPGs (most recently, lots of action-RPGs released for Android) that bog down the beginning of the game with a huge amount of dialogue and exposition, and it's always a massive turnoff. This is more important for a mobile platform such as Android, but I think it holds true for all platforms. You want to get the player into the game as soon as possible. Even if the player has the patience to wait through all the boring dialogue and exposition, they probably won't remember all of it later on. A quote that's often used for screenwriting that I think is useful here is "Enter the scene as late as possible, and leave as early as possible". Think again of Bastion. There's no introduction to the world or characters. You're thrown in just as the Kid is waking up and you have no idea what's going on. That's what makes it compelling! It's building a connection to the character right away because you're both confused and discovering something together.

It's too bad that we had to stop development on the game, but I'm now working on another game with Paul that is much more realistic in scope. Hopefully someday we'll be able to revisit Steam Story.