kyotocosmology

[kyotocosmology]

The advice

If I could only give 1 bit of game writing advice it would be Always be wary of ppl giving you game writing advice. But if I could give 2!! the second would be Always remember story is a guest in gameplay's house

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Bow wow

Wrote to a pal about barks recently & thought I'd tidy & post here too.

IMO bark/self-talk writing is a separate form to other game writing, I’d say it has more in common with poetry or song lyrics. If you're good at those you're good at barks

I also find cookbooks written by real food perverts useful ref, or sports commentary by sports perverts; anything that at its core is a description of rules attaining a mythic aspect from the writer or speaker’s love for it

Many of the great (voiced) barks fall somewhere between dialogue and sound effects. That is, what they’re saying doesn’t matter as much as how the player associates the sound with the action. (Think of how speech in 80s-90s games was often literally sampling & was deployed accordingly)

Much like poetry or lyrics sometimes you want to express sth in a way that’s amazing and has never been done before & sometimes it’s more powerful to just say the thing. Picking which is usually by feel

You have to pack the text with meaning, even more than usual. You’re setting the rhythm for how the character responds to the game - just like music is level design, combat barks are combat design, exploration barks are game design, etc

Shorter is usually better…

...except when it's not, lol

For instructive barks (a resource is low, taking too much damage, about to deal a lot of damage, I need healing!) always frontload. Players have to understand what they’re being told ASAP and making it characterful/writerly/flavourful comes next. Just don't forget that second pass

The old golden rule for barks was that they can’t be memorable or players will notice when they repeat. Well it’s actually OK & even desirable for players to notice repeating barks— they look forward to seeing or hearing them again!

BUT it can be a guess which lines repeat well and which lose their spark after the 50th time. This is where the ‘sound FXification’ I mentioned before can help if it’s voiced

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How Do You Write?

Under duress or by magic. When I'm being paid to do it I use the former to find the latter

I always know how a conversation starts & usually don't know how it's going to end. Art imitates life etc

It's very woo-woo to say 'I hear my characters speak' and 'they have their own agency' but it's true. That's me in the corner

I steal liberally & often wholesale but never from other people's writing

I do try other writers' styles on. I've become a big fan of writing alt text for text screenshots to feel what it might be like to type this stuff

I've seen how using overheard conversation works for others & I do it sometimes but I prefer to transcribe vibes. A vibepire if u will

Surprisingly I've found game writing - which done right is not at all like other kinds of writing - affected my prose writing. I assume my first draft is shipping; I write wildly out of reading order; I will cut the shit out of my own stuff

Sorry but Posting (before the second-to-last Twitter char limit increase) immeasurably improved my work. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone now of course

Never take writing advice from someone you wouldn't take criticism from

edit: forgot one, if I can't write it fast I won't like it. I don't mean the whole - games take years, the novel is going to take years - but the act of writing has to be faster than the speed of my inner critic. I have to suspend my own disbelief

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YouTube grammar isn't a problem in and of itself. It is absolutely fine to be "wrong" in English. The problem is what decreased fluency demonstrates about how too many of us engage with our own language - and language is the heart of and key to human knowledge.

You don't need to learn all the rules, because most of them are fake and inconsistent. Languages only have "rules" when they're dead, and English, unkillable, wriggles like a trout when you try to pin it down. For all the attempts to impose Latin grammar on the Norman layer, English is fundamentally not a romance language, and it has wantonly shucked most of its Germanic complexity too.

English said: what if we fuck off everything we possibly can from our nouns, pare our verb forms down to a minimum, and make a handful of particles signpost everything instead? Sure, native speakers now face a baffling difficulty curve when they need to understand concepts like "object" and "genitive" in order to learn any other language, but now we have SO much room in our panniers for words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words. Thank you we'll have that word. Thank you we want that one too. Thank you, great root there, we'll take that and mix it with a stem from somewhere else. Consistent spelling and pronunciation? No thank you, we need more space for words and words and words and words and words.

Think about the term lingua franca. It literally means French, which was once THE language for international communication, and has been thoroughly dethroned. The Academie tried to lock it down with rules, and it began to die. English would never. English has never had an authoritative rule book and none will ever exist. What we have are style guides: localised and specific for purpose. When they try to put rules on English it's out the window, down the drain pipe, through next door's window, rummaging in the silverware drawer looking for stuff to nick.

All this to say, you can let that misplaced apostrophe go. You can accept meme speak in Merriam Webster and drifting definitions. But that doesn't mean you stop studying your language, because the beauty and strength of English is in its capacity to express context, nuance and social grounding through word choice. There are entire anthropologies hidden in common turns of phrase (the equestrian influence on metaphors about ruling and control - free rein, give him his head, took the bit between his teeth - is the long shadow of the titled class system). When you ask why a writer or speaker didn't "just" use a simpler or more familiar word or phrase, you are admitting you don't understand the privilege you have as a passenger on one of the longest and most unstoppable trains in the history of human communication.

You must be curious, hungry, devouring. When you encounter a new word or phrase, you should question it, delight in it, and file it away. Eat everything. Read, watch, push outside your borders constantly, encounter, roll over and engulf new sources of information. Consume and add to your glory. Celebrate novelty and enfold it in your loving embrace. Be gluttonous and show your receipts. Be English, in the only sense of the word that retains any pride.

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You can watch the angel and the wires

A pal was doing an open call for "What makes game worlds interesting to you outside of gameplay?" & I said "the sense of artificiality" because - say the line Ben!! - everything is narrative design includes the artifice of being a videogame.

A stretched texture that's good enough. Polygon seams glittering in the dark. Tilesets repeating. A landscape that escaped the environment artist's shadow: pure topography, blurry as a rushed watercolour, studded with billboard trees. The edge of the map. The skybox folding into itself on the edge of the map. The idea of 'the skybox' or 'the edge of the map'.

The magic is that even if you can see the Matrix & your internal voice says "geometry outside the playable area" some older urge inside you still wonders how they live out there.

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They built another world

In my old age I've softened on my worldbuilding stance (Don't) a little from the posts I made, uh, about eight months ago. I'm not against you worldbuilding for yourself. I'm not even against contractually obliged worldbuilding - the only kind I've done - it's a living!!!

But if you're doing it for your player or reader, I urge you to consider this: for as long as I'm locked in to your story, I trust you implicitly. I believe anything you say. If something works like this that's how it works. If somewhere's over there that's where it is. If up is down I might initially take a little convincing but you're the boss! I do not believe the participatory element of fiction should be fact-checking the author & you should not feel compelled to open yourself up to that unless, ofc, it's your thing.

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how'd you like Dragons Dogma 2, both as a self-contained experience and as a sequel?

I haven't played it yet D: My burnout has necessitated sticking to bite-sized games when I can even manage those. But I came to DD1 years late & revisited it again in '22, so I still have a 3-10 year window.

I'm excited to go hiking in it & to feel those warm dark nights again. What a sense of place!

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Revisiting the pillars

I haven't dedicated enough time to this blog for it to be genuinely useful in the way I was hoping, but by way of sunsetting I wanted to re-answer the first Q I got because I was wrong!!

i was curious about how often you see design pillars come into play for narrative/writing processes in industry settings. i personally find them an extremely useful tool for narrative design, as they help define the entirety of the intended player experience, but i know that not everyone uses them to their full potential, if at all. do you have any experience with them/do you also find them useful?

I think at the start of a project when there is no game, & the story is rebooted every week bc someone up the chain has been entranced by jangling keys, then design pillars are so important. You should cling to them, lash yourself to them. They're your stand-in for a holistic understanding of the game itself. Whenever you find yourself thinking 'How did we get here?' on narrative design you can always orienteer back to them.

Once the game has a physical form I think that's where my original answer came from. The pillars are still important but in the way that an ancient temple is important. The game has the primacy for the player experience now and is the living document; the pillars have become, to borrow my fav Danez Smith, the lovely towers in the distance.

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The weight of the game world

The greatest trick a game can pull is the sense of its world having weight. We know it doesn't really: it's a paper-thin stage floating in a void. But cities, people, history, seasons, the sensation of life itself-- all these things have weight. They exert a nostalgic gravity. They invite players to add the weight of their own experiences like palimpsest. Like sentimental graffiti.

Sometimes it's obsessive dedication to a bit that creates a weighty world: Shenmue, GTA, Yakuza, Riven. Sometimes it's luck-- Daggerfall is thin as gauze, you were constantly at risk of falling out of the world, but I will spend my life looking for an experience like stepping out of its first dungeon into the overworld & running through a snowbound forest into a town at dusk.

A lot of weightbuilding (sorry) falls on visual design disciplines and QA but as writers & narrative designers we should be always be asking How can we make this heavier? How can narrative easily and cheaply tip the scales? How does it make you feel?

To quote an old tweet: When I say I don't like worldbuilding you know what I mean. The wrong kind. The kind you've spent 3 years writing fanfic for a game that behaves exactly as you tell it to &, crucially, does not exist. & then I play it and the world is a movie set. You've missed the weight of life.

Edit: that said, lmao, sometimes the artifice is the point per the text & comments of Leigh Alexander's latest https://xleighalexanderx.substack.com/p/components-of-reality-the-setting . Particularly tickled by the idea of horror game mansions as McMansions - so many fit the bill

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The obliterating angel of self-satisfied prose

What this isn't about is killing your darlings. That has such overperformed last-century manliness: why darling, why killing?

& what it also isn't about is avoiding your dialogue sounding artificial. All dialogue is artificial especially, especially naturalistic dialogue

No this is when you’ll write something that reminds you why you're so delightful. You almost have second thoughts putting it in but don't you deserve it? Your editor or lead will say this is a bit much or even pull the eternal yellow card: “I don’t really get this line”. When you look back you’ll realise they were giving you an offramp. But maybe you dig in your heels, or maybe you ARE the lead & you think: If I can’t please myself how can I please the players?

I can’t tell you what to do in this situation. I can tell you that the lines you write for yourself will be infamous but maybe not for the reasons you want. There’s an early line in an RPG I played ~20 years ago that I constantly think of & how its writerly qualities, its braggadocio, pulled me right out of the character, out of the game, out of the room. Out of body. Threw me into third-person viewing. To this day I can’t say it was a bad line but I can say it was the wrong line.

& that’s what you need to consider more than you might if you were writing straight prose, where it’s easier to make this stuff seem effortless. In a game showy writing sucks up oxygen like a fire. In a game showy writing attains the affect of a Buckle up fuckers twitter thread. Its own qualities are lessened by how it drowns out the rest of the game. The writer has something to say! The writer has done something.

But sometimes you have to flash this stuff around a little bit. Treat yourself.

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the_worldbuilding_disliker has logged on

A friend (hi friend!) recently asked for a succinct answer on why too much expository capital W-worldbuilding in games can be bad. & for me it comes down to this: it smacks of the sensation that you, the writer, don't trust your dev team and you don't trust your players. Maybe that's a deliberate strategy in which case OK! but if it's not, why out of the 100s of ways we have to engage the player thru play are you reaching for the Big Book? Why not make learning about this world participatory rather than didactic?

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Night Ended

We've always been bad at videogame preservation but now we're burning both ends. Not only are games from 30, 40 years ago vanishing we're vanishing games that haven't come out faster than ever before. Disappearing creators we don't even know yet. The cost, the weight, the foresight of responsibility to create a sustainable art form is too much. It's wild that Embracer ran a side hustle of buying up retro video games for their private museum and now they're shuttering studios. When a studio closes & the people go all the work disappears. Best case the source code's on an unmarked PC case at the back of a storage unit. It'll be forgotten.

A couple of decades ago when I didn't think things through very much I tracked down one of my childhood gaming inspirations on LinkedIn to thank them profusely for everything they'd done. & while they were kind about it they were also tangibly pretty put out! They thought they were just drawing cool pictures for a videogame. Never once considered they would be inspiring a kid to learn to draw or chase a career in games. Suddenly the weight of that responsibility had been thrust on them & they didn't know how to feel about it. Didn't want it. It was some pixel art they did in the mid-1980s. They thought it had been forgotten.

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Guides on writing after this moment

Some resources that I've found useful for improving the way I write & think about fiction in a post-October 7th world

Fargo Tbakhi against Craft:

CL Clark on fantasy(/ies of) war:

Vajra Chandrasekera on art+politics:

& it's never too late (trust me, I came to it late) to read Edward Said's Orientalism

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Books about game design but not really but really

Collecting my suggestions & others' from a twitter thread (remember those?)

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino Pilgrim in the Microworld, David Sudnow Breathing Machines, Leigh Alexander Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman An Inventory of Losses, Judith Schalansky Visit to a Small Planet, Elinor Fuchs (https://web.mit.edu/jscheib/Public/foundations_06/ef_smallplanet.pdf) Noises Off, Michael Freyn Influence, Robert Cialdini Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges Wonderbook, Jeff VanderMeer Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin Motel of the Mysteries, David Macaulay Ghost Stories for Darwin, Banu Subramaniam (esp. “Singing the Morning Glory Blues”) Batman: The Animated Series Writer’s Bible (https://dcanimated.com/WF/batman/btas/backstage/wbible/) Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavić The Passion, Jeannette Winterson Rainbows End, Vernon Vinge Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing., Robert Paul Smith A Telling of the Tales, William J. Brooke Finishing The Hat & Look, I Made A Hat, Stephen Sondheim Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Cause Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman Life: A User's Manual, Georges Perec The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick 7 1/2 Lessons About The Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett

additions: Microserfs, Douglas Coupland The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

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By design

When I suggest resources for game writing/narrative design (like a few posts down this blog) I intentionally avoid actual videogames or videogame study. & I still believe this is very healthy but I've started to think about more about what writers can learn from game design.

There's a ton of systemic wisdom in encounter design, or combat design, or level design that could be transposed directly into the way people interact with stories in games; game mechanics as grammar. What's the learning curve of your storytelling? When do you challenge the player and when do you ease off? What are the set of permutations you're working with and how do you vary them? How do you manage repetition (it's not always a bad thing)? What tools and what spaces are you allowing for participatory storytelling, & how do you encourage their use?

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prayer flags

I've been asked a few times if there's anything to watch out for in a game writing interview. This is by no means exhaustive:

If it's a tribunal of dudes, are they aware of the dynamic?

Do you get the feeling they gave your samples more than a cursory read/playthrough? Have they made the effort to understand them and you?

If you come from a non-traditional game writing background are they dismissive of your expertise?

If there's been churn on the team are they candid about why?

If you ask about team/studio diversity do they get defensive, or treat it as a 'gotcha' question?

If a leader jokes about being strict or mean or a bit of a tyrant ha ha they're not joking

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54

Soft launching the list of games that I would personally, obsessively, recommend to anyone interested in game writing & narrative design.

When I threatened to do this months ago I did commit to more detail (at least: time to play, mechanical complexity, etc., not so much describing what I find narratively significant about them) so I'll probably work on that

Price guide: $ - sub-10, $$ - 10-20, $$$ - 30-40

13 Sentinels (PS4, Switch, 2020) $$ 80 Days (iOS, PC, Switch, 2014) $ Afterparty (all, 2019) $$ Asura’s Wrath (PS3, 360, 2012) $-$$$ Alpha Centauri (PC, macOS, 1999) $ Analogue: A Hate Story (PC, macOS, 2012) $ Anthology of the Killer (PC, macOS, 2024) $ Amarantus (PC, macOS, 2023) $$ Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs (all, 2013) $ Black Book (all, 2021) $$ Cape Hideous (PC, 2024) $ Cart Life (PC, 2013) $ Children of Morta (all, 2019) $$ Cosmology of Kyoto (PC, macOS, 1993) - Dragon’s Dogma (all, 2012) $ ECHO (PC, PS4, XB, 2017 Fatale (PC, macOS, 2009) $ Flipnic (PS2, 2003) $ Goblet Grotto (PC, macOS, 2012) free Goodbye Volcano High (PC, PS4, XB, 2023) $$ Kentucky Route Zero episode 1 (all, 2013) $$ Killer7 (play with a GC controller if you can) (GC, PS2, PC, 2005) $$ Lumines (all, 2004) $ Mediterranea Inferno (PC, PS4, XB, 2023) $ Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2, 360, PC, 2001) $ Mutazione (all, 2019) $$ Need For Speed: Heat (PS4, XB, PC, 2019) $$ Nier (PS3/360 western release with Father Nier) (PS3, 360, 2010) $ Parameters (web, 2012) free Pokemon Snap (N64, 1999) $-$$ Portal (not the Valve one) (home computers, 1986) - Pyre (PS4, PC, macOS, 2017) $ Resident Evil 7 (all, 2017) $$ Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS1, 1999) $ Riven (PC, macOS, PS1, 1997) $ Roadwarden (PC, macOS, 2022) $-$$ Saturnalia (all, 2022) $$ Silent Hill 3 (PS2, PC, 2003) $-$$ SOMA (all, 2015) $$ That Which Faith Demands (PC, macOS, 2021) $ Tharsis (all, 2016) $ The Fool's Errand (home computers, 1987) $ The Unfinished Swan (PS3, PS4, PC, Mac/iOS, 2012) $ The World Ends With You (DS, Switch, 2007) $-$$ Tokyo Jungle (PS3, 2012) $-$$ Tomodachi Life (DS, 2013) $ Umurangi Generation (PC, Switch, XB, 2020) $$ Until Dawn (PS4, 2015) $-$$ Vangers (PC, macOS, 1998) $ Void Stranger (PC, macOS, 2023) $$ Wheels of Aurelia (all, 2016) $ WORLD OF HORROR (PC, macOS, 2019) $$ Yakuza: Like A Dragon (PS4, PS5, XB, PC, 2020) $$ Zeno Clash (PC, 360, 2009) $