I’ve always leaned toward writing and storytelling, so I was wondering what companies look for in hiring for those positions. I have an idea of what’s in an artist’s portfolio, but what does a writer’s portfolio look like?

Since I’ve never actually hired a video game writer (other than myself), I passed this question on to David Footman, Scripted Events Director for Ubisoft Toronto. David generously took a break from making the next Splinter Cell to offer his advice in today’s guest post.

Disclaimer: While I agree with almost all David says, I don’t share his belief that familiarity with the teachings of Robert McKee (or Syd Field, or Bob Truby…) is an indicator of a writer’s skill or craftsmanship. I say this although I’ve taken their courses, bought their books, and (almost) always came away feeling I’d gotten my money’s worth.

I’ll add my two cents on screenwriting gurus later — but first, here’s David, with a game director’s perspective on what he looks for in a game writer:

I think there are two “schools” when it comes to scripted event direction in video games. People who move into this role from animation or art direction backgrounds make up the first school. The second school have a background in TV and film. I come from TV and film, and this informs my choices and processes in games. Creating the story for a AAA game needs two types of writers — an experienced game writer, and an experienced screenplay writer.

Writing for games is different from any other genre. The interactive nature of the story demands that the writer fully understand the term “Gamer Experience.” In the last five years, I’ve heard this term come up in game story discussions more and more. It’s a powerful concept, and once understood, it not only changes the way a writer approaches narrative, but the gamer experience can change depending on the genre of game you’re working on.

My first video game project was an RPG, Lord of the Rings: 3rd Age. RPGs are the extreme example of how a game story can be unique to each player, but even on RPGs we don’t have the money or time to build more than three or four splines for the story. In a linear action adventure game, the degree of “unique experience” is much less. Still, every player wants to feel like they’ve had a unique experience. We don’t just provide an illusion of this — we now have systems in place that make this a reality, like systemic scripts, dynamic dialogue systems, and perhaps most importantly, user-created experiences that abound in multiplayer, co-op and social games. A good writer must be focused on creating narrative systems that tell the player’s story, not their own. It’s an important distinction.

As a scripted event director, I’m not always involved in the broader aspects of the game story. Often I shoot the scripted events, direct the performance capture and audio sessions, but have little say in how it’s all assembled within the game. Many movies are “made” in the editing room –- the tempo, style, and tone are established there and nowhere else. It’s the same with video games, but you have level designers and a myriad of other artists, scripters and programmers (which is why you’re now more often seeing the role of Narrative Designer, a job that didn’t exist five to seven years ago). Over the last few years, I’ve broadened my scope to help design all of the game story elements, not just scripted events.

When it comes to purely cinematic scripted events, on top of working with a game writer, I really value an experienced screenplay writer who’s had at least three scripts produced. Seeing your work on-screen is the best way to learn, and the craft of writing for film takes an enormous amount of talent and skill.

“The camera is the dread X-ray machine of all things false” — Robert McKee

When it comes to writing for the screen, the camera is the ultimate lie detector. Characters and dialogue stand naked before its powerful magnifying lens. Scenes that contain truth, conflict, revelation, and reversals provoke and capture audience imaginations. I look for writers who refuse witty dialogue, cute setups, and phony interactions, and instead look for dramatic structure in all of their written scenes.

If you can’t already tell, I’m a big Robert McKee fan. I love his approach to writing, and any writer who has studied under him already has a shoe in my door. You’ll hear “keep it simple” a lot nowadays, and it’s a great term for writers, directors and actors. Good dialogue comes from a good understanding of characters and the world around them, and first drafts always suck –- just accept it. Writing is about understanding that a great story needs to be boiled down to its essence and re-written over and over again until it contains only the purest of elements. I look for writers who get their work out in the open, and who aren’t afraid to take risks.

Writing can be a vulnerable job, constantly putting your heart out on the page, critiqued by everyone on the team, misunderstood by actors. You get bossed around by directors and producers, and in the end everyone wants to blame you. I look for writers who can collaborate, but who can also stand up for their convictions. Just as everyone who gets dressed in the morning thinks they’re a costume designer, everyone thinks they can write — and nothing could be further from the truth. The writer is the nucleus of a game, and even if you have the best development team in the universe, your game doesn’t stand a chance without a talented writer.

(Jordan in) Roger that. Now, about those screenwriting gurus:

(I posted a while back about my own McKee experience, here.)

I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from taking McKee’s course or reading his book. They’re great. But they are no more a shortcut to becoming a professional writer than, say, reading books and attending lectures about soccer are to becoming a professional soccer player.

It’s all about the hours on the field. The ten thousand hours, if you’re a Malcolm Gladwell fan. For a writer, that translates into hours spent writing, getting feedback on your writing, and rewriting.

The danger of gurus to an aspiring writer (or an aspiring anyone) is that they can lull you into thinking you’ve saved yourself a few thousand hours of hard, apprentice work. Whereas in reality, all you’ve done is added a few more tools to your toolbox, which is (or should be) already full of tools. So go ahead and try their wares. Just don’t be a sucker. Especially, don’t fall for the idea that anyone’s book, course, or paradigm is “necessary,” or that it supersedes what you can figure out on your own by paying attention when you read fiction, play games, or go to the movies. Even Aristotle’s Poetics doesn’t make that claim.

For a fuller discussion of “Screenwriting Gurus and So-Called Experts,” check out this podcast from two highly accomplished, in-demand, working screenwriters, John August and Craig Mazin. Craig’s views are harsher than John’s (although if you know Craig or have followed his blog in the past, you can tell that John softened him up a bit for this podcast). Here’s John in one of the podcast’s more pro-guru moments:

Syd Field is — if you’re going to read one book, you should probably read Syd Field, just because everyone else in this town has read Syd Field. People will talk in, sort of, Syd Field terms whether they’ve read the book or not. When people talk about Act I, Act II, Act III, mid-act, climax, worst of the worst, those are all kind of Syd Field’y terms.

Everyone’s going to talk those ways, whether you actually believe in them or not, development people will talk in those ways. By reading Syd Field, you’ll understand that everyone thinks that there’s a first act that ends at about page 30, that there’s a reversal that happens at about page 60, that there’s a second act break that happens at page 90, which is the worst of the worst, and then the movie resolves itself in the third act, which is the last 30 pages or so.

Everyone sort of uses that as a template for thinking about stuff, even though that’s not the way most movies actually happen. The danger is people use that as a template to try to shoehorn any given movie in to fit those beats and fit those page breaks and that idea that this is exactly how a movie has to work, as if there’s one magic formula, or that the architecture of screenwriting is quite literally architecture or engineering — that if you don’t do these things exactly perfect, the entire movie will fall down and collapse on itself.

John’s point applies equally to video game writing. If you think of McKee, Field, Vogler, et al. as frames of reference that other writers and creative execs at film studios and game companies are likely to share, that in itself is a good argument for being familiar with them.

End of guru-related digression. The points David makes about game writing are absolutely valid, and reflect important realities of game development that any writer interested in working in games should know.

Tomorrow: A writer’s take on the question, from a game writer who works with David: Richard Dansky, lead Tom Clancy Writer for Ubisoft Red Storm.

The book isn’t free — we’ve priced it at US$7.99 — but at 300-plus pages, I hope it’s good value. We’re publishing it without any copy protection or DRM, so pirates shouldn’t have much of a challenge. Book sales will help defray the costs of this project and of maintaining the website.

The ebook contains the original Old Journals, plus never-before-published entries leading up to the beginning of The Last Express. You can download a free sample PDF of the first 40 pages, or the full ebook, here.

Thanks to Danica Novgorodoff for designing the book (Danica is the multitalented author of the excellent graphic novel Refresh, Refresh, and designer of many First Second books, including Solomon’s Thieves), and to David Anaxagoras, Ryan Nelson, and Aaron Simonoff for their hard work putting it together. It’s safe to say it turned out to be a lot more work than any of us expected.

How Prince of Persia got made — and almost didn’t

In the ebook, you’ll read what I wrote in my journal on the day I videotaped my kid brother running and jumping to model the prince’s moves; the day I gave up on the project; and the day I decided to finish it after all.

In the seven years from May 1985 to January 1993, Prince of Persia went from a few scribbles on yellow-lined paper to a published, best-selling video game franchise, and I changed from a callow kid into (I thought) a seasoned software entrepreneur. If you’ve read the journals, you know that it was a bumpy ride, and that the game’s eventual success was anything but a foregone conclusion.

Whether you’re a game designer or in another creative field, whether you had an Apple II in the 1980s or weren’t born yet, I hope you’ll find inspiration (or something else of use to you) in this story of how one game got made.

Check out the ebook here.

A request

This ebook is an experiment in many ways. I have no idea how many people will be interested, or how well the non-DRM “honor system” will work. Either way, I’ll post once the dust has settled, and let you know how it went.

If you’ve enjoyed the Old Journals on the site, but don’t feel the urge to own the ebook, you can still support this project by helping us spread the word. Readers like you who take the time to post or tweet about the Old Journals ebook, review it on Amazon, or just tell a friend, will make a big difference in the experiment.

Many thanks!

When Yuri, Joanna Wasick and I came together in a sound studio for the first day of voice recording on POP:SOT, we didn’t have animations, animatics, or even concept art yet. While the POP team was bringing the world and characters of the game to life on screen, two actors first needed to make them real in their imaginations. The Prince and Farah began as voices in darkness.

I cherish voice recording as a special, thrilling, and terrifying moment in game production. Having experienced it from a writer-director’s point of view, I asked Yuri for an actor’s perspective on the process.

Yuri Lowenthal is an actor who lives and works in Los Angeles. You may have heard/seen him in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Afro Samurai, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Ben 10. He is married to actress Tara Platt and easily stalked at @YuriLowenthal. And if you’re nice he’ll tell you the exciting story about the time he met Jake Gyllenhaal.

People often ask me: “What’s harder? Voice acting or real acting?” I’ve heard it so many times that I hardly get offended anymore. Almost hardly. I mean, I get it; the person speaking is really trying to say: “What kind of acting is more difficult, the kind where we just end up hearing your voice, or the kind where we end up seeing your face?”

Well, let’s break it down:

For on-camera acting, I generally get the script in advance, time to talk with the director about the character and what his or her vision is for the project, maybe do a little research, put on a costume, work with some props, walk around the set, rehearse with other actors, and take time to break down the script so that I can bring you, the viewer, the best performance I am capable of.

For voice acting, I generally show up the morning of the recording, am handed a script, and after about 5 minutes (if I’m lucky) of discussion with the director (or sometimes writer) about the project, we get down to business so that I can bring you, the viewer/listener/gamer, the best performance I am capable of. Will my performance be judged less harshly because I didn’t have the niceties that an on-camera or theatrical situation can afford? Absolutely not.

As a voice actor, I have to jump in, scan the script, get as much info as possible in a short amount of time from the people involved and make choices on the spot — but stay flexible in case my choices aren’t in line with what the client needs. I have to pay extra close attention to the director, because they usually have a LOT more information about the story and characters than I do. And I’m alone, empty-handed, in whatever clothes I grabbed out of my closet that morning, in a room about the size of the closet I grabbed my clothes from, standing in front of a sensitive microphone that will pick up every little sound — voluntary or involuntary — that I make. And the only thing I can count on being there for me is my imagination.

Not that I don’t use my imagination when I’m acting on camera; but in the booth, it’s my most powerful weapon. In the dark, by yourself, you have to create everything — which, when you look at it, can be either terrifying or immensely empowering. For fear of otherwise dissolving into a gibbering puddle of panic, I choose “empowering.” You have to. You must bring a certain confidence into the booth with you, because no one else will be there to prop you up, and the client rarely has giant wodges of time for you to “find” your performance.

To be a good voice actor, you have to be a crack actor. A cool voice will only get you so far. Years of theater gave me a huge jump on voice acting. And you know what? All the voice acting I’ve done has made me a better on-camera actor.

Now, I’m not saying one or the other is better. I love both, and I absolutely love showing up to do a voice acting gig and not have to get there at 5am for makeup and wardrobe and then sit in a trailer for a couple of hours while they light and rehearse until they’re ready for me to come out and say three lines of dialogue. Instead, I can roll into the studio at 9am and be out by 1pm, sometimes having finished recording what is, in essence, a whole movie. And I didn’t even really have to put pants on.

On the other hand, sometimes I love getting into a suit of armor and hitting another actor with a sword.

(As I watch my video game work segue from voice acting to sometimes full performance capture, I see the two worlds on a collision course. But that’s a story for another day.)

When I’m voice acting, you don’t get to see my face, so it ceases to be a question of whether or not I “look the part.” If I can sound like it, I can be it. You don’t see a lot of working voice actors getting cast because of their looks. Once again, you have to be a good actor. Not just a pretty face. Or even Persian.

Friday’s podcast especially warmed my heart. It’s ostensibly about the working relationship between screenwriter and director, but that’s not why I’m reposting it. It’s because Craig and John showed me that I wasn’t alone growing up pronouncing words like

misled = mizzled
segue = seeg
awry = orry
hyperbole = hyperbowl

until the day, generally years too late, when the awful truth came crashing in on me.

But I still think it’s possible that I may be the only one who grew up reading HWADDA-nits. You know, in paperback. Like by Agatha Christie.

You can read more about the film here.

Hope to see some of you there. And Mom, if you’re reading this, Happy Mother’s Day!

The kind of sturm and drang that’s swirled around “Green Lantern” is actually par for the course on most visual effects-heavy tentpoles these days — and the problem’s growing. Such pics now routinely fit the description of a “troubled” project, with “troubled” the new normal.

Traditionally, big studio movies never miss their release dates. This is different from the videogame industry, where high-profile AAA titles, under pressure to raise the bar technologically as well as artistically, can be granted extra months or even years if the publisher feels it’s worth it.

Game makers have long admired Big Filmmaking’s ability to meet schedules no matter what. But with the shift to digital, film post-production is acquiring the atmosphere of a “normal” game studio at crunch time:

[Studio] management practices are still catching up to the reality of tentpole production, where effects have to be built before the picture is tested, then vfx have to be added and/or changed as the picture comes together and in response to audience testing, all while marketing demands shots for the campaign.

All of Hollywood seems to be still figuring this out, and as a result, the tentpole pattern is now well established:

• A movie demands you’ve-never-seen-this-before visual effects both for marketing and story;
• Ambitious plans and a short schedule leave little margin for error;
• Inevitable schedule problems trigger urgent meetings among studio execs, vendors and filmmakers to get the project back on track;
• “911″ emergency calls go out to almost any vfx shop in the world that can take on some last-minute work;
• Everyone runs a harrowing race to deadline despite all the extra help.

Collapse, rest, repeat.

As a videogame maker, I always assumed we were just crazy to begin with. But is the madness in the craftsman, or his tools?

I love being in an industry where we get to study what we’re doing from an academic point of view, while we’re doing it.

Here’s the transcript of my notes from that interview in case anyone’s interested. I stumbled across it while cleaning out an old hard drive.

It was May 1991. She was 89 years old. She often spoke of herself in the third person. She had a strapping male secretary named Horst.

As we said goodbye, I realized I was shaking the hand of someone who’d once shaken hands with Adolf Hitler.

“And maybe did more than just shake hands,” George added.

Or rather, partial script. For writers interested in the differences between writing for movies and games, it’s worth noting that there is no game design document equivalent to a film screenplay (i.e. an established format for the writer to communicate the story to producers, director, cast and crew).

Typically, the larger part of my writing work on Sands of Time was conveyed through non-screenplay documents (dialog recording and tracking spreadsheets and the like) to the team of designers, artists and engineers. I’ve described that process in more detail in this article for MIT Press.

The “readable screenplay” posted here reads like a film screenplay, but that’s because it contains only the cinematic cutscenes – not the in-game scripted events, dialog, and voice-over narration that are just as essential to the player’s experience of the story. Those exist in no easily readable form.

The best way to experience a videogame story is to play the game. But for a quick read, this script offers at least a glimpse into Sands of Time’s beginnings.