The paper book comes from CreateSpace, a really cool self-publishing service for authors. Basically, we sent them a print-ready PDF and they did the rest. The book weighs in at 323 pages, and looks and feels like a good-quality trade paperback. We’ve priced it at $16.99 (the difference from the ebook versions reflects the printing cost).

You can purchase the book here.

To anyone who’s previously paid for another version of the ebook and would like to have the .epub version for convenience, let us know and we’ll email it to you. Like the PDF, it’s non-DRMed.

Once the dust has settled, I’ll post (and Aaron, Dave and Danica may guest-post) about the results of our grand ebook/self-publishing experiment, and what we’ve learned. Short answer: It was more work than we anticipated — but now that we know how, the next book should be a lot easier. I think.

Also: For readers curious about who some of the people referred to in the journals are, or what became of them, I’ve posted a “who’s who” of players in the making-of-Prince of Persia saga, here.

Many thanks to everyone who’s read the book and reviewed, posted or tweeted about it. The response has been fantastic, and makes it all worth it.

Today, here’s a writer’s take on the subject. Many thanks to Richard Dansky, David, and the Ubisoft Toronto team for taking the time to share their ideas.

By day, Richard Dansky is the Central Tom Clancy Writer for Ubisoft Red Storm, which means that in some way, shape or form, he gets his hands on the storylines and content of most Tom Clancy-themed computer games. By night, he writes the spooky stuff.

The most important thing to look for in a game writer is a game writer. Everything else is secondary. If the writer doesn’t understand that they’re writing for a game — not a movie, or a television show, or a comic book, or a novel or a tabletop RPG or a choose-your-own-adventure book or the underside of a Nantucket Nectar bottle cap — then nothing else matters. Game writing really is something different from any other style in terms of what it demands of the writer – it’s the only place where the writer isn’t telling their story, or the protagonist’s story, but rather the player’s story. Yes, the player takes on the role of the protagonist, whether that’s an avatar they create themselves or an established, iconic character like Sam Fisher, but the fact remains that everything that goes into a game is just possibility until the moment the player interacts with it, and thus creates their own story of what happened.

That doesn’t mean that the other stuff — like being able to string words together in an aesthetically pleasing way — is optional. That’s absolutely not the case. Obviously, a good game writer is someone who writes well, who can convey information directly and concisely, who can build characterization through the restricted toolset available to a writer of games, and who actually does all those wacky professional things like meet deadlines, do revisions, and so forth. The best understanding of game narrative in the world can’t help you if all of your characters sound exactly the same (like, say, you), or if your heroic fantasy heroes sound like surfer dudes, or if your idea of a strong story involves people sitting around a cafe in Cambridge talking about how their parents made them totally dysfunctional. The basic skills of the craft are non-negotiable. It’s just that you have to have them and be able to work with them within the parameters of making a game.

A good game writer understands that the game isn’t about them, or their story, or their witty dialog. The rest of the team isn’t there to realize their vision, and the player isn’t there to admire their brilliance. The game writer I want to work with wants to collaborate with the team to create the best player experience possible. That means crafting a story that shows off the features that the game is built around — no setting key plot moments on the featureless Siberian tundra for a stealth game, thanks. That means working with level design to come up with cool spaces for the action to happen in that also happen to make sense within a narrative framework. That means working with sound to get character voice right and concept artists to create the best visual storytelling possible, right on along to double-checking with localization to make sure that you haven’t accidentally named a character something rude in Farsi. (This happens more often than you’d think.) At the same time, the writer I want to work with doesn’t want the player to sit back and enjoy what is handed to them. The game writer I want to work with creates things that the player can pick up and integrate into their own experience of the game, so that everything that player does feels right and seamless and utterly appropriate to the story they create as they goes along.

Something to bear in mind is that games where the narrative and the gameplay are forcibly separated are getting rarer on the ground. They’ll always be there — sports games in particular lend themselves to that sort of bifurcated structure — but more and more, we’re in a position to conflate the narrative and gameplay elements in really cool and interesting ways. And that means making sure that in addition to being good writing and emotionally true writing, any writing that goes in there can’t step on the gameplay. And that means finding writers who can be smart and economical about exposition, and who understand that if it’s a choice between between “hear the interesting line” and “do the interesting thing,” “hear the interesting line” loses — rightfully — every time.

What I don’t look for in a writer is someone who doesn’t know games, doesn’t play games, and isn’t interested in learning anything about games. It’s someone who can’t understand that technical or asset or budget constraints necessitate changing the script because we just can’t do that. It’s someone who won’t take feedback, or who expects the team to just intrinsically understand their brilliance, or who wants to protect every single solitary word they’ve written because they’re under the mistaken impression that they’ve sweated out diamonds in a first draft. I don’t want to work with a writer who thinks their job is done the second they hand in a script — there’s a lot more work to do — or who thinks that only the fun parts demand their full attention. (Here’s a hint — the players are going to hear your systemic dialog a hell of a lot more often than they’ll hear your witty one-liners.) And I don’t want to work with someone who’s not willing to learn, because we all learn, on every project and with every team.

I’ve been very lucky in the writers I’ve collaborated with over the years. Ian Mayor and the team on Driver: San Francisco, Mike Lee on Splinter Cell: Conviction, the mighty Jay Posey on Ghost Recon: Future Soldier — the list goes on. All of these folks understood that we were working on something bigger and threw themselves into that. They did great work with short turn around and last minute changes and sometimes jury-rigged methods of iteration to make sure things were as good as they possibly could be. And they didn’t just do this for the script, but for the game. I’m lucky again with the folks I’m working with now — scripted events director David Footman and writer Navid Khavari — because they get it, because they do great work, and because they’re coming at things from a different angle than I do, which lets me learn. These are the folks I enjoy working with, and I look forward to working with in the future. And if you’re smart, they’re the folks you want to work with, too.

A huge thanks to Jordan Mechner for the opportunity. Good game writing doesn’t just happen, and we need more of it in our industry.

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.

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld.

This collection of first-person anecdotes from the team of engineers who created the Mac in the early 1980s is beautiful, revelatory, and totally coffee-table-worthy. It conveys the atmosphere of early Apple, and evokes the fascinating bundle of contradictions that was Steve Jobs, in a way that makes it the perfect complement to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, which the person you’re shopping for probably already owns.

(Isaacson’s book is also a terrific read — as accurate and balanced as one could reasonably wish for — but as it’s already destined to become the #1 best-selling biography of all time, plugging it seems redundant. Basically, it’s the iPhone of hardcover biographies.)

If you’re interested in delving deeper into the early Apple story, another great primary source is iWoz by Steve Wozniak (sharing credit with ghostwriter Gina Smith). Woz is the antithesis of the other Steve in so many ways. This memoir — which covers his childhood tinkering, creation of the Apple II, and subsequent departure from the company he co-founded — conveys his unique and wonderful personality. If you happen to be the parent of a smart kid born into the 21st century, his evocation of his 1960s boyhood and relationship with his engineer dad will give you a lot to think about.

Other books I’ve enjoyed lately, in no particular order:

Jesus of Nazareth by Paul Verhoeven.

It’s true: the director of Robocop and Starship Troopers has written one of the most entertaining, historically grounded, and plausible evocations of Jesus’s life I’ve read. Verhoeven, the only non-theologian member of the Jesus Seminar, spent years doing research for a film about Jesus before deciding to write it as a nonfiction book instead. Of special interest to movie buffs is his assessment of the historical accuracy of previous cinematic treatments, including Scorsese’s and Gibson’s.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

This book blew my mind, in the best way. I’ve been curious about how my brain works pretty much ever since my brain started working, so to discover a book this revelatory is a big deal.

Warning: This is not a quick and easy, Malcolm Gladwell-style bedside read to unwind with at the end of a long day. Though it’s very readable, it demands to be read when you’re fully awake and brimming with mental energy. Not only that, it actually explains why you shouldn’t read it when you’re tired.

Feynman by Ottaviani and Myrick.

A hardcover graphic novel might seem an odd medium for the reminiscences of famed raconteur and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman, but it’s totally delightful, funny, romantic, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of math and physics. Read it even if you’ve already enjoyed his memoir, the hilarious Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.

I’ll post as soon as we know the release date. There’s a lot of work still to do — the full trilogy will weigh in at over 450 pages, in full color. To all those who read Book One (published last year in paperback) and are waiting for the rest of the story, many thanks for your patience!

Meanwhile, here’s a sneak preview of a couple of inked (not yet colored) pages from the third book:

I’ve posted these in an album on the Solomon’s Thieves facebook page, plus a colored sample page from Book Two.

(By the way, the Sketchtravel auction was a huge success and raised over $100,000 for the charity Room to Read. Yeahh!! Looks like some kids in Southeast Asia are getting a library.)

ELIZA was one of the first (and longest) BASIC programs I typed into my then brand-new 16K Apple II in 1979. Originally created at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, this pioneering natural-language-processing simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist impressed my family and friends every bit as much as Siri does now. I was curious to see how they would get along.

Here is a transcript of their first encounter. Despite their 45-year age difference and two-million-fold disparity in RAM, I thought they understood each other remarkably well.

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!

And not just because we heard the news — and shared it with our friends — on the iPhones and MacBooks that our fingers touch, on a daily basis, more than practically anything else.

Apple’s products have changed the course of my life, as I’ve previously written. But I admire Jobs most of all for three reasons that have little or nothing to do with the MacBook I’m typing this on:

• He got fired from Apple. Kicked out of the organization he’d devoted his life to building. I can only imagine how that must have felt. Yet he came back from it in a way that said: “That wasn’t my life’s work, it was just the overture.”
• He bought Pixar from George Lucas when they were down and out. He put his own money on the line,  then doubled down, buying into the dream of computer-animated features at a time when nobody else would.
• He gave one of the best commencement speeches ever, one I’ve often returned to when I’ve felt the need to adjust my frame of mind. He said things like this:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Jobs was no plaster saint. He shares many traits with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Walt Disney, and will take his place in history books (or history ebooks) alongside them. Like the co-founder of that other Apple, John Lennon, he was, is, and always will be an inspiration.

It’s one sketchbook with a bright red cover that’s traveled the world for over four years, passed from the hand of one artist to another — literally. Shipping the book in the mail, or giving it to an intermediary, is not allowed. Each artist gets a few days to do a “sketch” in the book. No do-overs, no mistakes.

The sketchbook eventually reached over 70 artists, including such living legends as Quentin Blake, Hayao Miyazaki, Peter de Seve, Carlos Grangel, and Tadahiro Uesugi — and, I’m proud to say, LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland.

Here’s Uyen’s page:

You can read more about the project at www.sketchtravel.com.

The original book will be auctioned in Brussels on October 17th, with proceeds going to a charity called “Room to Read” that builds and furnishes libraries for children throughout the world. I really, really envy whoever gets it.

For the rest of us who don’t come up with the winning bid (I think it starts at something like 20,000 euros), a reproduction of the book is being published by a European house called Chêne, and can be purchased through amazon.fr. There’s also a super deluxe collector’s edition complete with a wooden box.

Pre-ordering mine now.

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.