"The video game story-development process is incredibly broken," says Austin Grossman, shaking his bald head and looking out the window of a tiny cafe near the University of California at Berkeley campus. He speaks from experience: Grossman helped design almost a dozen critically acclaimed video games, including Looking Glass Studios' System Shock, cyberpunk fave Deus Ex and the 2006 "reboot" of the Tomb Raider franchise, Tomb Raider: Legend.
He loved the work, but as a storyteller he felt stifled. So he took a few years off from the video game business and went on a quest for better stories, pursuing a Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley, and starting work on a novel. The first fruits of his journey will hit bookstore shelves Tuesday in the form of Soon I Will Be Invincible, a funny-melancholy novel about the emotional lives of comic book villains and heroes.
Hollywood has taken notice and a film is in the works -- Grossman says he's been in talks with potential directors, giving input on everything from visual design to casting. "We know what's been done with huge big budgets and with comedy," he explains. "But there's still room for a more interesting, emotionally expressive superhero film."
The guy may be a library nerd on the cusp of becoming a literary sensation, but Grossman says he's doing it all for gamers. "I absolutely want to go back to video games," he says, adding that writing a novel has helped him see what's missing from video game storytelling: the freedom to suck.
"Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away," he laughed. "I didn't have to know the ending until I got there." Stories for video games, on the other hand, are very rarely revised. Grossman recalls how game developers might start building the animation of a final battle scene right after he'd delivered an outline of the story. Even if he realized later that having the battle there was stupid, it was already coded and couldn't be changed.
He believes video game stories are stronger when designers use the "waterfall" process, beginning with a small prototype of the game, then playing and altering it continually throughout development. "Companies have to accept more uncertainty in the design process," Grossman argues. "That's the only way to get a good story."
Another problem comes when designers try to shoehorn storytelling devices like character development into games. "Video games have their own emotional vocabulary, their own language," Grossman says. "Maybe they just don't do character."
Still, sometimes he dreams of making video games from the Victorian novels he studies as a graduate student, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. "You could do it Grand Theft Auto-style, running around the city jacking coaches and trampling kids," he muses. The whole point, he says, would be to experiment. That's just what he hopes to do when he returns from the archaic world of print and goes digital again.
