LAS VEGAS -- Organizers of the DICE Summit learned that the easiest way to fill an hour was to ask the developers of Mass Effect, BioShock, and Rock Band about how to tell a story in a videogame.
It's a question that 2K's Ken Levine, BioWare's Ray Muzyka, and Harmonix's Greg LoPiccolo have clearly spent a great deal of time pondering, as their answers to moderator Ricardo Torres' questions were extensive, detailed, and well thought-out.
LoPiccolo began the roundtable by noting that the three game makers were seated "like points on the narrative scale," with Rock Band's subtle and implied story sitting opposite Mass Effect's extremely detailed and deep game world, with BioShock's more visual approach to narrative falling somewhere in between.
"The industry's done a good job of expanding the definition of what a narrative can be," observed Levine. With BioShock, he wanted to make much of the story optional, so that could enjoy the game without necessarily listening to every audio diary or reading every sign in Rapture. Levine used the visuals of BioShock to tell much of the story rather than using a more traditional approach like Mass
Effect's dialogue because "I'm too lazy to write that many words," said
Levine.
Harmonix had a "pretty pragmatic goal in mind" to introduce the narrative of Rock Band, that of trying to bond people together emotionally in a band. "So we pretty much blatantly ripped off RPG
design tools," and were somewhat surprised at how well it worked to create an emotional connection between the player and his in-game band.
Because people "understood so much about what bands do and how they work" Harmonix could "cheat a lot" and still create a compelling narrative with just a few simple loading screens.
BioWare's approach, as anyone who's played Mass Effect will know, was to invent a backstory for the entire game universe, creating histories and mythologies for planets and races that ultimately had no direct effect on the core gameplay, but made the universe feel genuine and fully realized.
Muzyka likened this to an iceberg, saying that "there's like 90
percent of the work you've done that will never be seen by the player."
The hard part, he said, is deciding what makes up the tip of the iceberg that players finally see--which characters, scenarios and locations do you actually put on display?
Levine agreed that paring down the information finally given to the player was a difficult, but essential step in the storytelling process.
Describing some of BioShock's original story documents as
"fucking insane," Levine explained that whittle his original vision down extensively, "taking five characters and turning them into one.
Every character in the game became the expression of an idea. We really tried to limit the amount of ideas we were getting across."
If they had to do it all over again, how would they tell the stories of Rock Band, Mass Effect, and BioShock
differently? LoPiccolo would include online band world tour, that's for sure. Muzyka, meanwhile, would try to find a faster way to get
Commander Shepherd off of Citadel and out in the galaxy. As for Levine, he wouldn't have put BioShock's big reveal smack in the middle of the game.
Crafting a great tale is all well and good, but at the end of the day, there are still bills to be paid. How does a master storyteller balance art and commerce? According to LoPiccolo, keeping your eye on the bottom line and setting financial limits can actually be helpful when it comes to creating games. "You could make any kind of game about anything, and that can be sort of paralyzing," he said. "I think that constraint is your friend."
Muzyka agreed, saying that "Constraint spurs creativity." Levine voiced a similar opinion when he observed that with all of the technology and options available to developers, "It's easy to forget that your job is to amaze people. If you amaze people, they'll buy the thing, and it's very easy to forget that."
