Without These Friends You Fail
A report from an adventure in game writing
When I told people I was leaving Microsoft to be a full-time writer, almost everyone responded positively. Sure, I got a few catty remarks. (‘You’ll be back. I give you six months.’) But the overwhelming reaction was a sort of wistful endorsement.
I wish I could retire, a friend would say, gazing across the bustle of the company commons.
I’m not retiring, I replied. I’m just changing my career. I’m going to write.
Oh right, the friend reassured. Will you travel then? Or spend more time on your hobbies?
Mostly I’ll be working. Like I do now.
Sure, sure. I would love to travel more.
At this point, most friends drifted away on the wind of their secret longings, and the conversation was over. But some showed actual curiosity.
What will you write? Can I read anything?
I had several projects under way, but one really caught their interest.
I’m the writer for a new video game, I told them.
And here the responses varied, depending on whether the friend was an engineer or artist or academic or just a neighbor. But they all used one word…
Really?!
Apparently, I didn’t strike them as someone who would work on games. I was a plausible novelist, or songwriter, or science blogger, or even playwright. But video game writer? That surprised them. I don’t think they were questioning my ability so much as my interest and, perhaps, ethics.
I could challenge all this but the truth is I’m a very particular gamer. I get restless with most games and walk away after an hour. This creates a self-defeating spiral where I don’t invest enough time to build enough skill to appreciate them. But I also think it has to do with the quality of games. I’ve been hooked on several over the years, and finished them with delight. To name just a few: Myst, Marathon, Halo, Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, Inside. So I do play, but only when the game is meaningful and taps into a collective consciousness that makes stories so important to human beings. That means I skip a lot of blockbuster titles. And that creates the impression that I’m just not that into games.
So I can understand the surprise my friends showed.
Well, it’s 18 months later. To all of you who asked, “Really?!” I’m back to finally answer your question.
With a definitive: YES!
I was the writer for a new game, Disintegration, from the studio V1 Interactive. In collaboration with creative staff at V1, I wrote the story overview, character bios, and cinematic scripts. Disintegration will launch on June 16, and I think you should try it. Here’s why.
Who is this character?
On my first visit to V1 Interactive, I got lost in the parking lot. It’s true. The game studio is in an ordinary, suburban office park, surrounded by tall fir trees and chirping eagles. But the signs are vague, and the main entrance looks like nothing more than the front door of a security company. So I walked around the entire glass-clad building without finding a way in. Finally I heard a rap in the second-story window from my friend and founder of V1, Marcus Lehto. It felt a little like playing Halo with him years ago, where he’d laugh at my struggle and finally say, ‘Dude, you just do this.’ (In my defense, he created that game.)
I had a minor case of impostor syndrome when I signed up, and this little snafu didn’t help. As I climbed the stairs, I asked myself questions I used to ask about new hires when I led software projects: Could this person add value? Could they bring a new perspective but not slow the project down? Were they creative and collaborative? Could they carry three coffees and still open a door? I didn’t know…
Within a few minutes of meeting the team, my reservations faded. Not because I had suddenly proven my worth, but because the people at V1 are warm, big-hearted, and collaborative. They’re also consummate pros who inspire you to make something better. My main partner was Lee Wilson, Story and Cinematics Lead and long-time veteran of the games business. With the dry charisma of a Brit and the quick wit of an improv actor, Lee made me feel welcome from our first encounter. He is a reminder of the development adage that says: A product is a direct reflection of the people who created it.
Which brings me to the first reason you should try the game:
1. Disintegration has complex and memorable characters.
When you’re writing good fiction, your characters become indistinguishable from real people. You know them. When you put them in a scene, they act on their own and lead you through events. They create surprises that, in hindsight, make perfect sense for such a character. They talk to you in dreams. Just like real people. It takes a long time to develop characters like this. You need to explore their histories in much greater depth than you’d ever write; you need to understand how their experiences shaped their identities; you need to follow them through life. The process can be more archaeology and anthropology than pure invention, and ultimately you arrive at a set of characters, a world, and a story that feel like they’ve always existed.
(@ Hard-core Disintegration Fans: rest assured, this world may well exist in some dimension. Who are we to say that we haven’t excavated it from digital ruins or extracted it from an Architect’s Head?!)
So it’s fitting that in my first meeting with V1, we walked through a draft set of character sketches and talked about how they fit into the overall story concept. And we’ve had that same discussion many times since, finally arriving at the cast we have now.
In the world of Disintegration, every person has had to face a profound choice: Whether to be Integrated, having their brain joined with a mechanical body. Integration started as a trend among the privileged classes, as protection against environmental devastation, worldwide conflict, and disease. But when the Rayonne, a global militant order, came to power, they launched a program to Integrate all of the population, often against their will. Meanwhile, a coalition of people who refused integration (called ‘naturals’) joined forces with integrated Outlaws to resist the Rayonne and restore humanity to the world. Our story begins in the midst of this resistance and our characters play a pivotal role.
You are Romer Shoal.
I think you’ll like the protagonist, Romer Shoal, the first-person character you play in the game. He’s a reluctant hero with a questionable past, once a celebrity gravcycle pilot and spokesman for Integration. As the story begins, he’s fallen far from his glory days, and he hasn’t yet committed himself to your mission. This is a challenging line to walk in a game, making a first-person hero more than an empty vessel, but the story benefits from it.
Black Shuck.
You’ll despise the villain, Black Shuck, the sinister commander of a remote ship, whose complex motivations reflect the doctrine of his order, the Rayonne. Shuck may destroy many bodies, but his satisfaction comes from manipulating minds. You will need to match wits with him.
The legendary officer, Tala Bryndis.
You’ll admire Tala Bryndis, an officer of the human resistance forces who suffered a great family tragedy at the hands of Shuck. There are advantages to a partnership between Tala and Romer’s Outlaws, but they must decide if they can trust each other.
Waggoner the sage.
And then there’s old Waggoner, who has trained many crews in the resistance before, but who finds Romer’s case particularly intriguing. Waggoner is also haunted by a lack of trust, more comfortable in his back-country gear than the lab coat he once wore.
Crew members Rezek and Coqui.
And there is Doyle the ex-cop bruiser, and Agnes the bad-ass beautician, and Coqui the street fighting jokester, and Rezek the family-loving crack mechanic, and Seguin the non-binary computer programmer. They will become your family, and you will trust your life with them, and they will surprise you. I promise that.
Disintegration is categorized as sci-fi. I believe it expands beyond the genre, into speculative fiction. But the categorization fits. And like all sci-fi, this requires that the characters adhere to established archetypes. (There must be a “shadow,” like Darth Vader or Sauron. There’s usually a “mentor,” like Gandalf or Obi-wan Kenobi.) People instinctually love archetypes. But they also dislike lazy imitations. There lies the paradox in establishing archetypes in fiction: they must be familiar but unique.
Embracing this paradox and conceiving of characters both archetypal and novel--that was an essential goal in writing Disintegration. I should add: much credit goes to the voice actors. The script was well-refined when Lee started the recording process with Jack Menhorn, the brilliant Lead Sound Designer. But each actor made the character their own and it was thrilling to hear facets of their personalities we hadn’t written into the script. This is an important lesson for screen writers of any kind: Listen to the actors and let them make your story better. Your words aren’t precious; your ideas are.
It’s All Fun and Games
You’ve probably heard of a ‘table read,’ when a team working on a script for a film (or game cinematics) sit around a table and read through the script, each person acting for one or more characters. This was some of the most fun I had working on Disintegration. You hear immediately what lines work well, and what lines make you cringe. You can’t hide from how it sounds, even if you sweeten the meeting with a six-pack. Your colleagues get to have a run at acting (Lee’s the best villain, of course, because he’s English). And you get a sense for the overall arc and length of your story.
Producer Joe Erskine, who contributed profoundly to the story, organized our table read and kept us on track. But after the first pass through the Disintegration script, one thing was obvious: It was long. Really, really long. Like epic feature-film long. We had, with all the best intentions, blown our story out to unmanageable proportions. It was about four times too much material. This was good, in the sense that we had explored the story in depth and had scores of great scenes. But it was problematic because we were straying from one, immutable fact about Disintegration…
It’s a GAME!
And that brings us to the second reason I think you’ll like it:
2. Disintegration has unique, rewarding gameplay
Some games have really strong stories. Others have challenging and captivating gameplay. But to really demonstrate the potential of the medium, you need both. As Marcus says, “The lore of the universe is one of the most important parts of a game, giving purpose for the elements living within.” Let me translate: The best games have great gameplay and a great story in a fascinating world.
Convention says that, as the writer, I didn’t need to worry much about gameplay. I could work with Lee on the script and call it good. But Disintegration was conceived to make these two facets work in harmony, symbiotically, interdependently. Like Yin and Yang. Like the oxpecker and the rhino. You get the idea.
I’ll share one significant example. Marcus and his design team have invented an approach to gameplay that no one has done before. And many people suggested it couldn’t be done. They combined a first-person shooter (FPS) with a real-time strategy (RTS) game. As Romer, you pilot a gravcycle and blast away at Rayonne enemies right through the game. But you also control your crew on the ground (remember: Coqui, Doyle, Agnes, etc.). Each member of this crew has a unique ability that you use tactically in combat to fight the enemy, complete the mission, and protect your team. You can’t complete your campaign, or finish the game, without using both your first-person abilities and all the abilities of your crew. You won’t get far in multiplayer without using your whole crew either.
It’s about teamwork, sacrifice, drawing on the gifts of your partners while bringing your best. Without these friends, you fail.
Those are also essential themes we explore in the story of Disintegration. You’ll learn how these characters depend on each other, how they develop deeper relationships, how they suffer losses almost too great to bear, and whether they can trust each other. You’ll enjoy it in film and live it through gameplay. This makes for a particularly gratifying story experience--perhaps better than a movie and as good as a novel.
You won’t get far without your crew, who bring a diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives.
Great Stories Are All the Same
Marcus asked me to join the project after reading a draft of a novel I was writing. In sharing our ideas for fiction and imagined worlds, we found that we had common views on storytelling. We also gravitated to similar themes related to the overwhelming challenges humanity faces. People have always needed great stories to make sense of the world--and we need them now more than ever.
So this is the third reason you should try it:
3. Disintegration addresses serious themes in a classic story
I want to address that last part: all the qualities of a classic story appear in the tale of Romer and Black Shuck and Tala and Waggoner. (This is going to sound like bragging, but I believe it!) These characters have difficult histories, secret flaws, and strong desires that bring them into conflict with each other. The story starts with a bang, the action rises, and there’s a payoff at the end. The characters develop, learn, evolve--just as you navigate the campaign. There is tragedy and there is humor. Now I’m overselling. But here’s the real point…
Great stories have certain essential qualities--including those I just listed. Without these qualities, you can’t have a great story. Sometimes--in literary fiction, for example--the qualities are more subtle or masked, but they’re always there. And games are no exception. That’s the biggest reason I’d play the story campaign in Disintegration or other games like it. Because by the end, I will have lived through a gratifying story with all the complexity of life, with my perspective expanded to consider its themes for a long time. Disintegration will stick with you.
And when you’re done, you’ll want more. Which leaves us only the question: Will there be a sequel? You’ll have to ask Marcus. But if there is, and I have a chance to work on it, I think I’ll be able to navigate the parking lot.
Really.
Marcus and Lee, thanks for the wonderful opportunity to work on this game.
And Dear Reader, thanks for your time. Now go download the game!
