Eric (00:00:00):
Welcome one and all to the Titans of Text podcast. We are your hosts, Eric Oestrich.

Danny (00:00:16):
And Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld. And we have with us today Doc, game designer, narrative designer, article writer and overall font of hot takes. If you were looking for the aforementioned takes you're in for it tonight. Welcome doc.

Doc (00:00:28):
Hey, thanks for having me.

Danny (00:00:30):
Uh so before we get down to questions, game design, all that stuff tell us a bit about what you've done and the games that that people might know that you've worked on.

Doc (00:00:43):
A very long time ago, I commented a lot on Kotaku. That's probably, that's what everyone should know. I'd come in a lot, enough that somebody said, hey, you should actually do games writing. And he is a very well respected game writer guy.

Doc (00:01:01):
I won't name him, but, more like a proper journalist. Like in terms of what he covers, he was like, he's like, Hey, you have random internet comments and I think you could be a writer. And I was like, really? He's like, yeah. And he encouraged me to submit a piece. I wrote to Kotaku I'd written to a bunch of different people, but I tried to talk you and I was like, Hey, you featured my community posts on the front page more than anyone else. That means you think I'm front page material. So why don't I do some freelancing for you, which is the ballsiest thing I'd done in my life up to that point. And, and they let me, so for about seven years I've written design stuff. The past couple of years branched out, tried, you know, us gamer, just got some stuff done, advice, stuff like that.

Doc (00:01:47):
So I did a lot of journalism, but it was a lot of journalism about how games work. And that got the attention of a company called hit detection. He does AAA game consulting and I obviously can't talk about their clients at all. But they hired me to start helping some people out making their games better. So I had this like natural progression of writing cool articles. About how games work to helping people make better games. Some of those games are pretty well beloved. And then after that I lost my home. The reason being that consulting work is few and far between when you're remote and I did not have a lot of opportunities, so I ended up losing my home and I was like, what do I do? So I pitched an idea for a game on Twitter. That game ended up being a collaborative project called Paratopic, which Cice called, this is before I was writing for vice, so it's not a conflict of interest, Probably the most important first person game in 2018. We won an IGF award. We were up for a couple. I think AV club said we were, you know, incredible game. Tim Rogers over at Kotaku, which probably is a little bit of a conflict of interest, but I wasn't really working there at the time. He had it in his roast of the year and said everybody should play it. Like a lot of people, a lot of people seem to like it and we kind of, I think kickstarted a PlayStation one style horror, first person revolution. So there's a bunch of games out there now that are like PSN horror classics. There were like big explosion just all at once. You know, within like a year after we really, so Paratopic probably the, the one of the most people, well no, about, at least within the indie space.

Doc (00:03:26):
Like, you know, a lot of big YouTuber dudes who I had never heard of, cause I don't really do youtubing, Vinesauce, super best friends, like a bunch of people covered our game. So we got, we got a lot of attention, which was, which was cool. Why I've done freelance narrative design work for a few people. I can, the only one I can really talk about is Hardspace: Ship Breakers, which is by the by Blackbird, a company that makes they made the Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak It's a bunch of former original Homeworld creators from Relic that are kind of doing their own thing now. So, yeah. Did shitload of narrative stuff for Hardspace. And it was just absolutely wonderful to see that at PAX and see people buying it. Hearing that my dialogue in game, that was cool.

Doc (00:04:16):
Now I'm working on a game called Adios, which is a first person game about a pig farmer who's decided he no longer wants to dump bodies for the mob. So he's, it's, yeah, it's a first person game where you talk to the person who has to kill you if you decide to go through with your plan and you go around doing stuff on the farm. And we have a D.C. Douglas who's the voice of guys like Kamoshida, the first boss in persona 5. He's in monster Hunter, ACE combat. He's Wesker, Albert Wesker, in games like Resident Evil 5. We have him as one of our characters. And then we have this wonderful guy, Rick Zieff, who I hadn't, hadn't encountered in a lot of games, but it turns out he's the he's the guy at the beginning of Resident Evil 3 who hides, like the remake, who hides in the truck.

Doc (00:05:02):
And he was like, I'm not getting out of here. I'm going to stay safe. While this is, you know, all this is over. Dario Russo, I think the character's name is, but yeah, Rick is, Oh Rick is amazing. Not a dry eye in the eye in the house for some of those, those scripts, which made me happy. So yeah, we're doing that just kind of as an experimental narrative game cause we got kind of enough funding to do that and that's the cheapest kind of game you can make in 3D. So that's what we're doing now and I'm hoping, you know, eventually to get back into making shooters. That's me. That's my career.

Danny (00:05:33):
I remember when you had the voice actors for audio in the studio, in the sound studio and you were tweeting about that at some point.

Doc (00:05:41):
I was losing my shit is what I was.

Danny (00:05:44):
Tell me a little bit about how that went.

Doc (00:05:46):
Do you know when you write a script, do you have a voice in your head? Right? You write a script down and you kind of, people have talked about this before, it's like here's narrative and it's this, the person in your head, if you tried to put an actual voice to it, I wouldn't necessarily know who it is. So I was doing that. But because I'm a writer and I'm writing for, I'm ready to go. This is essentially a stageplay except set around a huge interactive environment. A huge, I mean huge is like Assassin's Creed Odyssey. This is a single farm. But it's a single farm so it's, there's a lot going on. Mmm it is. I dunno how to put this, when you're writing a script, kind of, you started having like no voice, right? Or you have, you have line readings in your head. I tend to read my scripts aloud. Like when I'm writing them, I act them out to make them sound more like dialogue. Cause sometimes you'll, you'll find when you're, when you're quoting yourself, you'll be like, Oh shit, line does, doesn't make sense. Like it looks good on paper and then when you say it, it doesn't sound natural.

Doc (00:06:45):
So I'd written this thing out, I'd worked on it, but I had no idea how it was going to be for people to do it. And then, you know, the guy's fucking talking about, you know, life or death type situation. He's talking about, you know, morals. He's talking about why he quit the Vietnam war. He's talking about things that would spoil the game. Like he's doing all this stuff and he's fucking delivering it with this, this like pathos. Right? And there were times where I hear the line and I go, this isn't what I wanted and I try to communicate what it is and he, he'd just fucking knock it out of the park every time. And that's what both of those actors did. And then we got a couple more for a couple smaller roles in the game. And it's making me theory, it's just amazing, like to hear something you've written, to hear someone, okay, become the character to bring that person to life. It's, that's a very cliche way of putting it. But I also, I understand why people say it now. Like, because that's what it is. That is the process. I hope that makes sense.

Danny (00:07:41):
No, it absolutely does. In a former life I was running theater troops and wrote stage plays and performed a, I performed and put them on across South Florida. Which is where I grew up. One, one thing I'm interested in because you mentioned that it's like a stage play. It's in that small seawall, I know it's a, farmers are pretty big. I live in the Midwest. I know how big farms can be, but compared to, you know, games people are used to like an MMO or something. it's probably not enormous. So it's a stage relating back to the, the writing, the voice in your head the voice actors acting it out. How do you feel about the I know there's a theater term for this and I can't remember it. Kind of like the delegation of character design, of, of character motivation and of character direction. Ah, because you've written a thing, you obviously have what it's supposed to be in your head, but then you give that to someone and you trust them to create the character, you know, to take that further than you were thinking about.

Doc (00:08:52):
Well, I mean there's, so there's a couple of different, there's so many ways to attack any question, right? Not attack, but like, you know, tackle problem. Right. So I'm wondering, it's like I'm paying them, right. That's the, that's the simplest answer I'm paying them so I can get what I want. Right. That's not really, that's a really what it is. But it does mean like when I was doing indie projects for no money, I felt like I couldn't push back because everyone was working for free. Right. So how picky can you be when people are just doing this on their own free time to, you know, hope maybe to ship some, you know, each project or something. So when you, when you get to sit down with like real actors and they are booked for a certain amount of time and you have like an audio engineer and a voice director and yourself and you're all sitting there and you're just, Nelson was there too he's our producer.

Doc (00:09:46):
So when we're all sitting there like listening, we can kind of mash things out, right? And so I've written the story and I have a, an a conclusion we're building towards, right as I write these characters out, I kind of, I know some people who do like character sheets first and then try to make all the lines fit that. I try to be more organic. I try to be like, okay, I know at the end of the story is, and I kind of have a sense of who these people are and then I kind of mold them over time. It's like clay. And so, you know, I get to a point where it's like every, they're saying lines for certain reasons. They have reasons to sale signs that they're not saying it's subtext. It's, well, we are not the guy who wrote one of the guys behind lost, I think it was Lindelof himself said he writes every character with the secret.

Doc (00:10:27):
He doesn't he doesn't need to talk about that secret at all, but it's something that informs their performance, whether or not they, whether or not it's even in the work itself. He writes them with that secret so that it, it changes who they are as a person, like how those lines are delivered. And of course in lost, thye examined pretty much everybody's secrets just to, you know, just to see who they were because that's what that show is about. But for me, it's like I kind of sat down and I have a line in there where Hitman just says Roy would have been about his age. And farmer just goes, yeah. And that's like, all you hear about that. And they asked me what that meant and I was like, Oh, Roy was Hitman son. And he passed. And since farmer and Hitman have this relationship with their kind of friends because this guy has been delivering bodies to his farm for, you know, 20 years or whatever, farmer knows.

Doc (00:11:21):
And farmers is sad about it in a way. And that feeds into the rest of the conversation. And the great thing about these actors are, these guys are, these guys are fucking pros. And they're like, well, so it ties in the script like this, this and this. They pick up on a lot of what you're trying to do. I'm really lucky that a lot of what I wanted came through in the script without being a direct, like I am sad because I have a problem. Like it's, I wanted to avoid the Marvel school of film writing. I remember having this argument with this person on the internet, which you should never do. You should never have arguments on the internet. I know from experience we're like a, he said mad max fury road isn't as good as Marvel movies. And I was like, what?

Doc (00:12:04):
And he's like, yeah, cause I figured out, nobody tells you what their motivations are. They just kind of do things and in a Marvel movie, yeah, yeah, that'd be right. Wow. Tony stark will be like, I have the alcoholism and that's why I'm depressed. And you're like, well that's bad writing. Like, yeah, it's good. It's like one of the best movies, whatever. Because it does like Kobayashi effect. It does like all this shit that's, it's just a simple shot of like a person looking at something really quickly. It gives you a sense of who they are. The uncanny zoom up to a, up to a Immortan Joe. Early on in the film there's just this zoom that makes him look really intimidating. It just creates an effect. Like there's a, we do well what we do in movies and it's, we do anything else.

Doc (00:12:54):
We don't want to just explain things because we're trying to give people feelings because we want people to, you know, get arrive at a place. So when it comes to working with the actors, it was like trying to get the actors to understand what I, what feeling I was going for in each scene. And the great thing was because these guys were so fucking pro usually it didn't take any time at all. Like they there were several scenes in the game. They actually nailed in one take. There were times a day be going and then somebody be like, do you want to stop now? And he'd be like, no, no, no, no. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. Let's keep, we gotta flow, let's go. We were really lucky in that we got the two of them to record together.

Doc (00:13:35):
Most games don't do that cause they tend to book actors separately and stuff like that. We had covert going on, but we managed to get both guys recording in home studios through like some sort of online service. And so while we have their lines separately, we actually were able to get them recording together, which meant they could bounce off each other and it brought the lines out in a way that felt really good. So that's, that's the really long answer. You know, short answer is I'm paying them. The long answer is so much of it is about the writing. And then getting the actors to understand the writing. And I'm so lucky that DC and Rick were just as professional as they were. They could immediately, they're like, Oh, I get what you're going for here. And there were a couple of times, there were a couple of times where they were like, wouldn't it be better if I personally maybe like this?

Doc (00:14:23):
Or sometimes you're like, wait, wait, hold up. I'm going to, I'm going to give you like four different readings of this line. Let's see which one you like best. So sometimes it was them trying to help us out by like, just giving us options. Like a, like a really good, you know, restaurant guy, not a waiter. Yeah. The fancier guy who brings you fucking, you know, a wine thing and you're like, what wine is best? And he's like, Oh, so I believe, you know,

Eric (00:14:47):
Sommelier.

Doc (00:14:47):
you should have, yeah, that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a Sommelier, right? They were doing that, except with dialogue. It was great. But for me, aye knew I didn't want to be, you know, I didn't want to be like David Fincher who tries to break his actors down by making them do scenes over and over again arbitrarily until they get the performance he wants. Like I was like, here's your goal in the scene. Like emotionally, here's what the audience to feel emotionally, here's what your feeling. Here's why you said what you said now. Well, the performance they bring out of that, I kind of let them do it and I wanted to trust them with it. I wanted, I figured if I'm making a game, I'm collaborating with people and they've been doing this for years, they may even know better than me what they should do. I'd only ever heard DC like do things like ACE combat where he's very anime. There's this great, great scene in ACE combat seven where he names your enemy pilot who's been named mr X for the game. The guy has like 17 names, like it's Mohali, Dimitrio, et cetera. There's like 40 of those and one of them is just an A with a period after it.

Doc (00:15:58):
Like every other name. It's all the way out and he delivers it in this way. That is, I don't know if it's comic or not, but it's very anime and it made me laugh every time I hear it. But he delivered it with his very straight read and like that's the kind of voice that I'm used to having him do. But when he read our lions, he sounded more like less animated, more understood that this is like a okay Midwestern farm game. So he delivered in a way that I really felt was better than any of the other auditions that we had. And so I was like, okay, let's go with him. And my voice, my voice director, he's worked on games like okay, watch and definitely cry five and stuff is like, yeah, I think it'd be really good but we may have to dial him in.

Doc (00:16:38):
Like we may have to get him, you know, less limited to kind of talk the anime out of him. No, DC fucking came in and just delivered like it was great. He read the script, he got what the script is going for. And so I guess what I, what I'm saying is, is one, you got to trust your collaborators, but too give them, give them something to work off of. Some of the worst leadership I've ever encountered is where leadership doesn't know what it wants. So I knew exactly what I wanted and I wrote an entire script to building towards that. The whole, every line means something. It's not just bullshit. It was trying to sound naturalistic. It was loaded. Like a lot of those conversations are loaded with meaning and stuff for the characters that the audience doesn't, you know, it'd be fun to go read a Wiki 20 years from now and have people being like, Oh man, there's so many secrets in this game.

Doc (00:17:27):
There's so many, you know, hidden meanings. You know, it'd be great to read all sorts of bullshit theories that are completely pointless. Cause it's fun to do sometimes. Yeah. That's, that's for me, it's giving them enough to work off of that they feel really confident in what they want to do as well as a trusting them. When I used to trust them and that, that like if they were like, I want to do this differently, I'd be like, all right, because we've done this before, they know what they can do and I don't, so I'm willing to at least give them a shot. Cause you know, sometimes they'd be like, Hey, what if we try it like this? And I hear it and I'm like, no, let's try the other way. And they try it and they're like, Oh yeah, I see what you mean.

Doc (00:18:05):
Yeah. You got to collaborate, you got to trust other people and sometimes you gotta be like, you know, the reading in my head isn't as good as the reading he just gave. That's it's, yeah, it's going what will make the best end product. There's, you got to kind of force your ego out of the way, but you got to give them enough to work on too. That's a lot. I know I'm repeating myself. No, no, that was great. I thought that was very good. So out of my really long spiel there, is there any questions? Thank you. Yep. Anything I need to clarify?

Danny (00:18:40):
I think I want to talk about fury road a little later. There's a line of questioning where it fits, but we'll get to that. After this one.

Eric (00:18:53):
So you're a narrative designer. What does that bring to a games development and construction?

Doc (00:18:59):
It depends on where you come in the, in the development of the game, how do I put this? So there are a lot of people in AAA video gaming who are not narrative focused. It's partly because of the way that games are made. You have guys who were like, you know, they joined gaming as like a tester or a programmer or something and they, you know, get promoted up the chain and they get more responsibilities. Or Hey, this guy is like a really good artist and now suddenly he's directing a game. And so you have all these people who have different disciplines and different things that they value going into a game experience. But they often come from individual disciplines, which means that our narrative is valued.

Doc (00:19:40):
Can you, it can vary wildly, like super wildly. There are other issues as well. For instance, in the AAA sphere, there are guys who will, in the AAA sphere, there are studios that have production processes that mean they can't get all the actors in at once. There are things about scheduling and booking and where actors are located. There's so many things. And so you may end up having two different voice directors on two different sides of the planet. One in say London and one in Los Angeles. And they're both recording the same character for a game. But let's say one's a female version and the other is the male version. I am talking about a real example that I'm not going to really talk about. All right. This is not a hypothetical. There's a, there's a male version of the character and a female version of the character and one of them may be like, yeah, so do your reads like this.

Doc (00:20:42):
And the other maybe like, so the way I read the script is like this, so you may end up having some there just because of how they chose to set things up and who they had record. There is a, there was a game I was playing where the voice actors sounded really bored and I was like, these are really good actors. Like these are, these are actors I've seen in movies. They're fucking amazing. Why does it sound bad here? And I looked it up and I realized that the voice director is someone who's been on a lot of games where I thought the voice direction was really flat so someone can just straight up come down to whether or not the voice director is conveying the story in a way that sounds good. I like that. Tony, how big this process is, right? Like you asked me about storytelling and I'm going all the way down to like the granularity of voice direction, but that that is how big it can be. It's like storytelling is selfish. It is fundamentally the thing. Everything has to be built around because it requires pacing and flow.

Doc (00:21:41):
If you are playing a game like you know you don't, everybody says I ignore the main quest in Skyrim and just go off and like Dick around in the world. That's the kind of problem games face. Like how do we know that a person is looking at the thing we need them to be looking at when the thing happens, are we scripting it? Is it a cut scene? Will the players feel what we want them to feel based on what's happening is our they dock and they're running around in half-life twos, a letter, red letter dates. He bagging all the tables while they wait for the story to continue. You know like there's a lot of different ways players can approach the game and the verbs that you've give the players can change how they're doing it. So for me, I'm like, story needs to be top down.

Doc (00:22:22):
So it needs to be the first thing you think about like before gameplay. Because gameplay's a way of telling a story. It's like, it's like when you're shooting a movie, right? If I'm going to shoot a horror movie, I'm going to like go to my set designers and be like, you make this really dark. I'm going to go to my actors and be like, you, I need you to play more campy than normal. Cause we're making a slasher film or something, you know, and every single aspect of how we make a movie, how it looks, how it feels, all of that is designed to support the script that we have in games. It's like some creative directors, like, you know, you saw this incredible movie the other day. It's called the road and I want to make a game like that. And they're also like, also I saw children and men and I liked that.

Doc (00:23:04):
So we're just gonna we're just gonna you know, they bring the entire dev team into a room. They sit them down, they show him clips from the movie and they go, we're making this. And then they start kind of ashing out what that will be. And sometimes you have people who don't know what they want. I literally once worked with a AAA company and they, we asked them where something was that we'd seen in a previous game. Like it was what the entire game was about. Like a, imagine this is not it, but imagine like, like being pitched a zombie game and then you go to the studio like six months later and you're like, what happened? All the zombies. What's your entire game was a zombie game, right? And they're like, Oh we cut those cause didn't fit with our brand and now we're making something else.

Doc (00:23:47):
It's like how many millions of dollars did you spend? You know, now you're making like a scifi, a shooter with, with, you know, aliens or some shit. Like you've completely changed what you're doing. Why did you do that? Like, so when you have that, it's really hard to be a narrative designer when you're, when your leads are like we don't know what we're making. We're just kind of making a thing. And it means that they're like, these can shift things and change. You can read about like a Jason Schreier did a great article for Kotaku a few years ago about mass effect Andromeda and how they, you know, it started out as this really full project and then it kind of gradually just became a BioWare game except that BioWare isn't good at making open worlds. So it became a really bad BioWare because they didn't really, no, they wanted, they ended up repeating a lot of their own mistakes.

Doc (00:24:35):
They, you know, it's what happens when you have bad leadership. Like so much of what you need is good leadership and you need to put the story first. And I know there's a lot of people out there who resist that. They're like no gameplay comes first. Look, gameplay supports the story. There is, if you're having like a split between game plan story, it's because you're telling the story poorly. If you're telling the story well the game plan story are going to work together. It's the reason that halo is great is because halo has a story and has a game and both of those things are completely like they're completely interconnected. There is no real delineation between the two. Cortana is telling you what to do in cutscenes. She's also telling you what to do game play and they are the same. Well most of the cuts, cousins just kind of grease the wheels.

Doc (00:25:23):
They kind of move things on or give you a reason to split between two locations. Like they're good, they help halo work. The reveal of the flood is the perfect mood setter for what happens if you didn't have that cut scene then the first time the flood appear might be a little weird cause they're just like weird little guys and you don't understand how scary they are. That cuts in kind of helps prime you and then helps that. It just greases the wheel. That scene a little bit more. The role of narrative in games in my opinion is that it should come first and like less. You're making like a puzzle game or like an [inaudible] or something where it's like pure gameplay. Cause games. Games aren't a huge spectrum. But if you have a story, if you're thinking I want to have a story in my game is that comes first. And if you wrote a story where the story and the gameplay don't work together, then you've either written a bad story or you're telling the story poorly. So like if you need a three hour cut scene to explain some shit people should have learned in your game, probably just should have made a movie instead.

Doc (00:26:23):
Well if that makes sense. Yes. The exhibits example, this would be a death stranding right? That game actually, no, we won't do that cause that's a, that's pretty recent. Let's go five years back. Let's go to metal gear, solid five, right? There's a mission that game Paul is shining lights even in death. It's one of my favorite missions in any video game throughout the game. You probably the mother base, right? It's your big oil rig in the middle of nowhere. And that's your soldiers. Are you kidnap soldiers? And apparently this cause them to respect you so much that you all kind of become one big happy army family on your base. And there's a lot of cool things about that. There's, there's neat stats like their language, right? Like certain people speak Russian or French or Congo, like they speak all these really interesting languages.

Speaker 2 (00:27:14):
So you're going through the game, you find out that there is a language transmitted virus and it turns out that everyone who speaks that language gets the virus and dies and they're spreading it to other people. So that's bad. And that's cause the, the, the whole game like thematically metal gear solid five is really strong. It's actually structured. Most of the, most of the people are giving it credit for it. But it's this really interesting give about like what is identity and how does language factor into identity. Does your ability to converse with other people, your conduct, it shows up industrially as well. Like the connections to other people formed by shared language. Like it has a really, really cool stuff that is going for. And as a dizzy, it's like what would happen if you got robbed of language. And so you have this mission where you go into a cordoned off area of your base.

Doc (00:28:10):
And so they've changed the way the base looks to be creepier because people are dead and there's blood everywhere. And it, it, it's unsettling because you've been here plenty of times, like you've, you've explored your base, you know what your base looks like. This is an uncanny version of your base. So it just, in the art design they've changed. Like without doing a cut scene, without doing anything, just through the art design, making this thing, you know, well different is unsettling. And when you start, when you encounter these guys that are infected with the virus you after shoot. Awesome. And the thing is, as you've been running around the game there's this cutesy little thing I do with everybody salutes you, like plus. And sometimes you can punch them and then they'll get back up and they'll salute you on the mic. Thanks boss for the CQC training.

Doc (00:28:53):
It's great. It's like cheesy but it's great. In this mission they know you have to kill them because they have this virus and it has to. Yeah, it has to be stopped and so they like struggle to stand to their feet and salute you one last time and it's this huge tear jerker have a moment like it is the, the bad guy has one in that moment he's making you shoot your own men, these men that you personally recruited by kidnapping them to join your forces. So like that is an example for me of where systems in the game play created an emotional personal impact on you as a human. That leads to like a much more interesting playing experience and metal yourself. Five is one of the best playing video games in the world. It has incredible character controller. The ability to like run around and like jump on a cardboard box and slide down a Hill like that game controls so much better than basically anything else in the world.

Speaker 2 (00:29:50):
That is a game where gameplay was not sacrificed to tell a story except for the really long cut scenes. It has like two hours of cut scenes in the whole game. So yeah. I think, I think stories should come first. I used to think gameplay should come first, but I've kind of realize that, Oh, the gameplay is how you tell the story and if the gameplay and the story aren't working, if something is getting in the way, it's not because gameplay and story are at odds is because you're probably telling us during the wrong medium. It's like trying to shoot a Watchman movie that happened and it was bad. The comic is written as a comic. The panels are designed a specific way. You are supposed to look at the panels and a specific way adapting it to a movie loses its impact.

Speaker 2 (00:30:31):
The Watchman movie just looks nice because the director, what's his face? Zack Snyder is a commercial director and so he knows how to make things look nice, but he's not, he just does things for rule of cool. Like the original Watchman comics is very considered and why the panels are the way that they are and changing it to movie doesn't adapt it properly. You know, house of leaves could never be a movie because house of leaves is a book about books. It is a book where you know, you have notes in the sidelines or a single page. Like you flip a page and the, the lines get shorter and shorter and shorter until like there's one page in the words like Ron or something. And it's designed to scare you, right? You can't do that in a movie. You would be using different language to tell that.

Doc (00:31:14):
So gameplay is a language. That's what I think gameplay is a language. And you want to tell your game, do you wanna tell your game, your story through the medium of games with the language of the gameplay that you want. So you try to find gameplay that fits the story you want to tell. I realized that I'm saying this to somebody who's just like made to very like not too, I've made one very mechanics, light narrative, but I mean that was, cause I had really fucking low budget. Huh. Sway on this, this next game, right? I still have really fucking low budget, but now I can afford voice actors. So I'm still making walking Sims. But trust me, I will be making gameplay heavy games and still trying to still tell a story with them. I'm just not there yet because money is hard to get.

Danny (00:32:01):
No, I mean I agree. I am. Originally when I went to university, I was studying human communication and which is kind of a sociology thing and we're one of the big people of course, a very well known a person who's passed at some point on Marshall McLuhan and he's the medium is the message. The medium is the massage books, which are very interesting books. The, especially the way they're laid out, they are not, they're not just words. they are designed specifically. And it's an important thing, which kind of leads me to the next set of questions that I have written down here.

Danny (00:32:40):
I want to talk about some specific games because you are, you are a let's say student of the first person shooter or the first person game in general. I myself, I'm also a a big long time fan of first person shooters. Take a game. We, we talk about fury road, we talk about mechanics like halo and those more modern games, but looking at something like like Wolfenstein and doom, the early, the early FPSs maybe not a historically the first one, which is some weird French game that very few people ever played. But Wolfenstein, it kind of cheats on story because world war II is kind of this like easy crutch for anyone making a game or a movie like, well, everyone knows what happened in world war II.

Doc (00:33:32):
You know, it's a context for morals. It's all right. It's, you know, very simple stakes. Like what is there to, you know, set up. Yeah. Right.

Danny (00:33:44):
So you kill Nazis. They're easy. You always kill Nazis. That's, that's the lesson. And doom is similar because you're killing obviously demons or very ugly possessed humans, but doing doesn't have the same Hilton backstory that a world war two game does, you know with Nazis and everything that was happening, it's, you're just on a base and then there's demons and you're just kind of moving forward.

Doc (00:34:10):
Well, I mean, but consider that like you're still dealing with what is essentially an alien invasion. Like at its core, it's an alien vision and most people get that. Like, I mean, we had war of the worlds we've had you know, We've had, you know, night night with Frakes we've had a, yeah, that's invasion of the body snatchers. That's what I'm thinking of. Alien invasion stories. So I think, I think it's easy to understand that even though, yeah, they're coded as demons and you're a Mars, it's the still the principle is the same and, and you know, it's, it's an arcade game, right? It's Mario like doom. Doom is Mario Dumas is very simple. Like save the princess. Okay. Shoot the demons. Got it. Like you walk into your room, they're shooting a no to shoot back. You know, I don't think anybody plays dumb is like, I'm really fucking into this narrative. True. but do we need more? I mean, doing porous came out decades ago at this point, which it's scary because I feel dated by that. Do we need more today? I mean we have the two doom remakes of the doom three, I guess is a very different game than obviously do one and do them two. Where do we need more now then just here's a bunch of guns. Here's a bunch of demons. They killed your pet rabbit go kill everything. So I don't know if I'd use the word need, right? I mean, I think on a very basic level, art, isn't it? Like we, we sit here and we go, you know, I am feeling sad today, so I want to cheer myself up. So I want to do something that cheers me up or I'm dealing with a problem in my life right now and I want to solve that problem. And the way I'm going to do that is by, you know, playing a game, winning in the game, feeling like, okay, I can, I know how to solve a problem, you know, and going through like going back to real life and going, okay, now that I feel like I can solve problems, I think I can take this one on. You know, there's, there's like a very basic level that art helps us deal with what we're feeling or it brings out feelings in us. Like looking at starry night, right? You see a painting, it's still painting, you know, and you see it and you go, wow, just makes me feel something.

Doc (00:36:18):
There are, our heart impacts us. It's the thing we need to make. Like it's a, I think it's inherent in, in human behavior, right? That we make art. What I wouldn't so much say that we need to add story to games. So much as now we are able to make games that can tell stories like, I think with doom sort of hard to do because it's all sprites and shit. You know, when you have a game like Metro Exodus and you have like really, really realistic people who can like do performances and stuff, they, you know, you can, they can generate empathy with you. They can do things like, you can just watch a person touch another person's hands, which is really hard by the way in games because 3d is fucking hard. But just, just little things like little little human interactions it means you, you're suddenly empowered to do more.

Doc (00:37:04):
You have the tools to do more. And once you have the tools to do more, I think naturally humans take up that space. Like when we are able to do something, we immediately fill that void. It's like water. It's like osmosis, whatever. it's, that's what we do. That's what humans do. I don't think I've ever seen a, you know, a thing where it's like, Oh Hey, we have the ability to do X and nobody's going to do it because why would you do it? Like if we can do games that look better, we're going to do games that look better. You know, because I think we can tell better stories with better tech. It's not to say we, but that's entirely true. You know, one of my favorite games of all time is marathon affinity, which has a really good involved and interesting story and it plays with tux and really interesting ways.

Doc (00:37:47):
And it's a fucking 2d Sprite shooter too, just like doom. It's a contemporary, it's bungees contemporary to doom. Like it's, yeah, there, there are I don't think it's a need. I think it's an inherent or like an inevitable result of improved technology. Just like we didn't have novels before the printing press, you know, do we need novels? I don't know. But did novels enrich our lives? Yeah, absolutely. The stories have an impact on us as people. No new artistic technology is inherently necessary, but they all enrich us. So, you know, yeah, we could have stayed making games like doom, but I think eventually people would have tired by doing that. And I think it's like, especially moving into things like 3d, we're able to literally create entire worlds for people in habit and we new rule sets for

Doc (00:38:36):
Those worlds and all sorts of other things, which means we have a greater possibility space. And I'm looking at my computer and I have Battleborn installed for some reason. So I mean it's not all aspirational I guess.

Danny (00:38:45):
On a, on a similar note I want to talk about, I'd start with Bioshock cause it's the one that's, it's such a marklar name Bioshock, but the other shock games before Bioshock system shock had the same thing. Audio logs, Bioshock itself. It's been a long time since I actually completed system shock too. But Bioshock itself and maybe not as much the second one or definitely not as much. The third one tells the story honestly, pretty damn. Well, as you walk through it, you're, you know, you, you run into crazy people, you hit them with hammers. You electrocute them. You don't hit the big guys with hammers because they're scary. That dude tells you to do things and you do them. And you know, all that, all that, all that pans out, but then you have this proliferation of audio logs. Are they distracting? Isn't is an element like that too distracting or you know, is it just like, Oh, you can ignore them, but can you ignore them?

Doc (00:39:50):
I mean you can, but like, like is he go all the way back to the past? Right. We go all the way back to the invention of the audio log in system shock. They could not afford to do 3d human like, like 3d human enemies. So they were like, okay, we need to way to still have that story. How are we going to do it? And Doug church came up with the idea, I think it was Doug Church himself, the creator system shock and the fun, you know, now working at valve on mysterious projects was working on left for dead three for a while.

Doc (00:40:21):
We don't really know what he's doing. The invention of the game jam, this is the guy who's had a huge impact on games. He taught Ken Levine everything he knew. And then Ken Levine fucked it all up. Doug Church is like a really important person. Video is probably one of the most probably, yeah, five most important people in video games in terms of impact he's had on the entire industry and no one's, no one knows about him cause he's not like a Japanese game creator who okay. It's like a game by Hideo Kajima right. You know, he doesn't quite have that. He's a guy who like would, would show up for work like at two in the morning and then work like for three days straight and then disappear for a few days and they just kind of let it happen because he's a fucking actual genius.

Doc (00:41:01):
That's what I heard anyway. And I mean his coworker was Shamus Blackley who went on an event to the Xbox. So like he was in good company. Dude was like a, they were both MIT dudes like looking glasses. Incredible. But that doesn't answer your question. I'm sorry. That's fun history. He did it because of its back restriction. Right. Over time. I think we've turned into audio logs is a way she tells the story, the backstory that a lot of writers are really into. Like backstory doesn't fucking matter. This is the one thing that everyone, I wish everyone would learn backstory rarely matters and I realized, I just talked about like how proud I am of my game where a guy mentions that his son is dead and that's in the past. But like that's to create a specific character moment where a person expresses sympathy for a man who has to kill him. That's a, it's a very specific emotion I'm going for there. Right? A lot of other people like I don't want to tell you about all the cookie crazy stuff about you know the lore. Like I want to give you a snapshot into the lives of people who lived here before all this went to shit. It's kind of a double edged sword. On one hand it can be really interesting. The my cup runneth over audio log from system shock two is one of the previous business storytelling I've ever heard. I fucking love that line. And it is, it is funny that I think you get it in the level where the gravity has been turned upside down and you encounter a church that's upside down and upside down crucifix.

Doc (00:42:25):
When you go in, I believe the my cup runneth over line where he's, he's committing blasphemy essentially by being connected to the many is a, I think it's supposed to be all thematic. It's, it hits you on the head a little hard, but that's, I mean that's Ken Levine, that's what he does. He writes with the finesse of an anvil so there can be great audio logs, right? The problem is you play a game like gone home, right and gone home. Story is actually about a person trying to find her family and not knowing where they are. That's what gone home is really about. That is the core of the game. That's what they pitched the game to you as when they sell it, that's what gone home is when you play it. They just put all that extra stuff in there because they're trying to tell you a second story at the same time.

Doc (00:43:08):
And it's like, it's just having a person telling you like expositive the past at you. Really good storytelling. I don't think it is like, I absolutely do not think it is. Just having a person telling you about their past isn't interesting or meaningfully, you know? Imagine just sitting there, you know like fucking McDonald's and some person walks up to you and you're like, hello. And they're like, hello. And you're like, so what's your name? And they're like, my name's Jim. And you're like, okay Jim, tell me about your life. And Jim just sits there and tells you. Would you be interested in that? Like would you really be interested and just a person giving you a series of events? Probably not unless Jim's a really good storyteller. And so a lot of audio logs are just that. They're just spice, they just exist. Two tell you about the world before to PR to convey information and when an audio log conveys information isn't interesting. There is one of my favorite writers of all time, the playwright David Mamet who did a, you know, Glen Gary, Glen Ross and the trial, like a lot of these Oscar winning amazing movies, right? Incredible playwright, one of the best of the 20th century. He, he wrote about the storytelling and he said sometimes it seems to the penguins, he's referring to the guys in suits. You know, sometimes it seems to the penguins that our job

Doc (00:44:32):
Is, or sorry, it seems to the penguins that our job is to convey information because we are right words and sometimes it seems to us that, you know, our jobs communicate information as well. But you wouldn't turn into a movie like, or tune into a movie for information. I wouldn't, nobody would, nobody likes watching stuff just for information. We CA, we come for the drama, we want trauma and most audio logs don't dude drama. And I think there was this guy I used to respect as a critic and then he kind of fell in love with himself and stopped being a good critic because he stopped being self-critical. But he wrote an essay a really long time ago that was like, there's this issue of tangibles, criticism. This is this idea that sometimes we see something that's tangible and we think, Oh this is the problem or the solution.

Doc (00:45:26):
Like in bungee in destiny right now a bunch of people telling bungee, Oh Hey, the problem with destiny right now is bounties. There's a lot of bounties and they tell me how to play. It's like that's not the actual problem with the game. Boundaries are a reinforcing actual problems with the game. We need to change those problems and change what bounties do and then no one would have problems with counties cause they wouldn't realize that that's the, it's it's a symptom. It's people looking at symptoms and thinking that's the actual problem. And there's a, you know, a real underlying condition. So I think, I think audio logs are a condition there. A or a symptom of a condition. They're not the condition themselves. When an audio log is deployed for emotional impact, it's great when an audio log is deployed just to provide information. It's not that great. Lore is not as important as the very small, but vocal lower crowd would have you believe.

Danny (00:46:17):
That's fair. And I know I was thinking about this, I wish I had thought about this before even asked the question, but I know you've played the division and the sequel yeah, division two and I have myself and one thing that I hate in the division 2 is picking up audio logs and the echoes, I start an echo just to get the collectible and then I run out of it as fast as I can cause I don't want to see them. It's like totally pointless to me.

Doc (00:46:49):
Yeah. So it's again, that's like trying to set up the lore and stuff. It's like I don't give a shit about that. I want to go fight, you know, Aaron keener, the guy who created the virus, like it's cool to find out what happened. But like, yeah, I'd rather watch a cut scene maybe. Yeah. And some of the, a lot of those logs are really well written. They sound great. They sound like, you know, the voice direction is great. The information being conveyed is kind of interesting at times. Like probably the best audio log in all of the division is show Farrow calling his niece, Joe Farrow is the boss of the cleaners. A bunch of dudes who they're like blue collar workers who decided, and rightfully so, the best way to clean out the virus is probably to burn it out. Unfortunately their implementation of that policy is to torch anyone who looks like they might be sick,

Danny (00:47:39):
they're zealous, they're just very proud.

Doc (00:47:43):
Yeah, they're very overzealous and they're zealous is a great way to put it because they're, you know, they are zealots for their cause. They are super dedicated to burning the shit out of people. They could, you know, help their community, but no, they want to burn the shit out of people. Like murder is their solution. So they're dicks. They're real, they're real fucking dicks about it, but Farrow is the leader of it. And I loved him cause in the boss fight, before you encounter him, like most bosses will call you or whatever, right. Joe is getting into his flame thrower armor. The stuff that you know, protects them from the fire and shit.

Doc (00:48:18):
It's four or five a year and he's asking a guy to help him put it on and he's like, we got to hurry. We gotta hurry. We gotta stop these guys. Like he is panicking because he's trying to save the world and he views you as someone who's trying to stop him. So he's this really interesting guy, right? And the audio log of him calling his niece is don't believe he's saying don't believe what they're going to tell you about me when they kill me. He's like, you got to understand I did this for you. I'm trying to make the world a better place, a place where you won't get sick. And it's really touching in a way like, I mean, yeah, he's fucking crazy and he's a jackass, but he is trying to do the right thing and it, it, it is a good insight into this character that you cannot interact with any other way.

Doc (00:49:08):
And it's personal. And so I love that audio log in is one of my favorite audio logs in games. But yeah, most of them I don't give a shit about, you know, it would have been better to have cut scenes where you encounter the president doing bad shit and have to arrest him rather than like hearing it in audio logs or watching an echo where no one's moving and they're just saying through audio can do some, they do let you infer. I appreciate that they let you in first stuff, but it's still, you know, it's still a bit, it's missing something that it needs more. Yeah. No, I'm not wild about audio logs. Personally. I was going to do something in adios. We're probably not going to do it, but I was going to do something where he had all these notes around the house and sticky notes and it wasn't, it wasn't to give the player information other than to point out that the farmer's wife, of course she passed, had Alzheimer's and so she was leaving all these notes around for herself to be like, you need to take this many pills a day.

Doc (00:50:12):
You need to do that. I felt like one it was, it's not where I want to direct our development efforts, but to it just felt like it was still telling people the story rather than just letting them live the story. So I've cut it for now. If I can figure out how to make it in a way that will make me happy, I may go back to them.

Eric (00:50:32):
So name a game that has an ideal, or at least as close as you can to it. Introductory slash tutorial section.

Doc (00:50:39):
Hm. Crisis.

Danny (00:50:45):
Yeah. The first one right? the first one.

Doc (00:50:46):
Yeah, that fucking, you wake up in a plane and you jump out of it immediately and then it's like, yeah, press this button to move left or right up and down and you're like, okay, okay, I got this. And then you land and it's like, it goes through, you know, you go through the crouching, you go through the, you go through the sliding, you can pick up a turtle like immediately. I love that. They're like, by the way, you can pick up turtles in that same level as you'll show. You're still learning how to play actual shit is happening, like relevant to the plot. It's not just like, you know, like say Wolfenstein the new order a game I love, I do love the game, but that game is like you just are doing a generic D-Day thing and you have kind of objectives throughout that.

Doc (00:51:28):
In this game. It's like, okay, we're going on an infiltration. You go in and then the infiltration goes wrong and you find your partner's strung up and the guy's like, Oh shit, let's regroup and okay. Introducing you to the sandbox really quick. Like you're, you're going from opening cut scene to like proper gameplay really fast, like in, in the new order. Just cause I'm making that contrast in the new order. You don't really get into proper game play until you're like the level after the prison. I think it takes a while. It takes like several levels. No, it's for that. It's the, the first proper Wolfen sign level is a, when you're at the checkpoint, so you have the tutorial level and then you have the asylum level, which is another tutorial level. And then you finally have the like you go into the basement, you torture the guy and then you have the, you know, get out of the car and okay, now you have a full proper shooter gameplay level that, that you're doing.

Doc (00:52:24):
Like it takes a while to get into what the actual flow of the game is. And crisis is like, no, I mean, you know how to jump, you know how to sprint. Okay. anyways, here's two or three buildings in AA gun. We need you to go like kind of all the way around this at all. You can take a boat and just cross straight over. You can take on these bases, like do whatever you want. We just need you to get to that. And it shows you all the physics you can mess with. It's immediate. Like it is literally probably three minutes from clicking start to the sun rising up and being able to do the gameplay because that was the other crazy thing is in 2000 and 2007 we didn't have a lot of games with dynamic lighting like that where you could go from nighttime to daytime so quickly.

Doc (00:53:09):
And it was surprising like it was, I remember the first time playing that going, Holy shit, it's day time now. When did that happen? How did that happen? So yeah, I would say, I would say crisis is probably one of the best tutorials I've ever seen in a video game. It's very short and that's what makes it work.

Danny (00:53:24):
I would have to agree with that. The New Order thing, because I remember playing the new order like long after it had come out because I finally bought it when it was like $10 or something. And by the time I got to the asylum, I was like, I'm kind of over everything happening already. Like, I don't, I don't even want to see what's coming next because it's just like I've done all this stuff I didn't want to do.

Doc (00:53:47):
The reason you pick that level is, and I mean I'm, this is coming to somebody who loves that game. The reason I picked that level is every friend that I've spoken to who doesn't like the new order or who didn't want to give it a chance, is someone who played that level and went, Oh, I understand what this game is now and I want no part of it. And that's not what the game is. But the game doesn't like the game is trying to subvert your expectations. It wants to start off being like, ha, you think I'm a military shooter but I'm not? And you can't really do that. You can't. It's really hard to do that. That game works best for people who bought into the game or who are just patient enough to get through it. Don't be like, I spent my money on this. I'm going to, I'll be damned if I don't finish it. Like it's a, yeah, I dunno.

Doc (00:54:34):
it's just really long and it just takes a long time but not alone. Yeah, it's like a two foot wide point. Moody, if they'd started you like on a boat, heading to the beach, hopping the, you know, front down and just immediately putting you out of the beach and letting you play shooter bits and try to get the feel for how the shooter works. Maybe it would have felt better, like a generic D-Day thing where you just immediately start. That might have felt significantly better. But yeah, crisis is like immediate. It's like, yeah. So this is a physics sandbox game as well as the shooter. We have really wide levels. Do whatever you want, go for it. Well, and you do, and it's amazing.

Danny (00:55:14):
I mean, Crisis a lot is, is, is another fury road. It's a, it's a, there's a little bit going on and then all of a sudden you're on the truck and you're going and the movie never stops. So the game never stops. Crisis doesn't stop. You just keep killing things and blowing shit up.

Doc (00:55:32):
It's got some holes. It's got some, you know, things like that where it slows down like it's got, it's going faster and slower pacing because it is a stealth game in some ways. Like you can turn invisible. But yeah, you're right. It does have a more, it does kind of just go and never, it never sits you with a cut scene for like five minutes. It's like, Nope, we know you're here to play a game. So the cutscenes are always really short. Like there's a, at the end of level one there's that cut scene. We were like, what the fuck? Why is there a ship in the middle of the Island hovered in ice? And he's like, I don't know. Anyways, I need you to go get some info.

Doc (00:56:09):
Go that direction. Okay, we'll meet up later. And you're like, alright. And then you're just freed up progress through level and it's wide and it's open and you can do it how you want. And that's, that's where that game gets juicy, you know? That's where the game gets really, it's just the ability to mess around with the physics cutscenes are often indulgent. I disagree with valve, right valve was like, Oh, we shouldn't have touched scenes anyways. Here's a 12 minute level call a red letter day. I timed it once, it was like eight minutes and tone and all the time it was like 12 but like it's called a red letter day and it's literally you meet you do the run right? Like where you're getting chased by the guards, the city. And it's really good. Like the whole opening of half-life up till you meet Alex is really good.

Doc (00:56:53):
And did you meet Alex? Just the entire game is ruined at that point. Because she immediately does all the things that you just have to follow her and she's like, all right, follow me. I'm going to open this door here. Hi. Don't you think it's cool that we've a secret door that's a soda water machine? Like when you press the button and opens the door and you're like, I don't give a shit. And she's like, anyways, I'm going to introduce you. All these people you should probably recognize is MPCs from half-life one and you're like, I don't care. And then they're talking about like, you know, teleported cat incident and like, Oh that's my pet bed crab. Don't worry, we cut her beak off, which is not torture. She's a vet now. She will try to turn you into a zombie but she can't, we took that part away.

Speaker 2 (00:57:36):
Oh it's, it's doing all this shit and then you know, Oh Hey Gordon puts your MIT degree to use a plugin. You go through this whole level that's like 12 minutes long. It is a cut scene and it only exists to give you a sense all over the world. Like [inaudible] it's, which is good. You want to sense the world. But we already did that with the opening. Like walk through the thing where the guards like pick up that can like we've already established this, they're doing it again, but they're doing it slower and they're having people tell you stuff and they ended the cut scene basically going Eli knows why you're here. Get to Eli. I think when we did this entire 12 minute cut scene for people to tell you there's more exposition ahead buddy. And then we get into the game play.

Doc (00:58:18):
The game play is like, okay and you just go through a lot of okay game plan including the way too long canal level before you get to Eli. And then immediately either is like, eh, go fuck around with this thing. I'll tell you what you're here for later. And then you come back and like, Oh no, calm might have attacked. Oh you got to get to Eli again cause he's got to tell you what to do. By the way he's in prison and go get him. So you go over to, you know, through Raven home and city 17, and you go all the way to Eli and you're like and rescued you like tell me why am I here? And he was like, well, and then just like I'm kidnapping Elan and you're like fuck. And then Eli gets kidnapped. I remember why I'm reciting that defensive halfway to other to say like fuck the whole scene shit.

Speaker 2 (00:59:00):
Right? Like that whole game. It's like so proud that it doesn't have scenes, but you know what, because it doesn't have a cut scenes. You somehow get in a teleporter accident that causes a two weeks to go by. So they made a time machine where you can jump into the future and they never talk about the implications of this. They just did. And they did it because they couldn't have a cut scene. They couldn't have like a Oh in two weeks fast. So they monkey jump, Pat jumped forward in the future and in the rebellion who's all like, eh, we, you know, don't trust anybody because you know, we shouldn't because it's, you know, self preservation and were rebellion. Rebellions are generally not known as trusting people due to the fact that they're trying to survive and fight a resistance. You know, it's the whole thing.

Doc (00:59:45):
They're like, you know what, that mysterious dude who showed up and every time he shut up, our boss got kidnapped and systematically our entire leadership was dismantled. You know that guy and everyone in Elsinore, billions like, yeah. And like, well he just disappeared with Eli in a known combine stronghold and all the resistance people are like, yeah, definitely. Clearly, Gordon is definitely the chosen one now. Even though he somehow kidnapped Alex and you know, he was responsible or at least present when Alex and Eli and Judith who they didn't know as a trader at the time, even though all three of those people who were in our leadership are fucking missing now. Gordon is definitely the guy. He's the, he's the chosen one. He's the, you know, fucking guy's gonna free us off. He's been gone for like two weeks. So what if we just started rebelling like by ourselves and they have the combine on the ropes.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Like you're playing the game and it's like, it's clearly they're not winning, but it's very clear that they're fighting comment. And when you're, you're asking for an explanation of why this is, it's like, Oh, these people decided you being missing for two weeks was the catalyst to start rebelling. I was like, why didn't they just do this before? They're clearly doing pretty good. Like they got to got Brene like worried now and, and, and that's the problem I have with that game is if a cut scene would have done a better job because there would have been a reasonable reason to do things. Instead, it's just like, yeah, this guy showed up in all of our leadership was destroyed and he was claiming to be some dude from the past. He's probably like, realistically, I think most people have been like, Oh shit, the Columbine suckered us somehow with the Gordon Freeman clone or some shit.

Doc (01:01:24):
Like instead they're like, this makes perfect sense. We should rebel now even though he's not here and we have no leadership now. Like they did the opposite thing of what you would expect them to do in a cut scene. You could have had like, you could have tried like a thing where like Gordon's like, no, they kidnapped the dude. Like, not Gordon speaking, but like, you know, Alex could've been like the kidnapped dad and Judith was a trader and you know, they got him in the tower and we have to like shut the tower down and then people would have been, could have been like, well with Gordon on our side we can do anything and then started rebelling. But instead it's a mysterious two week for teleport because they refuse to have cutscenes. So you gotta be thoughtful with your cutscenes and crisis has a great tutorial level because it is thoughtful with its cutscenes and its overall pacing.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
The pacing is really short. Like you don't have to spend 20 minutes doing shit that you're not going to do for the rest of the game. It's like you're sprinting. He was picking things up and throwing them. Do you know what to do? Here's a general sandbox level to kind of give you a way to play with our mechanics. Have fun. That's a better tutorial. So I'm sorry for going into why half-life two is a piece of garbage, but there you go. There's my Correale by the way. I think half-life two's tutorial is actually really good. But it also, you know, once it gets to a red letter day, it, it, you learn what the game's all about, which is a refusing to do cut scenes where they would make the game better. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, this, this is about, this is about game design and choices design here.

Doc (01:02:59):
So BD problems or is a good thing? Generally it's like spend as little time annoying people as possible. Because people have to play your fucking game. Like don't do you shit. Players can't, you know, engage with, if you're doing a really custom opening level that it doesn't hold any bearing for the rest of the game. Why that's a waste of resources. It's a waste of interest. It is making your players go like, I don't really understand what the game's about. Like Assassin's creed origins is bad in that you're like fighting these views and really mad about it and you don't know why as a player. Like you're like, why do I care? Who is this guy? What's going on? But this is why all TV shows are like, we're going to establish who our characters are in every episode so that people get it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Like every good TV show you've ever seen, I guarantee is one that makes it clear who all the characters are pretty quickly so that someone who's channel swapping can can just like start tuning in being like, Oh, I like this now. Cause that's, that's literally how a person who wrote on like Boston legal and the good wife and other stuff, that's what they were talking about. It was like, yeah, that's how a lot of TV shows work. And so we write ours also. They said, James Spader is amazing and just wonderful as a person, which is great to hear. Yeah, like he was in one of those shows. Yeah, it's, you need to make people care quickly and then you need to kind of get out of the way. The more, the more barriers you put between the player and like being able to interact with the game, the worse your game is going to be.

Doc (01:04:43):
So the longer a tutorial level is generally my opinion, the worst it is, the crisis level is long, but the actual tutorial part, it's basically up until you find your dead partner, which is like two or three minutes. And then it's just this huge open sandbox and like do what you want and it's not like a big open world game, but like when I'm playing, when I'm playing a game like horizon zero Dawn and I'm spending like eight hours in a limited open-world area before I can go out and explore. I'm not having fun like I'm, I'm bored.

Doc (01:05:17):
Yeah. And that's, that's a problem I have with a lot of games is is there, yeah, the barriers they put between the player and the game experience. Like you should generally get the player to the core loop of the game as quickly as possible. And he goes, I'm saying this and I'm making a game. This absolutely, this does not apply to. There are games where this does not apply. I get that. And the witness, the witness is really good. You walk down a straight line. Do you see a single puzzle? It's just like, click here, drag here. Okay, now I know how to play the game, and then you're free to do whatever. That's also a really good tutorial. Even if Sean Blow is kind of a pretentious, nut, Sorry.

Speaker 3 (01:05:56):
That's going to do it for this half of the dDococtor Burford episode Titans fans tune in in two weeks and listen to the second half where we come full circle on everything. Essentially more half-life 2 ragging, discussion of game design. And of course, doc, gets a little bit more into adios and Shipbreaker.