Chained To The Keyboard

All things considered, it’s a good time to be a writer.

Sure there are thousands of eager aspiring scribes competing with us for a tiny handful of jobs. Sure we are forced to wade through a mire of misinformation, shoddy writing advice books and dodgy companies, not to mention our frequent struggles with crippling self-doubt.

And yet, in spite of all this, I’ve seen things that give me hope.

Fahrenheit, for example. Known as Indigo Prophecy in the U.S., it represents a major leap forward in the way we think about videogames. Videogame critics - a horribly ineffective bunch at the best of times - hardly know what to make of it, but it has received attention from other critical arenas. It’s been plastered with labels like ‘interactive drama’ and ‘unique immersive experience’. I only know what I saw.

There were three of us sitting around the TV, watching enthralled as my friend played through the game. It was his second run through, so he had the controls pretty much figured out. A new scene started, and the main character was walking through a lonely cemetery to meet his brother at the site of their parents’ graves. His face was haggard from a night of sleepless worry. A light snow fell around him, frosting the tops of solemn gravestones and mausoleums. The screen separated into a De Palma-style splitscreen, one frame tracking around him, another in wide shot panning across the cemetery, and another close on the character’s face. I was caught in the moment. I was watching a film.

Then the character stopped, turned around, went back the way he’d come. My friend said, “Dammit, I’ve gone the wrong way”, and I realised for the first time that he had been controlling the scene.

That realisation is something I have rarely ever experienced in a videogame, because the average game does not strive towards cinema or story. Fahrenheit is something different, a ‘cinema simulator’ if you will. The only other games I can possibly compare it to are Shenmue (Dreamcast) and Shenmue 2 (Xbox), which were part of an incredibly ambitious but now discontinued saga that was supposed to be released in eight installments and chronicle several years of the main character’s life. The ahead-of-its-time Shenmue series utilised the same techniques of scene framing and reflexive action sequence controls that Fahrenheit has now incorporated.

So why is this so exciting for writers? Because videogames are now more than 25 years old, and fast approaching that point in the history of a medium when it breaks free from the bonds of novelty and asserts itself as a meaningful artform. Today, the typical videogame development team consists mostly of programmers and graphic artists; the lack of professional writers is one reason game plots and dialogue are, in the majority, awful. Some developers, chiefly those specialising in computer RPGs, have built their reputations on the fact that they employ real writers, and can therefore churn out a fairly engaging story.

In this fascinating diary, Fahrenheit’s lead developer David Cage reveals something of how he wrote the script:

Writing the full game design document took me about a year to complete. The final script is about 2000 pages and integrates absolutely everything; story, characters, gameplay, structure, branching dialogs, horrible sketches, maps and storyboards (I am terrible at drawing), instructions to remember for acting and directing, indications about music and sounds and much more. With the experience of another very complex game (Omikron), I have established some rules for my game designs in order to put all the possible information in there while keeping them clear (I hope). This document was the master document for the whole production. It was truly our “bible”, the absolute reference for everything.

That’s 2000 pages, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the equivalent of writing 20 feature film scripts, while keeping track of every branching twist and turn the player might possibly take. That’s some serious writing.

The videogame industry is already bigger than Hollywood. Maybe some day, teams of writers will work alongside engineers and artists to create interactive cinema unlike anything we can imagine. When you tell someone you’re a screenwriter, they may just have to ask: “Film, TV or game?”

BLOGKEEPING: My apologies for the lack of updates, Gentle Readers. I’ve been having some problems. All I can say is: Don’t sign up with Ozemail. They may be the shittiest ISP in all of human, nay universal, history.

I solemnly swear to update lots more once my internet actually starts working again. Here are just a few of the mind-expanding, life-affirming topics I’ll be posting about in the next few weeks:

Why I love ’80s fantasy films.

The importance of Robert E. Howard’s Conan.

The genius of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.

And the next installment in the wildly popular Xander-Recommends-A-Book series: Bullfinch’s Mythology.

In fact, why don’t you all tell me what you want me to post next? Get thee hence to the comments section and debate about it! Debate for my amusement!

To cut a long story short, I returned it to the store.

Judging from what I played, the game is pretty shallow. It has about as much relation to real-world filmmaking as Theme Hospital has to medical surgery. That’s not a slight on sim games; I was just expecting something a bit more robust.

The actual movie-making part of the game - the reason I bought it in the first place - was pretty much ruined for me due to some kind of incompatability with my graphics card. I spent hours trying to fix the problem, but to no avail. My girlfriend, however, seemed to enjoy the micro-management aspect of the game, so I gave it to her. It wouldn’t even install on her computer, so back to the shop it went.

And I’m not alone. I’m sure a lot of people out there are enjoying The Movies and having no problems, but there seems to be a vocal minority on the publisher’s forums for whom the game is buggy to the point of being unplayable. I think it might be time to stop giving Lionhead and Peter Molyneaux the benefit of the doubt. Judging by Black & White and its sequel, their games seem to possess an abundance of good ideas and not much else.

I really should have seen this coming, given that I recently returned the awful and sophomoric Fable. Sorry Pete. My goodwill towards your company just ran out.

This is where I should be telling you all about The Movies, which should have been released on Wednesday. I was there bright and early, eager to get my copy before they sold out… and of course it was nowhere to be found. The worker-drone at E.B. knew nothing (as usual), but the helpful guy at J.B. Hi-Fi explained that they had put the game on the shelves that morning, only to have it immediately recalled because of a faulty installation disk. He explained that it would be fixed and re-issued, “in about a month. Probably in time for Christmas.”

Goddammit. So I bought Civilization 4 instead.

Now, Civ 4 is an excellent game. Let’s get that fact out of the way right now. However, it has one little problem: me. When it comes to the topic of history, I can be an excessively curmudgeonly bastard. By way of example, the other day I spent half an hour yelling at the History Channel because the narrator of ‘I, Caesar - The Life of Justinian’ kept referring to the Byzantine Empire as the ‘Eastern Roman Empire’. Let me tell you, buddy, you can only get away with that before the 5th century A.D.!

See? I’m getting all worked up again. Which brings me to the bizarre historical oddities of Civ 4.

First up, I have some problems with the range of nations you can select from. The Incans are included but not the Mayans. The Mongolians are in there but not the Koreans. The freaking Empire of Mali (Where? Exactly) is included at the expense of the once-great medieval power of Ethiopia. Arabs and Persians are present (and it’s a pretty hazy distinction between those two) but no Turks. And, glaringly, we’re missing vital historical players like the Norse, Celts, Babylonians and Carthaginians.

More mind-boggling are the leaders chosen for each country. Representing the Arabian Empire we have the general Saladin but not the prophet-warlord Mohammed, who founded an entire religion and forged his empire at scimitar-point. For leader of India we get Gandhi, which has the rather anachronistic effect of making the Indian nation pacifistic and diplomatically pleasant throughout all of history.

No Ptolemy for Egypt. No Charlemagne for Germany. Greece gets Alexander the Great, who was actually Macedonian. Rome gets Julius Caesar, when it should have got Augustus or Trajan. But the poor Aztecs get the shortest straw of all: Their national leader is Montezuma, arguably the most incompetent ruler that nation ever had.

Then there’s the treatment of religion in the game. In the interests of not offending anyone, the designers decided to allow any civilization to adopt any religion, and for all religions to be functionally identical, gameplay-wise. This leads to some serious wackiness. You get Hindhus eating cows and Jews eating pigs. You get Jewish missionaries, which have never actually existed in history. Weirdest of all, there are no economic bonuses or negatives for converting to Islam, which in reality forbids usury and requires the payment of Zakat (one fortieth of your yearly earnings go to charity).

And just think about it: Would Buddhism really be the same religion if Siddhartha Gautama had been born in feudal England? What would Egyptian Christianity look like? These are the questions that keep me up at night. In my last game Moses was born in the Aztec Empire, which led me to imagine a Mesoamerican Ten Commandments like this:

1. Thou shalt worship no other gods but Quetzalcoatl. Oh, except for Huitzilopochtli. And Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, Xipe Totec, Coatlicue, Xochiquetzal…
2. Thou shalt not kill. Unless it’s to sacrifice a burning heart to me. Because if you don’t, I’ll pull down the sun and end your pathetic mortal existences.

And so on.

UPDATE: Good news, everyone! Turns out the rumours of The Movies’ demise were greatly exaggerated. The problem seems to have been fixed, because I now have myself a copy. Hooray!