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Tom Bissell: author, critic, video game writer. What was his path to authorhood? What inspired him to write the video game-focused essay collection Extra Lives? And how did he end up in Cliffy B's lambo? The writer of Gears of War: Judgment (and a number of unannounced upcoming games) tells all.

 

Also this month, Steve is joined by co-host Michael Abbott of the Brainygamer blog and podcast! Savor his dulcet tones.

 

GAMES!

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Hey, this is pretty great. I have been a big fan of Bissell's non-game writing for awhile, so it's cool to hear him talk about his publishing history.

 

Good cast.

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Yeah great cast, this is super super interesting stuff, I can't stop listening. I'd normally listen to these casts in half hour chucks when I'm getting ready in the morning but today I can't stop, I've found myself just sat staring at a wall listening to it for the past hour.... High praise :):tup:

Also, judgement was awesome. I tried my best, not sure if I won anyone over

https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/8500-gears-of-war-judgement

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I'm only about 40 minutes in, but this one is so great. This whole series has been awesome and valuable. I don't think there has been much effort to get to know creatives outside of just marketing jargon. I think this kind of thing will be valuable to define schools of thought and maybe help people create better

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Yeah great cast, this is super super interesting stuff, I can't stop listening. I'd normally listen to these casts in half hour chucks when I'm getting ready in the morning but today I can't stop, I've found myself just sat staring at a wall listening to it for the past hour.... High praise :):tup:

Also, judgement was awesome. I tried my best, not sure if I won anyone over

https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/8500-gears-of-war-judgement

 

 

I'm only about 40 minutes in, but this one is so great. This whole series has been awesome and valuable. I don't think there has been much effort to get to know creatives outside of just marketing jargon. I think this kind of thing will be valuable to define schools of thought and maybe help people create better

 

This is fucking awesome to hear. So glad you guys are into it! Yeah talking with Tom was fantastic, with all his diverse background in lit/criticism/games.

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Yeah I'm definitely digging this. I love how often you guys interrupt each other to discuss tangential but awesome anecdotes.

 

Appreciated the Resident Evil stuff. I remember passing the controller around a group of friends and no one wanting to touch it, no one wanting to be the one to round the corner and face the dreaded zombie cinematic then proceed to awkwardly rotate tank-like Jill around in a futile attempt at escape that most often ended with a full speed dash into a zombie hug.

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I played resident evil at a friends house when it first came out. I remember when using the shotgun we'd wait until the zombie was touching distance before aim up to blow its head off. But 9 times out of 10 I'd panic when the zombies got that close and forget if the aiming was inverted or not... Anyway, I'd pick the wrong way and end up kneecapping them instead, then properly freak out attempting to deal with the crawling zombie I'd just created and start shooting at the ceiling

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Tom Bissell is everything that is wrong with game writing.

 

 

 

That's not true at all. I'm lying. This is my first post, and I'm a liar. Sorry. I don't believe that, really, and I really enjoy Bissell's writing (well, love his nonfiction, not really in love with his fiction). In addition, it sounds like he's depressed and/or really tired, but at the same time, I DO believe that the approach he has taken to game writing is a destructive and problematic one and I was really glad to hear that Michael called him on it.

 

BTW, what a star studded episode! Abbott and Bissell on the same cast? Exciting!

 

The problem with most game writing can be boiled down to two things that Tom Bissell correctly points out. Much of the time the writer is someone called in to put words on paper to fulfill a very basic purpose of conveying information to the player. This is what Bissell has had the unfortunate experience of doing, and he's right when he points out that it is a problem. The other problem is that when writing is done from top to bottom as part of the design, it's generally done by one of the developers who is the lead on the project and also just happens to write. Sometimes this works very well (Gone Home is brilliant, as is Braid, for instance), but often it doesn't, because this writer is often pretty terrible. 

 

Why is this so bad? Let's look at movies. I know, video games are not movies, but they share a LOT of similarities. On projects that have crappy, throwaway, uninteresting writing, what often happens is that the director and/or producer (sometimes on their own, sometimes at the behest of a studio) decide to make a movie about, say, Transformers, and then they go find a writer and say, hey, here's x amount of money, here's what the movie will have in it (main characters/plot arc/whatever) and it will probably be starring these people who are attached, so go write that. The result is writing that is terrible, generally. Or else it will be a small indie project and the director and the writer are the same person and you either end up with something that is amazingly directed, but terribly written (Gondrey's The Science of Sleep. Ugh. Go back to Charlie Kaufman and always have him write your films!), or else the director is actually just a writer who couldn't get anyone to pay him for that and so decided to direct it himself, and so the film is pretty poorly directed (anything Kevin Smith). There are so many examples of bad films that fall into these categories where the writer isn't involved or else is simply already involved in the project. 

 

Here's the thing though: We have so, so, so many examples of when things CAN work. What happens here is that the writer and the director work together. The writer is brought in early and either they write and then take it to the director, or else they work with them and the main idea is hashed out that way. THEN they are also involved in the process as the realities of film hit, as budgets grow or shrink, or actors change, or scenes aren't working, etc., writing as the film is being made, telling the director when something isn't working (sometimes this works, sometimes not), making sure that the project is the best that it can be. Anything Charlie Kauffman has written is a great example for this, but most movies that are a wonderful unison of writing and visual storytelling/acting/etc. is the result of this collaborative process.

 

So going back to me picking on Tom Bissell (I hope I'm making it clear that I think he's woefully wrong but also not that he in any way is responsible for the industry's bad practices): He sighs and throws up his hands and says he's just the carpenter and he isn't writing in games for any artistic fulfillment. Again, I can see how the dude is tired and burnt out, but wow. This hurts, because it is so wrongheaded (I would argue it's even more than the ludicrous argument (which I'm glad he recanted) that game stories in the future would be entirely procedural). Writers should be game designers or creative directors, helping to shape the game, not just someone hired to write words. They should be the art leads, not the person who was contracted to do textures on the guns (caveat: the lead writer should be this. If there is a team, there should be the guys just doing the tiny stuff, but they should be lead by a writer who is in there from the very getgo). Going back to films (which again, is imperfect, but works very well, as it is a collaboration in which the writer isn't even the top 3rd most important person in the process and is about working together to make many parts come together), the writer doesn't just write the dialog (though at times they have to do just that), they work to shape the vision. They're not the director, but they still talk about how shots are framed or how a performance should go. Writers in games NEED to be like this, not being the lead game designer, but talking about how the game should be designed to best work with all of its component parts.

 

Tom is working on three projects. That's insane. The reason he's working on three projects is that right now studios only want someone to write some words, then do nothing for a while and then do some rewrites, but again, this is wrongheaded. What needs to happen more often is that the writer should be hired for the entire duration of the project (or, better, FULL TIME with the freaking company) so that they can talk about game decisions and not just play through the level when it's created and then figure out what framework might fit there. What made Deus Ex: Human Revolution as good as it was (and it's a flawed game in a number of ways) was that even though it had problems and rough edges, it held together more often than not, and even though a really tight budget and timeframe sabotaged it at times (the ending, the boss fights), there was still an incredible amount of work marrying the narrative to the design so that it wasn't just words that the writers were making, but systems, and the result was a game that felt integrated at every point (except, again, when time and money created huge problems--entirely because that collaborative process was undermined and the result was those discordant areas). Seriously, that Mary Demarle was able to wrangle such a tight narrative into such a sprawling game built of system interactions is a marvel, and she is a hero of mine.

 

So yeah, Tom Bissell isn't what's wrong with game writing at all, though a number of his comments were a bit frustrating, but he IS illustrative of some of the HUGE problems that plague it. I mean, seriously, games, a talented, smart, proven, dependable writer couldn't get work, and what work he COULD get was only coming in and trying to cram some words into levels? Too often do people get asked to write because they're there (again, sometimes this works out great, but most of the time, I mean, seriously, writing in games, as a whole, is a joke), and then spend a plurality of their time on the writing. Instead, writers need to be brought in and then they need to do more than scribble words, they need to sit in on design (and, okay, it'd be helpful if they had some design experience to supplement that). Hell, this is the reason I'm learning to program despite having a graduate degree in writing and decent publishing history, because no one will hire a writer, but if I can program my way out of a paper bag (it's the limit of my skills, that's it) and have a few games designed I have more of a chance getting a job than I would showing them a publication history and a devotion to good writing in multiple forms. This kind of involvement with the writer is how plays work, it's how movies work, hell, it's how good graphic novels work, it should probably work with games. 

 

This massive rant aside, however, I thought that this was a marvelous episode and I'm enjoying everything in Tone Control so far. I'll probably end up using bits of this and the Neil Druckman episodes in a class I'll be teaching next semester. Really interesting, worthwhile stuff here.

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Tone Control is a really great podcast. 

 

That's all I have to say. 

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I love Tom Bissell's bit about the importance of respecting a player's interpretive agency. Not only is it incredibly disappointing when you see developers try and take that away from players by beating them over the head with some sort of moral lesson or whatever, but it also sucks when you see video game critics engage in polemics that attempt to narrow the scope of discourse about what a game is supposedly about... this in a medium where the person engaging in the work has so many opportunities to change the tone! Although there is an interesting thread here because all the guests on this podcast have made games that are really good at respecting that interpretive agency.

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I'm looking forward to hearing this. Your discussion with Mr. Bissell at the Center for Fiction in NYC was interesting!

 

Whoa! You were there? Wacky!

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This massive rant aside, however, I thought that this was a marvelous episode and I'm enjoying everything in Tone Control so far. I'll probably end up using bits of this and the Neil Druckman episodes in a class I'll be teaching next semester. Really interesting, worthwhile stuff here.

 

As you note, a lot of this is systemic to how the studio is run/works with writers, as opposed to being on the writer themselves. It sounds like Tom had the exact right outlook for the particular assignment he had; I think you'll find his involvement in the stuff he's working on now (once it's announced) is a much different arrangement.

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I'm looking forward to hearing this. Your discussion with Mr. Bissell at the Center for Fiction in NYC was interesting!

 

 

Whoa! You were there? Wacky!

 

I was there, too!  I've returned there a few times because my local library doesn't take used books, but the Center for Fiction does.

 

I wonder if it's still around; I haven't gotten an event e-mail in a while...

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As you note, a lot of this is systemic to how the studio is run/works with writers, as opposed to being on the writer themselves. It sounds like Tom had the exact right outlook for the particular assignment he had; I think you'll find his involvement in the stuff he's working on now (once it's announced) is a much different arrangement.

You're right, I think that he had the perfect outlook for the assignments he had. I don't think this is an example of bad writers (especially since I think Tom is an excellent writer), but rather unfortunate systems where the studios don't seem to understand that narrative is more than words an actor speaks (or GUI text) and so they only bring in a word monkey to slap some writing into the spots. Tom and Michael point out that smaller games do this well and Naughty Dog has been a huge game company that has consistently put forward interesting, strong narrative elements with huge, AAA blockbuster games. 

 

To reiterate my main point, I don't look at Tom's GoW output and say: what a bad writer, I look at it and say: I can't believe that someone like Mr. Bissell had so hard of a time finding game writing work, and, further, it's upsetting to me that even someone like him only had so much input into the game. It really makes me wish that more studios had more respect for the narratives they claimed to have and had a narrative designer from the get-go (every AAA game should have a design lead, an art lead, a lead programmer and a narrative lead on every project, and they should be there as early as possible--smaller games obviously have to make due with who/what they have on hand much of the time). 

 

I love Tom Bissell's bit about the importance of respecting a player's interpretive agency. Not only is it incredibly disappointing when you see developers try and take that away from players by beating them over the head with some sort of moral lesson or whatever, but it also sucks when you see video game critics engage in polemics that attempt to narrow the scope of discourse about what a game is supposedly about... this in a medium where the person engaging in the work has so many opportunities to change the tone! Although there is an interesting thread here because all the guests on this podcast have made games that are really good at respecting that interpretive agency.

 

Agreed, but with a caveat: I think that too many games pay too little attention to the tone their gameplay creates. In other words, while too often the narrative is too narrow in the message it wants to get across, too often does the gameplay give TOO BROAD of a tone with too many possible meanings. It isn't that a breadth of possible meaning is bad, but rather that it should be narrowly structured so that it doesn't feel schizophrenic. In this way, the players can create a large depth of meaning, but it is carefully constructed by the developers so that the meaning is pointed in a direction. Without belaboring the point: the Far Cry 2 episode was wonderful because it shows not only how much authorial control there was in keeping a consistent tone, but how Steve (and many others) could end up with an interpretation of that game that differed from Hocking's original intent (regarding the nihilism point Steve made). This is what great novels do, allow the reader to have different interpretation of something through strong authorial control of things, and I think that great games will obviously give the player more control (it is a game), but that control will be tightly managed within a narrative construct.

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I was there, too!  I've returned there a few times because my local library doesn't take used books, but the Center for Fiction does.

 

I wonder if it's still around; I haven't gotten an event e-mail in a while...

 

They are. I stopped getting the emails, too, and I don't remember if I unsubscribed or if they just stopped sending. 

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You're right, I think that he had the perfect outlook for the assignments he had. I don't think this is an example of bad writers (especially since I think Tom is an excellent writer), but rather unfortunate systems where the studios don't seem to understand that narrative is more than words an actor speaks (or GUI text) and so they only bring in a word monkey to slap some writing into the spots. Tom and Michael point out that smaller games do this well and Naughty Dog has been a huge game company that has consistently put forward interesting, strong narrative elements with huge, AAA blockbuster games. 

 

To reiterate my main point, I don't look at Tom's GoW output and say: what a bad writer, I look at it and say: I can't believe that someone like Mr. Bissell had so hard of a time finding game writing work, and, further, it's upsetting to me that even someone like him only had so much input into the game. It really makes me wish that more studios had more respect for the narratives they claimed to have and had a narrative designer from the get-go (every AAA game should have a design lead, an art lead, a lead programmer and a narrative lead on every project, and they should be there as early as possible--smaller games obviously have to make due with who/what they have on hand much of the time). 

 

 

Agreed, but with a caveat: I think that too many games pay too little attention to the tone their gameplay creates. In other words, while too often the narrative is too narrow in the message it wants to get across, too often does the gameplay give TOO BROAD of a tone with too many possible meanings. It isn't that a breadth of possible meaning is bad, but rather that it should be narrowly structured so that it doesn't feel schizophrenic. In this way, the players can create a large depth of meaning, but it is carefully constructed by the developers so that the meaning is pointed in a direction. Without belaboring the point: the Far Cry 2 episode was wonderful because it shows not only how much authorial control there was in keeping a consistent tone, but how Steve (and many others) could end up with an interpretation of that game that differed from Hocking's original intent (regarding the nihilism point Steve made). This is what great novels do, allow the reader to have different interpretation of something through strong authorial control of things, and I think that great games will obviously give the player more control (it is a game), but that control will be tightly managed within a narrative construct.

 

I wasn't actually saying anything different. I specifically mentioned that the guests on Tone Control are all exemplary on the point of interpretive agency. Far Cry 2 is a good example, as is the Walking Dead which is a tightly controlled narrative experience, but one where the player is given the room to express her experience within that narrative.

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This is maybe my favorite episode yet. As a budding writer it's super interesting to hear his thoughts on the process and his weird excursion on writing while on cocaine. I'm only an hour in, saving the other for the final workday of the year tomorrow. Nice way to ring in the holidays! 

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Steve you're doing an amazing job with these. Thanks a lot, I love listening to such discussions. I always love hearing Michael Abott, I hope you poked him to start putting out episodes of his own again.

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Again, great job with this series so far. I've really enjoyed the candid conversations with all of the guests, and can't wait to see who you have on next (is there a Mechner in your future, perhaps?). While not a writer, I do take into consideration various aspects of game design, and have found everything these discussions have touched upon to be interesting, if not enlightening. Keep dat up.

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