No, but for some studios it’s hard enough to get a game noticed or even played through once, let alone twice. What I’m really talking about is making more out of what you’ve already got. If you look at the narrative design of a really big triple-A game, what they tend to do is throw more and more and more content into it in the hope that people will think it’s amazing. Well, okay, what if we throw in a little bit less, but we designed it more efficiently? We do this with art assets. If somebody builds a lamp
really do that. But there are new lines of dialogue. There are new ideas and new conversations and new little beats or new reflections or responses by the character. That’s content, but it’s very much smaller. It’s much more subtle. In quite a lot of games, you don’t see everything that’s in there anyway. Very few people see all the content that’s in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Does it help having all this extra content? I’m sure they thought about it. There are lots of different ways to think about what content generation is, or how much it cost to make, or how significant it is beyond ‘we made another level’ and I think that again leans into the strategy one can use to make things deeper.
I just wonder whether you’re in a privileged position, in that you have an audience and you have the time and the independence to think about all these different narrative ideas and bring them to fruition. It’s almost certianly the case that other studios don’t have that same luxury you do. As an indie studio, one is in a privileged position to try things and do new things and to break away from existing proven models. If you’re being funded by someone, they want to know that it’s going to work in advance and the best way to do that is to say, ‘Well, we’ve copied what this game did.’ That’s fine. That’s a completely reasonable way for a publisher and a studio to behave. Because we’re self-funded, we get to not do that. That doesn’t mean that we’re exploring a dead end though.
22 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2023
post, they don’t use it once they use it a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Can we do that with narrative? Can we make our narrative work in different times in different places in different ways and give us different contexts so that when we see it again, because it’s a replay, it means something else to us? Can we do that, if we put in that little bit of extra effort or thought into the way that we think about it? Maybe that’s something that we can get away with because we work in a low-fi way, and maybe that’s something that our audience expects, but to be fair, if they do, that’s because we’ve built up that expectation by doing this over the years. It’s not because we found that audience waiting for us and it’s not because
“I think we’re only really beginning to see what writing and narrative design can really do for games. It’s exciting.”
we sold ourselves that way. But also, that’s slightly not my problem. I’m
interested in what narrative in games can be and if the large studios find it difficult to copy that, okay, well they can have fewer sales and we can have more, that’s fine by me, I don’t mind. But I do think sometimes people have a tendency to say, ‘We’ve been doing this for a while. This is how games work. We can’t change things.’ I don’t accept that. I think we can do things that are more complex and more interesting. I love how when I started in the industry, writers for
games were quite unusual. They tended to be brought in at the very end, they were mostly ignored. That has changed completely. Writers are integral to studios now. I think we’re only really beginning to see what writing and narrative design can really do for games. It’s exciting.
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