Playing at writing: Rhianna Pratchett has a chat.

Hark at this: The utterly delightful Rhianna Pratchett has been kind enough to sit down with our very own Simon Fox for a chin-wag about the various delicious things that happen when words and play meet in a blender. We’ve split this into 2 parts for the easiest word consumption experience. Part 2 to come very soon indeed.
 
Simon Fox: When you decided to write for a career, what is it that made you go for games?

Rhianna Pratchett: I’m not sure there was an intention behind moving to writing for games - doors opened and I was interested in what lay behind them so I walked through.

In terms of career I think I went through the usual phases of actress, lawyer, mermaid - I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, and Journalism is great for people who don’t know what they want to do, so it’s what I studied. I didn’t even know games writing as a career existed.

I’d been a gamer for a long time - the gaming came very early on, even before my interest in writing and so eventually I got some staff work at PC ZONE reviewing games.
When I left PC ZONE to go freelance I was offered a job as a story editor on Beyond Divinity - I did it for a job and because I liked the company.

SF: What were the first games you loved?

RP: There was one called Head Over Heels on the spectrum, I think it was. I remember it being HUGE. I used to play the Monkey Island games and the Leisure Suit Larry games with the little girl who lived next door to me - I think we were about 13 and had to guess the answers to the ‘are you 18?’ questions at the start - which were all about the American political process, which probably was as good a way of testing your age as anything really.

SF: Though it clearly had it’s failings..

RP: Yes we did manage to get past them, though it took a little research! I learned the word prophylactic which I’ve never actually needed to use - but there you go I have learned words from games - prophylactic and also falafel from Conquest of Camelot which was also one of my early favourites. For a really small town girl that was quite a unique word.

I used to play games with my dad, he would play the games and I would draw the maps because this was long before the days of having maps in the box or mini-maps - so, getting your graph paper out, drawing your own map - that was the real old school and there was a joy in that I think.

SF: Designers go through a massive amount of effort not to require players to put that kind of work in now

RP: I know, a lot of games seem frightened that the player might actually have to think about something, I don’t think the audience have got any dumber - but games sometimes seem to have.

I remember so much about Conquest of Camelot - it shows you how much a good game can resonate within you. Good games can stick with you as much if not more than a book can, because you did these things.

SF: You’ve written for the page as well as for games now, which of these mediums do you feel offers a better experience for the writer?

RP: Well it depends what you see as a better experience - if it is one where you have a lot of space to be creative and your authorship is valued and given the respect it deserves, I would say Novels are where you will get control of everything. Games are right down the other end of the spectrum because the narrative is fighting with so many other elements, game design, mechanics, art, level design - are all competing for space and agency and narrative is only one part of that. For many developers it’s not seen as an important part either. That’s sort of changing, many developers are at least paying lip service to the importance of narrative now. Games are not easy for writers.

SF: Given that these issues exist, what do you find exciting about writing for game specifically?

RP: Loving games helps. Being interested in the experience of playing and putting them together and how powerful they can be when done right. I still tell stories about games I played 20 years ago - I did this or got stuck doing that - and I think that’s wonderful. To be able to get that kind of resonance with your audience is great and the kind of narrative experiences I am trying to create are the ones that people do talk about and do become meaningful and do make them laugh and cry or smile. I think games are a wonderful medium for doing that, but it’s not easy.

It can fail because just putting all the elements of a game together even without narrative is very difficult, trying to get a narrative in there that is coherent and working with everything and isn’t broken by a piece of programming or a game play mechanic is very difficult.

It’s like writing for a movie when some of the sets have already been designed, or get redesigned while you are writing, it gets cast and re-cast and the entire location moves. It’s incredibly challenging but when it’s done right it is incredible.

SF: Do you feel as though there is a dialogue that you have with your players when putting a narrative together? Is it possible to offer them a real impact on story?

RP: The games I work on don’t tend to be hugely player driven narratives. They are kind of small playgrounds and narrative is gated on either side. I’m not sure what’s best - I think for every player who likes to shape narrative there’s another who just likes to be told a damn good story. Look at how popular the uncharted games are, they’re very well loved and that’s a very linear game. It’s not player driven narrative but it’s very well received. It’s so well crafted that people just want to experience it.

Player narratives, I think are very interesting. There’s certainly space for them in the more string of pearls type approach, but it changes so much from genre to genre. Overlord had a through narrative but also a bunch of branches - It can be a lot of work when content branches like that. I like to have a strong core narrative because but offer some branched story for players who like to step off the golden path.

Bioshock is a great example of a game which does that, there’s a through narrative but you will be rewarded with exposition if you explore. I think understanding the world and the characters can be a huge motivational drive for characters - I so often hear players say it was the narrative driving them forward in a game. We respond to story, it’s in our DNA as human beings - we will seek to create stories where there are none.

SF: Do you prefer working on games with a straightforward narrative?

RP: I do like having the space to explore smaller stories in the world as well as the core story. It’s the smaller stories and characters which help you flesh out a world. In Borderlands for example - I wasn’t a huge fan of the core story but I really liked some of the smaller stories around the edges, the diaries and characters like Kalis and how much she hated her colleagues. Those were more interesting to me than the core dialogue so for me it’s about both of these threads.

SF: Do you do a lot of world building when you work on a game

RP: Yes! I like doing that because it gives truth to your world and I think giving that fidelity and making players feel that this is a world that could exist even when they turn the game off is important and I love doing that. I think that is where writers are not used enough. The term writer scuppers us sometimes in the games industry - writers can shape a world and define the boundaries of it, they can come up with all sorts of things that are very useful early on and that work should be part of the level design and the game mechanics. People tend to think writing is only words and it can be slotted in at the end - but if you want your world to have a coherent narrative, and it’s going to have some kind of narrative whether you place it there or not, it would help to have a writer involved! Story is threaded into everything in a game, the players actions, the art of the world, the sound design - it all contributes. It can be a wrestle trying to get involved early enough to have a real impact.

SF: I agree - and it’s very striking when the game play and story are both supporting each other. Is there an example of a game you can give where mechanic and narrative sit very comfortably together?

RP: From a writers perspective it can be a case of having to work from the mechanics. In Heavenly Sword we had a character who lives her life as a warrior and has to kill a lot of people - how does that translate into what drives them as a person. Sometimes there can be this disconnect between the narrative and the action - you might have this terribly deep meaningful character but commits mass murder on a regular basis and it’s never factored into their character. It’s a weird game logic and sometimes you can get away with something like that. I think Overlord managed to have a fidelity of tone between the mechanics and the narrative and a lot of that had to do with building humour into everything from the ground up. It all had the right tone, and we had a great deal of fun doing it. I still occasionally watch people playing it and laugh at the lines. I think we benefited from being a small team, there was a lot of trust there and I was given a lot more agency to help put the cast together and direct them.

The end? No - no not at all, part 2 of this interview is coming very soon. Why not stick us in your RSS readers so you’ll know about it right away?