Unreliable Narrator

Making a game is all in the planning, reckons Sam Barlow

An accepted truth in our industry is that no one knows how a game is going to work until they make it. This is why games are always late and sometimes don’t work out, despite best intentions. But is this really the case? As I grow older and more contrarian, I find myself questioning this. I think we can imagine how a game is going to play before we make it. And we’d make more interesting games if we did.

I once met a successful film financier who had never lost money for his investors. It was straightforward, he claimed. Start with a good screenplay. Hire the best cast and crew you can. Shoot coverage. The key is that screenplay – this document, relatively cheap to produce, is a predictor of a movie’s quality, a blueprint for its construction, and is easily converted into an accurate schedule and budget. A writer may spend time to perfect the movie on paper before the messy business of making it. Our financier wanted to invest in videogames but was surprised to learn we had no real equivalent of the screenplay.

It’s true that there is no videogame document as useful as the screenplay, and we’re unlikely to discover one. (I did once see a triple-A videogame that was developed from a literal screenplay, but I will leave it unsaid as to whether the result was a good videogame.) But I believe the process of writing a screenplay is instructive. Writing a good screenplay is hard, specifically because you have to first imagine the finished movie in order to describe it. A good screenplay suggests where the camera is at every point, how the film is edited, how the succession of particular imagery will implant a story into its audience’s brains. Amateur screenplays are full of continuous verbs and ambiguity of POV that make it hard to understand how to photograph the thing – but there are enough scenes and plot to convince the writer they have a real movie. In games, teams routinely launch development with the equivalent of a bad screenplay. There may be a bulleted list of mechanics, a description of plot, some visuals… but has anyone sat down, closed their eyes, and fully imagined the finished game? Where a bad screenplay is ambiguous about how the camera tells the story, a bad game design is ambiguous about the specifics of the core gameplay loop. A movie writer cannot hide their fudges when a script is read. But a game designer can jog into development claiming that only once things are playable can the real game design begin.

So a game gets built. Designers start to ‘find the fun’, a process like wandering the desert in search of a mirage. What emerges from the process are side-effects of the human capacity for play. A designer stuck in a greybox tweaking game mechanics finds a piece of fun that is fun only to the team who’ve spent the past six months living with it. It’s the equivalent of a film crew with no script filming endless reels of gorgeous visuals – an echo chamber that is entertaining in the moment but has no larger purpose. Give it to an audience expecting a real experience and it deflates rapidly.

It is possible to make a good game through iteration and improvisation. Sometimes a designer sets out to find the fun and does indeed find some! But games are often huge projects with lots of moving parts created by lots of people and lots of money – a situation that rarely nurtures the creative process. So let’s rethink how we treat the early creation of game ideas. The magic is not in the describing of a game on paper but in the rigorous imagining of the finished game that must occur before it can be described. Writers are forever having to explain to their partners that when they sit and stare into space, they’re working. They’re doing their hardest work! Truly imagining is the trick. Not visualising a trailer moment. Not dreaming of hazy action spied over a player’s shoulder. Imagining, clearly, the act of playing the game. We should invest time doing this. Months. Years. In our heads we can scrutinise if a game works, and tweak it to make it special. Much easier to view the game with clarity here than when it is real and surrounded by the endless distractions of a running game engine. Iterating a prototype is fast but far slower and more limiting than iterating in our imaginations.

A game that has been fully imagined before it was made is easy to spot – it’s one that’s so specific and special you know the only way to make it was to set out to make exactly that game.

Excuse me now as I go to sit and stare into space and imagine. I’m working.

It’s true that there is no videogame document as useful as the screenplay, and we’re unlikely to discover one