Killzone 2 screenwriter interview: the challenges of video game narrative

Killzone 2 screenwriter Iain Howe explains how he worked himself up from a games tester, whether a game's narrative takes the back seat in development and if games have more potential in storytelling than films.

Today I bring you the first part of my interview with Ex-Guerrilla Iain Howe. As well as the above, we talk about the art of dynamic in-game dialogue and whether cutscenes are counter to the gameplay experience.

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Hello Iain, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and the development roles you've been involved with.

Iain: I'm Iain Howe and I've been in the games industry for about 13 years now. During my career I've worked my way up from Tester and Customer Services rep to various roles in Development from Production to Research and Design.

Most recently I've been a Designer, before moving to the Community Team where I wrote articles for the Killzone website and compiled the Killzone Universe back-story. Upon leaving Guerrilla last year, I worked as a freelance writer, where I worked on the Killzone 2 screenplay and other similar tasks. Online I'm known as Eon on the PlayStation message boards.

Do you think working yourself up from a Tester is the optimal way to become a video game developer?

Iain: It was about the only way to get a job as a Developer when I joined the industry - short of being a family member, friend or college room mate of someone that had hiring discretion. I would say that, back then, it was a case of relying on luck to get your foothold into the Industry and then sheer hard work to prove yourself.

I wouldn't say it's the Optimal route for a career in the industry, these days, but it is A route into the industry - this is largely because a Developer is as good as their list of credits. I'd still say that a good credit on a major release is worth more than a relevant degree.

Of course, it's getting harder and harder to get that first credit without a degree. I know many Developers that are working with local universities in intern programs, in order to get bright youngsters with relevant skills into a position to learn the ropes and prove themselves.

These days, I'd say that for Art, Animation, Production and Programming - that's your Optimum route. Level Design posts are secured more certainly by people with a little programming talent to back up their geeky pop-culture chops and OCD. Game Design is a bit of a black art, because it seems that the quality of a Game Designer is something determined by the reviews of his last game.

What challenges do video games face in telling an entertaining and convincing story?

Iain: Perhaps the biggest challenges that video games face in telling an entertaining and convincing story is the struggle between storytelling, which tends to be a passive experience, and the gameplay, which is an active experience.

Every game that tries to tell a story that I've played has had to split itself into two pieces, the cutscene that handles exposition and narrative and the gameplay that allows resolution by the players own hand. The challenge of telling story in an interactive manner, allowing the player to experience the story whilst still holding the controller, is the holy grail of interactive storytelling.

Until we reach that point, we're always going to have that awkward juxtaposition of game and story - each fighting for their share of the players attention.

Some have said that video games can surpass the film medium in telling personal stories, do you agree?

Iain: It is inevitable that games will surpass the passive media of books and films in storytelling. Any story where the listener can drive the narrative him or herself, shaping it to their preferences, has to be more compelling and entertaining than passively accepting someone else's narrative vision.

However, until we manage to overcome that separation of story and gameplay that I mentioned earlier, we are never going to achieve that goal. At present, it often seems that gameplay sections work counter to the cutscenes and cutscenes break the immersion of the gameplay sections.

So you believe that cutscenes are counter to a fulfilling narrative experience? Don't you think they're the only way to really develop a character? Or are they just the easiest and most effective compromise?

Iain: The great thing about cutscenes is that you're not playing the game, so you can break all the important game rules that absolutely trash your ability to convey awesome drama in a meaningful way during the standard situation the player is in during the game - a screaming bloody fire-fight.

The absolutely dreadful thing about cutscenes is you're not playing the game, so you immediately yank all control of and a lot of the interest in the outcome from the player and carry indulge your dramatic tendencies - often at the expense of the paying audience.

I'm not saying that cutscenes aren't the easiest, if not the only, method for intense narrative development at the moment - I'm saying that if we want to elevate storytelling in games to exceed the current state of the film maker's art, we have to find a way that is better than interspersing 45 minutes of bloody, pulse pounding, murder with a five minute movie short. That's not going to compete with a full length movie, for obvious reasons!

So what is it about video games that give it the ability to tell a convincing story?

Iain: Films invite us to observe the protagonist of the movie, whilst games promise to make us the protagonist of the game. Providing a game gives you a protagonist you can easily empathise with and provided the games storyline allows you to properly suspend your disbelief, it is easy to experience the events of the game as if they are happening to you, not some protagonist-by-proxy.

Any emotional reactions to the events or emotional themes in the games narrative become much sharper and first hand, which makes the experience a lot more immediate and fulfilling. In this manner, the story of a game can come to mean a lot more than the plot of a movie.

Are video game script writers hampered in any way?

Iain: I found the experience of writing for Killzone 2 to be fulfilling, but I also found a number of challenges. The vast majority of the dialogue I wrote were one liners that would be spoken by a random ISA or Helghast soldier when he had to reload, when he was shot at, when he wounded an enemy, when he saw a grenade and so on. The VAST majority of it.

The hard part about this is that when you come to write it you have no idea of the context. You won't know who's saying it, where he is, who he's speaking to, whether it's raining or not and so on. Battle cries were written without knowing how long the battle had been raging already, who was winning and whether the crier was outnumbered and near death, or leading a glorious counter charge.

Screenwriting for movies, of course, is painstakingly precise - each line delivered at a precise place and time, and hand-crafted for the character speaking it. This represents a huge challenge.

There is also the fact that the game does without dialogue for the majority of its development - and quite happily too. Dialogue becomes something that is considered a 'polish pass' item - most of the attention (and money!) in games is lavished on the animation, AI and effects. A consideration of the Lighting in the level or the animation of the enemies attracts considerably more head scratching than the question of whether the dialog sounds just right.

In-gameplay dialogue must be a fine art. Killzone 2 did well at providing a multitude of different responses - but there were still some failures and repetitions, such as punching your comrade resulting in "Shoot them, not me." Do you think it's possible to make all reactions different and react realistically to the current surroundings?

Iain: Ouch - that's the first time I've heard of that one, and it really highlights the difficulty with what I call Emergent Dialogue. Emergent Dialogue is any line of speech that the writer devises with one set of circumstances in mind that ends up getting played in different circumstances. The AI calls a line of speech with very little information on the context that speech will be delivered in, so the challenge is to write interesting dialog that doesn't rely on situational context to be valid - beyond the defined AI trigger for the line of speech, which may not give you very much information at all. In the example above, it's obvious that the AI isn't distinguishing between a melee attack and a ranged attack.

The problem, of course, is the need to try and predict every situation beforehand and record a large variety of lines covering all those situations. Given the war between budget, time and chaos theory, you are never going to be able to write canned speech that predicts every situation.

It gets even worse when you remember that none of these lines is called in a vacuum - expecting randomly called lines of canned dialogue called in sequence to mesh into Shakespeare is like trying to turn back the tides. All you can do is plan on as many contingencies as possible, try and write the most flexible dialogue you can and try and write as many variations as you can afford.

Does a games story take the back seat in video games development? Is enough money and concentration spent here?

Iain: There is a fight at the moment as to whether Gameplay or Graphics is King. Whilst the accepted wisdom is that how the game plays is more important than how it looks, it's obvious that (as in life) a game that is sexy finds its audience much more willing to excuse other flaws.

Nobody has this discussion about Gameplay vs Story, or Graphics vs Story. Don't expect that to change any time soon! I think that Developers are completely aware of that fact, and they direct their awesome budgets accordingly.

The tricky part is finding who to write. Teams have tried both hiring a respected Hollywood scriptwriter and appointing the most literary of their Designers to the task - and both approaches have problems. Scriptwriting for games demands a very different skill-set than game design or scriptwriting for movies - I don't think that skill-set is widespread. Moreover, the actual Process (with a capital P) for delivering and implementing good dialogue is not something that seems to be sufficiently developed.

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Come back for part two of our interview with Iain Howe next week, where we'll enter an in-depth talk on the best way to present narrative in video games.