Ace of Swords

I find a lot of writers fall into a trap: trying to write a story with the wrong ingredients.

No matter what story you want to write, you need the foundation of having the right amounts of the right things. The more of something there is, the less unique and distinct it is.

If there's loads of swords in your story, then a sword is not unique or distinct.

If there's only one sword, a lot of your story will be about why there's only one.

By carefully deciding how many swords to put your story, you get just the right amount of swordiness in your story.

Pretty basic, right?

One
One sword, and a lot of the story is about that one sword. Whether it's because that's the Sword of Light that no weapon can match, or whether it's because only one character in your office comedy show carries a sword.

While that one thing will always be distinct, you can make it more important by defining related things as blandly "not that". Or you can play it down by having a lot of variation.

For example, if your story is about twelve nearly-identical adventurers and a shlubby dude, the story is about the shlub. On the other hand, if your story is about thirteen people, only one of which works in a coffee shop... well, presumably, the others work in other places and the coffee shop employment will be distinct but not a major driving force.

This is also an easy one to accidentally trip over.

If your story features six white guys and a black lady... that one lady is going to stand out far more aggressively and distinctly, even if you didn't intend her to.

An example of this would be Bulk and Skull in Power Rangers. They're usually considered as "one unit", and they're really the only non-superpowered unit in the series. Because of this, they draw a lot of attention - people often feel more strongly about those two than about any individual rangers. As a plus, they can be split apart when needed and used as...

Two
If there's two swords, the story will be about how those two swords get along. A sword of fire and a sword of ice: who has them, how do they shape the world, what happens when they fight? You can see Lodoss Wars for an example of that.

Having exactly two of something draws attention to it. It can't be played down as much as if there's only one, or if there's a lot. Two is a really loud number.

Whether it's two swords that fight, or two amulets belonging to twin dragons, or two short people in a land of tall people, or two countries on the continent, or two species in your fantasy setting - it's all about how those two connect, and the differences in how they affect the world around them.

A lot of people write dualities like this into their stories without realizing how important it can become.

For example, you might set up a hero and a rival as being the only two people with a specific ability. If you then resolve their conflicts and have them move into the third act together, it's going to feel strangely flat and cheap... because their tension was far more powerful than whatever random baddie you're having them team up against. Makes more sense for the rival to take over as the big bad.

Some
If there's "some" swords, then the swords usually map to a specific category of character, and represent that character. They separate that kind of character from other kinds of characters, and become projections of that character's desires.

The easy example of that is Star Wars, where each space wizard has their own sword. It sets them apart from non space wizards, and the swords are usually considered to be extensions of the space wizard. If someone uses a sword that's not theirs, it won't work right unless they are "accepted", and if you find an abandoned sword, it probably still echoes with the space wizard that made it.

This may sound very spiritual, but it's an extremely handy way to extend your characters into your story space. Space wizards can have an outsized effect on the story because they are able to extend themselves into the story with their magic swords. The swords reflect and project who they are and what they want.

A non-swordy example might be superpowers in a comic book, or adventurer licenses in a fantasy manga. For less combat-centric things, it might be jobs in an office comedy.

When setting this up, it's important to choose a thing that extends the characters in a way your story needs. If space wizards had magic wands instead of swords, the story would feel more ephemeral and distant... but swords are immediate and primal, suiting the melodramatic conflicts of Star Wars. Similarly, in an office comedy, having distinct job roles extends the characters into the office space in a suitable way. If they had swords... well, it'd be funny, but it'd be a very strange office comedy.

"Some" may also be used to define a unified group, but in this case it's really just "one". For example, there are "some" ring wraiths, but in story terms there is "one" group of ring wraiths, and a lot of the story is spent on exactly how and why they exist. There are "some" Borg, but it's really just one group, etc, etc.

Lots
When there's lots of swords, they stop being unique and start being a functional prop. Their existence is important to the story, but individual swords are not terribly interesting and the things they do are often glossed over and taken for granted. They are often used as a framing device or narrative engine, rather than being used as swords.

For example, if absolutely everyone has swords, that says a lot about the kind of world they live in... but individual swordfights are likely to be glossed over and summarized. A Game of Thrones and The Hobbit show that.

If you want the swords to be more important, you have to come up with more important swords. So these are magical swords. Oh, too many magic swords? This one is a super-duper magic sword...

This isn't necessarily bad writing, but it's essentially separating the thing into "a lot" of ordinary swords and "some" special swords. This is why Bilbo's sword Sting can be easily thought of as an extension of Bilbo: short but sharp and shines when things get dangerous. There are "a lot" of ordinary swords and then "some" swords that are extensions of specific characters.

Again, swords are just an example. Another example might be monsters in Power Rangers, or species in Star Wars. They push the plot along and frame the story, but they are only distinct or unique as required to do that.

Summary
This is a very basic, easy, and primitive way to consider what ingredients you're adding to your story world.

Regardless of the type of story you want to write, if your ingredient proportions are wrong, you'll end up struggling to write what you wanted to write.

This is especially important when you're not writing the story.

If you're designing a world for a tabletop game, or for an extended series of stories, you need to arrange the ingredients to support the kinds of stories you want to exist!

At least, that's my take. Let me know what you think.

Writing CRPG Characters

I've come to have very strong opinions about how characters should be written in CRPGs.

Here's the rule: the character needs to engage with the player.

This is a funny thing about a CRPG. The game can have terrible writing and unbelievably poorly written characters... as long as the characters properly engage with the player. Similarly, even if you have wonderfully written characters voice acted by legends, if they don't properly engage with the player, they're background noise.

So here's the exercise:

Don't write a backstory. None of your characters have any backstory.

Now your writing will radically improve.

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In order for a character to feel real, they have to exist in the same time and place as the player character. They have to talk to the player character. Negotiate, exchange ideas, come to a shared understanding of the world they exist in and their places within it. Their relationship has to evolve.

Backstories are poison to this, because a backstory exists in another time and place. Dripping a backstory into the player's ears as they earn relationship points doesn't establish a shared reality, doesn't involve negotiation or an exchange of ideas, doesn't improve the character's understanding of anything, and rather than evolve the relationship, it happens after the relationship evolved!

Some games try to bring the backstory into the present. This is possible, but it's more likely that you'll screw it up.

The basic rule is that you should never close loose ends without opening at least as many.

Most character backstories come into the present to close off loose ends - essentially ending the backstory and closing out the character. I have no idea why this is common, but it's just the worst approach.

Since I've been playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker, let me give some examples.

(Keep in mind that this game is written abominably.)

There's a warrior you'll use as your primary tank. I think every player uses her. Her backstory is that she's just so gosh-darn pretty that she was adopted by the religious order of beauty. She got angry with everyone telling her she was pretty, and quit.

Seriously.

Her "loyalty mission" is a character from her backstory showing up, fighting her, and scarring her face. The end. She's apparently no longer pretty and apparently the church no longer cares about her. All the loose ends are tied up and her character is now in limbo. No more interests, no more goals, no more looming threats, no more opinions.

There's another character that's undead. Her loyalty mission involves figuring out who killed her and, again, tying all the loose threads up so she has no more plot.

There's a character that's a ranger. His loyalty mission? Murdering innocent trolls because a troll killed his family. Again, it's tying the loose ends and closing the story of his life.

There is one character that qualifies, that passes the "loose threads" test. That would be the dumbass barbarian poseur.

Her backstory is that she ran away from her tribe because they didn't respect her. Her loyalty mission? Earning your respect and her self-respect at the same time by hunting a monster and taking the lead against it.

That's how you do it.

You and her are in the same time and place, discussing something happening in this time and place. It's not a monster from her past, it's just some random monster-of-the-week threatening your kingdom.

You and her are negotiating and exchanging ideas, finding a good balance between her heritage, her need to prove herself, her desire to belong, and the very blunt threat of a giant monster.

She grows as a person, having proven herself to herself. She's a little less of a poseur, and has found a place that accepts her.

You and she have an evolving relationship: you're no longer just 'a baron of some land I happen to be on', but her adopted tribe leader. A more fun and unusual relationship than the normal "strangers->friends->lovers" route!

I won't say her character is good or interesting. It's written with all the subtlety of a freight train... falling on another freight train...

But the structure of her character beats is solid, and therefore her character seems to exist and be a part of my story. She didn't close any loose threads off, she just joined my story as a living, growing person.

Could you adapt the other character beats the same way?

Sure. If the fighter's beauty is so great, let her lure in an ever-increasing volume of ever-richer and ever-more-aggressive suitors. Eventually it gets out of hand, and you have to choose: do the two of you get married in name only just to keep the suitors off, or does she carve a scar into her own face to stop them from coming?

It's not great writing, because the premise is dumb, but it's a situation that exists in the present and evolves your relationship to each other.

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If we look at other characters from other games, we can see the same basic premise.

Did you, like everyone, like Garrus? Well, guess what? He's the one that followed these rules. His character beats were always about something happening right now, he grew as a character, you negotiated and exchanged views with him, and your relationship steadily evolved.

Did you like Aeris? Well, guess what? She followed these rules.

Did you like Celes? Well, guess what? She followed these rules.

Even characters like Solas, weighed down by a ponderous backstory, are popular not because of their backstory, but because of how they bring their backstory into the present. How their backstory creates more problems, more loose threads... rather than resolving any.

I think there may even be some compelling characters whose names don't end with S. Try to find some, and see whether they follow these rules. I think they will.

So, my take:

1) Character beats should take place here and now, about things that matter here and now.

2) Character beats should involve debating, exchanging ideas or opinions, not just listening.

3) Character beats should evolve the character. Remember that weakness is strength, and that their place in the world is changing.

4) Character beats should evolve your PC's relationship with the character.

If you follow these guidelines, even if you write terribly, you'll at least have a compelling character!

At least, I think so. Let me know what you think.

Obsessive Worldbuilding

I regularly see people talk about worldbuilding best-practices, typically with a warning against simulationist or overly detailed worlds.

The idea is to have interesting stories to tell in that world, right? So focus on that, rather than endlessly detailing how many centuries ago the elven court left for the high hills.

There's a few things to talk about here. The first is:

Yes. That is good practice. To me, the most critical thing about a world is how well it supports on-theme stories. That said...

Obsessive, detailed worldbuilding is fine.

We're talking about worldbuilding as the process an author goes through, not as the world is revealed to an audience in the final product. Obviously, including lots of dumb details in the final product is bad writing... but those details aren't necessarily bad worldbuilding.

One reason to worldbuild is to experiment with the boundaries of what's possible in the world. When developing a world, it's often unclear what the unique elements of the world allow. If you have a special kind of magic, or an unusual technology, or even something as simple as just a slightly deep dive on a particular social issue, it's often unclear where it will lead.

So you explore it. You detail out all the things that seem interesting and unique about this world. In the process, you realize there's something unique about the way this culture evolves, or an interesting take on the theme of family, or whatever else you can dig up while you're rooting around.

Filling the stories you tell with details nobody cares about is bad writing. Similarly, sticking to a fiction you've invented when you can replace it with something more powerful is bad writing. But those are bad writing, not bad worldbuilding.

When some obsessive worldbuilder shows you a ream of notes on the world they've invented, they're not showing you a finished story.

Maybe that's not how you work. Maybe you don't need to explore those ideas, because you already know where you're going to go 100%. It's a different process, but one doesn't invalidate the other.

Like a cartoonist with three pens talking to a painter: the cartoonist doesn't rag on the painter for their endless paint supplies and brush variants. It's understood that the two have completely different approaches.

Sure, the painter might suck.

The cartoonist might suck, too.

Another reason to worldbuild is to fill up the author's "working imagination": to make the world feel real to them. Some make the mistake of thinking that the notes they take can give someone else the same "working imagination", and then they get yelled at for misunderstanding how writing works.

... That's not writing. That's worldbuilding. I'm sure they regret bringing you into their process.

The next time you see someone excitedly building a world in a way you don't like, consider that they're searching their world for new ideas, new variants, and trying to leave a vivid impression in their own minds.

Foreshadowing and Layered Storytelling

Spoilers for Life is Strange and Night in the Woods. Night in the Woods spoilers are hidden behind a button (in the web version) and you can skip them.

Recently I've seen a lot of games stumble over the concepts of foreshadowing and layered storytelling. Even really good games. So let's talk a little bit about it.

This might be a bit rough, it's my first take.

Games have twists. At the end, in the middle, twists everywhere. All these twists have to feel like they make sense.... but they usually don't. They often feel like they "came out of nowhere".

There's usually foreshadowing: nobody simply forgets to set up the ending. They just... foreshadow badly.

The two most common kinds of bad foreshadowing are the accidental reveal and NG+shadowing.

The accidental reveal is pretty obvious: the foreshadowing is so blatant that it simply gives away the twist.

NG+shadowing is the opposite. The foreshadowing is so minuscule or unrelated that you can only see it as foreshadowing when you're playing the game a second time.

You might think we're on the hunt for goldilocks moments: foreshadowing that isn't too blatant, but isn't too subtle.

Not me. I say both those kinds of foreshadowing are misunderstanding the role of foreshadowing.

Let's get... hoity-toity.

The twists that stay with me are the ones that are thematically relevant.

Let's say we're writing a game about a main character struggling through a rough time in their life. The backdrop to this is a series of mysterious murders: our MC lives their life, notices murders happening in the background. At the end of the game, the two plot lines come together and there's... some kind of cool twist.

If you're a writer, you need to think about how these two plot lines support each other. They're not just two stories happening in the same place: both need to be stronger because the other exists.

The first instinct is to make them related physically. Our struggling MC witnesses a murder. Or is suspected of being a murderer. Or one of the friends is a suspect. Simply moosh the two plot lines together and then stitch things up. It works. Ish.

A good writer will think about more than that. We need the two to support each other thematically. The serial killing is a twisted reflection of our MC's internal struggle. The twist at the end is how the two separate or merge, and it reflects not the meanderings of the plot, but the slow syncing of the two themes.

...

Let's discuss and compare Life is Strange and Night in the Woods. They both have the same main character and a similarly laid-back approach to gameplay, so they're a good contrast. Since NitW is new, I put the NitW spoilers behind a spoiler block. You can skip them.

...

In Life is Strange, our main character has psychic powers. These help her to mask her social anxieties by allowing her to simply undo social interactions. Initially, her personal arc is about coping with or overcoming her social anxiety - perhaps with a highlight on the awkward fact that she's attracted to her childhood friend.

This arc is probably strong enough to sustain us through the whole game. Our B-plots each episode could easily integrate in. We can talk about Kate, who faces social execution due to a video of something that was not her fault. We could talk about Chloe, who has no 'social' because people keep leaving her and she's burning on a combination of deeply loyal raging and deeply bitter self-isolation.

These segments integrate well with our personal arc. Our worries about our own inadequacies and mistakes are shown as funhouse mirrors, blown out of proportion. Some segments are minor, like Victoria's cronies briefly admitting their own social worries. Some segments are major, lasting almost the whole game and providing a constant thematic companion - Chloe, in this case.

However, our personal arc doesn't require any superpowers. That story could be told with no superpowers at all.

The role of the superpowers is not to advance Max's arc. Max is responsible for advancing Max's arc. Instead, the superpowers are a mirror of Max's arc, showing in more concrete terms how Max is advancing, and giving us a simple tool to help tie other arcs to Max's own arcs. Think about it: if Max's powers reflect Max's place in her own arc, then naturally they'll be good at interacting with arcs that also reflect Max's place in her arc. Max's powers can be a needle and thread to stitch arcs together. They give us, as authors, a tool to make Max's arc feel palpable and clear.

Let's make it plain:

We start Max with the power to briefly rewind time, which we initially use mostly to let the player re-do awkward social moments. This gives us plenty of opportunities to cement both who Max is and who she wants to be. This basically represents Max's ability to consider other people, rather than just wallowing in herself: via retrying, she can consider how other people will react and plan her conversation accordingly.

That said, the limits are more important than the capabilities.

We can meddle with other people's lives, such as stepping in for Kate and Chloe. But we quickly learn that no matter what we say, there are things that can't be fixed with a few careful lines of dialog.

The arc of the powers reflects her own personal journey: she's just starting off, so she is pretty limited.

We slowly ramp up her powers to interacting with physical things. First with miraculous timing, then by being able to hold items while rewinding. In the real game, these are all mixed together... but we're talking about our own theoretical version, so we can separate things out.

This growing power reflects Max's interest in being better at peopling. The things she can't do with a snippet of dialog, she can do with physical objects.

It's very possible to use these powers to tie arcs to our current situation.

For example, the "Victoria on the stairs" puzzle, where she blocks our way until we pour paint on her. We can't convince Victoria with words, so we convince her with actions. In the game, this is one of the worst puzzles, since it makes so little sense, takes so long, and is immediately rendered pointless with another nonsense puzzle. But thematically, it's a good idea. A similar puzzle could have worked well.

For example, the Warren Gets Beat Up scene could have been replaced with a Making Warren An Accidental Badass scene. That would have felt awesome, and would have allowed us to take Warren down a self-destructive path for later use in a different arc.

If we really wanted to have it be a Victoria scene, why not have it be something that makes sense? Victoria's goons found Max's satchel, and are saying that nobody can be SURE whose satchel it is, and that they should probably go turn it in to the lost in found... in Pensacola.

Both of these puzzles are about situations dialog can't resolve. Both of them are about people who get things done beyond the reach of simple dialog, and about people who are also suffering from concerns dialog can't reach. In fact, we could get away with outright stating that as a throwaway line. Max sneaks up on Victoria and friends, hears them talk: "It's all just talk! If talking could solve everything, my mom wouldn't be in the hospital dying." Etc, etc.

This section of Max's arc could culminate in the second episode, when Kate tries to commit suicide. In canon, this situation is beyond Max's powers of time control, and represents a chance for Max to step up and personally resolve the situation without relying on "cheats" - proving that she no longer needs them. It represents Max closing the circle: dialog spoken from the heart is powerful enough to do what her carefully calculated superpower dialog could not do. Max has outgrown her powers.

In canon, Max's arc changes from social anxiety to heroism. More specifically, the theme becomes "how far will you go to stay with someone you love", which is also a very potent arc. I have no problem with this arc change, because it builds off of Max's earlier arc in an organic way and is completely believable.

Unfortunately, the arc doesn't follow through: the author clearly didn't think it out well enough, and the story devolves into a macabre serial killer dream. While the individual elements are written well, they don't thematically tie in with either of Max's arcs, and the whole thing falls apart. The finale does drag it back around, but only after hours of serial killer nonsense actively detracted from it.

That weird serial killer sequence? It was a twist that came out of nowhere.

It was foreshadowed, but it still felt awkward and forced, because the themes didn't line up.

Creating gameplay based on your theming is a powerful tool for a lot of reasons. First, it gives you a great lead: no matter what you're trying to do in the game world, you know how it should feel and what it should be about, so it's much easier to develop. Second, it draws the player in and keeps them in.

We can craft moments of triumph and pain that work within our arc - either our social anxiety or our heroism. Finding that Rachel died and watching Chloe crumple will gut us either way, but subtle highlights on Max's reaction will tell us whether Max is struggling to support Chloe or rescue Chloe. Those are very different feelings and players will pick up on it, especially as Max's subsequent actions struggle to do one of those things specifically. IE, are we trying to go back in time to rescue Rachel? How about to prevent Chloe from meeting Rachel? How about just supporting Chloe with hugs, pot, and ice cream? How about taking advantage of Chloe to bind her to you emotionally? All of these are valid paths which support different arcs in different ways, and develop Max in different, interesting directions.

Which direction you choose is guided by what path you want to take. And, at the end of the game, the ending sequence will be about resolving that mess.

The canon ending is: sacrifice the town for Chloe, or visa-versa?

However, there are other, equally powerful possible endings. For example: wipe yourself out of existence. Chloe's dad wasn't there cooking lunch for you, never died. Choose which of two or three Chloes is "real", and face down your nightmares of the other Chloes - it's even worse because they forgive you. Rewrite history so many times that there is no "real" Chloe, only your Frankenstein's Chloe made up of a hundred different pasts stamped together with superglue.

Those are all "heroism" endings, but there are just as many "social anxiety" endings. Solve Chloe's problems, or let her work through them? Leave Chloe straight, or just tweak reality slightly so she's your love interest? Etc, etc.

Knowing our goal allows us to build up a path towards it, choosing gameplay, puzzles, B-arcs, and supporting cast that highlight our journey. Usually this is about building up Max's vector until it is out of control, then simply pointing out that it's out of control.

I say "vector" deliberately. This isn't about letting Max use her power to stop a serial killer or whatever. That's not part of either of these personal arcs.

Technically, sure her powers are being used. But not in a way that reflects her personal journey. It's just out of desperation - and live-or-die desperation isn't part of her personal arc, not unless it's on someone else's behalf.

The serial killer arc could have worked if Chloe was the captured victim - Chloe ran off to check the grave without you, and she was gone when you arrived. It would have been interesting to let Max go off the rails trying to rescue Chloe from ever-earlier points in time, watching reality disintegrate.

But I still hold that a serial killer wasn't even needed. Max's powers are the serial killer. Jefferson's role could easily have been to narrate Max's fall from innocence in a much less murdery way, by simply being a smooth-talking pervert. This would have been useful in the part of Max's social anxiety arc where she learns that she can't really know someone by simply collecting their responses.

In the end, Max choosing whether to sacrifice Chloe or the town only makes sense if Max's arc is "Chloe and I will be together at all costs". And that can be established best by creating this universal, stitched-together flow.

That's the best kind of foreshadowing and layered storytelling to me. The two episodes spent on serial killer stuff weren't stitched in properly, and that was the game's clearest failing... despite the fact that it was technically both foreshadowed and layered.

What I'm saying is all of the B-arcs, puzzles, and twists should come out of their thematic connections to the core arc.

...

Now, how about Night in the Woods?

Night in the Woods is really good and the same length as Life is Strange, go play it instead of reading spoilers!

Well I loooove spoilers! Click here to spoil NitW!

Night in the Woods has the same main character, but instead of mild social anxiety, Mae clearly has something very wrong with her. It becomes clearer with every passing hour that there's something broken in her head and she should really be seeing a specialist.

Mae's personal arc is harder to set up than Max's. With Max, you start off knowing almost everything and can just walk alongside as she moves forward. With Mae, a lot of the power of the arc comes from you not knowing precisely what is going on, either with her or the story. This approach relies heavily on mystery to keep pulling the player forward, supported by brilliant dialog and incredible visuals.

Night in the Woods paces the arc out by using a number of B-plots which advance alongside you. You're technically allowed to choose which B-plots you want to engage with, but the constraints of the game mean you end up choosing almost all of them and only advancing a set distance down each. Aside from some minor constraints, this is the same as using a linear story, so let's consider it as such.

In practice, these B-plots are mostly getting to know people around town. From the central cast (like Bea, your oldest friend) to super-minor characters (sports fans drunkenly shouting catchphrases). In the first segment of time, Mae's homecoming feels like a homecoming, reconnecting with the locals and her childhood. In the second segment, things start to fall apart, in much the same way Mae fell apart. In the third segment, Mae is rescued by her friends and comes to terms with her personal issues. In theory.

In practice, the first two arcs are really solid and the third is very shaky.

The solid arcs are solid because all the supporting elements are solid. She comes home, and the only changes that are highlighted are the pointless ones - one snack shop became a different snack shop. Highschoolers are now slightly older highschoolers. Her best friends still hang out and have a crappy band, not made any less crappy by Mae's return.

The arc moves forward, and things start to fall apart for Mae. She's more socially awkward than ever, in fairly inexplicable ways. She's getting sick, tired, and having hallucinatory dreams.

This is supported by all the B arcs. She sees a ghost kidnap a kid. She finds a severed arm. The town council is refusing to let the pastor help the homeless. Bea is angry at her, and has a rough life. Gregg is happy to see her but is in the middle of leaving. Her mom pressures her until they get in a bitter fight. She finds there's a freaky cave under her house and her grandfather's family treasure was a human tooth ripped out of a still-living human's head. She raises and releases a swarm of rats. Everyone recommends she see a doctor. Oh, and her cop aunt has unsettling things to say.

All of these are "things are going awry" arcs, and they work well to give the story a strong forward thrust. Without this combined tide of supporting elements, the game would probably be unplayable, since in the second arc Mae is pretty unlikeable and her illness is largely inexplicable. These arcs provide the thrust needed to move into the redemption arc.

It's a mistake to just say "these arcs" and leave it at that.

It needs to be clear: these arcs are the meat of the game. They do give the game the thematic thrust to move forward, but that's backed up by brilliant dialog and exceptional art. The thematic match stitches all those elements together into a compelling whole rather than leaving them as beautiful but disjointed vignettes.

Unfortunately, it falls short in the third arc. It's not a bad experience, but the thematic matching disintegrates and we end up with something that... comes out of nowhere.

Well, literally and figuratively.

Mae's third arc is when she properly disintegrates under the pressure. None of her friends believe her, even though they see the same things she does. It becomes more clear that things are - physically and mentally - Not All Right with Mae.

Unfortunately, there aren't very many helpful B-arcs. Most of the B-arcs are closed, or stop matching up thematically. Only two really make sense to me: your second hangout with Horror Film Girl is a fairly powerful sequence where you talk about wanting to be monsters. Also, when you accompany Bea to a party, not only is it clear that Mae is Really Not OK, but it's clear that Bea is Really Not OK, Either, and you're Really Not OK Together. Nice reflections in both cases.

There are other scenes. For example, you investigate various ghost phenomena. However, this is where things really start to disintegrate.

These ghost locations make no sense. A small building with more elevators than rooms, and something chases you from elevator to elevator. If it was Mae on her own, it's easy to explain: she's delusional. But Gregg is with her, and sees the same things, so now the question becomes: what supernatural thing is happening? Why is the building like that? What is chasing them around, since nobody knew they were coming and nobody should know where they are in the building even if they did show up?

All of the ghost hunting events are like that. There is definitely something very real about Mae's concerns. This is a huge change in the direction of the story, since up until this point there was no sign of anything supernatural, and Mae's personal difficulties seemed to be the center stage.

It's possible to entangle Mae in supernatural affairs and have it work. You just need the supernatural affairs to properly synch up with Mae's personal affairs. In the same way that all the plots synched up in arcs 1 and 2.

But it doesn't synch up.

Out of nowhere, it turns out that Cthulhu lives in the basement and there's a cult of dads hurling bad children into a pit. Moreover, all of Mae's mental problems are because Cthulhu is talking to her.

There are two big problems with this.

One is that it's really not great. People can simply suffer from mental issues. It's allowed. You don't have to have a paranoid delusional prone to psychotic breaks be right. They can just be psychotic and delusional. It feels oddly disrespectful to learn that none of Mae's problems are actually Mae's problems and she can just... shrug out of them by yelling at Cthulhu.

This could have been viable if it were an attempt to represent something - like faith can help you through tough times, or the universe is too big and uncaring to worry about things too much. But if that was the intent, it wasn't done very clearly.

The other problem is more structural: it doesn't line up. There's no thematic continuity.

Let's consider this sentence:

"There's no hint of a cult or that supernatural things even exist in this universe until - bang, dad cult out of nowhere."

This is a common complaint I've been seeing, and it's valid. But it seems to me to be missing the point.

There is some foreshadowing of the evil dad cult and Cthulhu. The town council gives some hints, and the dreams give some hints. Especially the sphinx dream - it is clear foreshadowing.

But it's not very good foreshadowing. It's NG+shadowing.

The dadcult isn't a good match for Mae's personal journey. It brings it to a close, in that the dadcult and related dadgod nonsense caused her problems and killing them all solves them, but it's a particularly unconnected plot arc that doesn't line up with Mae's personal journey.

It could have worked. Mae is a screwed-up person trying to make a place for herself and those around her. The dadcult is screwed-up folks trying to make a place for themselves and those around them. Even the dadgod could easily have been portrayed as a screwed-up eldritch abomination trying to make a place for itself and those around it.

Think about it. The sphinx dream was all about how annoyed and grumpy the sphinx was. Why not have the sphinx complain about things like how ever since the rip in the sky opened, it's been hard to talk with the other gods, since they're still eternal and unchanging but now I've been bound to this stupid flowing stream of useless thoughts and dreams.

The dadcult needs stitches to bind it to Mae. Over the course of the game, the only stitching attempts were to show that a ghostly figure was following Mae around and being creepily near-supernatural. When we reach the dadcult proper, it's just "here's a huge data dump blaaarrrrpphhhglglele".

Rather than foreshadowing, it needed flat-out time. The dadcult needed to be revealed more slowly, so it could start to sync up.

Obviously, in our magical machine of make-believe, we can throw as much time and money at the project as we like, so let's pretend we arranged it a bit differently. Instead of discovering the dadcult during the third arc and having a fun time falling off cliffs and limping around, let's presume we find the dadcult at the end of the second arc.

Rather than just being told that the police didn't care and our parents didn't respond, we could have been allowed to talk to aunt cop in person and have her dismiss our concerns. This would have given us a lot of opportunity to bind the situations together.

How?

Mae's personal problems are weird and largely ineffable. She can't explain them, and they're destroying her life by making her unable to understand things everyone else takes for granted. We could show the cop having the same problem, or Mae's problem extending to the situation, or both. And then we could do some supernatural/psychotic break hinting.

Mae tells the cop there's a cult. The cop says it's hunters, and Mae should be more careful, not go wandering around in places she doesn't belong. When asked why there was a massive group of hunters wearing deer heads and shooting stuff before hunting season, the cop says it's a small town and sometimes the customs don't make a lot of sense. When pressured, the cop says she can't explain something she can't explain. There's a short pause, then the cop's visuals glitch out. She becomes just shapes. For a moment.

This would obviously be a very different progression. In this version, Mae's not so badly injured, if she's injured at all. So the pacing has to be redone to allow Mae to get injured in another cult event.

At this point, dadgod hasn't been introduced. If we want to introduce dadgod, we would need to show some flat-out supernatural shit. If we want dadgod to be responsible for Mae's problems, we'd need to set that up a lot earlier with a lot more pseudosupernatural powers.

There's a lot of space for that. "Nightmare eyes" Mae? Yeah, just give her literal nightmare eyes.

Personally, I'd prefer it without a dadgod. The cult is just a cult, Mae just has problems. I think the supernatural element is not necessary, although I do like the idea of dreaming of ancient gods. I like the idea of the gods in Mae's head reflecting her personal struggles. Talking to cryptic monsters is a good way to work through your own cryptic thoughts.

Anyway, I hope this didn't sound like whining. Night in the Woods is superlative, and will probably be remembered as a masterpiece. Although I felt the dadcult was rushed, the game remains excellent.

I just felt compelled to write about this concept, because it's the one thing Night in the Woods falters at in the end. They "foreshadowed" the dadcult, but that kind of foreshadowing just isn't what they needed.

They needed to stitch the dadcult themes to Mae's themes.

Just foreshadowing doesn't make something feel like it belongs.

Concrete Analogies

In films and novels, every element of the story generally exists to reinforce the story. This is so obvious that when you see something that doesn't lock into the narrative of the movie, you immediately think that the narrative is not what you thought it was.

But what's obvious to movies and books isn't so obvious to games.

Most games are thrown together out of genre standards and whatever sounds cool. The many elements of a Deus Ex game do not all support the personal journey of JC Denton or whoever the lead is. Instead, they struggle to create an immersive mood while providing gameplay. At best they support the same theme. Normally, not even that much.

For example, think of a typical RPG. Volcano level, ice level, forest level, village, town, capital city, etc, etc. Goblin, wolf, troll, fire elemental, thief, etc, etc.

But what's the actual story of the RPG? How does a volcano level support that story?

Typically, it doesn't. It's just a genre convention.

It could, though. Volcano levels have a lot of characteristics, any or all of them could match up. They're chokingly toxic and hot, bubbling with something deadly. It could represent a time when the main characters are bitter and rage-filled. It could represent the world's opinion of the main characters, at a time when they are being blamed for troubles. It could represent a journey into your bitter dreams, or into your hate-filled past. It could host a particularly sinister group of people, or represent the uncaring brutality of the planet itself.

Thinking like this is a bit different from simply trying to make an interesting volcano level. It requires you to understand the overall arc of the story and use the volcano level as a reinforcing element at the right time. But it should also give you a lot of ideas on how to make the volcano level suit your story even more.

For example, few RPGs have a cloud of ash, or a violent volcanic explosion, or toxic smoke. However, your story could benefit from these events. As a simple and heavy-handed example, if the main character's husband dies, a cloud of ash could envelop the whole village. The villagers could desperately plea for the main character's help, and going into the volcano filled with magma and toxic smoke could very easily represent the main character's grief mixed with the unending pull of duty. People are depending on you! Do your job even if you want to die!

There's nothing wrong with being heavy-handed, so that would probably be a pretty solid sequence.

Hopefully, you can clearly see how using the volcano level to support the main character's personal arc can strengthen the entire experience. Not only can it lead to stronger design, but it can also keep the player on target, feeling the right things at the right time. Just don't forget to let the player enjoy the game, too.

This kind of basic approach is really under-used. Devs don't tend to think like this, probably because genre conventions are so heavy in their mind. It may also be because game writing is rarely very sturdy early on, so devs are worried about having to completely change the story element to a level, or because of the difficulty of synching up so many level designers.

But, anyway, that's a really basic approach. Basically stealing straight from the movie industry.

Is that the best we can do?

Nope!

Video games are interactive. Our analogies can also be interactive.

The simplest example: that lava level represents our main character's struggle with her grief and sense of duty. But unlike a movie, we can play through this level. Each thing within the level can theoretically be tied into the story - every hallway, every enemy, every treasure, every puzzle.

This could be done very simply - each victory clears a point of grief or gives a point of duty. This is an iffy design since it's fundamentally going to push the player into completionist fits, but you can avoid that if you take some care when designing.

Instead, we could tie the various locations into memories the main character has. This could be done very obviously with flashbacks, but it can also be done subtly - the dungeon layout is identical to the town layout with monsters where the people were, etc.

We could also tie it to the real world in more concrete ways - people who know you and want to help show up over the course of the dungeon to pull you along or make things worse. Equipment shatters as you use it against the monsters, except perhaps the dagger your husband made.

There's almost an unlimited number of ways to embed the character arc not just into the concept of the volcano level, but into the challenges it contains. This can be done passively, to lure the player deeper into the arc. But it can also be done actively, giving the player some control over the outcome of the arc. Not necessarily the emotional outcome for the main character, but how it affects everyone around them.

Now let's talk about space ships.

Space ships are an extremely versatile thing in fiction. The play a lot of roles, but it's not unusual for a space ship to represent the overall arc of the movie or book. For example, Serenity from Firefly physically represents the characters' struggle for independence and life. It gets torn up or filled with compromises, but it still flies free.

Or it may represent the foundation of the series, like the Enterprise embodies all the ideals of the Federation in one tidy package. Or it could represent a mission even as it facilitates it, such as the makeshift shelter in The Martian.

Space ships are very flexible because they do so many things. They are vehicles, homes, cities, tribes, regiments, factories, workplaces, governments, and anything else they need to be - often several at once. Moreover, they are flexible because they are fundamentally made out of parts and the parts can be revealed or changed as the story demands.

From a game design perspective, space ships are also flexible because they can be created by the player or by the dev or any mix of the two. The player can be inside them, outside them, or embodying them. They can be working, broken, or need maintenance. They can be echoingly empty or packed with people. They can have a future and a past embodied in the state of their systems. They can have specific missions, or be built for a specific person's personal use. They can have distinct cultures, distinct puzzles, distinct costs, distinct payouts, distinct performance.

With all those things in mind, there's no reason we can't incorporate those elements into the stories we're trying to tell. Easy example, same as the volcano level example: the space ship falls apart as the main character's husband dies, and duty calls.

There are a lot of little things hidden in this idea. For example, a space ship that the player makes could play this role, in which case the specifics of the ship would vary wildly depending on the player. Which means the specifics of the arc the main character goes through would be different.

What if the player made a space ship that was too good, too self-repairing, too durable? When things go wrong for our PC, things don't really go wrong on the ship. This lack of an emotional resonance leads the player to underestimate the internal conflict of the PC, or leads the PC to have less internal conflict. Either way, this blunting would weaken the story. But we could make it so that if the ship doesn't echo the conflict well enough, the character doesn't recover from their trauma.

Or the other side of the spectrum: the ship is too badly designed and when it falls apart, everything falls apart forever.

We've been using a pretty dark and personal story for our examples, but there are lots of other stories. A space ship can just as easily represent wanderlust, or parenting, or your memories of a day at the beach, or the struggle to leave a mark on the world, or star-crossed lovers, or whatever.

In fact, the same ship can represent those things. Or, at least, ships built in the same game engine.

There's a lot of question in my mind as to how blatant this should be. I mentioned "grief and duty points", and that's one way to deal with it. But I think it's pretty easy to make it a bit more subtle.

Fundamentally, the components and experiences of the ship represent the emotions and interactions of the main story, whether that's personal or something bigger. It could simply be that stories only advance when there's an opportunity to advance it. IE, the main character stays in mourning until there are half a dozen opportunities to struggle through it using duty as a crutch, culminating in a dedicated final act. Your ship design, your chosen missions, and even how well you do on those missions could change when those opportunities arise.

Same for the others. Star-crossed lovers only advance by alternating between demonstrations of lovey-doveyness and star-crossedness, featuring the crew, the ship components, the missions the ship is on, the worlds the ship visits, etc.

The problem is how these arcs form. Generating stories is tough to make feel real.

Well, let's talk about that some other day.

Games Writing: Thematic Elements and Motifs

So, I've been playing a lot of games that get a lot of press. Most recently, I played Metal Gear Solid Five.

This essay's gonna be full of spoilers for it.

If you've ever taken lessons on writing books or movies, you've probably learned about themes and motifs. These repeating elements bind your work together and make it ring. Done well, they lead the audience straight into your premise and bind them to it before they've even noticed.

In video games, these are even more important. Not only are they more effective, but they are also more easily applied than other writing elements since they can be worked into any part of the game, including both cut scenes and raw gameplay.

Let's talk concrete a bit. Let's do some MGSV spoiling!

One of the motifs of MGSV is the idea of being ripped apart but having to live on. Missing limbs, missing voices, missing pasts, missing futures. This motif is so prevalent it's literally the title of the game: "The Phantom Pain" refers to the main character's missing arm and, through it, all of the other linked elements in the motif.

The motif isn't used as well as it could be. It's really only brought up right at the beginning and then again in Skull Face's final scenes. It could have been a lot stronger by linking it into the many times pain or loss is brought up. The child soldiers lost their families and that pain pushed them into a life of murder and violence... why not frame it as a lingering pain? Why not link it to Big Boss's missing arm with a simple camera pan?

These seem like small things, but they really aren't. Having good motifs and themes will make your story resonate for a lot longer. Like a trumpet, you need to have a funnel of themes for the player to breathe through, and then the note will ring out loud and clear.

I kept playing MGSV in hope that they would pull it together, but they never did. Kojima was, as usual, focused almost entirely on flash and glamour instead of the underlying power of the story. In the end, the plot was a muddled mess.

How could themes have helped? How could motifs have brought it together? What was wrong with the writing in what most people consider a gem of a game?

Well, let's consider the revenge element. This is a theme that rings pretty clear, it's brought up a lot. I don't consider it very convincing, though: there was never really any time I felt "in tune" with the main cast's lust for vengeance.

That could have been helped by some pretty subtle changes to the game itself. For example, instead of the utterly useless chicken hat that they keep trying to force onto you when you fail a mission, they could have marked your murderer and made it very hard for him, in particular, to spot you. And it could stack - if you are killed by 10 different people in this level, 10 people are now a bit blind.

This would be more universally useful than the chicken hat, but it would also push the player towards taking vengeance. Not only are they angry at the jerk that murdered them, they know that person is now weaker and open to retribution... or at least open to being snuck past.

There are a lot of other vengeance-related gameplay things you could have done - for example, causing me to actually lose any of the NPCs I cared about would have worked. But that doesn't happen until the heart of the vengeance arc is complete.

There's no doubt that the vengeance arc is the strongest arc in the game. The intention with this theme is to show that everyone's actions descend from a deep rage, a lust for vengeance. It could have been addressed clearer, but the basic idea is extremely solid.

And it has an extremely powerful ending. Themes and motifs are intense, and can be used to build up a finale that leaves a hell of an impact. If you do it right, people will remember your story for decades. It'll stay in their head.

In MGSV, the vengeance arc comes to a head with the death of Skull Face. Injured and trapped by debris, Skull Face is at the mercy of the two main characters, both of whom have lost limbs to his schemes. Instead of killing him, they blow those limbs off of him, then tell him to kill himself if he wants, and walk away.

It's a hard-to-watch scene and a dark note, but then the stupid engineer nobody likes simply goes over and shoots him. Then goes "yay! I got vengeance!"

This would have been the perfect ending, if it had been paced a little better. Two people obsessed with their deep, decade-long fury set up their brutal plan for vengeance... and then some little shit with a small, recent grudge ruins it to take vengeance himself.

That could have been perfect, turning the whole concept of vengeance into a sour note, a farce. It would have been subtle, understated, and heavy. Like a trumpet, one of the best ways to use a theme in the end is to have it ring hollow.

But that's not what MGSV does. It doesn't pace it right, it doesn't hit it cleanly, and then it immediately sweeps away to a long set of interminable speeches that have almost nothing to do with vengeance. Even if they were about vengeance, they're filling a gap - a hollow, ringing space that needs to remain empty. The trumpet turns into a whimper when you fill the bell with glitter.

You can argue that the "real ending" of MGSV is better and not flubbed, but just as an example, this is how you would have turned the vengeance theme into a powerful ending.

The difficulty is that you really have to trust that empty space. The themes and motifs don't need your help, they need space. The player has to have time to digest it and let it grow. But once it does, it will stay with them forever.

Bioshock Infinite is another example of a badly flubbed ending, but in BI's case it was all done subconsciously. Say what I like about Kojima's lack of depth, he at least uses his themes consciously. Levine does not.

As I was playing BI and getting steadily more annoyed, I started to suspect the themes were used consciously, and the touch was just incredibly subtle. Of course, that wasn't the case, and BI's plot ended up being trash.

What themes?

It's clear that BI was written by dads, and the trashy plot progression seemed to be leading to one hell of a powerful ending: DeWitt had to learn to let his daughter go, let her be her own person, maybe even kill himself to save her from his own endless meddling.

All of the game's muddy and backtracky plot elements - all the racism, all the sexism, all the old friends you have to kill, the other me, the past me, the future me, the alternate daughters that have all suffered at my hands - all of that would suddenly shine and shout if it turns out that the problem is just me. It's all... me fucking it up. Me judging it by my own biases. Me acting to protect and control, only to end up poisoning everything because my grip is too damn tight.

I know some people liked the faux-philosophical ending of BI, and I won't say you're a bad person for it, but it doesn't hook into the themes and motifs set up during the play. And the reason is because Levine didn't realize he was including themes of being an oppressive daddy figure. He just... is one. It bled in naturally, mixed with the natural juices of murderous first-person gameplay, and turned into a truly noxious mix.

It doesn't cost anything to get an ending right. It's actually cheaper, because you don't need another fifteen minutes of pomp and glitter. Just a slow pan across a scene you already built.

But it takes an enormous amount of trust in yourself, in your writing, in your editing. It takes a lot of convincing to tell yourself "the game should just... end here. I don't need to make a long speech. I don't need to set up the next game. I don't need to do anything. I can just... hold here for ten seconds and roll credits."

There are plenty of movies and books that do just that. For example, Fight Club. Fight club's ending is probably still in your head. You probably remember it even now, the self-inflicted gunshot, the burning city.

But in games it's super rare. Games are too nervous to let things sit, to let things ring on their own. Devs want to fill that space, and in the end it just muddies things up and leaves the endings tasting of sawdust.

What's the last game ENDING you remember?

I bet you remember a lot of middles! But the endings?

...

Anyway, this essay was just written immediately before bed, no editing. I hope you enjoyed it anyway, let me know what you think.

Star Wars Review

Finally saw Star Wars. This will be me talking about it, because I'm sure everyone wants to hear my opinions!

Well, they might be a bit unusual.

First, though: spoilers ahead!

All the spoilers.

...

Force Awakens is by far the best film JJ Abram's ever put out. The movie is... not bad. The DP is great, the effects are mostly great, the actors are mostly pretty good, the sets are great, the music was fitting, and the directing has been carefully cut into pieces and arranged to be as unbad as could reasonably be managed. The writing is awful, but in an inoffensive way.

It is radically better than I expected, which is nice. It is... not bad.

Now, let's talk about some thematic stuff, because this is where the movie interests me most. Obviously, any thematic stuff is in here on accident or because JJ Abrams saw the cover for a book or something, but there's still some meat here.

First, the villain. I like him.

Now, let's be clear. The guy is a doofus. He's a pale shadow of Darth Vader. But that's the point! That's great! There's no way for a new dragon to step into Vader's shoes, and this is an open, in-world admission of that. I like the fact that the mask makes him look vaguely intimidating, but he's a snot-faced kid inside. I think that's fantastic. It fits in-universe as a scared boy stepping into radically outsized shoes, and it fits in the metafilm as an admission that nobody's gonna match Vader, and it fits in the mythology of the Force: villainy isn't born from strength.

I like the overall arc of him killing his father, and his father basically letting him do it. I think the progression was bad, the dialog was incredibly overweight, and the moment-to-moment writing/directing was pretty abominable, but the overall arc is fantastic. The idea that a scared kid needs to kill his father to prove himself, and his father just lets him? That's powerful. That's good.

Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to build a villain up from "scared little kid". It takes a lot of screen time to grow up, and they aren't going to give this kid that amount of screen time. So he's never likely to feel like a real threat. It's easier to work backwards: show a badass, reveal he was a scared little kid. Because of that, I don't think this villain will ever really work. This is especially true since they gave the heroes a massive power boost and brought them up to his level already, meaning that he has to grow substantially faster than the heroes, but with a fraction of the screentime.

...

The overall concept of the movie was good. JJ Abrams is no good, and everyone knows it. Forcing him to recreate the original Star Wars movie is a great way to keep him pinned and reasonable, and then you can rely on editors to save the film. A tried and true Star Wars approach.

Unfortunately, it doesn't make much sense. It undoes the original trilogy, and nobody in-world has any explanations or concerns about how it happened.

I understand that Disney needed to use their existing actors before they die of age, and that Disney needed to make a "return to Star Wars classic" movie. But I just can't accept this nonsense setting. You have to reaaaaally stretch to explain it, and even if you do, it ends with "and that means the original trilogy basically accomplished nothing."

The big bad is awful, just the least interesting villain I've ever seen. Clearly they just wanted the Emperor again, but it's really dull. It's made worse because it makes no sense. Where did this ultimate big bad come from? Everyone talks about him as if he's always been around, but that again degrades the original trilogy.

It's a very "Dragonball Z" plotline.

Now, I think it would be really interesting if the villain turns out to be making Kylo suck on purpose. The idea of training a Sith lord wrong in order to bring his fear and anger to a peak, then fixing the mistakes... is an interesting one. I don't think that's what's in store, but it could have been an interesting idea. Still, the villain is nonsense.

"But where are they supposed to find a villain if-"

Uh? Exar Kun? The backstory could have been "Kylo Ren was in training, stumbled across a Sith holocron, and OH SHIIIIIIIII"

I think that could have been equally compelling. And there's a lot of cool reveals built into that. For example: Kylo Ren keeps asking for guidance from a hologram. Then it's revealed it's just the holocron, and he's just searching it. There is no super villain Emperor equivalent: everyone just thinks there is, because Kylo keeps bringing them in to see this really intimidating holocron. And it's really good at administration: they ask it what to do, and the computer spits out an optimal answer. Everyone thinks it's a real person - maybe even Kylo.

This would be an amazing way to instantly level him up, a real Bates Motel moment. We go from thinking "how is this Sith Lord so bad at everything" to "HOLY SHIT HE'S HELD THE WHOLE EMPIRE TOGETHER WITH THE POWER OF HIS DELUSION!"

Look, if we're gonna talk about movies that Could Have Been, let's talk about the nonsense map. Of the many things in this movie that didn't hold up, this was a biggie. So, here's a simple alternative:

Luke's teachings failed, and Kylo was seduced by the dark side of the Force. Everyone was killed. So Luke goes in search of the original temple to try and find clues as to how to teach better. Fine, great. The original temple is in the galactic core. Nobody can get in safely without a map. Luke left R2-D2 behind as an anchor, to help keep him oriented and to "catch" his messages. R2 has spit out a number of map fragments over the past decade or so, but rather than saying "we can't pick out these stars", they say "we know which stars they are, but we can only get this far. We need the map for the black holes deeper in to get any further."

And BB8 holds the first piece. The one that just gets you started. The rest is already complete.

This offers a lot of cool ideas. Diving through stellar debris. The Empire - oops, 'Order' - trying to brute-force find a path by sacrificing ships. Our Jedi-to-be having to feel her way through an area that's drifted since Luke went through, using the same techniques he used. This is a good, concrete-but-not-blatant "following in his footsteps" analog.

Look, the movie could have been a lot of things. Thousands of people have given their suggestions on what the movie should have been or how it could have been made better. Adding mine to the stack is no big thing, but I did want to say one more thing:

This is the first sci fi movie in a while that made me want to write my own stuff. Not fanfic, but things with some of the same themes, or pieces inspired by the holes in this movie.

That makes this at least a successful sci fi film. I know the director is worthless and any new ideas were included on accident, but at least I was inspired.

Come on let's twist again!

Let's talk about twists. If you want to know what caused this essay, watch minute 22 of this video, but there are mild SOMA spoilers.

I have a lot of experience with twists. There are times when I've had to pull a twist on two dozen people working together, all spending more time with the world than I spent creating it.

So let me tell you: the quality of the twist is not what matters. What matters is where the twist is.

A lot of people try to outsmart their audience, put in a twist they'll never be able to figure out. Hell, maybe SOMA does that in the end. But that's the wrong approach, because it's in the wrong place. It's like saying you're going to build a bigger and better boat to sail across the Himalayas.

The point of a twist is to shatter ground the audience thinks is solid, not to shatter something that the audience already thinks is broken. If the audience is struggling to figure things out, a twist isn't going to have much impact, because it's not a twist. It's just another piece of the puzzle.

For example, if I write a story where the main character doesn't know who her father is, the audience will naturally consider each vaguely right-aged man in the story. If I drop hints about who her father is, they'll figure it out immediately. If I drop misleading clues, they'll feel annoyed that they were misled. No matter who the father ends up being, it's not really a very good twist because the audience is already on their toes searching for that mystery.

On the other hand, Star Wars has a very pedestrian "Luke, I am your father" twist. It's a bit too spoilered to still have the impact it had back then, but it had a fair amount of impact.

Nobody in the audience was thinking about Luke's father much. They thought they knew Luke and Vader's relationship. So the twist shattered that understanding and worked well.

You don't need a complex twist. You need a well-placed twist, to shatter things the audience thinks they understand.

This is especially important in science fiction stories, because magic science widgets are inherently unstable. Introducing a concept like warp drive or cloning automatically makes the audience grapple for a pattern and struggle to extrapolate. They are reaching out for everything they can find, and a twist won't even make them blink. They'll just be happy they found another piece of the puzzle.

That is, if you mention clones or androids in your story, the audience will automatically consider whether any given person might be a clone or android. If you mention psychic powers, the audience will search for things that might be psychic. If your twist is related to a sci fi concept, it's not a twist because the audience will never be on truly solid ground.

That's why worthwhile sci fi tends to fall into a few categories:

1) Extrapolations
Extrapolate faster than the audience, and you can leave them amazed at the wonders your story holds. In order to do this, you'll need a new concept or a new take on a concept, since if the audience has seen it before, they'll have extrapolated it before. A good example of this is the Foundation series.

2) The Human Twist
The most reliable way to put a twist into a sci fi story is to put the twist on the human side rather than the sci fi side. This is why nearly every sci fi story reveals that a person is something they don't appear to be. A robot, a time traveler, the inventor of space dust, a double agent, etc.

The audience will feel more comfortable with the human side of your story than the sci fi side, and they'll usually stop looking for human-side twists. Sci fi stories can get away with human-side twists more easily than other genres specifically because the audience will be focused on the razzle-dazzle magic science half of the story.

But be careful about revealing that someone is actually a robot, because that's been done. A lot.

3) The Thematic Twist
Another popular way to put a twist into a sci fi story is to set it up with a stinger that changes the audience's perspective. A very common, trashy way to do this is to reveal that your far-future space opera is actually in the past and now the heroes have just become Adam and Eve. It's a good example, I guess, but it's really overdone.

A razor-sharp twist at the end of the story can reframe the entire story and leave it lodged in your mind for a long, long time. However, this is extremely difficult to do. If the audience can guess the twist, it won't work, and if the audience thinks the twist is an ass-pull, it won't work. The only way to pull this off is to have a twist which fits into the theme of the world rather than the logic of the world.

A good example of this might be the Ghost in the Shell story where pleasure bots start going ballistic and the team has to figure out why. Rather than a terrorist, it turns out that the bots were being sabotaged by corporate slaves that desperately wanted a rescue. There's not much in the story to help you "predict" that, but it's not a murder mystery, so that's fine. The theme of GitS supports this kind of story, and therefore it doesn't feel like an ass-pull.

I do not recommend aiming for thematic twists unless your world has a very strong theme.

4) Muddy Themes
A lot of sci fi stories are built around a "moral". For example, during the sixties every sci fi movie had the moral "scientists shouldn't tamper in god's domain". However, sci fi with a moral is typically excruciatingly bad.

Instead, consider thematic mud. Not only is it easier to write, it's also easier to watch.

See, thematic mud doesn't have to be something that is foreshadowed or deeply rooted. All you need to do is cast light on different sides of the story, or on things outside the main story line that are affected by the main story. This casts mud into an otherwise straightforward experience.

For example, the original Alien movie wasn't simply "alien kills humans". The theme was muddied by a corporation trying to sacrifice the crew and an android betrayal. This became a staple of the Aliens universe, and is a big reason it remains so popular: the muddy themes give it a much wider story space than a universe where all the humans are always heroes and all the aliens are simply villains.

Obviously, this is pretty common. The original Frankenstein novel shows the monster in a sympathetic light. Vader's depth comes from knowing he is Luke's father. Nearly every hero is written flawed so we can feel this same muddy sense.

By spraying a bit of mud into the theme, you can engage the audience more and create a better environment for fanfiction.

5) Justifications
Create a world (typically a terrifying one). As the people within the world become more and more desperate, the audience will become more and more assured that they understand what is going on, although they may not understand why. Then you introduce a justification which gives the in-world characters some concrete direction and flips the audience's understanding upside-down.

For example, a more memorable Star Trek episode is the one where Crusher is watching the Enterprise slowly shrink. People are vanishing, and eventually it's just her in a race against a collapsing universe. There is no foreshadowing of the twist - the authors didn't go "oh, hey let's go into WARP hey there was a bit of a WARPY WARP WARP malfunction in the WARP BUBBLE which you know COLLAPSES SLOWLY after you WARPY WARP but everything is oooookay".

Instead, they just let the tension rise, let the audience get comfortable with the world, and then revealed that it was a warp jump malfunction. They didn't need to outsmart the audience, or leave bread crumbs so the audience could figure it out. It's not a murder mystery. They just waited patiently for the right time, then let Crusher discover the justification for her adventure.

This gave Crusher something to grab, and the episode launches into a pretty tense race against a disappearing universe. The audience, now understanding that this is a warp drive malfunction, immediately begins thinking in the same way as Crusher: "What do we do to get out of this? Can we restart the warp core? What is the solution!" And the pacing of the final race is such that Crusher discovers ideas at roughly the same speed as the audience, similar to an extrapolation sci fi story on fast-forward.

It doesn't matter that it's basically nonsense, or that the phenomena is never brought up again. The pacing is fast enough to keep the general audience from being able to think that deeply.

Justifications are extremely common. Nearly every sci fi horror story is a justification story. The trick to remember is that your reveal switches your story from whatever it was to a race to extrapolate faster than the audience.

For example, in the Thing, the justification is revealed pretty early. The extrapolation is incredibly dense, though, because of the nature of the challenge. Therefore, an hour can be spent on stretching that extrapolation out just like a murder mystery, and at the end you may still be left with questions!

Terminator is similar, except that instead of a murder mystery it's an action movie. The movie continually reveals new powers for the Terminator, but each power makes perfect sense: the movie extrapolates what a robot from the future would be able to do, just a little faster than the audience will probably manage. Yeah, future robot can see better than we can. Survive getting hit by a car. Has metal underneath his skin. Can remove and repair his eye. Can imitate a voice. Terminator 2 is exactly the same technique, but with a more advanced robot that can be extrapolated with more breadth.

SOMA was likely trying to fall into this category, but they attempted to foreshadow their "twist". The problem is: it's not a twist. It's a justification. They needed to reveal it when the player started to feel comfortable with the rules of their situation. Then they needed to launch into a series of extrapolations where they reveal more and more of the things the justification can do to the world.

...

That's my thinking on twists.

"Tough Moral Choices"

These days, every RPG pitch is exactly the same. A grim, dark world where death waits around every corner, every decision could be your last! Face tough moral choices in this epic fantasy adventure with four hundred hours of gameplay!

OK, all of those pitch elements are bad. Briefly:

We can tell how grimdark your setting is from your art samples, sell us on something unique.

We can tell how epicfantasy your setting is from your art samples, sell us on something unique.

Tell me what in your game supports hundreds of hours of play, because hundreds of hours of empty fetch quests is what I assume.

Death and deadly decisions mean nothing, because we can save and load pretty easily. Also, it's bad gameplay to kill the player off for choosing poorly: don't offer a choice if one of the options is just flat-out wrong.

But by far the most egregious of these claims is the idea of "tough moral choices".

This is an incredible combination of poor gameplay, poor writing, and avoiding responsibility for the content of the game you're making.

First: poor gameplay.

Choosing between a few canned options is extremely dull gameplay. This is especially true in modern games, where unique characters are expensive to make and full voice acting makes every line expensive.

In older games, you would usually be presented with "moral choices", but the game rarely judged what you did. For example, in Fallout 2 there was a string of events where you could sleep with a farmer's daughter, then be pressured into marrying her and taking her with you. The game doesn't really care what you choose to do, it simply gives you a variety of choices, many of which are based on the core game features (gunplay or stat/skill tests) rather than being strictly canned dialog.

It isn't expected that you'll have the farmer's daughter in your party. But she was very cheap to create: her graphics are (I think) identical to other NPCs, and her dialog is very limited. That was acceptable, because it was true of all the party members. If she is in your party, there's a lot of things you can do with/about her, all due to the in-world mechanics of how party members are handled.

But today, it'd be a huge deal - you've got to give her a 10,000 polygon face and 8 hours of voice acting and an interesting back story because she's a party member! You've got to make sure that every player gets her on their team or you're wasting that cash!

Basically, "tough moral choices" are poor gameplay because choices are poor gameplay. "Tough moral gameplay" is a better thought: players should be able to make their moral choices through core gameplay, or should have direct core gameplay intertwined with them. Not small loot rewards or people liking them more - that's not core gameplay.

Second: Poor writing.

When you start every scenario thinking "what's the good, neutral, and evil path?" you end up with an extremely dull, repetitive set of quests where the player always chooses the same path.

This sabotages your writing in a lot of ways. Firstly, it makes you create canned paths through every scenario. This sabotages the tension and uniqueness of the scenarios, and it's deeply wrongheaded. The biggest thing you need to understand is that the player chose to enter a scenario, and that is a big clue as to what they want to accomplish.

For example, there's a mugging. The player steps in. You immediately know you don't need the neutral or evil paths. Nobody neutral would step in, and nobody evil would step in just to make it worse. That's nonsense.

Do you hear me, Bioware: not even a Sith would step into a robbery just because they wanted to make the situation worse!

It's easy to write a situation such that you know what a player is trying to accomplish when they step into it. If the situation does have good and bad paths, rather than offering a popup choice, make the points of entry different: if the player talks to the nice people, he's obviously trying to help the nice people, and if he talks to the baddies, he's an asshole. You can even make the context command for starting the sidequest literally pop up your goal before you hit the button: "Press A: Try to intervene".

Once you have gotten the player to commit to a "want", you have a fulcrum. You know what the player wants, so you can simply offer him different ways to get it - many of which can be integrated into the core gameplay. Are you going to try to talk the robbers into leaving? Bribe them into leaving? Threaten them? Kill them? Hypnotize them? Bluff them? Grab the victim's hand and run? These are all much better role play options than "make the robbery worse because you're a really bored cartoon villain".

Of course, this thinking can also go awry. When you come up with canned paths based on gameplay, they can end up serving the same purpose and causing the same damage as your ethical choices. Every scenario must have a warrior, rogue, and wizard path? Just as bad.

And the same solution applies. If your player waltzes up to a wizardy challenge, they are choosing the wizard path before they even see a dialog box.

These things can even be automatically generated. Can you imagine how much more interesting algorithmic quests would be if you could enter them in several different ways, each of which represented a different moral or gameplay approach?

Third: Poor authorship

Perhaps the biggest problem I have with the "moral choices" thing is that it is a cheap copout that lets you avoid putting anything of value into your writing.

When you try to brainstorm for all the things a player might do in a situation, you are throwing away your authorial intent. You can't say anything if you need to say everything.

If you want the player to be able to do anything, give them gameplay options to do that. I wasn't faced with a "steal?" popup box in Oblivion or Skyrim. Instead, I was just permitted to steal. And, since it was integrated with the game world and other mechanics, I could come up with a lot of different schemes. Wait until night, or sneak behind them, or lure them out of the room then dash back in, or put a basket over their head - lots of options. And the game didn't judge me much, aside from small mechanical considerations like not being able to sell stolen goods (even in another town?!) and sometimes having the target hate me afterwards (even if they never saw me?!)

Although neither of those games has much authorial intent in it, the ethical options are nicely integrated into the play of the game rather than limited to popup boxes.

Games that offer both freedom and authorial intent are hard to come by. Planescape: Torment is a good example, as is Grand Theft Auto Anyofthem. These are games where the developers had something they wanted to say. Maybe it was worth hearing, maybe it wasn't, but they got it across by saturating the game in character. The world is full of interesting things that have some kind of impact, not generic doodads and setpieces. The characters all have personalities and act according to those personalities.

The interactions with the world echo with the authors' intents - in Planescape you can hear thoughts about the hollowness of the world and the struggle to live here anyway. In GTA you can hear thoughts about worthless bro culture vomit.

Anyway, the point is that these games let the authorial intent shine through most of the time, and the games are renowned because of it. The "moral options" within these games are largely couched inside the gameplay and progression, and the game doesn't judge you much when you delve into them.

So what do we do?

If you want moral play in your games, I recommend putting moral play in your games.

A good, easy example of this is the new Fallout Shelter mobile game. The game allows you to control the lives of a lot of people, and you have a lot of options as to what to do with them. A lot of players create outrageous vaults full of bizarre immoral stuff, but the game doesn't judge them much. Most players probably have relatively 'normal' vault cultures, but they still make a lot of moral choices about how things need to unfold. For example, who has to stand guard, who gets to train up, who gets to have kids, and so on.

Now, no game is a blank slate. The mechanics of Fallout Shelter radically tilt the kinds of cultures players are likely to express. For example, anyone can train up to max stats in about the same time, but children do not really inherit much of the stats of their parents. This means that there's no point in breeding for stats. But, contrarily, children do inherit their parent's appearances, so there's a lot of pressure to breed for appearances.

I don't know whether Fallout Shelter's devs thought of these pressures when they designed the game, but the result is very different that an alternative would be. Say, if only children could be trained to increase stats, and children inherited the adult stats of their parents. Then there would be a situation where every generation was better than the one before it, and bloodlines would be extremely important. Would it be better? Worse? It'd be different, for sure.

Diving straight into eugenics is a powerful example, and I kind of went for the jugular. Few things are as morally sensitive as "breeding humans", but it is exactly what Fallout Shelter is about. I think a more careful game could have been made to teach the dangers of that kind of thinking - without compromising the open play. Having mechanics that emerge from eugenic practices would not interfere with the player's freedom, but it would make them think twice about exercising too much control over people's personal lives.

And, of course, Fallout Shelter has a lot of moral constraints built into it. Children and pregnant women are invulnerable to hazards. Nobody ever gets sick, or angry, or dissatisfied with their life. Nobody needs to rest. Nobody ages. And nobody dies without your permission.

The point is this: your "moral choices" are better off as "moral gameplay". By allowing your player to affect NPCs in ways that cause emergent behavior, you can allow your players a lot of freedom without compromising your authorial intent or writing. You can express yourself more clearly, because you can embed your authorial intent in the rules of the game!

You may have to let go of some of your railroad, though. Linear main quests never survive an encounter with an experimental player.

But, uh... linear main quests suck, so that's fine by me!

How to Sci Fi

Using "deep sci fi" elements makes your stories more powerful, more memorable, and more easy to write. I think the only reason people avoid using deep sci fi in their games and comics is because they've never really known a good way to do it. So.

Deep sci fi. By the numbers.

What is Deep Sci Fi

A huge numbers of games and comics use sci fi trappings. Robots, cybernetics, space ships. And that's fine. Those are fun.

Deep sci fi is what gave science fiction its original staying power. It's what created those sci fi trappings. And it's pretty easy to tap for your own purposes!

Fundamentally, sci fi is about people living in very unusual situations. Sometimes those situations might be completely fanciful. Other times, those situations reflect a piece of our culture, refined and amplified. Normally, the latter is considered more powerful, and sci fi trappings are built specifically to allow us to easily move our current society into a future where pieces of it can be examined individually.

For example, the concept of robots and androids are a powerful way to discuss race, immigration, economy, and the nature of work. Space ships can offer some similar discussions on other concepts, but are more about allowing us to easily compartmentalize our world - we can simply say that all the pieces of our culture we don't want to examine are someplace other than the space ship.

These tools allow us to quickly and easily put people into compelling situations.

Deep sci fi is about exploring what those lives are like. It is about exploring the limits of the human condition by putting humans in weird conditions.

Setting Up Sci Fi

At this stage, you probably have some idea about the kind of sci fi world you want to build. Is it some kind of cyborgs-in-cities adventure, like Deus Ex? Is it a tale of huge starships at war? Or a small crew of people trapped on the moon? Or engineered monsters fighting against fridge-wearing supersoldiers?

Even if you aren't thinking in terms of deep sci fi, those seeds already exist. When you choose the kind of situation you want your audience to experience, you have already chosen a deep sci fi topic. You just need to make it clear to yourself.

There's no need to be clever or unique or savvy. Just find what you're focusing on.

In a world like Deus Ex, where the people have become cyborgs and work for huge corporations, you're probably trying to focus on the nature of the daily grind and how people coexist with large corporations. This sounds like an overly simple foundation for the sprawling, epic gun-adventure you might want to build, but it provides a strong foundation for your writing.

Understanding that this is about how people coexist with large corporations allows you to easily build your key characters by simply designating them as in different kinds of relationships with the corporation and having different kinds of reactions to that.

Your main character is bound to the corporation not wholly by choice, having signed a contract that brought her in deeper than she thought. Now she finds herself a tool of the corporation in a literal sense, flesh replaced by mechanisms.

Then keep up the brainstorming.

Another character is bound in the same way, but the corporation saved their life and they are happy with the situation. Another character is seemingly bound to the corporation, but has such a high rank that it is her tool rather than the other way around. Another person is a chair on the corporate board but has no implants and is not bound to it. Another is working on implants and is bound to the corporation through high-security zones and reams of red tape rather than required maintenance. Others are not bound to corporation, and find themselves struggling to stay unfettered in a world where corporations are almost a requirement to get work, health care, money. And yet others are bound to the corporation by their need for maintenance, but do not work for the corporation - wealthy ones that can afford the best, poor ones that suffer greatly when they fail to make this month's payments, and ones that are bound up in the system and are "covered"... as long as they can keep their job, which is strongly pushing for them to turn themselves into tools and therefore be bound ever more deeply...

These simple relationships aren't hard to brainstorm. While some of the scenario is written into these assumptions - for example, we're assuming the corporation is not terribly ethical - there is no "plot" here. But you can already see how the plot might evolve as these characters and their activities bounce into each other. Each character is also written as a shadow of a character. We don't know exactly what their job is, or exactly what their feelings are. Those things, too, will evolve when things start to move.

You can easily repeat this process for every kind of setting you might be interested in.

Are you making an epic space military game, something like Homeworld or Mechwarrior? You're probably exploring the nature of war, or examining pieces of our current militaries. There's a lot of easy characters there, as well. Simply defining someone as "an admiral" is already more meaningful than before, because you know this is an admiral that exists to help explore the nature of war. So you know that, in the end, he's going to weigh in on topics like civilian casualties, the weight of soldier's lives, and how politics/money enters the equation. He's not simply going to be "good" or "bad". He's not simply going to come up with masterful strategies. He has more important things to talk about as well.

All of these kinds of thoughts do come with a price tag.

They make your writing easier, more compelling, and more memorable... but they do require you to show some opinions. You don't need to try to hammer your opinions home - that'd be counterproductive - but your opinions will naturally shine through. You might think this is problematic, but take a look at the best selling big games. They tend to have opinions. It's okay. You're allowed to reveal some part of yourself through your art. It's kind of what makes it art.

Building With Sci Fi

Well, you're brainstorming your setting. You're thinking about writing standards. What's your first act? Your second? What's the twist? What's the arc? What's the-

Stop!

The thing about formulas is that they exist for the same reason we're developing right now. Formulas and scaffolds allow you to direct your efforts effectively, and write efficiently. It's hard to follow two formulas at once, so let's talk about a sci fi formula in specific.

The point is to give your story enough structure to make it compelling. We're not about ticking checkboxes - this won't make your story formulaic.

Finding Peace

Deep sci fi starts when someone is not at peace, and ends when they are. It doesn't matter whether it's a 1000-page book or a half-hour episode of an endless series. The easiest way to show how someone lives in a strange situation is to show them struggling to live in a strange situation. This is structurally similar to a heroes' journey, but it's easier to think of it in this way.

In Blade Runner, Deckard is called back to work for his old bosses. His peace is disturbed and he is sent out to do something dangerous and annoying. At the end of the movie, Deckard runs off with a beautiful robot, at peace with his choice and with the short time they will have together.

It's an extremely simple arc. Does Deckard "learn" anything? Does he change? Does he grow?

Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn't really matter: sci fi is not about the people growing or changing. It's about them living.

In Star Trek, every episode is about something disturbing the peace of the Enterprise - an SOS, a space wedgie, a sudden vacation, a nightmare, a warship. At the end of the episode, peace is achieved. In most episodes, twin arcs are used - an "A" and "B" plot, each of which is about striving for resolution in its own way.

In a cyborg game like Deus Ex, your peace is disturbed when you find yourself beholden to the corporation. What are some potential resolutions?

This is the easy part. Because sci fi is about exploring the human condition, "peace" is all about the kinds of peace people actually find. And there's not many options.

Death, falling, passing the torch, gaining a family, taking on an important job, or returning to old habits are the most common options.

In our cyborg game, death would mean the main character sacrifices herself or decides to leave the corporation even though she will die without its maintenance. Falling would be continuing to work for the corporation, or getting promoted. Passing the torch might be if she retires but a child she saved takes over. Gaining a family would be if she finds someone to love, adopts a kid, or remembers who her family was before the operation. Taking on an important job would be if she decides to fight to fix the system, or is promoted and decides to reform the company, or becomes a doctor, etc. Returning to old habits would require we establish old habits in the first place, but it's pretty straightforward.

Not all characters have to find peace. Only the main character. Others can take it or leave it, it really doesn't matter from a structural perspective. Similarly, they don't have to find a peace that somehow matches up to how they lost it: Deckard found peace in love, but his lost peace is contract work. You really have to squint to relate those.

So, when you are developing your story, figure out how their peace is lost, and figure out how they attain peace in the end.

The Engine

You have one or more main characters worked out, with their lost and found peace jotted down in pencil. Now you need something to give your story mass and shape.

The twist?

Thinking of a good twist is hard, and it's probably not worth it, because it'll be spoiled by the box art and the headline of the first review. Nope!

The engine.

What we need is an in-world conceit that shapes all our interactions. The key here is that the engine is not something which grants physical powers. It's something which grants specific relationships.

In our Deus-Exlike, the engine is the maintenance drug that only the corporation can provide. It binds everyone to the corporation, and instantly creates a ton of relationships. But - here's the kicker - it's a standin for ordinary corporate dependence.

The maintenance drug is a way to purify and amplify our real relationship to corporations. Our inability to choose another ISP or power provider. Our inability to leave our day job. Our inability to get away from our landlord. Our willingness to buy the next Apple product. Being forced to use Microsoft Word. Or, more darkly, being forced to obey increasingly aggressive policing, both physical and digital. Being forced to stay quiet despite the exploitation and destruction corporations cause. Otherwise, the company will take you to court and crucify you.

In Star Wars, the engine is the Force. It's basically magic, but the exact way it manifests forms the beating heart of the Star Wars universe. You can certainly argue that Star Wars isn't "proper sci fi", but it does have a good engine inside it. Like a moped with a rocket on the back. The Force allows us to amplify the concept of good and evil, of duty and personal responsibility.

In Star Trek, the engine is the starship itself. Starships occupy a very unusual place in that universe, because they are all large and owned by benevolent (or disinterested) governments. The Enterprise has a hilarious amount of freedom to do absolutely anything, and it's backed by the almost endless resources of the Federation. This allows us to build a setting in which benevolence can shine: good people are empowered as a default. Therefore, a lot of Star Trek is about exploring different definitions of "good".

The engine cannot be easily escaped. It forces people to do things, it gives some people power over others.

You may already have an idea for what your engine is. It can be anything that pushes people into new relationships. Anything that makes people band together and split apart. This will give you your cement, because it will guide your characters together and also tell you what kind of friction they will create.

... You can still put in a twist if you like, but it's just not as important.

Filling in the Stones

With an engine and a list of characters, we can start to see shapes form between the characters. "The corporation" never does anything. One of the characters with leverage over the corporation uses it as a tool. "An asteroid on route to earth" never does anything. Instead, it's the pressure and panic that causes the characters to do things.

Our main character works for the corporation, bound to it by reliance on the maintenance drug. This automatically creates friction between them and their bosses, between them and ordinary people. "Why are you doing these bad things?" some kid on the street asks her. She would stop if she could! She would stop. She tells herself.

The drug cannot be easily escaped. It gives your bosses power over you. And, in a way, it gives you power over everyone else - your advanced cyberware is only possible due to that drug.

In Star Trek, our space ships empower us. They give us the strength to push our concepts of "good", to resist or protect other people pushing their own versions. The Klingons think it is good for the strong to rule. The Vulcans think it is good for pure logic to win out. The Ferengi think that the greatest good is profit. Everyone is trying to be good, and our engine (ships/benevolent bureaucracy) give us all the power to push and shove and fight.

So, if we want to do an episode of Star Trek, we simply start with an A plot and a B plot. Let's say... Data's peace is lost when he installs an emotion chip. It is regained when he uninstalls it. The peace of the ship itself is lost when we fall for an ambush and find ourselves floating powerless in a nebula. It is restored when we defeat the Klingon and sail away. Very simple plot!

The stepping stones. Data's exploring the idea of "good" as an emotional response. This conflicts with the more nuanced and stable ideas of "good" put forth by the other members of the crew, but their concept of "good" does include the freedom to explore your own ideals. So Data moves through the episode conflicting with each character in turn, and each getting slightly more annoyed in turn. Each one gets to explain their idea of good, and how it conflicts with Data's idea.

So to do this, we just look at every combination and we write everything that comes to mind. Data's lower efficiency annoys Geordi, whose idea of "good" involves functioning well. Data's fear annoys Riker, whose idea of "good" involves bravery. Data's rage annoys the captain - no, wait, that's one option, but perhaps a better idea is if the captain represents the "good" of exploring your own ideals. So Data would attempt to remove the chip, and that would annoy the captain. Data's new emotions confuse him, so he sees Deanna, and she tries to cheer him up...

Why limit it to the crew? Data fights Klingons, who are impressed by his anger and prowess. Data talks to Klingons, and they are annoyed by his mechanical nature before he puts the chip in, and annoyed by his fear and weakness when he finally does put the chip in. Data gets into a fiery argument with a Klingon.

These are stones for one of the plots. Not everything is staunchly related to the engine of starships/benevolent bureaucracies. Not everything is related to the concept of "good". Those are simply underlying things which make it easy to come up with some of the stones.

There's not really an order to them, although there are some orders that make more sense than others.

You can come up with a similar set of stones for the plot about the ambush.

Enterprise tries to do its kind of good: rescuing people. Klingons try to do their kind of good: proving their strength and capturing trophies. Enterprise tries to be innovative and hold on. What are some specific encounters? Well, in this case it tends to come together rather more chronologically for me.

Enterprise tries to rescue "damaged" Klingon warbird. "Injured" Klingons beam aboard and try to take the ship. When that fails, there's a fight and the Enterprise is badly damaged. It runs into the nebula, where it loses power and drifts. Klingons try to hunt it down. Enterprise wins.

Coming up with things that can happen during the fight is kind of fun, although not very deep. Enterprise vents atmosphere to change course. Enterprise vents fuel and then blows it up. Someone - captured Klingons or crew - tries to build a radio and call for help using some other power source such as a phaser. Electrical storms cause damage to the Enterprise, but then become part of the critical final plan.

This method of brainstorming isn't anything new or impressive, but these scenarios look great tacked up on a wall.

Bridgebuilding

Now it's simply a matter of putting the stones down in an order that makes sense, and linking them together. But this is also where deep sci fi shines.

Often, these mini-scenarios have an obvious order to them. The Klingons can't get annoyed by Data's cold-fish demeanor after he's put in the chip, so that has to come first. The ship can't drift into a the nebula before it gets attacked.

But frequently, the setpieces and events you come up with won't have any obvious order to them. Does it matter whether Riker or the Captain gets annoyed at Data first? Does it matter whether we suffer from a damaging electrical storm before or after Data talks to Deanna?

You can put them in some order, and it'll make sense.

But nobody will remember either event.

I'll give you three methods to link events up when there's no obvious order. This is not just a way to arbitrarily stack things: this is a way to make the themes and characters shine very brightly, because they all hold together.

Tick Tock

The first thing to do is to separate your ticking clocks. Ticking clocks are extremely powerful. Introduce them early, and resolve them late. A ticking clock adds a massive amount of tension, and every moment that happens within a ticking clock has more weight. Moreover, actions can be taken to try and resolve or extend the ticking clocking throughout its span, giving you an easy inspiration for additional events.

Our most obvious ticking clock is the electrical storm - the ship can only take so much zapping. Do we have any others?

Sure, how about when the Klingons invade the Enterprise to try and capture it? There's a struggle to find and contain them before they can damage the ship or hurt crew. Similarly, when the Enterprise takes a beating and warps into the nebula, we can make that a ticking clock to escape the weapons range of the Klingons. Whether a ticking clock is five seconds or five hours, it adds weight.

Ticking clocks are the "Dragonball charge-up scene" of sci fi.

Thematic Cause and Effect

The next thing you want to do is find the thematic links between events. For example, Data's steadily unraveling nerves are similar to the disintegrating ship. While Data's nerves are not a hard enough limit to be a good ticking clock, we can echo his mental state by using the grinding, sparking lightning storm. When Data says he's not sure how much more he can take, the ship judders and sparks fly out of a wall panel. You could even cut away to show the lightning storm from the outside, growing stronger.

Basic rule, though: don't cut away and then immediately cut back to where you were. That's a bit on-the-nose.

Echoes like this are very powerful. Cut between characters to contrast or support each. In our Deus-Exlike, our avatar is brought down by a debilitating lack of drug. We could cut away to show the loyal employee injecting himself, or we could not cut away, but instead have our avatar fall off the building and land in an alley full of discarded limbs.

Both work well - you don't have to worry about being too obvious, because too obvious is just about right.

In these situations, you have the opportunity to advance another thread during a cutaway. If we cut to the loyal guy injecting himself, then we should be advancing loyal guy's thread. On paper, whether that scene happens before or after your fall is unimportant. In the actual experience of the game, the thematic power of him advancing while you fall is very powerful. People will remember it: it's not simply that one came before the other. Thematically, your fall caused his ascent, even though the two were not related in any in-world causal way.

Ticking Callbacks

Most of your stuff should have a pretty concrete order at this point. Ticking clocks form strong bounding boxes, and within those boxes come the thematic cause-and-effect. And, of course, the fact that some things directly cause or predate others.

You may still have some floating bricks. You may be too sparse and need to come up with more detail. It's time for the Ticking Callback.

Ticking clocks are a call to action for everyone affected by them. As long as you have a ticking clock, you can show any scene of someone trying to fix it or delay it and it'll work perfectly. It's so easy, in fact, that you can also easily tie it into your themes, character progressions, and setpieces without raising the bar much.

You can embed events into the ticking clock by making them about the ticking clock. Geordi's annoyance at Data's new inefficiency is most powerful if it happens within a ticking clock, so it can be an event where Geordi is trying to reduce the damage from the lightning storm. Because there is a ticking clock, the scene fits in great, and now has a powerful explanation as to why Geordi is so annoyed.

But that's not the limit of our ticking clock integration. Oh, not even close.

See, whenever you create a scene to try and thwart the ticking clock, you have to create another scene where you use that exact same method for other purposes. This is absolutely required: a freefloating ticking clock scene is not very powerful, and sticks out badly.

If Geordi gets angry at Data as they attempt to armor the ship against lightning storms, good, that's scene one. But it's not very memorable on its own, and has no feeling of resolution. Geordi's little arc doesn't find peace.

So we come back to it. At the end of the encounter, the Klingons are getting close. How does the Enterprise defeat them? By turning the storm against them using the same technique that failed because Data was too confused and slow. Even if Data doesn't come up with the solution, it's fine: Geordi can say "hey, Data, remember when you made that storm worse?" And then the two of them can share face-splitting evil grins.

You can also set this up in the opposite order. If you think of a cool level or scene (the Enterprise vents fuel and lights it on fire!) you can set that up with a ticking clock action (someone discovers heat makes the lightning storms worse). However, keep in mind that the setup needs to be thematically linked in. In this case, we can link it in by having Data and Geordi have a spat about it.

This is just another way of setting up a Chekhov's Gun, but this method is powerful and easy.

For our Deus-Exlike example, we have a ticking clock of running out of drug. We attempt to resolve it by raiding a company warehouse, only to find that the inventory document was a lie: the warehouse is full of illegal robots that are far more dangerous and fun to shoot at. Later, we have the opportunity to unleash those robots on the corporation to create enough chaos and cause enough damage to let us accomplish a more important goal.

Final

These approaches are built to help create a compelling story. They are flexible enough to accommodate the "cool setpieces" approach to sci fi writing, and also strong enough to let you link things together even when your boss dictates that level 2 and level 7 should be swapped.

To recap:

Figure out what aspect of today's society you are amplifying, and create characters that interact with that.

Figure out an "engine" to drive how people relate to each other, and who has power over who.

Figure out at least one main character: how do they lose their peace? What kind of peace do they attain in the end?

List a lot of cool interactions and setpieces and figure out how they interact with those ideas.

Find your ticking clocks. Start them early, end them late.

Figure out which scenes can thematically descend from or echo which scenes.

Fill out your roster with Checkov's Guns built inside the ticking clocks. Make sure the setups involve your original concerns, and the second half should be a turnaround.

Don't bother with a twist unless it's REALLY good.

Now you have a killer sci fi story that is both compelling and deep.