I’m the one with the yellow pants.

Yeah, I feel your pain, guys. People don’t pay for movies anymore either, and if they did I’d have a clear-cut business plan that anyone could understand, and I’d be rolling in investment money by now and going full speed ahead on a bajillion-dollar live-action-CGI-blend-extravaganza about space pirates or something. But that’s just not the way the world works anymore.

Now, I understand the need for a coping mechanism. Blame the cheap bastards who just want to download all of your hard work that you worked so hard on for weeks and months and years. Maybe they’ve got a point when they say the big record companies shouldn’t keep making money, but you, nooooo, you’re indie! You make less money than a part-time fry cook at McDonald’s, and if people steal from you, then they’re bad, bad people! You deserve to be paid for your hard work!

No you don’t. You’re indulging in your own creative vision; nobody asked you to, and you’re not providing a service to anybody. You are creating all the pretty music in your head because you feel like it, and you are not inherently entitled to anybody’s appreciation and certainly not monetary compensation.

If you’re good, though, and people like your music, then you don’t have to tell them that you deserve to be paid for it, because they know. They’re your fans now, and they’d love to throw money at you.

So, I’m sorry to break it to you, impoverished indie musician, but if you’re not making money from your music, then you’re either not good enough or you haven’t put a god damn PayPal button on your website.

Slash rant.

Just…watch this video…

I am so, sorry, John Graham. I never meant for this to happen. Please forgive me.

I’ve received some skepticism, sometimes based on first-hand accounts, about my theory that pirates will donate to support you if you just ask and make it easy for them. It’s based on the idea that no, they actually won’t.

This strikes me as unlikely. No pirate, hell, no person has ever publicly stated that they don’t believe people who work so hard to entertain us should receive no money in return, and that they’d certainly give money to an artist they support. I don’t think this isn’t happening because all of those people are lying. I think it’s happening because of a lack of education.

The phenomenon of indie artists putting a big “donate” button on their site is a relatively new one. It’s a reflex for many people to buy a movie from Amazon or buy a game from Steam. Donation is a bit more disjointed and confusing, and not everyone knows where to go. If it was downloaded from The Pirate Bay, there’s even more disconnect from the creator’s website. That’s what my new For a Living project is looking to remedy.

Go to the project’s page to download a graphic that you can place in your movie, game, or other form of visual media. It’s like an FBI Warning, except not about how stuff is illegal and instead about how food costs money.

I’m not sure how the same could be applied to music. Podcasts have audible credits and copyright information, so it’s an easy translation. For a music album, doing this on every song would get annoying. Fortunately, a lot of other factors are making it much easier for indie musicians to benefit from file-sharing, so there’s not a lot to worry about.

Large corporations have come up with a solution: go into the manufacturing business. They are now Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, creating new rights for themselves using a revolutionary new process known as “fellating lawmakers”. Their revenue stream comes from licensing these digital rights at high prices, and suing people who don’t pay. But it’s too expensive for indie artists and creators, and it doesn’t win you any friends.

Because of this situation, indie game developers are doing horrible things like experimenting with in-game advertising. I’m not saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of annoying ads bombarding us. I’m saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of depending on the advertising industry for revenue.

Think about it: TV series with devoted fanbases are cancelled because they don’t make enough ad revenue. Millions of websites depending on Google AdSense would go broke if their accounts were inexplicably terminated (I’ve read about this happening before but can’t find a link detailing it. Maybe I’m typing the wrong words into Goo…gle…wait a minute). And remember when GameSpot fired Jeff Gertsmann when their advertisers didn’t like his reviews? For people who call themselves indie, it’s not very indie-pendent.

The best way to be indie in any medium, be it game development, filmmaking, music, writing…hell, even running a business in general, the only party you should be depending on is individual people. Some may know them as “customers”, or “users” who “generate content” on your “social media application”, but let’s avoid such corporate-speak, as it makes baby Jesus cry and is killing America. But there’s still the problem of how exactly to make money on individual people anymore. In a world where art is hard work and people don’t seem to want to pay for it, one man will stand up to explain his opinion. That man is me. Reread the previous two sentences in a movie trailer guy voice, then click the jump-cut-continue-reading thingy:

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. Part of the admission process is defining what exactly the problem is, so let’s do that now:

• Indie creators need money
• People seem to prefer downloading stuff for free
• If your money comes from ads, you are a slave to the advertisers

Video games are seemingly the easiest medium to solve this for, but the proposed solutions only work for specific cases. I thought about the approach brought up by Dimerocker (as of writing, their site consists entirely of an unmutable coming-soon video with bad techno music, so don’t click) near the end of the Kotaku piece. Asia has dealt with this problem, and the most popular games there are free-to-play with premium components which you can get for micropayments. Piracy is impossible because the games have to be played on the web. This is great for MMO, arcade, and proceduralist games. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well for games disinterested in replay value. Some narrative or art games are meant to be played once, and would not benefit from premium items or costumes or levels. For the same reason, this is no way to make a profit from movies.

But a video game business model which could potentially work for other mediums is a revival of the traditional arcade. Imagine a game in which you could play the first level, and every level after that cost 25 cents. It would be browser-based, or otherwise require an Internet connection, and every level you purchase is accessible to you forever. You can save your game, stop playing, pick it up later as normal, and only pay more when you progress to a new “chapter.” This could be applied to movies and books as well, allowing you to pay by the chapter (in the novel or DVD sense) after getting an initial, free teaser.

Anyone reading this is free to try that out, and I hope it works for you, but I still see problems. Presumably a large service would offer this, so what if such a service were to go offline, temporarily or permanently? Not only would that anger customers, whose purchased movies, books, and games are now inaccessible, but creators, who were dependant on the service for their money. Also, the service would be free to pull any “objectionable content,” which would happen willy-nilly if the history of YouTube and Apple are considered. It’s a combination of DRM server scares and not actually being indie which still doesn’t sit well with me.

Perhaps it would work if everyone assembled such a service themselves. Host files on Amazon S3, take PayPal (or some other, more micropayment-focused service), and you’re done. You’re depending on corporations for the infrastructure, but they’re basically dumb pipes. They won’t shut you down if you’re controversial, and if they go bankrupt, switch to someone else.

Alternatively, for the convenience of people without credit cards or living in countries with taxes or tariffs that cause problems, make payment optional. Very few forms of media can be experienced on the Internet without downloading anything, and technologies allowing you to record music or movies from your screen and speakers prove that people want options. Right now, game developers have a free ride; while it’s possible to hear the same song or see the same movie on your iPod as opposed to your computer, Grand Theft Auto IV probably wouldn’t work all that well (it doesn’t work all that well on PCs in the first place, but I digress). This will change. But because of this desire for options, things need to be downloadable in an open format recognized by whatever Personal Media Device or Mobile Entertainment Console or MPπ player happens to exist. Therefore, piracy will occur, so you need to not depend on people paying for easily redistributable stuff. Make them pay for your continued ability to do work. I don’t have an easy, surefire answer about how to do this, other than that you should make donations easy, flexible, and conspicuous. Allow people to pay whatever they want, and some might pay $5000. If not, at least the 100,000 people who downloaded it from Pirate Bay will pay a dollar. With enough experimentation and loud screaming about this business model, the general public will get used to it, and it will be completely normal.

Either way, all that’s left is getting the word out. But with the ubiquity of Facebook, Twitter, IMing, and the age-old practice of human beings ejaculating the word-language from their face-mouths, anything with a compelling, free teaser and a low-to-no price of entry to its awesomeness will sell itself. Such a system will work very well for the 10% of people who make stuff that isn’t crap.

The other 90% may be out of luck. I’ve been thinking for about a half hour how to follow up that statement, originally believing that’s not a good thing. After all, lots of great ideas fail miserably the first time they’re attempted. But then I realized that that 99% of crap is mediocre, derivative, and boring, failing to add anything new to the world. A decreased chance for mediocrity to achieve anything for a creator is actually a pretty awesome thing. People who genuinely have passion for what they do will improve themselves and come back strong, while idiots jumping on the bandwagon will move on to find something they’re actually good at. To some degree, the world works that way already.

So the best thing for an indie artist, musician, filmmaker, game developer, or writer to do in this day and age is twofold: Don’t suck at what you do, and make it easy for people to realize that.

Gratuitous picture of Matthew Ebel's FACE.

I’d heard of Mr. Ebel before, having encountered a song he did back in 2001 called “In the MUCK” (MP3). It’s about how the real world is annoying, so let’s all turn ourselves into furry animals because that’s more fun (specifically on FurryMUCK, but subtly enough so that people who have never heard of or joined it can relate to the song. I loved the song, but for some ridiculous reason I’d never bothered to do more research into him. Until now.

Despite being active in the furry community as an osprey (you see, even though ospreys have feathers, we still say they’re “furries” with “fursonas,” because “featheries” wouldn’t imply the same group, and “anthropomorphic animal enthusiasts” is too long, and oh whatever), most of Ebel’s music isn’t as overtly animalistic, but that’s probably a good thing because having to throw in an obligatory animal reference in every song would get old. All of it is just as catchy and awesome, with a style that’s like Jonathan Coulton meets Dangerous Kid and hints of Banooba; comparing him to a signed artist would be so corporate and anti-indie of me, as well as less accurate, but let’s say Jack’s Mannequin with some Ben Folds-y wit if you insist. And he’s awesome.

I got his latest album, Goodbye Planet Earth, which mixes in a good deal of electronic stuff and Hitchhiker’s Guide references. The second track, “I Just Want To Fall In Love” (MP3) is ridiculously catchy and will not get out of my head. Gahhhh. =D

He’s also taken a page from Jonathan Coulton and written a song based on one of Valve‘s games (although his effort wasn’t actually commissioned by Valve for use during their end credits), a Team Fortress 2-inspired song called “I Blame The Spy”. As of this writing, unfortunately, the full version of the song is only available to people who subscribe to his premium music. Kind of an odd decision given that he could get several zillion new fans if video game blogs pointed towards it, something they’d be more likely to do if the whole song were free. Matthew, I know you’ll read this eventually because you follow me on Twitter, so fix that.

But all in all, you want Matthew Ebel in your ears. He gives very good aural pleasure.

Pixar has $180 million to spare, and doesn’t mind having hundreds of people manipulating 400 yottabytes to create one film. Good for them. But that shouldn’t scare off the rest of us.

The barrier to creating great looking animation doesn’t seem to be time, money, or resources; it’s the misconception that those, in fact, are an obstacle. Video game developers constantly show us that there is the potential for great looking visuals without an excessive amount of polygons. The reason video game graphics don’t yet rival Hollywood CGI isn’t because there isn’t enough processing power for detail, but that there isn’t enough processing power for implying detail.

Simple depth of field can dramatically improve a low-detail image. By simulating the focus of a camera lens, not only is a more photographic look achieved, but strategic use of it can remove most of the ugly portions of an image. This is possible in Valve’s Source engine, and can look great, but it’s not practical for video games; about two frames of it per second can be rendered in real time. But movies don’t need to be rendered in real time – a three minute high-definition sequence from Final Cut can take up to half an hour to render on my laptop, but after that it plays back smoothly; Pixar, by contrast, produces films that would take a single supercomputer several million hours to render (that’s why they have a ton of supercomputers), and they too can be contained within a smoothly-playable video file. But by taking graphics which could, theoretically, be rendered in real time, then rendering it with realistic looking blur and smoothing effects at two frames per second, an independent animator wouldn’t need to have access to supercomputers with enormous hard drives to make a film.

Perhaps I was too quick to call Meet the Scout on par with The Incredibles or WALL-E. Jenni Chasteen‘s comment about the lighting design was spot-on – Pixar has people who know cinematography, and Valve isn’t nearly as experienced. I disagree that it’s not even close, though; while it’s not great for photorealism, “cartoony” CGI is very possible to do with just a video game engine and blur effects.

Valve’s promotional movies may not be Pixar-quality, now that I think about it, but the technique and technology has the potential to be. In the hands of talented filmmakers, it’s wonderful for compositing onto live action. Is extending it to a full animated film that much of a stretch? I doubt it, myself.

So what exactly cost so much money? Without access to Pixar’s financial records, I’ll take a few guesses. But the short answer is that they’re spending way more money than they need to.

UPDATE: I guess this piece got high up in some common Google query, because I’ve had a lot of vicious comments on it over the years. So let me explain: This article is from 2009. I was nineteen when I wrote it. I also wrote this follow-up piece clarifying what I meant to say, which apparently isn’t as popular on the Googletubes. Anyway, this is a terrible post. I was trying to encourage people to innovate with low-cost animation, but the following is a completely ridiculous way of saying that. Please stop getting angry at me.

I’d imagine, from my experience, that some of the the biggest expenses in filmmaking are film stock, set construction, stunt coordination, and other tangible materials. Pixar requires none of that. The only materials they really need to buy are computer parts, which are relatively cheap on their own and downright bargains when bought in bulk. Yes, their concept artists need clay and paint and such, but that hardly seems like it would cost more than a couple thousand, even for a gigantic team of the kind of overzealous madmen who spend more than a week in an art school (i.e. me).

So that brings us to visual effects, which is essentially 100% of what you see on the screen. Yes, WALL-E and Happy Feet had live action bits superimposed, but anyone with access to a green screen and a DVX can imitate those. The actual CGI, though, is achieved by making a bunch of 3D models, texturing them, arranging them in a world, moving them around, and then pointing a virtual “camera” at various parts of the world to get the images you need.

It may sound simple (save for the whole “talent” part in terms of modeling, texturing, and animating), but to create the impressive visuals, Pixar needed a very large amount of polygons. Add to that the calculations necessary for lighting, post-processing (focus, motion blur, etc.), and spitting that out into 24 images per second at 4000 pixels wide, and you have something that requires a lot of very expensive computers to eat a lot of expensive electricity for a very long time.

Except it actually is as simple as I made it sound in the paragraph before that. Take a look at this video:

Impressive visuals. If you had never heard of Team Fortress 2, and that video cut off after the first 30 seconds, wouldn’t you imagine that perhaps this was an upcoming Pixar film (albeit more violent than their previous efforts)?

Now, obviously, this is actually a promotional video for a game. Let’s take a look at the game’s graphics…

Obviously not quite as impressive, but you’d be hard pressed to say that the Scout model in the game isn’t the same one in the Pixar-quality promo video. In fact, the line between the two is very blurry — specifically the fact that the promo video has more blur effects based on motion and focus. Well, that’s because it’s absolutely true.

Meet the Scout, rendered in Team Fortress 2, contains a significantly smaller amount of polygons on screen at a time than a Pixar movie like, say, The Incredibles. Can you tell?

On close inspection, you can see that the Team Fortress 2 models are slightly more jagged than Mr. Incredible. However, it’s unlikely that you’d notice this unless you were looking for it in a freeze frame. In addition, Team Fortress 2′s models are actually far less complicated than those from many other video games. Take, for example, BioWare’s Mass Effect:

(Image from Gamespot)

There, slightly more complex models and the jaggedness is solved, but still significantly less intense than what Pixar does. And most blockbuster video games cost things that are considered “indie budgets” to Hollywood: Gears of War cost $10 million, $5 million less than the pretty much indie-produced film Slumdog Millionaire. And as you can see in that article, many games cost “crazy figures” like $30 million, which is still pocket change to Hollywood. Off-season movies like Taken cost somewhere around $25 million, for god’s sake. Now, if you were to take all the work on Gears of War related to getting the thing to run smoothly on an Xbox 360, and channel all that into putting the camera in the right places, pressing “render,” and letting three laptops run for 10 hours to give you a 2 hour movie, I’d imagine it would cost even less.

So now we’ve thoroughly debunked the myth that CGI is inherently expensive. What’s left? A-list voice talent? Yeah, I can see that being up there. And marketing costs a lot. Indie filmmakers would probably replace those two strategies “five of my friends” and “Twitter,” respectively, but I understand Hollywood’s obsession with such luxuries. That can’t account for all $180 million, though, can it?

Well, in addition to Pixar’s overkill in terms of hardware and technical complexity, they employ a gigantic amount of people, paying them salaries and such. That’s probably necessary because of the technical complexity of their animation.

In theory, a team of four passionate geeks who already have MacBook Pros and copies of Maya, Photoshop, and Final Cut could probably make a Pixar-quality film in their spare time. Perhaps it’s the massive, daunting complexity of Pixar films that discourage budding independent filmmakers from trying to compete using more efficient methods.

Or maybe they’re all developing video games instead.

If a game developer feels they cannot tell a good story, or if they can’t get a writer…actually, scratch that, if they aren’t a writer already and they can’t get one, then they should probably be making a simulation game. By “simulation” I don’t necessarily mean Microsoft Flight Simulator or SimCity, that’s just the term I use to say “non-narrative” because “documentary” doesn’t always work (i.e. Space Invaders isn’t exactly based on real life, but it doesn’t tell a story). But assuming a developer feels up to telling an epic tale of some grizzled space marines fighting against insectoid/reptilian aliens in a palette of gray and brown, there are a few things I’d really rather they didn’t do. I will now follow in the footsteps of Our Great Noodly Lord The Flying Spaghetti Monster and give you eight of them.

1. I’d really rather you didn’t create a case of “gameplay vs. story”

This is not a debate or a question to ask, it is a design flaw. Of course you’re going to alter the gameplay to suit the story, and of course you’re going to alter the story to suit the gameplay. But for fuck’s sake, don’t make either of them worse in the process.

Case in point: Fallout 3. The game started off great, with all sorts of different quests on the side to play through and have fun with, but by far the most compelling was the main quest about finding your character’s father. It made sense that most of the production values would be devoted there, because they paid Liam Neeson a lot of money to be in it, and it was pretty much the reason your character ran out into the wasteland to make people’s heads explode with low-power rifles in the first place. So naturally, I focused a lot of my effort to the main quest, because there was always a sense of urgency (even though it was possible to say “let me repair my equipment before we go fight the enemy which is right outside” and then not come back for three in-game weeks, but it didn’t feel that way).

Then, all of a sudden, without much warning, it ended in a way that would be heart-wrenching and moving in a linear action game but is completely bone-headed and dumb in an epic, non-linear RPG. This meant you didn’t get to finish all those side quests or play anything else without starting a new game. Nothing in the story or gameplay indicated the point of no return, except for the inability to leave the final area after you’d walked in and probably saved already. So in order to end the game with such an emotional event, Bethesda compromised the gameplay by not allowing it to occur anymore. Now, the best case scenario is if the player reaches this point after there’s nothing else to see in the rest of the game and they know it, so they leave with a sense of closure. But in a game like Fallout 3, the odds of that happening are very, very close to zero.

2. I’d really rather you didn’t separate almost all of the story from the gameplay

If more than five minutes of the story goes by without the player being able to do anything (changing the camera angle or pressing X to not die doesn’t count), then you, as the game designer, should probably reconsider that portion of the story or invent some new gameplay to work with it. It’s perfectly okay to make a game where you control a character’s trigger finger and vocal chords at different sections. And if you don’t want the player to have control over specific story events, make them shorter. Cutting about 75% of the dialogue is a start, since the rules of screenwriting apply to cutscenes too.

The most prominent offender here is Hideo Kojima, especially with Metal Gear Solid 4. Metal Gear Solid 4 isn’t bad at all — it’s a stunning example of filmmaking. The fact that it has interactive portions at all, regardless of how fun they are, is my only (gigantic) gripe with it. Yes, the cutscenes play instead of loading screens, but it takes 20 minutes before you, the player, get to do anything (well, yes, you can change the camera angle or show a flashback or whatever, but I said that doesn’t count already). And later in the game, some of these cutscenes are 90 minutes long. You can pause them, you can save during them, great, but why bother with the interactive portions at all if they add nothing to the cinematics? If I were to watch all the cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 as a miniseries on DVD, but never touch the gameplay, I would lose almost nothing from the story.

The Half-Life series, by contrast, tells the entire story through your character. The closest thing to a cutscene that game has is when Gordon (or Adrian or Barney in the expansions) is being restrained by something, but even then you can still turn your head to look, and it’s not for very long. Now, granted, Half-Life has never had a very compelling or comprehensible plot: the first game was about aliens appearing out of nowhere, and this creepy man in a business suit watches you try to escape; Half-Life 2 and its episodes have been about another group of aliens taking over Earth somehow for some reason, but the aliens you killed in the first game are your allies now. What makes Half-Life great is not the plot, but the characters, the moments, all that. It’s comparable to 2001: A Space Odyssey: the movie’s supposedly about a hyperintelligent black monolith thing that made monkeys smart, which is kind of a ridiculous plot, but is that really what we’re thinking about when HAL 9000 starts going insane? No, we’re thinking about the characters who are in danger from this crazy computer, and it’s pretty predictable that one of them will eventually shut HAL off, but knowing that takes nothing out of it. Speaking of which…

3. I’d really rather you didn’t tell a story that makes the game boring to play through a second time

This pretty much applies to every narrative medium, game or not, but it’s especially important when the player has to put in effort to advance the story: if knowing the ending is capable of “spoiling” the whole game, then you’re doing it wrong.

Judging by the lighthearted aura around even the darkest portions, it’s no shocker that Grim Fandango ends with Manny and Meche falling in love and (after)living happily ever after. But even if one or both of them died (again) at the end, the pleasure of playing the game is seeing all those wild and crazy places, hearing all that witty dialogue, figuring out the ridiculous solutions to the puzzles, and listening to the fucking amazing soundtrack. In fact, you can go read the entire plot summary on Wikipedia before playing the game and you’ll still have just as much of a blast with it as you would have without knowing what happens. Don’t do that, though, just play it. Now.

But not every game is quite like that. Some are, as Aubrey and Jack spoke about, “junk like [a] Dan Brown” novel, where knowing the end of the story kills all the suspense and tension that came before it. I can’t think of any specific offenders at the moment because I usually forget about this type of game entirely, but I will say that it was good of KotOR to include such a plot twist at the end of the first act of the game, not at the end of the whole thing. I accidentally found out about it on a forum before playing, so the big moment wasn’t shocking at all, but then there was about 30 more hours of really, REALLY good story (and gameplay) to make up for that.

Then there’s the type of game which, because of the story, has gameplay which is only fun the first time around. Returning to Fallout 3, I felt the opening of the game was brilliant, and it was rather ingenious how they incorporated the tutorial and character creation by letting you play your character growing up. Then I played through a second time and it was all the same, so I just wanted to go shoot super mutants’ arms off with a pistol already. But when I finally got out into the wasteland again, the sense of discovery was lost this time around, except for the discovery that the deep, multiple paths of the storyline weren’t really all that deep or multiple.

4. I’d really rather you didn’t get me interested in the story just before making me fail over and over again

It’s bad enough when a game makes you repeat the same parts you failed over and over for the 24th time when there’s no story at all. When there is a story, or at least what sounds like one, it becomes all the more annoying when you replay the same sequence so much that you forget what’s happening outside of the frustrating gameplay.

What comes to mind is Portal: Prelude, which is, admittedly, a non-commercial mod, but it’s still game design and still includes narrative. Not only was the mod hyped and marketed as containing a riveting story, but it had all the trappings of it when you began playing. The scientists chattering about you would drop little hints that something bigger was going on, probably related to GLaDOS (who everyone wanted to know the origin story of, even if it was unofficial), and that made you want to find out what would happen. Then the first challenge required escaping four turrets in the same place by having pinpoint accuracy within a split-second. And it did not get easier from there.

The developers’ excuse? Well Portal: Prelude is for the Portal master who finds the original game too easy, of course. Except for the fact that “it also had to be feasible for people that were not that used to the gameplay mechanics” of Portal, but no, they have failed at that. But even if that hypocritical statement wasn’t in their design goal, perhaps they should have realized that a person who wants to have their 1337 $k!11z put to the test probably doesn’t give a shit about story, so their efforts are wasted entirely. Unless being in a select group of elite basement dwellers who spend their lives getting good at video games for no reason is prerequisite for being worthy of knowing such an epic tale, in which case that’s kind of ironically pretentious.

5. I’d really rather you didn’t put zero effort into your writing

Like I said about Half-Life and in number 3, dialogue and moments are much more important than plot. I don’t care how epic and riveting your plot summary is, if the characters are all meatheads who say the same clichés over and over, then you can’t write for shit.

Halo is not an example of good writing. It did not sell 23949821358632857392857 copies because of the story. But it probably would have sold 92352935123597235872035870325870 if it had a script by Douglas Adams. Actually, that would probably make it a very different game, but come on…Douglas Adams.

6. I’d really rather you didn’t dupe me into thinking I can affect the story when in fact I can’t

It’s perfectly fine to tell a linear narrative where the audience can’t change how everything plays out. Movies, theatre, and books have been doing it for years, and they’re quite enjoyable. But if you’re going to allow the player to make a choice that seems like it should matter, make it matter.

I’m going to rip on Fallout 3 again. The game has four different possible endings, but which one you get is only determined by two yes or no choices that you make in the final scene. If you make choice A and choice C, you get one ending, choice A and choice D gets you another, etc. So all of those other characters in the whole game, whatever you said or did to them, none of that matters in the long run? Well, I suppose that would be true if the game ended with the universe collapsing (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t).

BioWare, by contrast, always manages to make you care about your actions in their games; their writing is so convincing that I always feel too guilty to play as an evil character. Even in Mass Effect, which had only one ending from a big picture standpoint, allowed lots of the subtleties to be determined by everything you’d done since the beginning of the game. They did drop the ball in Sonic Chronicles, where no matter how much of a prick you are to Amy (the bitch deserves it), she’ll still fucking try to help you, god dammit, but almost all of the problems with that game’s story are related to the fact that BioWare was under contract to not cut the stupid parts of the canon out.

7. I’d really rather you didn’t make the story repeat itself

If for some reason a player has to repeat a section of gameplay, either because they failed it the first time or because you didn’t let them save the game wherever they want since you don’t know how to design games for anything other than an arcade machine, then allow the non-interactive, and perhaps even the non-challenging, portions to be skipped over. The player knows what happened, so don’t make them sit through it again, especially if it’s a die-reload-die-reload-die-reload-x16 situation. Oh, and in dialogue trees, if they’ve exhausted all the dialogue options about a particular topic, let them know somehow if they’re about to repeat something they said already. You could make that particular topic gray or something, that usually works.

I don’t have to give you an example here; just play any game and press lots of buttons during the cutscenes. If none of those buttons skips anything, that’s bad.

8. I’d really rather you didn’t even attempt to tell a story if you can’t adhere to all of the above

If you have a great story and a great gameplay design, but can’t fuse them together in a way that works, stop trying. Change one of them to suit the other or divorce them. Those are your options.

Some stories are excellent but are absolutely inappropriate for the medium of video games. Hamlet, for instance, is impossible to give interactivity; if it is, then you’ve rewritten it or violated what I said in number 2. In addition, some types of gameplay don’t lend themselves well to being mixed with stories. Pong, for example, is probably not the best candidate for creating a narrative around. Yes, Puzzle Quest managed to fuse gem-swapping puzzles with a story somehow, but if you have the slightest doubt that replacing your story with a level number and a score counter would detract from the game, then you’re probably not as clever as Steve Fawkner.

There. That’s it. Now stop doing those things in games.