Last year, I posted a script excerpt from the upcoming second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone. This bit of the script shows off the evolution of Andrew’s character since I wrote the first episode; an evolution which is, for the most part, a careen in the exact same direction.

There’s a very specific reason that I didn’t merely stick to Andrew’s character, but rather turned it up to 11. Shortly after the first episode of Your Face is a Saxophone debuted, my life imitated my art.

In Episode 3, Andrew will make this rant, which is I swear to god almost verbatim something that the person I’m about to tell you about said to me. I can’t make this shit up:

I met a guy — let’s call him Deuce Shmagner, because I’m not looking to call him out by his real name, tempting as it may be — who was running a small, in-person Bitcoin exchange. This was back when Bitcoins were a dollar each, and there was no online way to turn small quantities of them into cash (besides the kinda-sketchy Liberty Reserve option at MtGox). I was raising money for Your Face is a Saxophone at the time through Kickstarter, and some people wanted to donate Bitcoin. For people donating outside of Kickstarter, I was having Dave hold onto the money and pledge it to the project, so it’d end up counting. Hence why I needed to convert the Bitcoin to dollars.

So, I met Deuce in his apartment, sold him my 6 Bitcoin, and we ended up talking. As it turned out, we shared a lot of the same ideas and ideals (or so I thhought at the time). Technological optimism. Money as just a means to an end. Skepticism of authority. An entrepreneurial spirit. A desire to empower people. Deuce ended up watching Your Face is a Saxophone later on, and thought it was brilliant.

Several days later, I was beginning to freak out about finances. I’d burnt through a lot of money working on YFIAS non-stop for the past several months, without any income to offset my expenses. The Kickstarter campaign had stagnated, and the Intarnetz wasn’t nearly as excited about the whole thing as I’d hoped. Living in my parents’ house was taking a psychological toll on me, and I’d no idea where I could get the money to get out.

Then, Deuce spoke to me again. He had a business proposal for me, about selling Bitcoin to people for him and taking commission; if they liked, we’d set them up with a MyBitcoin account, and manage it for them. I responded by saying I had a business proposal of my own: redesigning their website, because despite the fact that they were legit, the site was kind of sketchy looking (For example, describing one’s company as “an extremely reputable Bitcoin dealer” has sort of the opposite effect).

Instead, Deuce told me that their Bitcoin business was a side project, and offered me a job in something more my speed. He and his boyfriend, who we’ll call Ted, were looking to found a new Internet TV network (which we’ll call “DeuceTV”) a la Revision3 or TWiT, but for the masses. There’d still be tech shows, but they’d be aimed at non-geeks, and among a whole slew of others on non-technical, more mainstream topics. And it’d have a global focus, with some Spanish-language shows, and eventually expanding into whichever other languages we could find people to speak. As icing on the cake, it’d all be CC-BY licensed. He wanted me to come on as the VP of Programming.

Pay would be low; they were funding it all from their bank accounts. We agreed on $1200 a month, which was about minimum wage for the hours I’d be working. That was enough to afford rent and food (but not much else) in an apartment I’d found with a friend in Harlem (The hours I was to be working meant commuting from Long Island wasn’t much of an option). It would be tough, but Deuce assured me that this rate would be temporary. Pay would go up as soon as the profits started coming in, which wouldn’t take too long.

We’d work early mornings till noon. After noon, they needed the apartment free for Ted to work as a chiropractor, and Deuce to do, um, IT consulting or something; it was never quite clear. Those were their pay-the-rent jobs. Once DeuceTV was profitable, we’d shift hours.

I was skeptical, but maybe, just maybe, this guy knew what he was doing. And I was desperate to get my own place and start becoming self-sufficient. So I said okay.

It felt good at first. Deuce would greet me with a hug every day I came in, because that’s just how we members of The Homosexual Agenda roll. He was my “boss” technically, but also a friend, it felt like. He and Ted and I could talk to each other on the same level. Just three guys starting up a company together.

It was around day two that everything started to go downhill.

Apparently, we were going to start with twelve shows, and we’d be launching on April 1st. This was on March 1st when Deuce told me this. This prospect was objectively insane.

Oh, but don’t worry, it’s okay, Deuce said. They’re basically going to be the same show, but about different topics. We’ll just sit down in front of these webcams with guests and talk. Or talk about stuff by ourselves. We don’t need “fancy production values”. As you can imagine, this is the point at which my excitement began to evaporate.

You see, I’d taken a look at Deuce and Ted’s previous work. It was blurry, grainy webcam footage of them sitting behind their computers, sometimes with a guest uncomfortably sandwiched between them, or a 4:3 image of a Skype chat stretched onto the 16:9 monitor (aaaagh) behind them. It was completely unedited — there were no titles, no graphics, and no removal of the ten seconds at the beginning where Deuce was pressing the frigging record button and waiting awkwardly for the opening music cue to start. I’d assumed that I was being brought on to improve some of this. Apparently, not to a very great extent.

So, it turned out we were going for quantity-over-quality. There would be nothing to differentiate us from every other amateur videoblogger, and certainly not come out ahead of TWiT or Revision3. And yet somehow this was going to lead to lucrative sponsorship deals.

Oh, but people like me, said Deuce. People don’t care about fancy production values, they just care about the content. Everyone likes to listen to what I say. Lots of people watch my videos. I have thousands of Twitter followers, and they’re totally not all spam bots or people trying to sell Internet Marketing Secrets, I swear. Pay no attention to Oybek, the kid from Uzbekistan who I pay $200 a month to mass-follow people on Twitter and then unfollow them if they don’t follow me back; I’m legitimately popular. We’ll have no problem and we’ll be making lots of money, just like how I said Bitcoins would be worth $1000 each before the end of the year. I know what I’m talking about, because I was a manager at a Fortune 400 company.

Note that he never specified which Fortune 400 company he worked at, nor why he’s the only person in the world who says “Fortune 400″ instead of “500″ or “100″. But I digress.

At this point, I had become what I hated: the guy only in it for the money. A shit amount of money — $1200 a month in Manhattan is nothing — but money nonetheless. The prospect of DeuceTV being anything that I could reasonably be proud of had evaporated by about day four, so I was only putting in the bare minimum amount of work that would get me my pay. Note the word “pay”, not “paycheck” — we’re talking off-the-books cash here, because we’re Libertarians and government is stupid and Ayn Rand is erotica.

Well, okay, I admit, I still had a small glimmer of hope. And you know what, for as aggravating as Deuce was, he was still a nice guy. Even though his business strategies were starting to bother the hell out of me, he still felt like a good friend to have.

Until I would wonder what the fuck I was thinking, after he did something like this:

I was helping Deuce set up a Podtrac account for DeuceTV, and as we looked through the FAQ, there was a question we had that wasn’t answered. I think it was something about iTunes integration, I don’t remember. So he looked up their phone number and called them.

It’s an answering machine. Of course it’s an answering machine, because he’s calling at 8 in the morning. This is the message he leaves:

Hi, this is Deuce Shmagner at DeuceTV, call me back at [whatever his number was].

No mention of the actual question. No reason for them to call us back. Nobody has actually heard of him or DeuceTV, so why is he acting like they have?

I mention these things to him, and he says, “Well, if they don’t call back, that’s their problem.”

Well, no, actually, it’s our problem because we’re the ones who are trying to find out if you know what fuck it I’m not even gonna try.

My cynicism was cemented when we had the SEO discussion. Deuce, through the extremely scientific and empirical means of some PageRank checker website, had determined that WordPress.com has a “nine out of ten PageRank”, whatever the fuck that means. Therefore, we’d need to create individual WordPress blogs for every single show, because that would be search engine gold or someshit.

The problem with WordPress.com is that we’d have limited control over the site design and user experience. If, as Deuce hoped, the ruse worked, and these WordPress blogs catapulted to the top of all sorts of search queries, then people would be confused as hell. They’d see these sites of radically different design to DeuceTV.com, and probably be under the impression that they weren’t affiliated.

I’ve seen some porn sites use tactics like this. Deuce wanted to use it for Oprah-like shows.

I started to get emotional in arguing against this. If, in fact, this search engine voodoo worked, it would be pissing on brand-building for the possibility of short-term ad dollars. To achieve his big social change goals, we didn’t want mindless search engine traffic stumbling on DeuceTV, we wanted people who actually cared about the programming and wanted to see it. Just because you get a lot of pageviews doesn’t mean they’re the ones you want. But who was I kidding? DeuceTV clearly wasn’t about making the world a better place, and Deuce was lying to himself if he thought so.

Anyway, it turned out that Deuce and Ted were going to be on vacation in Spain three weeks into us working together. Apparently they found some kind of travel hacking deal on plane tickets, and invited the entire family along. Great, Deuce, take a big vacation two weeks before launching your company.

Actually, it was okay, because that’s what I was here for. During the week they were gone, I would work from home, building the entire DeuceTV website all by myself, and create motion graphic opening sequences for all twelve motherfucking shows. The latter, I had pushed for — it was the one small concession of “fancy production values” that Deuce had allowed — but it was still quite a lot to do in a week. Especially combined with cobbling together an entire website, something I wasn’t very good at and didn’t really enjoy all that much.

Admittedly, I should have stood up and said it was too much work before accepting the responsibility. But he was paying me seven bucks an hour for it all, so I figured I had room to screw up.

Lo and behold, my work was complicated by a crisis. I don’t want to get too deep into it, but long story short, my roommate was moving us to a new apartment three weeks after I’d just moved into the new one, and didn’t think to tell me about it until it was happening. Also unpaid Con Ed bills and power outages. Needless to say, I was going to have to cut features from the website in order to get it done on time, and only finish motion graphics for the shows we were planning to tape the first week. I emailed Deuce explaining the situation. He didn’t seem to object.

And so, I got a functional and perfectly fine website ready, and prepared graphics for three shows, while somehow managing to scrape by with my mental health. I walked into Deuce’s apartment the day after they got back to New York, and showed off the website.

Deuce was not impressed. And had quite a bit to say to me.

His tirade hit these major points:

• I don’t want to hear about your personal drama in emails. Go gab about it to your girlfriends.
• You’re not paying me. I’m paying you. If you were paying me, then you could tell me what to do. But I tell you what to do because I’m paying you.
• By “telling me what to do”, I’m referring to the fact that you told me that you were going to make cuts from the website. Oh, and that thing with the WordPress blogs last week. That’s not your decision, because I’m paying you.
• Oybek never says “this is how it’s gonna be,” he just says, “yes boss, whatever you say boss”, because Oybek’s not paying me; I’m paying Oybek.
• You know, in Spain, when I was having this really refreshing bath, I was telling Ted, I’m never going to hire anyone again. I’m just going to take unpaid interns, and they’ll have to prove themselves.
• Oh, and by the way, there are lots of people who are desperate to do work for me. Look at Mohammed in Egypt. He’s working for free. I’m not even paying him.
• Maybe we should give you less hours? Because this website doesn’t look like you worked eight hours a day on it, because I was inside your head after all and know exactly how long it took, and if you can’t work eight hours a day, maybe we should pay you less. Or do you want to be an unpaid intern?
• You’re not paying me. I’m paying you.

Now, given the fact that A) I was being treated as a friend throughout this entire endeavor, and B) my job title included “Vice President”, it wasn’t all that unreasonable of me to assume that I could A) actually mention why I would need to make cuts to finish my work, and B) make decisions autonomously. See, Deuce was paying me, but not to work for him — I was working for the company. Or so I’d had every reason to be under that impression.

But I didn’t have my wits about me to say as much at the time. Firstly, I was caught off-guard by this sudden outburst, and secondly, as soon as he started talking about cutting my hours and paying me less, my brain immediately went into calculator mode. With less pay, there would be no way I could afford to stay in my new apartment, and if I couldn’t stay in the apartment, this shit job was hardly worth dragging myself to the Long Island Railroad for.

So, after Deuce finally stopped talking, and a long moment to choose my words, I said, “I realize that there are many people who are desperate for this job, and would do more work than I have for less. But I’m not desperate.” And I walked out.

Not that there actually are all that many people desperate to work with Deuce Shmagner, but hey, I already said I wasn’t firing on all cylinders in the heat of the moment. Technically, Deuce still owes me about $200 for the work I did while he was in Spain, but I was more concerned with getting the fuck out than pressing the issue.

Later, Deuce ended up pissing off the Bitcoin community, and they found out that his last business had been involved in mortgage fraud. He was living in New York because he was on the run from the state of Illinois. So he was a convicted scam artist too. Lovely.

Ultimately, I don’t regret working with Deuce; it was a screenwriting goldmine. I will never, ever again struggle to write the character of a pompous, egocentric, hypocritical douche. But there’s one thing about Deuce which I’m not sure comes through unless you really get to meet him, face-to-face. I don’t think Deuce knows that he’s a douchebag and a con man. I think he genuinely believes his own bullshit, and really does feel like he’s working to make the world a better place.

In one of our conversations about corporate influence in politics, Deuce mentioned an idea to me: the “accidental conspiracy.” It happens when a bunch of organizations, doing what they believe to be right, end up entirely by accident causing damage so massive to the world that it seems like it was intentional and coordinated. That about sums up Deuce Wagner. He is a walking, talking, living, breathing, anthropomorphization of an accidental conspiracy.

We all know the basics of geometry. A line is one-dimensional. A square is two-dimensional, made up of four lines connected at their endpoints. A cube is three-dimensional, made up of six squares connected at their edges. And a tesseract is four-dimensional, made up of eight cubes connected at their sides.

Actually, you might not have heard of the last one. But take a look at the image up top: it’s a tesseract rotating through hyperspace. Whether that breaks your brain or not, the point is: there can be more than three dimensions to any given thing.

So how does this apply to characters in fiction? Let’s have a look at some examples.

First Dimension: Time

A one-dimensional character can be taken completely at face value, and never changes. They always react the same way, their mindset is always unambiguous, and they never learn from their experiences, alter their personality, or grow. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.

Second Dimension: Behavior

A two-dimensional character is, generally, one whose behavior does change over time. They literally have an arc.

If a character has both motivations and behaviors which don’t change at all over the course of the story, then they’re another variety of two-dimensional character. Speaking of which, let’s talk about motivation.

Third Dimension: Motivation

A three-dimensional character changes over time, but they may be more than what they seem at face value. They have subtexts and inner motivations which explain their actions and give a reason for their behavior, which may or may not be clear to the audience. Both motivations and behavior may change over the course of the story, but not always.

Other people may define “character depth” as the complexity of these subtexts and motivations. I’d say a better term would be “density” — a dense character has a rich, complex backstory, which leads them to behave in a variety of ways in various contexts. “Dense” is also a derogatory term that means “stupid”, though, which is probably why this hasn’t caught on.

Intermezzo: Who Sees These Dimensions

Back to geometry for a second. The world we live in is three-dimensional, but we’re only seeing a two-dimensional projection of it. Have a look at the palm of your hand. Notice that you can see every part of your hand on the X and Y axes.

Now — without moving your hand at all — take a look at your knuckles on the other side.

Can’t do it, can you? That’s because you’re only getting two dimensions of information at any given time. Your retina is a flat, 2D plane picking up a flat disk of light. You’re not seeing the entirety of the third dimension all at once, just a cross-section of it. To see what else is out there, you have to start rotating things, and build a mental model of what the totality of a 3D object — like your hand — actually looks like.

It’s the same with characters. The first two dimensions — time and behavior — are completely visible to the audience. The third dimension — the motivation — is only visible to the character. But sometimes, the actions of the character may reveal little bits and pieces of their motivations, and the audience can start to build a mental model of them.

But what about aspects that even the character can’t see?

Fourth Dimension: Consciousness

A four-dimensional character not only has behaviors and motivations that change over time, but also a varying self-awareness. The character may think they understand their own motivations, but in reality be very, very wrong.

I’m not going to draw a diagram, because visually representing a four-dimensional object makes my brain hurt. Instead, I’ll just describe an example: A bully beats up on an effeminate gay boy (behavior), because the bully hates gay people (motivation) — or so he thinks (consciousness). By the end of the story (time), the bully realizes (consciousness) that he’s actually gay too, and has been ashamed of it. So he apologizes and makes amends with the effeminate boy (behavior) in an effort to atone and find happiness (motivation).

In other words, the fourth dimension is the discrepancy between what the character thinks their motivation is, and what it actually is. In many stories, the character becomes conscious of their true motivation over time, which then alters their behavior and/or motivation.

This could also manifest itself as a character who isn’t conscious of their behavior. For one reason or another, they fail to see the consequences of their actions, and over time realize that they’ve actually been acting against their motivation. For example, the idealistic businessman who wants to change the world for the better, and fails to see that he’s actually become the very thing he hates until it’s too late.

Four-dimensional characters may not be all that uncommon after all. What examples in literature, film, or other media of fiction can you think of? Sound off in the comments.

A large group of devoted Mass Effect fans absolutely detested the ending to the game’s third, final installment. The outrage became so frenzied that developer BioWare announced that they were going to change it. This news has led to further frenzied outrage from game developers fearing that their artistic integrity will no longer be respected, critics decrying it as the death of games-as-art, and other general quasi-enlightened indignation.

The simple answer to all this is that video games are inherently a collaboration between author and audience. The more holistic answer is twofold:

1. An author’s intent is meaningless if they fail to communicate it to the audience
2. Art and meaning does not have to be intentional, and is often unintentional

The first point is a uniquely metamodern observation: it neither rejects nor accepts the validity of authorial intent, but makes it contingent upon its relationship to the audience’s interpretation. The second point is something that has been well-established since the dadaist and surrealist movements (but obviously not widely-understood). The result is that Mass Effect is not a mere series of video games. It is performance art, being unwittingly performed both by BioWare and their fans.

VAGUE SPOILERS FOR MASS EFFECT 3 FOLLOW

Mass Effect 3 tasks the player, as Commander Shepard, with defeating the Reapers: an ancient race of synthetic lifeforms which live in intergalactic space, and return every 50,000 years to consume all intelligent life in the Milky Way. The technology which makes space travel possible in the Mass Effect universe was placed there by the Reapers as a trap for intelligent civilizations, urging them to develop along a predetermined path. It’s cosmic horror straight out of H.P. Lovecraft: humans — and all intelligent life — are insignificant in the face of something much bigger than ourselves, which we can never hope to understand.

The Mass Effect trilogy is all about defying cosmicism: yes, we can understand it, the player says. Yes, we can defeat it.

This is especially prominent in the third game. In order to raise an army to fight the Reapers, the player must unite all of the alien species in the galaxy. This is nigh impossible; hundreds- and thousands-year-old conflicts divide these races, preventing them from ever wishing to work with one another. Some of the most alien and strange races are believed to be inherently violent and dangerous — the insectoid Rachni with their hive mind; the artificially intelligent Geth who exist as algorithms on a server, and construct and destroy robotic bodies for themselves on a whim. Throughout the game, the player as Shepard defies this impossibility. Yes, we can unite all of these races. Yes, we can solve all of these conflicts.

This is exactly what happens. In the game’s final act, all of the intelligent species of the galaxy have indeed put aside their differences as a direct result of Shepard’s — the player’s — actions. Galactic peace seems inevitable once the war against the Reaper threat is won. The player has done the unthinkable. They have solved the unsolvable. Intelligent life is significant in the face of the cosmos.

But then, in the game’s final moments, all that is thrown away. The player is presented with a series of events so illogical that many fans believe it must have been Shepard’s hallucination as a result of Reaper mind-control. While logical, this “indoctrination theory” still constitutes a sudden about-face of Mass Effect’s underlying theme: yes, we can defeat the undefeatable.

Critic MovieBob has compared this sudden about-face to the bleak ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, likely in an attempt to evoke the challenge that Gilliam faced in releasing the film with such an ending. What he fails to realize is that Brazil‘s ending was not a sudden about-face. The bleak, fatalistic tone is present throughout the entire film. Every moment of hope in Brazil is clearly false in hindsight, whereas Mass Effect 3 makes every effort to make its uplifting moments perfectly genuine. If Mass Effect 3 was trying to imitate Brazil, it only succeeded at imitating Repo Men‘s failure to imitate Brazil.

This is what the fans realized, as evidenced by the popularity of this alternate ending. Throughout the entire game, the player is able to make Shepard point out logical flaws in an effort to bring peace, but this option is suddenly gone at the 11th hour. When I played the ending sequence myself, I remember — halfway towards the green-explosion-ending-o-tron — turning Shepard around and having him fire his gun at the ghostly child. I don’t know why I thought it would do something. But I remember thinking, why should I have to make this false choice? I’ve never been forced to do this until now.

The game ended. But for many outraged fans, it did not. Before, it was Krogans, Turians, Quarians, Salarians presenting false choices to players, and they handily dismissed them all. Now, it was BioWare themselves. BioWare became the antagonist. And all of a sudden, Mass Effect wasn’t over anymore. The players had become Commander Shepard, and they refused to accept defeat; they were going to defeat the Reapers. But they could no longer do that inside the game.

Video games are a powerful medium because they are not stories about someone else. They are a story about you. For one hundred hours, BioWare had engulfed players in the emotion of defiance. For one hundred hours, players asked the question, why does it have to be this way? And for one hundred hours, their struggle against injustice paid off. The players had fully assimilated the notion that with enough effort, enough struggle, they could correct any perceived injustice against them, and make anything make sense.

What else did you expect they were going to do?

Mass Effect is about defiance, and its persistence in the face of a supposedly unsolvable problem. When I say that, I’m not talking about the games. I’m talking about the fans and BioWare. They are performers, playing the protagonist and antagonist of Mass Effect, on the stage of the world.

And the fans won. That’s not the death of art. That’s art on a level that we never could have imagined.

WARNING: The following post discusses key story points in Avatar. They are not “spoilers” per se, because everyone has already seen this movie (if not literally, then figuratively).

Avatar’s story is the one thing that has elicited a near-universal “meh” from the entire world. We’ve all heard it before: hero infiltrates enemy, learns the enemy is his friend and his friends are the enemy, helps former enemy fight former friend, and said fight is a standard progression of hero almost succeeds, then he fails, but then he miraculously succeeds. Archetypes like this aren’t a bad thing; after all, we humans have been telling this same basic story for thousands of years, keeping it fresh with minor variations (i.e. Avatar’s transhuman motifs), and it’s always interesting if not particularly groundbreaking. But with all the love and attention Avatar’s visuals got over the alleged 14 years James Cameron worked on them, the script is admittedly less polished. That’s probably one of the big reasons why Avatar didn’t win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

There are many little things which Cameron could have done to twist the Hero’s Journey archetype — perhaps Jake Sully should have betrayed the Na’vi willingly before feeling remorse later on, for example — or simply cleaning up some of the dialogue and filling some plot holes would have sufficed. But perhaps the best thing Cameron could have done to Avatar is to make one simple removal, changing nothing else. This one removal would make Avatar’s criticisms of the War on Terror, racism, technology, and destruction of the environment immensely more powerful.

Following the scene after Hometree’s destruction, when we see slow-motion shots of Jake and Grace being wrestled out of the avatar links, Grace shouting “you murderer!” at Parker, fade to black. Roll credits.

Okay, that may be a “simple” cut, but it’s pretty major. Still, it would have made Avatar a much better film. Hit the jump for why:

Let’s look at what occurs up until that point. Jake has gained the trust of the Na’vi, he and Ney’tiri have fallen in love, and he’s beginning to feel “like out there [in the avatar] is the true world, and in here [in his human body] is the dream.” But there’s nothing he can do to stop the military from coming to blow up the Na’vi’s Hometree. The attack is devastating, and the Na’vi know that Jake was fully aware it was coming. Ney’tiri rejects him, says he will never be one of them. It’s heartbreaking. Tragic. The evil corporation with the big guns killed the innocent natives, destroyed the beautiful forest, and tore Jake away from the woman he loved, all so they could mine a stupid rock.

If the movie ended there, everyone in the audience would leave with one thing on their mind: blood for oil is a horrible thing. Look what it did to the Na’vi. Look what it did to our boy Jake.

But no, the story keeps going. Jake escapes and gets back in his avatar body to find that the Na’vi are still alive and well (albeit badly beaten and grieving for their lost people), and all he needs to do to become “one of them” again is to ride on the back of a really big dragon. He leads them into battle against the humans, and apparently their advanced technology is no match for flying lizards, rhinoceroses, and kitty people with bows and arrows (the same kitty people with the same bows and arrows that didn’t do squat just a few scenes before, but now they’re angry kitty people, so it totally works). In the end, the evil humans are defeated, and the kitty people live happily ever after with Jake among them.

So, what is the audience thinking now? Holy shit, we just saw dragons killing helicopters. That was cool. It was like Reign of Fire, but fucking awesome instead of fucking awful.

Yes, the battle scene was awesome, but what happened to the anti-war, anti-corporate, environmentalist message? Oh, yeah, that. Yeah, I guess the whole Iraq thing really does suck. Anyway, remember when that angry cat guy just like jumped onto the ship and shot like seventeen soldiers with his bow? That was fucking sweet!!!!!!

If James Cameron had ended Avatar on a horribly tragic but realistic note, it would have been a bold, ballsy, daring move, and an extremely effective one at that. Most if not all arguments about the story being derivative and cliché would be rendered moot, and its message would pack more of a punch than any recent film of its type in recent memory. It would impress not only with its visual technology, but with its audacious injection of seriousness and maturity into a blockbuster. Here would be a big-budget, spectacular film telling us that a hero cannot save the day; only we, the people, can do so by preventing the horrors just witnessed in glorious 3D from ever occurring in reality. In terms of making pacifists out of us, “war is a drug” has nothing on that.

Alas, dragons killing helicopters is a much more impressive demonstration of glorious 3D technology. It’s not Best Picture material, though.

Béla Tarr is the director of cult classic Hungarian films such as Sátántangó. Hideo Kojima is the designer of massively popular Japanese video games such as Metal Gear Solid 4. These two men actually have quite a lot in common, save for the medium they work in, their popularity, and their pretentiousness when discussing their craft.

Let me describe Sátántangó to you, briefly. The opening consists of an eight minute shot of the camera doing almost nothing while watching a bunch of cows:

The film continues with these similarly lengthy shots, some of which have literally nothing moving for minutes at a time, for seven hours. The film could have been a series of still photographs, and not much would be lost.

Metal Gear Solid 4 opens with a 20 minute cutscene, during which the player has no chance to do anything meaningful with the controller. Here’s a snippet of it, presented Mystery Science Theater 3000-style to make it more palatable:

The game continues with these similarly lengthy cutscenes, interrupted occasionally by short interactive sequences which are heavily scripted and offer the player no chance for creativity, for 40 hours or something. The game could have been a Japanese animated film with giant robots and guns and explosions, and not much would be lost.

The key difference between Hideo Kojima and Béla Tarr is that Tarr has gone on the record saying that he doesn’t want to adhere to the conventions of “good” filmmaking and storytelling. Kojima, on the other hand, is trying so hard to prove that you can tell wonderful stories through interactivity, when in fact the interactive elements of his magnum opus add nothing to the storytelling.

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage.
[...]
I recently finished my second thriller, or so I thought. When I sent it to several fine writer friends, I received this feedback: the protagonist and his girlfriend can’t spend the whole book unable to get in touch with each other. Not in the cellphone era.

Oh, poor pitiful you, Mr. Richtel. Your entire toolbox of tired plot devices that have been done to death is ruined, forcing you to come up with new and interesting ideas. How awful. At this rate, TV producers won’t be able to have computers make sci-fi beeping noises when someone uses Photoshop. Soon you’ll have to write thrillers where characters die because their partner’s iPhone “fixed” an important “typo.” Or romantic comedies where a woman gets angry at her husband because he can’t explain what he was really doing last night with her best friend in 140 characters, minus her Twitter name. It would be terrible!

For the record, on the off chance that Mr. Richtel’s cubicle is five feet away from my mother’s, I don’t actually think he’s a lazy, whiny hack, and I’m just coming off that way to appeal to the Gawker readers. The column makes some interesting points and brings up some valid issues, though it doesn’t seem to discuss many solutions to them other than “blow up the cellphone tower.” In this day and age, where everyone is always connected, that’s the kind of plot device that people can’t relate to.

I call it “gameplay format,” because if a screenplay is a movie script, a “gameplay” should be a game script. Now, “gameplay” is already used to describe the experience of playing a game. That’s precisely why I called this format a “gameplay,” because it describes exactly that.

In filmmaking, screenwriters aren’t supposed to talk about shots or blocking or directing all that much; at most, they make minor suggestions. The screenwriter’s job is to describe the action. Why not give the “gamewriter” the same job — talk about what happens when the player’s character does what, and leave things like controls and programming to the designer and programmer?

I decided to try creating a format based on a screenplay, and I’m writing a surreal dystopian comedy/thriller game to test it out. It will be called “Status Quo”. But I want to make sure I’m on the right track as far as it being readable by humans.

I will say two things: I envision this as a 2D sidescroller simply because I can’t program or model in 3D to save my life, and centered underlined text is a “level heading”. If I have to say anything else, then this format isn’t easy enough to read, and I have failed. MISERABLY.

So, please let me know if this is comprehensible, and whether I can improve it (the format, not the game necessarily). Without further ado, after the jump, level one of “Status Quo”:

                                        THE CLINIC

               INT. EXAM ROOM

               Overhead lights slowly turn on to reveal the white, sterile
               room. BURKE, a Watchman (a man with a gigantic eye instead
               of a head) stands on the left side, dressed in a hospital
               gown.

                                          DOCTOR (V.O.)
                                     (on INTERCOM)
                              Okay, Burke, just follow the
                              computer's instructions. We'll be
                              done shortly.

               The player now has control of Burke.

               A section of the floor on the right side of the room begins
               to glow green. A railing is on the right side of this green
               area.

                                          COMPUTER (V.O.)
                              Please step onto the green square
                              to begin the exam.

               SUBTITLE: Explain how to walk.

               The computer repeats its instruction every five seconds.

               WHEN BURKE WALKS ONTO THE GREEN SQUARE:

               The green glow stops. A red arrow appears on the large
               screen taking up the rear wall.

                                          COMPUTER (V.O.)
                              Please jog towards the other side
                              of the room.

               SUBTITLE: Explain how to run.

               A treadmill in the floor turns on. It is roughly the same
               speed as Burke's running gait. When it pushes Burke against
               the railing, he braces himself against it.

               WHEN BURKE REACHES THE CENTER OF THE ROOM:

                                          DOCTOR (V.O.)
                              That's good, Burke, just a few
                              more seconds.

               After a few more seconds of running, the treadmill stops.

               The intercom extends from the left wall, revealing a large
               retinal scanner.

                                          COMPUTER (V.O.)
                              Please look directly at the
                              retinal scanner.

               SUBTITLE: Explain how to look at things.

               WHEN BURKE LOOKS AT THE SCANNER:

               The scanner examines Burke's eye.

                                                       IF BURKE LOOKS AWAY:

                                          COMPUTER (V.O.)
                              Please look at the retinal scanner
                              until the scan is complete.

                                           WHEN BURKE LOOKS BACK, CONTINUE:

               WHEN THE SCANNER IS DONE:

               The scanner turns off.

                                          DOCTOR (V.O.)
                              I'm running the numbers now. How
                              are you feeling, Burke?

                                                     IF BURKE SAYS NOTHING:

                                          DOCTOR (V.O.)
                              Burke?

               SUBTITLE: Explain how to choose dialog options.

                                                      IF BURKE SAYS "OKAY":

                                          BURKE
                              I'm okay, I guess.

                                          DOCTOR (V.O.)
                              Good.

                                             OR, IF BURKE SAYS "NOT GREAT":

                                          BURKE
                              Still queasy.

                                          DOCTOR (V.O.)
                              Sorry to hear that.

                                                                EITHER WAY:

                                          DOCTOR (V.O.)
                              Hmm...let's see now...

                                          BUT, IF BURKE STILL SAYS NOTHING:

                                          DOCTOR (V.O.)
                              Burke, did you hear m-- oh, here
                              they are...

                                                                REGARDLESS:

                                          DOCTOR (V.O.)
                              Nothing seems to be too out of the
                              ordinary.

               The door on the left side of the room opens, and the doctor
               (also a Watchman) walks in, carrying and reading a
               clipboard.

                                          DOCTOR
                              Your iris is a bit dilated, and
                              nerve pressure's above normal,
                              but that's hardly surprising.
                              What with the riots and all.

                                    IF BURKE SAYS "THEY STARTED WEEKS AGO":

                                          BURKE
                              They've been going on for weeks,
                              though. I'm used to them.

                                          DOCTOR
                              Well, yes, we all are.

                                                  OR, IF BURKE SAYS "TRUE":

                                          BURKE
                              Yeah, that's true.

                                 IF BURKE SAID THAT, OR IF HE SAID NOTHING:

                                          DOCTOR
                              We're all used to them by now,
                              though.

                                                                REGARDLESS:

               The doctor lowers his clipboard.

                                          DOCTOR
                              It's like they're status quo at
                              this point. Very alarming.

                                         IF BURKE SAYS "MAKES MY JOB SUCK":

                                          BURKE
                              And the resulting paperwork is
                              just hell.

                                          DOCTOR
                              I'd imagine. Can't help your
                              stress level either.

                                                                REGARDLESS:

                                          DOCTOR
                              Well, at least coming here was a
                              break from all that for you. Back
                              to the grind, I guess?

                                                       IF BURKE SAYS "YES":

                                          BURKE
                              Yeah, back to the Bureau with me.

                                                                REGARDLESS:

               The doctor turns around and walks towards the door.

                                          DOCTOR
                              You can get dressed. Good seeing
                              you, Burke. I just hope it's at
                              the bar next time. Ha ha ha...

               The doctor exits the room.

                                                                   FADE TO:

                 THE BUREAU OF BUREAUCRACY/AGENCY OF INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
                                         COMPOUND

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.