Chekhov's Gun Bang Bang

Chekhov's gun is a writing principle that states that everything in a story should be there for a reason. Chekhov's famous example is that if we're told a rifle is hanging on the wall in chapter one, then someone needs to fire it in chapter two, otherwise why tell us there's a rifle there? Chekhov tells us not to waste time with details that aren't important. Talk about only what is in service to the story, no matter how irrelevant it may seem at the start.

Another Year Wiser: Orbital Operations for 19 February 2023

Chekhov's Gun is about lots of things. First and foremost, yes, as the quote says, it's about narrative economy – you often only have so much space and attention to play with, so, as Strunk and White might have it, 'omit needless words'.

In fact, specific sensibilities when it comes to narrative economy vary between mediums, commercial intent, and even just writers and their own voices. I think you've got a lot more latitude in your average novel than your average comic or TV show. That's partly because the latter two, at least in the commercial shapes we tend to talk about most often, have specific, formalist constraints (page count, episode length).

It's also down to the dependencies of including an element. A prose writer can just toss out a bunch of details without any marginal cost or wider implications. In comics, someone's got to draw that. In TV, it might mean costuming, propmaking, casting. In video games, concepting, modelling, rigging, animating, capturing, or all manner of thing, depending on what you're asking for.

This is where narrative economy collides with actual economy, which is very important.

(The same can be said even of prose or 'cheaper', marginally speaking, forms of writing. Even if I can produce an arbitrary amount of prose without issue, I may have a limited time assigned for it given what makes financial sense for that piece of work to look like. Even if I can write faster than your average bear, it might be incumbent on me not to do too much if there are specific formalist expectations of the content, or even just because then it becomes time intensive to edit or QA.)

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But there are some other useful aspects to Chekov's Gun. The inverse of its formulation, for instance: if you need to have someone fire a rifle in chapter two, you need to show that there is a rifle in chapter one.

This is, in some ways, 'earning' that moment (though there is more breadth to what 'earning a beat' can be). But also it's just about making the story feel intentional and inevitable. Often, it can be surprising the audience ('a character just pulled a gun!'), but making that surprise feel concrete -- resting on information that was available to them ('of course! the gun was on the wall the whole time!'). Though outside of Chekov's Gun, this can be earned in softer ways ('of course that character carries a gun!').

I'm reminded also of Sanderson's Law of Magic, which is interesting even if I have mixed feelings about it. Paraphrasing from memory: the level to which you are allowed to use a magic system in a work of fantasy to solve plot problems (e.g. a character using magic to get out of a fix) is proportional to the level of hard, established rules of that system. It's fine to have handwavy magic that behaves in ways that are inconsistent or hard for the audience to pin down, but if you then use them to get characters out of trouble, you're creating a situation where you're not bringing the audience along with you. It becomes effectively deus ex machina, or even 'Sonic Screwdriver Syndrome'.

(I'm increasing levels of tangent deep now, but one of the things that made me care less for Doctor Who than I already did was watching a two-parter where the first episode ended dramatically with the Doctor et al. surrounded by approaching Cybermen. Oh no! How will they escape?! And then the second episode begins with the Doctor whipping out the screwdriver and doing... something. I'm not even sure what. It felt like the most baseless manufactured tension and a waste of everybody's time.)

Anyway, Chekov's Gun here is partly about explaining at leisure what will be dramatically important in haste later.

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Last thing on Chekov's Gun: I think it's also paying off the promise of what you're putting out there. Not just in the strict narrative economy sense, but: if you're explaning some cool facet of the world or something about a character that seems specifically interesting... you're making a kind of promise to the audience that they'll see that play out somehow. Not because that's an unnecessary detail, but because you're getting them excited about something that sounds cool, and it's better to pay that off than not much of the time.

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But above all, as the quote says, this is a principle, not a prescription. I can imagine a reductive, CinemaSins-esque analysis of a work that points to all the details that it includes but doesn't pay off (or that it pays off without setting up). Which is not... how this works. This is a shorthand description of what tends to make stories connect up in exciting ways, not the be-all and end-all of how to make them.

Giving the heroes what they want

I have been v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was tempted to give a reason here, but: I don't need a reason, damnit! It's Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To contextualise how slowly: it's taken me... maybe a year or so to get to the end of Season 3, and that's with some skips.

This post is going to include some spoilers, at least up to the end of Season 3.

Season 3 is where the show really comes into its own. There's a whole lot I could say about that, about how S3 is really the point where it hits the 'promise of the premise', with some big interesting character arc swings and a great villain story-engine for the back of the season in particular, and how it has just one of the best and most thematic villains in general BUT I want to mention one episode in particular.

The Prom is the 20th episode of S3, the last before the two-parter finale we've spent so long building up to. The episode has an odd feel to it -- the pacing feels really off, and it does a lot of things differently. One of the reasons it stuck out, though, was because of my very strong emotional memory of watching it for the first time about a decade ago.

Towards the end of the episode, during the eponymous prom for the graduating class, Buffy's classmates award her the title of 'Class Protector', complete with a shiny novelty umbrella. This includes a little speech about how 'no one really talks about how Sunnydale High is weird' and 'bad shit happens all the time here and a lot of students die'. They name Buffy 'Class Protector' because she so often seemed to be at the centre of it all, saving people.

My emotional memory of that moment was strong -- an important highlight of the season -- so I was looking forward to this episode. But I was also worried it would feel saccharine now -- too much.

It didn't.

It should, I think. It has all the trappings of a somewhat easy moment that should come off as a bit trite. So I was curious as to why it lands so well.

• First off, it feels earned. We're three seasons deep in a show that doesn't give us a lot of moments like this. The show bounces around tonally, but mostly knows what it's doing. The time with the characters and in this world helps earn this moment. (It would have absolutely died for me if they'd tried the equivalent in S1, for instance.)
• The whole episode serves a different function from usual. This is a 'quiet(er) moment' episode before we move into the finale. It's space for those character moments to breathe, to reflect on where we are in the story and what this means. This is what lends it that 'off pacing' I mentioned above -- the core threat of the episode is pretty small-fry (if personal) and tangential. It's also resolved with what feels like trivial ease. Because that's not what this episode is about. It's a victory lap for the characters before the coming hardships, and the 'monster of the week' really serves to underscore/motivate some of the other moments.
• Another way of putting that is: this episode is about letting the core characters have what they want for a bit (with the exception of the Angel breakup plotline). That's... not something that this show normally does -- or, when it happens, it's to subvert it or serve some other, less wholesome purpose. And again, that makes sense! A lot of the time, characters getting what they want is boring! But here, after a long journey with them so far and all that's coming up... it feels earned, and special.
• The last point, really, and why the 'Class Protector' moment works so well for me, is that it also is the show breaking its own rules. Throughout Buffy, we've got used to suspending our disbelief about the sheer density of Bad Shit that happens in Sunnydale, especially at the high school. We get used to, say, the cops not investigating things and the students not commenting on it, because, hey, it's a monster of the week show. That's just part of its whole deal. (Actually, S3 pushes on that more generally with the reveal of how this structural conceit is embedded inside of Sunnydale's power structures.) In The Prom, though, that suspended disbelief is turned on its head -- and turned into a rare moment where the world acknowledges the wholeness of Buffy as a character. Again, it's a really delicate line -- it risks being a bit 'cute', by hanging a lampshade on some necessary narrative artifice. But to me it doesn't feel like winking at the audience or trying to 'explain away' something fairly functional. It's about reaching to create an earned moment for Buffy, which is precisely what the episode is about, which makes it sing, rather than clunk.

I have a cold coming on, which makes me grumpy and badthinky. I may arbitrarily skip updates this week.

High and Low Protagonicity

Another quote from that Kim Stanley Robinson interview:

Another useful conceptual tool is protagonicity. Does a novel have high protagonicity or low protagonicity—meaning the story is maybe spread out among a lot of different characters, who might be considered minor characters, except there aren’t any major characters. The story I intend to tell determines or suggests how I might go about deciding this.

Mountain Song, Claudio La Rocco via BookForum

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Maybe because my original writing background is in short fiction, I find myself biasing towards 'high protagonicity' when thinking about new story concepts. Actually, expanding that thought, it's probably also influenced heavily by games. This is a snap response rather than an explored thought, but I'd expect that games bias high protagonicity, by Robinson's definition, due to the role the player tends to occupy in relation to the story. The player character almost always acts a singular lens for the player to experience the story, and there are lots of by-this-point tropey narrative conceits to justify why the player is uniquely positioned to find that artefact/kill those rats/help this NPC find love.

(There are games that play with these ideas, of course, but offhand still with reference to the player character centred as protagonist.)

But, to immediately counter my own theory, the picture gets complicated when the player character is a cipher or else silent and where their relation to the narrative really comes down to the actions they are required to perform (which Only They Can Perform). That feels more like a weird collision of both high and low protagonicity, where so much is concentrated in one individual, but the means by which the story is told is in a lower-protagonicity way by NPCs with more dramatic range and narrative-if-not-actiony agency.

There are certainly some games that deliberately steer into low protagonicity more deliberately. The first one that sprung to mind was Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, a game I played while in the throes of a high fever as a young adult and so which I'm not entirely convinced is real.

Other (vomiting from the eyes emoji) Quantic Dream games do this too, leaning into storytelling with low protagonicity (e.g. vomiting from the soul emoji Detroit: Become Human). But I wonder if that's also wrapped up in the way those games so frantically borrow storytelling techniques from film in particular, a clutch that I think would risk seriously hampering their efforts if they had anything going for them to begin with.

Actants, and Relating Characters to Concepts

A few items from the narrative toolbox that came up for me over the weekend.

Kim Stanley Robinson on 'actants':

I start with a situation, usually. Say I want to write about terraforming Mars—then I need a terraformer, a person opposed to terraforming, a political radical, a Machiavel, a builder, a psychologist, etc. The French structuralists spoke of characters as actants, as the action-doers who make the plot happen. A single character could cover a couple of actants at once, or an actant could be split between a few characters. This I’ve found useful in clarifying things to myself as I get started. Therefore, characters are, at first, kind of just positions, or needed operators of the plot. But this is just the start.

Mountain Song, Claudia La Rocco via BookForum

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And something from the Failbetter Games blog (and I have no inside insight on this; I read this blog post before I started at the company and it's stuck with me):

One of the first things we did during narrative pre-production was invent the ensemble cast for Mask of the Rose.

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To arrive at those different types, we asked ourselves questions like these: Whose hopes, goals, and ambitions would be advanced by a fall to the Neath? Whose would be thwarted?

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Drawing from the lore, we asked ourselves, What lore mysteries might this character help us illuminate? What common Neath activities would have been different just after the fall? Would this character still be in Fallen London three decades from now, and what would they be doing there? Are they anyone we already know?

Designing Characters for Mask of the Rose, Emily Short via Failbetter Games blog

(And to reiterate for the avoidance of doubt: the opinions and assertions here are my own and not related to my work for Failbetter Games.)

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The connection point across both of these for me (and this was in the context of digging around for tools to help me with my own short story problems) is the conscious casting of characters with reference to the story you're trying to tell. There's a version of this which is very 'mechanistic' -- seeing the characters as nothing more that little plot devices. But I think to view it that way misses the point. The power is in using this as a lens, filter, or razor to tie characters into the story world.

I think this is most pressing in the development stage if you're trying to go from a raw concept into interesting characters whose own arcs will help you uncover aspects of the story world for the audience or help you explore your intended premise better. Obviously it's possible to start the other way round -- with a stronger handle on a character or few -- and I think this tool plays a bigger role in genre fiction or in forms that aren't, say, a literary novel.

One of the reasons these quotes stuck out to me enough to record them was that they were congruent with a previous thought I'd had along the same lines -- an explicit step during story development where you work through the process of relating character (certainly the MC) to the core concepts with which you're working. If you're exploring a premise, fictional world, theme, or question (which, I mean, most stories are doing more than one of those things...), I'd say it's vital to think explicitly about how your characters relate to those things so you can lean into or away from them. Or, more pragmatically, if a character's own story is going to be about something that feels largely unrelated to the central premise+, you need to be okay with that and make sure the form in which you're working can actually support that without it undermining your intended effect.

(If nothing else, if you think that your story DOESN'T have some central concept like those I describe above, that's usually a sign for me that I need to deeper my understanding of what the story's trying to be about (which may be different from my starting point), certainly in the forms in which I work.)

Likely no posts Thursday, Friday, or Monday.

Oblique Reflections on a WIP Short Story

I drafted a new short story back in January -- the first for a while. I've been too busy since to dust it off, but finally got back to it last night. In the spirit of my script dissection of The Last Clockwinder, I'd love to dump the current draft here so people can see the WIP -- BUT I don't want to kill of my own first publication rights by doing that either!

Anyway, it's about wizards in space. Here's the (current and not-for-long) opening:

Free-floating in space, Meiro convulses in panic. She fights for breath, she fights – pointlessly, it must be said, in blind, animal instinct – to drag herself back to the safety of the ship. She fights the chill grip that wraps itself around her as her cells threaten to burst and her blood freeze.

Behind her, the Merula streaks away. Ahead, the interceptor manoeuvres to a stop, orienting itself so the grab team can launch itself directly from the airlock. It’s hard for her to take the threat seriously, though, while she drifts suitless in vacuum. To her left—

A miracle.

Specifically, what made me want to write this was a collision of ideas: in the Dresden Files, wizards are powerful, but catastrophically wreck technology by their very presence. What happens when you put wizards with that aura effect in a high-tech, Expanse-style setting? How do absurdly, continental-shelf-shatteringly powerful beings cope with being cut off from an expanding universe?

During my readthrough and with particular reference to Writing Advice From A Slush Reader by Evelyn Freeling, here are the main things that stuck out to me that need changing:

1. It's surprisingly overwritten. I say 'surprisingly' because I'm usually pretty good at economy and flow within prose. It's serviceable, but I want more than 'serviceable'. This is an easy (and enjoyable!) thing to fix on an edit pass -- although that'll be the last thing on this list to get done.

2. Too much lore-dumping. This stems from a complex story-world setup playing poorly with short-form fiction. The answer here, I think, is largely yeeting it, but I plan a pass where I work on inveigling those things better into the story. The important elements of it, at least. This will likely be a combination of 'figure out how this lore actually manifests in concrete ways', 'slip in a sentence here and there rather than whole paragraphs', and 'trust the story/reader more'.

3. Craft issue: general structure/intercutting. The current draft flips between the 'now' and the 'then'. See the Freeling blog above on this. I've done this before in another (unfinished) story and rightly been pulled up on it. The blog has a good take on this here, I think, in that people reach for it as an arresting opening image BUT don't get back to that same height. I wonder if it's also drawing on a more cinematic style of a 'cold open' and intercutting, which makes far less sense in prose. I did wonder if I could get away with it, but on balance NO I think it needs work.

4. Craft issue: opening question. Related to that, I think there's a bunch of crafty techniquey things I can do on the first few pages to redress that balance with point 3. I think the premise/setup of the story has a solid opening question, so it's doing the work to surface that better.

5. Thematics. And linked to that, too little background on/interest in the MC. The deuteragonist has more spice about her that we just don't get from the MC. Their stories need to connect up more based on what they're each bringing into the story, rather than just through what happens within it.

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Right now, I'd say it's an acceptably written account of some cool things that happen. But it doesn't sing as a story. Not all the elements are pulling in the same direction, and the technical side doesn't bring out what is there enough. But I'm pleased to feel like I have a solid plan forward. I appreciate that reading about this without the context of an actual draft may feel pointless. But this is my thought process on it, nevertheless.

The Last Clockwinder: Diachronic Script Development

My goal here is to present a snapshot of how the script for one scene evolved over time and for what reasons those changes happened. The only context worth having for reading is that Jules is the player character, and Levi is her old friend and colleague, talking to her over the radio. (Though you can check out this other post for more context.)

I’ve used images in-line with my doodled notes on them. If for some reason images aren’t good for you, I’ve replicated these and my scrawling on this Google Doc.

Alright. Here’s Version 1. This is the first typed-up version I found, so is the oldest barring whatever I scribbled in my notebook.

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Iteration 1 (First Draft) 350 words, 2 pages

Three takeaways at the end, which mess with the rest of my numbering system, hah. 

1. It’s shorter than I would have guessed for the first draft (though we’ll see why later)

2. The skeleton of the final scene is here from the very beginning. That’s one of the reasons I chose this scene over some of the others that kept the same title, but whose content entirely changed – we’ll actually be able to chart a course through the revisions. 

3. For all that it’s short, and in some ways more successful than a few of the later versions, I’d call the style quite rambly and unfocussed compared to where it ends up. 

On to version 2

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Iteration 2 (First Revision): 500 words, 3 pages

The scene fills out quite a bit in this version. Key callouts (from this point, my numbering will be incremental and will help draw things together across versions): 

1. Added some lines for flow – Jules needs Levi to coax out what’s bothering her. More dramatically/emotionally interesting BUT it very much feels like padding compared to the leaner final scene. 

2. A revision of the previous version that doesn’t really change anything yet. This line will become a theme – it changes in almost every draft, as I was clearly dissatisfied with it in some way, until I land on something that actually works.

3. Lots of lines added here – the wordcount soared by 150w! – which do a decent job of fleshing out the characters, building in some world details, and injecting some humour. But at the cost of bloating the scene significantly.

4. I use placeholders like this a lot when drafting, though you won’t see many here, because I generally resolve them, even if not perfectly, for a turned-out versioned draft. 

5. More added, as in point 3. It does flesh things out in ways that get lost in the final draft, but there just ultimately isn’t the space for this kind of thing in this form of narrative. 

6. ‘and now our new friend here’ is an artefact of a point where the player character might have been a third party other than Jules or Levi.

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Iteration 3 (Version 1.3): 575 words, 3 pages

2. Yep, still playing with that line.

4. An attempt at a ‘fictitious swear’. Didn’t fit well; rightly removed from here and the script overall after this.

7. A new closing monologue from Levi. This is playing with theme and what the story is grappling with and has to say. It comes off a bit bald, but even more than that it just makes the scene even longer (up another 75 words!).

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Iteration 4 (V2): 300 words, 2 pages

8. Now we’re talking! This was part of the Big Cut Pass across the whole script when it became clear just how untenable scenes of the previous length were. This shaves off 175 words, and takes it down to barely 2 pages. It makes a massive, positive difference. You can see we’ve lost some detail, but considering how the scene flows now, it’s clear just how desperately needed that was. 

Slightly extended tangent on that point: the bloating and then shrinking of the scene could be taken as evidence of a certain amount of ‘faffing about’, given that it’s come back to a form much closer to where it started. BUT I think that’s a flawed reading. First off, the process of adding then subtracting is – if done judiciously – more like reducing a sauce than pushing a rock up a hill. Things may end up looking a bit like where they started, but it’s a lot stronger and more intense. 

Second off, the redrafting was part of the process of figuring out more about the game as a whole – exploring character and theme, and strengthening what things end up on the page, even if other things gets left out. I will say that this was an intensely good-feeling thing to do, and also a bit of a luxury in games writing. The ability to iterate like this – to test and extend the writing and make it better, was very, very valuable, but is not always possible. 

(Add to that that some of the iteration came specifically from playtesting and seeing what people were and weren’t getting about the story and story-world – what was boring them or going over their heads. Length played a big part of that – saying too many things just meant that nothing stuck, no matter how compelling the individual details were.)

9. This line is an interesting one to compare directly across versions. 

Original version: Over the years? A dozen? At most. There are – were, I guess – supply runs every half-year. I picked up a fair few of them. Heh. But I guess you know that better’n most. Why d’you ask?

First revision: Over the years... A dozen? At most. There are – were, I guess – supply runs every half-cycle. I picked up a fair few of them. Heh. But I guess you know that already. Why d’you ask?

Very minor wording changes. Notably, ‘half-cycle’ feels a lot more ‘on genre’ than ‘half-year’. 

New revision: Over the years... I brought a few dozen shipments, maybe? Why d’you ask?

Those words – 13, count ’em – say as much as the 36(!) of the original line and give up precisely nothing of value. 

What’s even more important, actually, is how this line looks in the final script:

Final script: 

That’s right, zero words. Because, ultimately, with space at a premium, that line was achieving absolutely nothing. 

2. THERE it is! Finally, a version of this line that actually feels like it snaps. The space dedicated to it feels fairly sizeable in this revised scene (a line, a reaction, then a line), but I think this was worth keeping because it was amusing and good for showing the relationship between Levi and Jules. The humour angle (I’m not going so far as to call it A Joke, but it’s certainly a minor gag) gets goodwill from the player BUT crucially also gives some nice dynamic lines for the voice actors to play off, and really works tonally with the shift into the emotional core of the scene at the end. 

10. Another set of lines to compare to the previous version. First off, they’re the only bits that remain of a much longer exchange. Second, the lines themselves:

Version 1.3: I never really knew her. We’d speak, a little, when I brought shipments. Small talk. She wasn’t very good at it. I guess when you’re stuck out on the edge of the world with nothing but a bunch of plants for company, you don’t get too good at small talk. This life wouldn’t be for me, is what I’m saying.

Version 2: I never really knew her. We’d talk, a little. But when you’re stuck out on the edge of the world with nothing but a bunch of plants for company, you don’t get too good at small talk. 

About half as many words, and I think nothing lost that’s not a) not that important or b) communicated just fine elsewhere. 

Version 1.3: She was brilliant, though, that much was obvious. I don’t really understand how this place works, why it’s here, any of that, but she clearly knew every living breathing bit of it. And she loved being here. This was her place, y’know?. There’s few enough find that in their lifetimes. Got to envy her that.

Version 2: She was brilliant, though, that much was obvious. She clearly knew every living breathing bit of this weird place. And she loved being here. But I think she was lonely. 

Similar reduction. We lose some of the more naturalistic rambliness and wordiness, but we knew by now that was absolutely not the way to go with this script. 

7. Also note how much has come out of the ending. No more monologue; slightly different emphasis, but striving for the same emotional/thematic notes.  

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Iteration 5 (Final script): 175 words, 1 page

There we go. Less than a page. 

11. The first line is now Jules. This is the result of a match pass – these scenes were always triggered by the radio ringing, and the player answering it. Having Jules speak first didn’t make sense! So, this is purely functional to cover that. 

9. Right to the point. Some of the same lines, but no working around to the point of the scene. There just isn’t the space for that. 

12. We switched this from a chuckle to a groan on the basis of trying to tamp down any read that Levi and Jules were an item. If that’s what you got from the game... well, you do you (but also: no). 

13. Slightly simplified version of this gag. 

7. Same ending content, but much simpler. No monologues, just a few lines with the characters’ own points of view in brief.  

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These were by no means the only interations, just the ones notable enough to reproduce here. If people find this valuable, I might dig into the passages I quoted at length and why I think each of the cuts to it worked (the process of figuring out what to take away at a word-by-word level). And, potentially, look for another scene to dissect in this way. Say ‘hi’ in the comments or on Twitter if that’s interesting to you.

A Chain of Thoughts on Fiction-First TTRPGs vs D&D*

Further thoughts on fiction-first TTRPGs that have solidified recently:

• To reiterate, a major difference is the 'locus of simulation'. Are you simulating the world and its people, or simulating a fiction about that world? This is striking in the genre-focused games of Powered by the Apocalypse, in particular.
• D&D(-alikes) often don't include tools or guidance within the game that make its GMs and players grapple with pacing or other narrative concepts which more readily create compelling fiction. (Not that it never engages with those things or tries to showcase them, but they're at best tangential, or more focused on the macro level of storytelling than narrower scenes and beats.)
• This doesn't matter so much if you're playing D&D* with people who bring those skills in from elsewhere.
• For this and other reasons, D&D* tends to lend itself to a 'contiguous time by default' mode of play, where you're mostly dramatising everything ('Okay, so you weave your way through the town's streets looking for an armour shop.'), and the GM exerting more of a directorial role over the flow of the narrative can sometimes feel like a failure state (emphasis on 'feel', because it's not).
• One of those other reasons (and this came up in conversation with a friend recently; forgive me -- I forget who) is probably down to D&D*'s history -- dungeon crawls and battle maps, where time happens necessarily slowly to give the players the opportunity to declare checking for traps, sneaking down corridors, etc., where the player is trying to simulate their character's actions as closely as possible -- and failure to, say, look for traps in one particular room can lead to a 'gotcha'. Pulling agency back from the players -- a narratively interesting and necessary tool -- becomes an incidental weapon in that environment.
• The same is true more obviously of combat -- D&D* has us dramatise essentially everything, moment-by-moment, because that is inherent in its combat system, which forms a significant part of the game (both present and historical).
• This makes the idea of 'hard framing' or even just using dramatic framing techniques as narrative tools, feel incongruous if you've come into TTRPGs through a D&D* mode (certainly speaking for myself).
• But good narrative really demands use of tools like this -- thinking about framing, where the action is, etc. -- otherwise you end up with a higher proportion of dead time.
• You do wrest some agency away from the players by doing this BUT player agency is not an unalloyed good. Different games and tables will benefit from different approaches to it, and most players I know would trade 'always on' agency for more of their limited at-table time to be spent on the good stuff.
• Fiction-first games build this tool into the system and surface them as explicit elements of play. Some are better at teaching this than others.
• Even if you prefer D&D-style games for other reasons (on balance, I think I still do), understanding the affordances of your system and what tools you can import from elsewhere can transform your play experience.
• One thing I love about D&D* is precisely the possibility of architecture in game-planning that runs against the affordances of an average fiction-first game which prioritises shared authorship over a hard underlying reality.

The Last Clockwinder: Refining the Writing

The Last Clockwinder's playtesting process provided an excellent means to probe and iterate on the narrative. With scratch audio we put together in the game, the managed playtests Pontoco ran were a chance to see how players were responding to the narrative.

A big focus for this process was comprehension. The story-world of the Clocktower, the Clockwinder, and the history of Jules and Edea in particular had a lot of different elements which we needed to get across without stating them too baldly or losing the charm and characterful dialogue. We were able to make a lot of well-reasoned changes in response to seeing playtesters actually play the game, at a stage when the script wasn't polished, the audio was scratch (e.g. me doing my best 'Alex from The Expanse' voice for Levi), and the game wasn't playable end-to-end.

This also gave us insight into the ways the players were interacting with the environment and the narrative elements, which helped us reposition or resequence the audiologs between and within rooms to manage that flow a little better.

Here are some key ways in which we responded to this feedback.

Simplifying the story

Things started off too complicated. This was mostly about the makeup of the story-world and 'rules' of the Clocktower. I think this was partly just a desire to make the story seem maximally interesting on paper during development, and partly as we tried to link together key threads from the story with what was being depicted in gameplay.

We did a lot of work, sometimes quite painful and difficult, to rationalise the story-world and the story itself. Collapsing or omitting plot beats; coming up with new explanations for things; working out what things could afford to be ambiguous to the player and what couldn't[^1]. The key here was not being attached to any one vision of it over time -- accepting the necessity that things would change (while still caring deeply about the story). Though it could be particularly difficult to really 'see' a new version of the story, since it was a kind of palimpsest of all the versions that had preceded it.

Being more explicit

I said before that we didn't want to state things too baldly or lose the character/charm and feel like we were hitting the player in the face with LORE and MOTIVATIONS. But there had to be some give in that. As always, what's obvious (or even banal and uninteresting) to the people immersed in a thing is not so to a first-time player. Recognising that was important, as was realising that some things that had become routine to us could be interesting revelations to the player taking their first steps into this world.

In practice, this equated to a) working out what these essential factors were ('the tree is called the Clocktower and is meant to safeguard endangered plants'), b) saying these more explicitly, and c) saying them enough times.

This could turn into quite a mechanistic process -- 'find 3 places to say that thing in the first five scenes' -- or inform revisions to ensure we weren't missing opportunities to underscore key details. Both get smoothed out in polish, but literally doing script passes where the goal is 'use Jules's name five times to ensure the player knows who they actually are' means you have the right bricks in place.

Cutting, cutting, cutting

I mentioned in the last post that I cut the script down to roughly 1/4 of 'average pages per scene'. That was vital. Too great a volume of material, no matter how good or characterful, can end up obscuring what you need them to know to understand the 101 version of the story. Slimming down the number of lines and how long each one is helps the most important stuff stand out to the player.

Obviously, there are limits to that, and you don't want to suck all the joy and whimsy out of the script, but the limit is usually much closer to the bone that one would naturally assume. To paraphrase something Stephen King says in On Writing: 'But it's good' isn't an argument against cutting something. It's supposed to be good -- that's your job as the writer. 'Good' should be the baseline.

Cutting is valuable for plenty of other reasons. It puts more trust in the voice actors: they can make a line that seems simple, even boring on paper sound great -- usually more easily than a complicated line. And short is usually just better -- I think knowing how much you can say in how little space is a foundational skill of the craft of writing.

Squint Factor and Overindexing

Two additional factors in the iteration process from playtesting. Playtesters and their feedback were invaluable, but we had to account for squint factor, particularly with regards to the voice acting. Our scratch audio was of servicable quality, but it was not recorded by professionals. The presentation and quality of it was also different from how it would be in the finished games. We had to consider what feedback might just be 'taken care of' by the switch to professional VO. (But also not let that stand as an excuse not to address something that could be improved in the draft.)

Likewise, it wasn't necessarily the right move to make a change in response to every single piece of feedback.

• Every player and playtester has their own unique context
• It's resource-intensive to be constantly making these changes
• Some feedback might contradict other feedback
• Our own vision of the game and its story was an anchor point worth protecting to some extent

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[^1]: And not 'ambiguous' in the sense of 'vague', but drawing the distinction between what we had to have them understand and where it would be okay if they got the wrong end of the stick/weren't clear on our own version of things.

The Last Clockwinder: Constructing the Narrative

One thing I skipped in the previous post on this was a description of The Last Clockwinder's story. You play Jules, a young engineer returning to her childhood home -- the Clocktower -- a giant tree in the middle of a waterlogged planet, and was previously tended by Edea, the Clockwinder. Jules returns with her friend and colleague Levi to save the Clocktower from sinking into the ocean. As she works on this problem, she encounters old recordings of her previous stay on the Clocktower -- when she was a wayward child crashing into Edea's solitude.

Our main narrative units for The Last Clockwinder wound up being audiologs and radio conversations -- two gaming mainstays. The risk with both of these -- audiologs in particular -- is that they can end up making the story feel like an adjunct to the gameplay rather than a cohesive part of it. Story, then gameplay, then story. I found myself wondering at some late stages whether we'd missed the opportunity to try for something more 'interesting' in terms of narrative delivery.

But I don't think that was the case. Not that we couldn't have done anything differently (something I may cover in a future shard) -- but they're mainstays for a reason. They can achieve a lot within many of the resource constraints I mentioned in my last post.

What's more, it's been very validating to see various reviews (user and critical) which have mentioned the 'just enough' nature of the story and narrative delivery. One of the reasons we took this approach was that fourth constraint -- balancing the player's attention. A player could skip every audiolog, multitask while problem-solving, or give them more of their attention. We made sure that nothing in the audiologs was critical to playing the game or having an understanding of the story, even if it would be an underweight one.

The radio conversations were, for the most part, the 'narrative golden path' -- the 'sine qua non' of the story. They represented more of an interruption (though most of the time multitasking was still possible), but were more important to motivating the player, clarifying next action/objective, and moving the story forward. (That's a very 'plumbing focused' take on them; I hope they're also characterful and entertaining in their own right. But, as far as possible, every bit of material had to pull its weight.)

One affordance of both audiologs and radio conversations is that they allowed us to think in terms of short, discrete scenes. That's not always a good thing in games, but the internal structure and placement of these scenes were very clear tools to play with for pacing out the narrative.

Here are a few further snippets that feel relevant here:

• Before we knew more about Jules and how she'd map (or not) onto the player character, we knew things would lack a certain dynamism/interplay if there was only one speaking character in the present on the Clocktower. Levi (the 'old hand') was an early addition with this in mind, to provide a foil to Jules and/or the player character. (An alternative would have been to only tell the story through the audiologs -- but this would have wound up remote and unsatisfying, and limited the scope for shaping an emotional arc across the game.)

• The original concept for the story was more 'hands off' and about striking mood and tone than about interfacing so closely with what the player was doing and motivating/directing them more explicit. I'm glad we didn't pursue this route in the end, for a host of different reasons -- iteration through playtesting was a key step in validating this. Moving away from that made it easier to give the player more of an emotional anchor on and understanding of the characters and world and better support the gameplay (helping motivate and direct them as the game unfolded). But there are a bunch of details of the world and characters that got left on the cutting room floor for that reason. 100% the right decision, but still interesting to reflect on now.

• My original script for the game was significantly overlong. I'll definitely write this up as its own post and maybe even do some side-by-side comparisons on my cuts. The first complete script draft I remember averaged about 4 pages per scene. I got the scythe out and cut that in half, and things still felt too long, so I had to cut it in half again. Really interesting (and vital!) process to undertake.

• We underwent several iterations of the script before the game was playable end to end -- all fine and normal. We had to get things down on paper and sometimes with scratch audio before knowing final decisions on various elements (sometimes so that those drafts could inform the decisions themselves). But it was also vital that we actually allowed time for several 'match passes' amid the polish when things were playable. This didn't just mean fixing things that were straightforwardly inconsistent with final game flow -- it meant looking for specific opportunities to exploit that connected the script (which always risked feeling 'remote' and removed from the player's reality due to our constraints) to what the player was seeing and doing in a given space. Again, something I can perhaps showcase in a script comparison, but often it meant replacing a general detail in a line of dialogue -- something that declared or implied something about the wider world, for instance, or a joke -- with something that filled the same role in the dialogue but was rooted in what the player would be seeing or doing at the time. This was another way in which we could mitigate some of the common downsides with our narrative units.

The Last Clockwinder: Core Constraints

The Last Clockwinder came out on VR platforms last week. I worked on the game, on-and-off, from January 2020 through to right near the end. Specifically, my role (alongside Olivia Wood) was developing the narrative background for the game, iterating on that, and writing and polishing the game's script.

My plan now is to work up a series of these shards on aspects of the development from my perspective. In keeping with the nature of this blog, they're not meant to be finished, polished artefacts. I'm thinking of them more as 'thought sketches' -- a way for me to reflect roughly on the project as much as to surface anything externally. They may serve as a precursor to more developed posts elsewhere or pitches for talks.

One of our main early discussions for The Last Clockwinder was over how to tell the story within the project's constraints. In the main and in no particular order, these were:

Affordances of VR

Representing any text-heavy content in the game, for example, didn't seem like a viable approach. This also informed things like expected play session duration in terms of parcelling out content.

Development resources

These priorities, for instance, made it unrealistic for narrative to demand character models or custom animations. Written story could inform aspects of the art and mechanical design, particularly in terms of influencing things that had yet to be designed, but the visual and mechanical design would need to have a heavy influence on the written story.

(I'm drawing a false distinction here between 'written story content' and the narrative of the game as a whole, because the art direction, environment design, etc. are not separate from the narrative and storytelling; they are it. But: see my original disclaimer around this being a 'thought sketch'...)

We also knew from the start that we wouldn’t be implementing any kind of complex underlying narrative systems. We weren’t going to incorporate branching narrative or have space for the player to make any significant choice in the story. That’s not a good or a bad thing; it was a reality of the game as it could be made, and so it was our job to make the story as satisfying as possible within that frame. Which is to say: making the player still feel like an agent in that story where the nature of their agency had these constraints.

Financial resources

Into which I lump: funding levels, general budget constraints in indie games, and prioritisation of investment narrative vs parts of development that were more critical to realising the core vision of the game. This is relevant in as much as it determined the available 'narrative resourcing' as a function of Olivia's time and mine plus the available time from other members of the team to dedicate attention to narrative. Which, of course, has an effect on what can realistically be delivered.

Balancing the player's attention

This always is (or should be) an important factor in narrative and game design. But specifically here, the heaviest emphasis was on the strength of the core mechanic and puzzle design. Those elements would be giving the player a lot to think about (and marvel at), and the core audience the game was targeting wasn't necessarily one who were automatically invested in narrative. 'Storytelling vs mechanics' is a false dichotomy, but we also wanted to be realistic about the game's audience and bring that mindset to decisions around the storytelling.

In the next post, I'll look at our approach to some of these constraints.

Narrative is process; process, narrative

Having yesterday set my intent to write on here more about narrative, it would be churlish not to attempt that today!

My first thoughts on the 'what' leaned heavily into process -- how I actually go about putting together what I write. My first-blush response was 'no, that's just what you normally write about' (since a lot of what I put on here relates to self-management and 'workflows' in a more general sense). But I prodded that thought a little further, because, in large part, narrative is process.

I think the way people talk about writing and narrative has -- rightly -- become a lot more functional and prosaic in various ways (or maybe my perceptions have become better filtered over time). It is a craft -- or perhaps a collection of crafts -- with solid principles and rules, not a mystical process. There is a certain element of it which feels rather ineffable -- the haunted gaps between those pillars of craft -- but I think a lot of that comes down to honed implicit understanding and emergent thoughts, which develop as a function of the 'infrastructure' you make for yourself to actually do the work.

I'm a very structured thinker and creator. I have a set of tools I've picked up over time which I'm very good at selecting and deploying. For me, that is a huge part of the joy of creativity -- cultivating tools which develop with you over time, and still being surprised by the results. If I have a superpower, I'd say it was that (plus the ability to pick up, try out, and keep/discard new tools I find along the way), though it certainly leaves me with my share of weaknesses, too.

Part of the joy for me is also the 'elephant eating' of it all. ('How do you eat an elephant...?'). Confidence with my tools gives me a certain sense of inevitability, as long as I have energy (attention + time). If something isn't working, I have other options, diagnostic approaches, and places to fall back to.

Not everyone thinks or works like I do, and that isn't to their detriment, but for me: narrative is process and process, narrative.

No updates tomorrow or Friday.