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The Game Concept Document
The GameFly Pitch
Imagine Your World—Not Someone Else’s
Make Your Map
Filling Your Tool Box
Cinematics. Or Cut the Cut Scenes!
Software for Game Writing
Acting and Dialogue—Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Use the World for Words
DRAGON EXERCISES 09: BUILDING YOUR WORLD
CHAPTER 10: WE ALL CAN’T BE BATMAN: ON MMO’S AND MULTIPLAYER
“Spel” Time
Whose Story Is it, Anyway?
Sandbox Games
Multiplayer Games and Modes
Emergent Gameplay and Emergent Narrative
Aerith Dies. Bob Cries
Multiplayer Often Comes First
DRAGON EXERCISES 10: FEELING YOUR WORLD
CHAPTER 11: ALWAYS BE CREATING
The Rise of the Indies
Who Are the Game Players?
Tools You Can Use
Start on Paper
Easy Mode
Medium Mode
Hard Mode: Game Engines
DRAGON EXERCISES 11: USING NEW TOOLS
CHAPTER 12: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
The Future Is Story
The World Is Full of Gamers
Get into the Game!
Our Final Challenge to You
DRAGON EXERCISES 12: BRINGING IT TOGETHER
Glossary of Select Terms from Video Game Production and Culture
Our Grateful Acknowledgements
Firstly, we want to thank you for buying this book. For putting your quarter in the arcade machine. We hope we inspire you to write, produce, or work on a great video game that elevates the industry to an even higher standard.
As this book is co-written, Keith and Bob have some co-thank you’s. As a team, thank you to Ken Lee and Michael Wiese for believing in this book and opening up the video game world to their wonderful audience and network of amazing writers. Thank you David Wright for your mad copyediting skillz and for helping us to upgrade this book to epic quality. Thank you Debbie Berne for making our musings and doodles look awesome. Thank you to Linda Venis and Chae Ko at the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program for giving us a classroom and allowing us to fill it with like-minded dreamers. Thank you to our research assistant, Stephen Warren, and to Alice Art Design and Rae Yamamoto for help with the graphics. And a special thank you to Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb for penning the Foreword.
I, Keith, would like to thank the other pieces on my game board of life: Juliet, Sabrina, and Ava. We’ve come a long way from that crazy night of playing Risk! Games often have a winner, and I am the winner with all of you in my life. Thanks to everyone at Syracuse University for supporting me in and out of the classroom. Especially to my chairman, Michael Schoonmaker, for getting our class on the books and to Dean Lorraine Branham for not telling me I’m crazy with some of my crazy ideas. Lastly, I want to thank Robert Sternberg. My friend. It’s always a treat to have you around the house and firing up the Xbox. But more than that—thank you for letting me pick your brain about what you are playing; what you think is working in games and why. I hope your passion turns into your profession.
And I, Bob, would like to thank my Golden Globe-winning girlfriend Terri DePaolo for putting up with a lot—a lot—during the writing and researching of this book. Also to my former colleagues and lifelong friends Karen McMullan, Martin Hagvall, St.John Colón, Amy Zimmitti, Mike Dawson, Allen Im, Jennifer Estaris, Daniel Boutros, Jeffrey Kessler, Greg Morchower, David Mullich, Bill Smith, and Michael Blackledge for making me feel welcome and for teaching me to teach. Plus huge thanks to all of my students and “knuckleheads,” past and present, for teaching me more than I ever taught you. I dedicate my effort in this book to my goddaughter Kristen Ericksen, who was playing Gran Turismo using manual transmission at age three, and who remains my favorite gamer.
Foreword
by Larry Hryb, Xbox Live’s “Major Nelson”
VIDEO GAMES are big business. As you will soon learn (if you don’t know already) the video game industry is HUGE. When I tell people that the industry I work in is a BILLION dollar business—they are amazed. I then follow up with another factoid: It’s bigger than Hollywood. That’s right. At only 44 years old, sales of the video game industry regularly eclipse the 125-year-old motion picture industry.
Yeah. That big.
While I’ve always been “into” video games—from that first time I played Pong at the local Sears department store on their “Video Arcade” system (just a re-branded version of the venerable Atari 2600) to the countless hours spent after school at friends’ houses playing NFL Football on Intellivision—which was really nothing more than a series of dots on a screen. We had to IMAGINE that they were QBs, linebackers, etc. Hours and hours pushing dots around the screen with our hands and our imaginations.
I attended the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University to study television, radio, and film production. There, I learned about traditional story development and using technology to bring ideas and characters to life: Write a script, go to the studio and shoot it with very expensive (tube) cameras, VTRs, etc. I practiced the art of storytelling, character arc, and all the hallmarks that make for a good linear story and program. I would study that by day, and return to my dorm in the evening and play video games. (It was upstate New York. What else was a nerd to do in the winter?) I could FEEL the creative and technical fields were on a crash course in gaming.
One day we would have video games with the fidelity of movies and TV. One day there would be far away worlds we could explore for hours on end.
Fortunately, we did not have to wait too long.
I started working on the Xbox team in late 2003—when we were deep into planning “Xenon,” the console that would become the Xbox 360. I was working on the “platform” (the systems that games run on) with some of the smartest people I have ever worked with: software developers, testers, network engineers, hardware engineers, and more. ALL incredibly smart and talented, but VASTLY different from the creative environment I studied in and was used to. These men and women WERE the left brain. I was used to the warm, fuzzy, vague, right-brain way of thinking—but that was not what this was. I learned to measure, analyze, and make data-driven decisions, not just ones that “felt right.”
I also got my first look into game development.
The next building over from where I worked was a studio