Richard Dansky

A while back, I got a pretty positive response to an essay about questions that you should never, ever, under any circumstances ask a writer. (I’m serious. Like, not even if they’ve got zombie plague and you’ve got the antidote, and it can only be administered through a ritualistic makeshift quiz show. Trust me.)

But with that in mind, I thought it was worth exploring the questions that you should ask a writer, the ones that will generally provoke an interesting and interested response. The ones that won’t cause a writer to transform into a snarling ball of maniacal fang-toothed fury. The ones they’re liable to answer in complete sentences, stone cold sober and with at least a faint hint of enthusiasm.

1-Tell Me About Your Book

This never fails, largely because almost all writers have enthusiastically and emphatically inscribed something into their latest book that nobody besides them – not the readers, the reviewers, the critics (and no, they’re not the same beast; cross-breeding them mules you out the dreaded Two-Starred Amazon Kvetcher), not anyone has teased out of the text. This is the one thing that (almost) every writer is dying to tell you about, the clever thing they did that they’re balloon-burstingly proud of.

Mind you, it often is clever, or subtle, or well-hidden. It is often worth hearing about, and knowing about it can often make the reading experience richer and more rewarding. Alternately, it can be where the author snuck the name of his favorite watering hole into the text (to be fair, I only ever did this in roleplaying books, not fiction), but even that can be fun, if taken in the right spirit.

2-Who Are You Reading?

Not “Who inspired you?” or “who are your favorite authors?” It’s “Who are you reading now”, with an implied “and can you tell me about the cool stuff.” Most writers actually like to read, and often do so voraciously. Being asked about what they’re reading lets them share the stuff they like – which everyone, writer or not, likes doing – and also presents an opening for the writer to talk about what he likes in someone else’s work. Rarely will you get something like “I’m reading [insert book title here], and it’s pretty good.” No, writers are an educated audience, and just like baseball stat geeks wanting to discuss the latest pitch data analysis they’ve seen, or Lost fans wanting to discourse on how precisely the series finale let them down, writers like to talk about cool writing they’ve seen and explain why it’s cool. It’s analysis and a show of appreciation and, every so often, an insight into the writer in question’s work as well.

3-What Are You Working On Now?

This one can be double-edged. Some authors prefer not talk about a current project, for fear of disrupting their mojo or getting it out in words instead of on the page, or having someone sprint down the hall and compose a similar-themed piece on their sparkly new iPad.  And that’s fine.

On the other hand, lots of authors do like to talk about a current project. Seriously. Check their blogs. The word count meters – 2045 words today on “The Vampire’s Ukelele!” Score! – alone are staggering in their omnipresence. So ask. Maybe the writer wants to talk about it because they’re looking for feedback.  Maybe they’re stuck on something and want to talk it out. And maybe they’re just doing something really cool, and can’t wait to share it because they’re xcited.

4-Which Book Do You Wish You’d Written?

If only to see how many variations on “The one that sold a zillion copies” you’ll get as a result.

5-What Were You Going For With This Thing In Your Book? (where “This Thing In Your Book” = something coherent, thoughtful, and actually evidentiary of the fact that you read the furshlugginer book with something approximating attention.)

Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book tends to go over well. Asking a question that indicates you actually read the book, liked it, and thought about it goes over better. And asking a question that indicates that you read it, liked it, thought about it and came up with something new and interesting to ask will make you a friend for life.

There is danger here, though. Asking a question that’s been heard a million times before? Asking a question that indicates you didn’t get further than the first paragraph of the back cover text (which was written over lunch by an overworked intern who had only the cover art to go by, and who has a psychological condition whereby they must use the word “mordant” at least twice per sentence or else become convinced they’re George S. Kaufman risen from the dead)? Asking a question you already know the answer to? And worst of all, asking a question that’s not really a question, but rather a chance to show off how brilliant you are when it comes to the author’s work. These don’t go over so well. Trust me on this one.

6-Can I Buy You A Drink?

Yes. Yes, you can. Next question.

7-What’s Your Process For Writing?

Not “How do I become a writer?” Not “Please tell me I’m doing the right thing with my own quirky, convoluted approach, any criticism of which will provoke an angry blog post and possibly an assault with a sock filled with quarters.” A genuine inquiry into how a writer works – really works, as in “puts butt in seat and starts typing” – can deliver valuable insight into how the act of writing happens for a particular author. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an honest answer along with some explications of the whys and wherefores of that process. If you’re not, you’ll at least get a story of how Famous Writer X was rude to you for no reason whatsoever, and you’ll be able to cadge drinks at conventions on that one for years.

Obviously, these are not hard and fast rules. Rather, they’re suggestion based on years of observation, discussion, and having to bail out writer friends from local holding cells after they beat one too many over-eager interrogators senseless with rolled-up convention programs. But if you do want to talk to a writer – really talk to one – you could do a lot worse than to start here.

by Richard Dansky

E3 (or “The Electronic Entertainment Exposition”, as absolutely nobody other than the show’s laywers call it) is the biggest video game show on the North American continent, and possibly the world. It sucks up all of the Los Angeles Convention Center – yes, even the morlock-haunted caverns of Kentia Hall and the meeting rooms up in the aeries where nobody ever goes. Well, nobody below management level, anyway. The show floors are a thundering carnival of 60 foot television screens, noise, and scantily clad women enticing journalists to come check out video games that neither party has ever heard of. It’s Las Vegas for nerds, when the video game companies roll out their brightest and shiniest toys for the media in hopes of building that ever-elusive buzz among the pwnz0rati.

There’s a programming track, too, what feels like a little slice of GDC tucked in amongst the marketing-driven madness. It’s small, and the speaker list is generally limited to those who can be considered “names” of one sort or another. For my part, I’d been going to E3 for years before I even knew the programming track existed, and so it was an immense surprise to me when I ended up seated on a panel.

The one I was selected for was lengthy in title and heavy in star power. David Jaffe, the lead designer on God of War and the man of the hour at GDC, was on board. So was Marc Laidlaw, IHG winner for The 37^th Mandala but now better known as the man behind the best-selling Half-Life games. Neil Young, head of EA Los Angeles. David Cage, the driving force on critical darling Indigo Prophecy. And oh yeah, me. Shepherded along by Dr. Ian Davis of Mad Doc Software, the panel was compared to (and I’m paraphrasing here, so bear with me) “the Justice League of game designers” or some such. But instead of being gathered from the cosmic reaches of the universe to fight evil, we were there to talk about creativity, immersion, and story, and how the heck to get it into video games.

As panels go, it was a good one. Ian did a fantastic job of moderating the ebb and flow, building up conversations between the panelists and generally not letting anyone ride their particular hobby horse over a cliff. If you were there in the audience, you learned that Jaffe is disillusioned with story in games at this point, and that Cage is trying to push the boundaries even further. I’m sure someone, somewhere has done a better online writeup than I can, seeing as I spent much of the panel praying that I wouldn’t sound like an idiot when my turn came to speak, and the rest of it wondering if I’d done so.

My own contributions were, I think, relatively well received. If there’s a banner that I wave in the discussion of game story, it’s that the unique difference between video games and other narratives is the identity of the protagonist. In a novel or a movie, it’s the hero. In a game, it’s the player, who uses the hero character to explore the world and thus create story out of the game’s implicit narrative. In other words, once I hand you the DualShock, the exact details of your game experience are up to you. As a game writer, I can provide the high points along the way and the shape of the narrative, the lines of dialogue and the setups for the fight scenes. What I can’t do is say exactly what will happen, because the very nature of the game means that you control the action. And slowly but surely, you’re seeing more and more games take advantage of this.

It’s an exciting thing to think, that we’re just on the edge of figuring out how to take advantage of this difference. The first video games were structured on novels, or more accurately, on choose-your-own adventures. Hell, I worked on a phone game not so long ago that literally was a choose-your-own – it’s the natural shape that text-only seems to fall into. Since the advent of graphics (and more importantly, game genres), we’ve been drawn to the Hollywood model, trying to make games more and more like movies. It seems to me, that we’re on the verge of moving past that, too, into a realm of unreliable narrators and immersive metagames and all sorts of other funky stuff that truly takes advantage of the fact that these are games.

And if I wanted proof, I ran into it in the form of some students from Camden County Community College.

During the panel, I was asked about techniques for applying personality to supporting characters in video games. My feeling was that you had to give them enough personality traits to make them seem like unique individuals, rather than walking gun platforms, while at the same time not giving them so much personality that it overwhelmed what they were supposed to do. This is a nice way of saying that the members of your Rainbow counter-terror squad should give you information in distinct voice but without asking for your advice on their love lives.

And then I brought up my favorite low-comedy characters, the guards from Far Cry. Far Cry, if you haven’t played it, is a first person shooter that can best be described as “The Island of Dr. Moreau with high-caliber rifles”, and part of the action involves lurking in various bits of underbrush and eavesdropping on the mad scientist’s evil guards. Now those guards had three purposes in the game. One was to shoot or be shot. Two was to provide useful information that the player could acquire via eavesdropping. And three was to be amusing enough that the player would want to keep eavesdropping long enough to get the useful info before blowing everybody’s brains out.

So I gave these guys what I hoped was funny dialogue, spicing it up with little personality quirks so that each guard seemed like a person, not “Guard #3”. That’s why the folks from CCCC found me.

One of the guards, you see, had been written to mention that he liked sand. Why? Well, for gameplay purposes he was patrolling a beach, and I figured what the heck, let’s say he’s from somewhere with a beach. My personal past supplied one – Ocean City, New Jersey. I spent a summer there once as a live-in mother’s helper (not that I was terribly helpful) and I just dunked it in to the dialogue without a second thought. It made the guy stand out, it gave him a little personality, and nothing more was needed because the player would inevitably shoot the guy before he got around to comparing the merits of various salt water taffy joints. That was it, just one line about Jersey. He didn’t need anything else.

It’s customary after panels for folks to approach the bench, as it were, with questions. One of the students caught me, and he mentioned the mook from Ocean City. His words were, I believe, “I know that guy.” He’d grown up in Ocean City, and had been about to pull the trigger when he heard the magic words. After that, he couldn’t shoot the guy. It was a neighbor, after all. There was a connection there. He told his friends about it, and lo and behold, they wouldn’t pull the trigger, either. They weren’t going to rub out the guy from Jersey.

Was it what the game designer intended? Probably not. Was it what I intended when I wrote the line? Definitely not. But it made perfect sense to these players, and because of it, the story of their gameplay experience became different and uniquely their own.

The mook wasn’t “really” from Jersey, of course. He had the same AI as all of the other guards, the same gun, the same set of pre-programmed instructions and animations and statistics that let him serve as one in an army of several zillion bad guys lurking across the various maps. There was no backstory detailing his misspent youth hustling quarters out of video arcade change machines in Brigantine ever written, no deeper intent other than “let’s give this guy a hint of personality”. He never even had a full name.

That’s one way of looking at it. The other is that there was enough there to hang a hook of imagination on, and that as far as those players were concerned, the story they made up for him was the real one.

One throwaway line. One big impression. There’s a lesson there, I think.