I went to a talk by Lee Sheldon in the last session of the 2004 AGC. I don’t remember the topic, or much of what he said, but I do remember he plugged his new book,
“Character Development and Storytelling for Games”. Whatever he talked about, I was sufficiently interested in it to make a point of ordering a copy when I got home. Here is a review of that book, starting with his intention, laid out in the first sentence.
“Character Development and Storytelling for Games is meant to be a resource for writers and designers and those who must work with us and who may want to talk intelligently with us at some point.”
Here is how I think he did. Pretty well.
This isn’t a book that will teach you how to write, except by example. It is rambling in a comfortable, conversational way; a very readable book, but then I would expect a man who has been making his living as a writer for several decades to produce something very readable. It isn’t a step-by-step or cookbook of writing, detailing pacing schemes and such, although it does discuss a variety of features and techniques of writing stories in games. The conversational style, together with the breadth of subject matter covered, does tend to defocus the book, but I think that was a necessary tradeoff, not a shortcoming.
This is a general audience book, as the first sentence indicates. As such, most experienced game writers won’t be finding much that is new here. So those twelve people probably shouldn’t bother reading this book. The rest of us might get something out of it. Let me thumbnail the book for you, and you decide.
The first section is a couple of chapters of background. It deals with the general questions of why make games and why tell stories in them, and then proceeds to expound one of the author’s themes, namely that telling stories is telling stories, regardless of medium. Not that the medium is irrelevant to how you tell a story, but that lessons and standards from more traditional literary modes generally have relevance to telling stories in games.
The next section, “Creating Characters”, covers characters, dealing mostly in basic concepts, but applying those concepts to the special issues created by writing for games. For example, the fact that the protagonist is the Player Character produces some unique considerations. Sheldon has rather a lot to say about respecting characters, something he clearly feels many games fail to do.
The next section, “Telling the Story”, takes a similar treatment of story, the elements of story, and storytelling techniques as they apply to games. Here the author climbs onto a number of soapboxes. The one that impressed me most was his emphasis on telling story directly in gameplay, rather than through cutscenes or backstory. I was also interested in his arguments for modular storytelling in games. Both of these ideas seem to me to hold considerable promise for improving both storytelling and gameplay in games.
The remaining large section, “Games People Play”, considers story as it relates to different types of games, and different genres of games, as well as considerations applying to console games and virtual worlds. Some of the material in this section was rather abbreviated, but the chapters on virtual worlds reflect considerable interest by the author in MMO writing and design. I think this disparity of depth gives the book a somewhat uneven feel, but I can’t say I’d have done it any differently.
There is a concluding chapter, and a couple of appendices, short, but worth reading. The book conveys a reasonable quantity of information, a fair amount of personal opinion, and a few good jokes, together with some jokes that are less successful.
My only complaint is that the author tends to lapse into “when I was writing Charlie’s Angels”, or “Edge of Night”, or whatever a bit too often for my taste. I also suspect that folks here will find him a bit too forgiving of some games. These, however, are minor quibbles against a book that is both comfortable and interesting to read.
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