Marc Laidlaw's Blog, page 2

Twitter’s Loss Is My Blog’s Gain

Just now I was wondering, what if there was an episode of Spongebob where it turned out that Patrick’s full name was Patrick “Starfish” O’Brian, and it turns out he had written all the Aubrey/Maturin novels. I was also thinking about a movie called A MAN CALLED SCROOGE, where the ghosts appear to Scrooge like a series of escalating boss fights and he beats the shit out them one at a time and finally goes toe to toe with Tiny Tim.
He beats the crap out of the post bossfight Goose Boy for good measure.
Bad Robot is right down the street, I should drop in. For them, I think I would package it as A VERY CLOVERFIELD CHRISTMAS.

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On Games: Yakuza!

Yakuza!

 

While videogames are capable of great subtlety and originality, there is no question that the popular face of the industry looks extremely familiar: science fiction games tend to rely on Star Wars, Bladerunner, and Aliens; fantasy titles owe much to the elf-and-orc-heavy lore of Tolkien and even more to Dungeons & Dragons; and horror tends to channel Night of the Living Dead or 28 Days Later. While games with subtle themes are a worthy subject, I’m going to shelve that topic in favor of one more crazy action genre, albeit one not nearly as popular in the West: the Yakuza.

Specifically, I’m going to rush not long- but whirl-windedly through the Yakuza series created in 2005 by Ryu Ga Gotoko Studio, a Sega division whose catalog is currently represented in North America by seven key Yakuza titles and several spin-offs. Many of the entries in this series have never been translated or released outside Japan, although the truly dedicated Yakuza fans will have found ways to play them regardless.

Tales of crime and mystery are common enough in videogames. There are games about the Mafia, games about cops, games whose action varies from cooperative heists to slow-paced detection and deduction. But there are no games quite like Yakuza, a mixture of carefully paced melodrama and frenzied, cartoonish hand-to-hand combat, embedded in a world where you can choose to ignore the story completely and just play mahjong or run a real estate business or manage a hostess club for weeks.

From Yakuza 0 to Yakuza 6, we follow the story of Kazuma Kiryu, gangster with fists of iron and heart of gold. Orphaned and then adopted by a Yakuza boss, Kiryu grows up in the syndicate, takes over as chairman of his clan, earns the respect due a legend, and eventually retires from crime to quietly run his own orphanage—where he must continually (and rarely successfully) resist the attempts of criminal characters from his past to pull him back in. The seven main games each cover a different period in Kiryu’s life, reflected in environments that model distinctly different fashion trends in modern Japan.

While the design of a good game runs deep, and may encourage intelligent exploitation of complex permutational systems, my favorite games are, most of all, new worlds, into which one can sink just as deeply (well, I would argue more deeply) than a movie or a book. Many games are defined mainly by their colorful environments. But you can keep your ghoul-infested castles and your alien-overrun space stations, your volcanic planets and zombie sewers. For me, there is no place I look forward to visiting quite as much as Kamurocho, a fictitious Tokyo district that serves as stomping ground and contested territory for the warring clans and cops that make up the Yakuza cast. As you play the game, either through Kiryu’s point of view or as one of the dozens of other colorful characters who people the series, you get to know Kamurocho intimately, and over a span of many years. Fashions change, restaurants go out of business and are replaced by new ones, back alleys give way to skyscrapers, vacant lots to construction sites. Yet the streets remain the same down the years, becoming so familiar that once you have learned to find your way around, you can navigate all seven games with the sense of returning to an old neighborhood. The one thing about these streets that never changes is that you will be jumped repeatedly.

The main action of a Yakuza game is…action. Street fights. Whether pitted against swaggering local toughs or predatory Yakuza packs, each lead character has their own fighting style. Kiryu is a master of fantastically improbable martial arts moves, and can make a weapon out of just about any object close at hand—signboards, traffic cones, entire motorcycles. Other characters, products of their era, specialize in dangerous break-dancing, or draw on their past as a disgraced baseball player to bring a batter’s finesse to their melee battles. Kiryu’s most beloved orphan charge, Haruka Sawamura, who begins the series as an infant and ends up in Yakuza 6 as an international pop idol, spends her own street time engaged in urban dance-offs.

While street fights are where Yakuza might seem to have the most appeal for gamers, it is really through the characters and stories that the series has built its immense international fanbase. I have never been big on games whose play grinds to a halt while you sit and passively watch cut-scenes, but in this one instance I will make an exception. I have discovered endless reserves of patience for Yakuza’s endless scripted scenes. The intrigues are complex and surprising, the characters quirky and colorful. And while I am frequently confused by the convolutions of betrayal and double-crossing, I have never skipped a line of dialog. I personally play with Japanese audio, reading along with English subtitles (although dubbed English versions are readily available). The translations are a marvel—melodramatic, self-mocking, sentimental and sincere, perfectly matched to the world of the story.

The sweeping tales are mainly concerned with honor and ethics, the yakuza version of the samurai code, rendered in comically broad strokes. Invariably, Kiryu meets some menacing figure from a rival or allied clan, finds himself in a battle from which he cannot back down, and then beats that rival to a pulp, coincidentally forging a durable bond of brotherhood with his fists. His new BFF is now there to get his back in future rumbles.

One strange charm of the series is that despite the continual mayhem, explosions, backstabbings, and gloomy doomed patriarchs, almost no one ever actually dies. They may seem to die, but death is a plot convenience, often turning out to be reversible when the story requires it. Far from feeling unfair, this makes it easier to enjoy playing the game. Our protagonists are moved to acts of great heroism by the threats of over-the-top villains; but for the player themselves, for you and me, there’s always a sidelong wink to let us know that it’s okay to have fun. Relax. Nothing really bad can happen when Kiryu Kazuma is on the scene. Go explore the streets, stop in an arcade and play some old Sega games, play poker or mahjong or go bowling or spend a few hours in a batting cage, go fishing, or, or, or.… If one follows only the main narrative and ignores all other distractions, one can finish the game with perhaps a tenth or less of its content explored. These small worlds are as fully fractal as your interest in them. For every significant storyline that pulls you to the game’s grand finale, there are scores of lesser quests to pursue, where the world bubbles up in weird and perverse ways: literally perverse in some cases. More than one miniquest tasks Kiryu or one of the other viewpoint characters with tracking down a lingerie thief or chasing a flasher through Kamurocho’s red light district.

The use of viewpoint in Yakuza is one of its most novelistic innovations. Some of the games barely feature Kiryu at all, moving fluidly through the lives of other main characters. In Yakuza 3, for instance, there are three playable protagonists; four in Yakuza 4, and five in Yakuza 5. Nor are the games tied exclusively to Kamurocho. Other locations, fleshed out with nearly the depth of Kamurocho, include a coastal town on Okinawa; a canal district based on Osaka; a maximum security prison; and even a small mountain village where you will find yourself spending days learning to trap animals for food and fur, before finally daring to hunt the local grizzly bear. This barely hints at the variety of activities packed into the series, not to mention all the food you will eat. Oh, the food! I have never been so hungry as ordering vaporous entrees from the dozens of menus of restaurants and cafes and takoyaki stands scattered around Kamurocho. This being a game, everything you eat will give you some health and even improve your character’s skills. And should you ever find yourself drinking too much liquor, you are likely to stumble dizzily into yet another backalley ambush, only to discover you now have access to a new drunken fighting style. It’s worth trying everything!

The series is not without flaws—or anyway features of the Yakuza genre which many will consider bugs in the western market. I am no expert in Yakuza cinema, and few Yakuza novels have been translated (the writer of the first Yakuza games, Seishû Hase, is a crime novelist well-known in Japan but unpublished in English), but they are extremely short on female characters other than the variety needing to be rescued. Mistresses, mob wives, clan matriarchs who step in when their husbands are murdered, are about all I can recall from the films. The games do somewhat better than this, there are several memorable women scattered through the series, and indeed Haruka’s story is playable in Yakuza 5, but it is overall a saga of exaggerated machismo. Fair warning.

To sum up this complex epic of treachery and brotherhood in a few pages is proving impossible, so I will instead offer a suggestion of where to dive in if you are curious. The series began in 2005 with Yakuza 1, and has barreled ahead with regular releases ever since. But in the gap between Yakuzas 5 and 6, the designers created a prequel, a new entry point for a new generation wanting to meet Kiryu-chan. Many feel Yakuza 0 is the best game in the series, which means it is one of the best games of all time. It features cunning narrative twists, dazzling dance sequences, and a brilliant use of shifting viewpoint to tell its story. So by all means, start with Yakuza 0.

If you like Zero, Ryu Ga Gotoku has remastered the older games. Yakuza 1 has been reworked and reissued under the name Yakuza Kiwami (meaning Yakuza Extreme!); Yakuza 2 is now Yakuza Kiwami 2; while Yakuzas 3 through 5 have been released in a single pack as the Yakuza Remastered Collection. Yakuza 6 is the very latest game in the main Yakuza series, and the last to feature Kiryu Kazuma or the streets of Kamurocho. The series is expected to continue without them for years to come, but this is a good time to get the complete Kiryu story.

Meanwhile, Ryu Ga Gotoku has given us the spinoff, Judgment. Also set in Kamurocho, the hero of Judgment is a former lawyer, trained by the Yakuza, full of shame after the outcome of a hugely public trial, now working as a gumshoe with legal leanings, who happens to race drones for fun and detection. A fine and self-contained spin-off, it distinguishes itself from typical videogame fare in its themes, which center on government corruption, health industry connivance, and the search for an Alzheimer’s cure. We are light-years from zombies and haunted sewers here. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

For fans of pulpier fare, Ryu Ga Gotoku has hardly surrendered ground on that front. In Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, they adapted a popular manga set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland obviously inspired by Mad Max, where an outpost called Eden barely holds its own against roving bands of car-driving mutant punks. Eden is constructed with the same care as a Yakuza district, and in fact the whole city is but a dystopian skin, in some places stretched all too thinly across the bones of Kamurocho, packed with slightly futurized minigames, casinos, arcades, and bars. You can choose to manage a nightclub by throwing mutants out on their ears, or engage in a post-apocalyptic mixology competition. Ultimately, the nods to Yakuza are so emphatic that you can give your hero a makeover and dispatch Kiryu Kazuma himself to patrol the wasteland, battling roving marauders in car-to-car combat. If the Yakuza genre holds no appeal, if you must have mutants and psionic superpowers in your videogame entertainment, then by all means go straight for Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise. If you enjoy that, you might find yourself warming to the idea of a pre-apocalyptic civilization, where good-hearted Yakuzas do their best to keep the world from ending, one beat-down at a time.

 

Yakuza 0 (PS4, PS3, XBox One, Windows)Yakuza Kiwami (PS4, PS3, XBox One, Windows)Yakuza Kiwami 2 (PS4, XBox One, Windows)The Yakuza Remastered Collection (includes Yakuza 3, 4 and 5) (PS4)Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (PS4)Judgment (PS4)Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise (PS4)

First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jan.-Feb., 2021

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On Games: Sekiro and A Plague Tale

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, FromSoftware, 2019

A Plague Tale: Innocence, Asobo Studio, 2019

 

I’m getting old, so I should probably go to bed at a reasonable hour, but I know I will be up late tonight (and tomorrow night, and the night after that, most likely) trying to kill an enormous poo-flinging ape that guards a cave in a beautiful mountain pool overshadowed by a hundred-foot-long reclining Bodhisattva. Eventually, I promise myself, I will kill the ape. But even then, I will not sleep. Other and worse things await me beyond this lovely pool. I may never get to bed on time again.

The source of my sleeplessness, this seemingly endless series of almost unbeatable beings, is the game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Sekiro’s designers, FromSoftware, have already robbed me of thousands of hours of sleep by way of their previous famously difficult games, Demons Souls, Dark Souls (One through Three), and Bloodborne. The major difference between Sekiro and the earlier titles is that in this one I am (much to my dismay) alone. FromSoftware’s previous games all made grudging acknowledgment of their difficulty and allowed strangers to assist one another, anonymously, through online play. But Sekiro’s lead character is named Wolf…and he is a lone Wolf. A stealthy shinobi, an assassin caught up in a blur of shifting allegiances, divine heirs, baffling bloodlines…none of which even remotely matter.

The story cannot matter as stories are meant to because it is delivered only as the game allows. Consider my crucial battle with the Great Ape. This is not an optional fight, tucked in a cul de sac to be found only by gamers intent on discovering every cranny. No, the Great Ape guards an object that must be acquired for the story itself to proceed. And to acquire that object, well…this is the reason I spend an hour or more each night, for the last couple weeks, trying to beat this fricking ape.

Imagine reading a novel, a thrilling adventure of great atmosphere, intricately plotted, full of remarkable characters—and yet at the height of every chapter, just when events seem most exciting and significant, you are faced with a paragraph you cannot read. Nor can you skip it. Imagine this paragraph contains ten sentences. The first time through, you read two of them, and then you must start over. You read only one this time, and then it’s back to the first word. You read that first sentence over and over again until you barely remember how you once read the first two sentences. And then a breakthrough: You make it all the way to the third sentence, and partway through a fourth. Weeks later, you have made it to the eighth sentence. It can take you an hour each night just to get to that sentence once, since most times you are still stuck on the second or third or even ignominiously the first sentence. Grimly you keep on. Do you remember the story at this point? Does the sense or meaning of the paragraph have any relevance here, or is your whole entire goal now to just get to the end of the final sentence?

Story cannot possibly survive this process. Nothing matters except to conquer that final word. You come to hate the paragraph and simply want to be done with it. If there were nothing here but story, you would never persist. No story can be worth all this…certainly not the less-than-epic story of a one-armed ninja who persists in dying in a dung-scented poison cloud.

In FromSoftware games, the stories, such as they are, exist mostly to confabulate a context for a series of escalating torments. The various Souls installments drew on a kind of dark medieval or European palette, a fallen world of knights and dragons and animated skeletons, all filtered through a Japanese sensibility that renders western cliches fresh to a jaded western eye. Bloodborne, one of the few games ever to spur me to read fannish explications on the internet, admits a more Gothic tinge that eventually broadens to include cosmic horrors for which the word “Lovecraftian” seems inadequate. What they truly design are worlds in which certain stories of historical significance may be glimpsed, while the players struggle through their own ongoing role in whatever dark realm From’s designers have trapped them. The difficulty of the game is at perfect odds with the desire of every story to tell itself. What kind of story is this, that holds itself back and may only be unlocked by a player with a certain honed set of reflexes? At times it seems like a story that does not care to be read.

It’s no wonder then that a month or so into Sekiro, I found myself turning to a game whose entire appeal was narrative—A Plague Tale: Innocence. I knew from the previews that it had a compelling setting, appealing characters, and some sort of story to tell. There it was, right in the title: A Tale! I hoped that it wouldn’t require me to suffer too much to enjoy it, and for the most part it did not. For the most part.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is set in medieval France, and after a night of playing with tolerable voice actors speaking English, I discovered that I could switch to French with English subtitles. My immersion in plague-ridden medieval France was complete!

This is in many ways a YA story, a tale of young rebels on the run and then in direct conflict with the requisite powerful authority figure—in this case the Inquisition, its brutal officers, and its particular loathsome megalomaniacal pontiff. Our hero is a plucky teenaged girl, highly skilled with a sling, and determined to protect her little brother from capture by the ominous forces who want the boy…for some power in his blood.

While rat-borne plague sweeps the countryside, we come to realize it is not the plague itself that is the game’s chief concern—but the rats. A sea of rats overwhelms the villages and battlefields through which the siblings make their way. Early on, we discover that the rats fear flame—and so there are puzzles requiring clever use of existing torches, brands, and burning carts to navigate pestilential landscapes. The game introduces a grammar of simple concepts to overcome each obstacle, and then begins to use them in more complicated ways. There is little repetition; the player is always learning and applying some new trick. It is wonderful.

It is also gruesome, grim, nightmarish. Those who fear rats might find it unplayable. Against this bleak background, the characters stand out brightly—the sister, her brother, a series of friends and allies.

And yet, in the end, after a completely satisfying story expertly woven with a game that rarely bogs down so far in difficulty that the story grinds to a halt…we see again the difficult balance of gameplay and narrative. How hard it is to get this right. At the story’s and the game’s absolute climax, the designers are still introducing absolutely new concepts and techniques to be mastered. Mastery requires repetitive practice and failure. Each failure again returns us to the first sentence of that paragraph. Again and again, one sentence, then two. When we attain the third sentence, we’re free and clear—we need never go back to the first again. But we will be hung up on the third and fourth for so long that the first is finally forgotten. It’s so frustrating. Lines of dialog, voiced by the villain, sound wonderfully evil at first. But by the sixteenth repetition, there’s nothing left but to get mad at them for reasons that would make no sense in the story.

Still…I spent two or three nights on the final sequence of A Plague Tale, where Sekiro would have held me in a similar scenario for a month. Just over a week after starting the game, I reached its conclusion, wonderfully satisfied with all but the last few hours; and it is the nature of such things that my frustrations were soon forgotten (had I not sworn to make note of them), while the charm of the characters and the thrill of playing such an exciting and gruesome—such an original!—adventure remain strong as ever.

I would therefore recommend A Plague Tale to anyone who turns to games for storytelling, as a fine example of how to craft a narratively compelling game without sacrificing either discipline.

And I would recommend Sekiro for people like myself, who have given up on sleep.

 

First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May-June, 2020

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On Games: Nioh

Nioh, Team Ninja, 2017

Nioh 2, Team Ninja, 2020

 

I am no Elizabethan scholar, nor trained in any form of combat, but I’ve always felt certain I could beat a seventy-year-old royal astrologer in a fight.

John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s advisor, the original 007, mathematician and cartographer, author of many occult volumes and investigations, has somehow managed to get himself blown up twenty feet tall, all of it covered with eyeballs. He’s powerful. He’s fast. And I, supposedly a trained samurai (although Irish born and raised), am really no match for him.

Dee, instead of frittering away his remaining years in a library like any respectable philosopher, has instead filled the Tower of London with alchemical devices powered by a rare “spirit stone” found only in Japan. Dee’s assistant, the diabolical Edward Kelley, spent his last few years in Japan, subverting shoguns and samurai in order to…to do what exactly? Create a brisk trade in these stones, delivering them to England? Import the monsters out of Japanese folklore known as yokai?

I am completely unsure how any of this is supposed to work. But I have given up trying to understand, and constant confusion is now officially part of the charm. All I know is that I too spent the last few years in Japan, opposing Kelley at every turn. I hate the guy not only because he’s absurdly buff and covered with awesome kabbalistic tattoos, but because he stole my spirit guardian Saorse and won’t give her back; even though as I fought my way through cursed villages and haunted mountains and spider castles, I gathered so many new spirit guardians that you’d think I would eventually be happy enough having twenty to forfeit the one.

But that’s not me, dogged Irishman in feudal Japan.

Now, when I say I’ve spent a couple years in Japan battling Edward Kelley, I mean it literally. Nioh came out in February of 2017, and I have only just now, in May of 2020, finished the island campaigns and returned to England to have it out with the various clones (don’t ask) (I don’t understand it myself) of Kelley and his eyeball-covered spymaster Dee. What took me so long was, initially, a very unforgiving level of difficulty, which past a certain point robbed me of all interest in fighting my way across Japan. I put the game down two years ago, figuring I’d had enough. What caused me to pick it up again in the last few weeks was a certain…Nioh 2.

*   *   *“Don’t sequels always suck?” I asked my boss, when he told me we were going to follow up the game we had just shipped by making the same thing again but with a 2 in the title.

“Not when it comes to games,” he said. “Surprisingly, because of iteration, games often get better.”

I have come to believe that this is correct. Iteration is a deep part of the process of designing a game: Finding some little spark of fun, something that works, and then methodically building on that by trying everything that you can think of to turn it from a spark into a blaze. By the time your game is for sale, you have filled it with so many ideas that you can easily lose track of which ones worked and which ones you wish you’d had more time to tune and tweak.

This is where sequels come in. The delicate balance of elements that make a game challengingly fun versus boringly easy or impossibly difficult can be very hard to get right. But with lessons learned the first time around, a sequel gives the developers an extra opportunity to finesse. Nioh 2 arrived in March 2020. Still smarting years later from my failure to finish the original Nioh, I had not initially planned to pick up the sequel. But I kept thinking that perhaps they had learned from their mistakes. Perhaps they had balanced it better this time. And boy had they.

Nioh 2, while a perfected sequel to Nioh, is narratively a prequel, and thus a completely acceptable game to play first, which I would recommend. Team Ninja is a Japanese studio, and the world they conjure is compelling, vivid, beautifully rendered. Now, I am even less a student of feudal Japan than of Elizabethan England, and while I miss the skewed renderings of famous figures from English history, I am more than happy to be carried off dreaming through this stylized version of ancient Japan without questioning its authenticity, suspending disbelief in a way that was much harder when continually confronted with an Edward Kelley so different from the one I know from his engraved portraits. In fact, the campaign here is partially constructed around events from Japanese history, including the Siege of Osaka—a thing I only discovered when ransacking the internet for clues on how to get through certain tricky passages. So it’s educational!

Also less jarring than the presence of an Irish samurai is my playable viewpoint character in Nioh 2. This time around, I am half human and half yokai. Yokai are supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore, and they fill the Nioh games in astonishing variety. Being half yokai myself, I occasionally set aside my human heritage and transform completely into a powerful magical being. I am slightly troubled by the fact that I spend most of the game mowing down other yokai, but it’s no more than they attempt at the first sight of me.

The story of Nioh 2 is a charming one, delivered on the fly, mainly in cut-scenes that surround the lively missions themselves. Its developments and outright twists are at times surprisingly moving, helped along by the fact that the game is not so difficult that you become bogged down in details and forget the larger picture. You are paired up initially with a jovial merchant, himself displaying yokai-ish aspects of the mischievous Monkey King, and it’s not long before such minor sidekicks (some based on historic figures) become major characters in the story. These transformations are carefully wrought, and work their way into the very game we are playing instead of sitting outside it in a sealed expository bubble. Allies follow you through the landscape, assisting you in combat, pursuing ends of their own; some eventually turn to enemies.

Seeing the way in which designers are learning to more closely merge narrative with the gaming experience is one of the deep pleasures of playing videogames at this time. Nor are these narrative experiments confined to games that market themselves entirely on the strength of their story and characters. In truth, I find myself drawn to games where the story is scarcely mentioned, hardly hyped, but shines through in ways less forced, less pretentious, more natural to the medium.

The greatest improvement Nioh 2 makes over its predecessor is one that makes it possible to see the story through to its end, by an increase in the ease of cooperative play. In both games, a weak or uncoordinated player (like myself) confronted with a battle or boss too difficult to beat, can summon help from other Nioh players who are online at the time. The sort of players who volunteer their assistance tend to be extremely experienced and powerful, and can quickly get you over your current hurdle. To summon them, you must offer an “ochoko cup,” an item exceedingly rare and hard to come by in the original Nioh. The scarcity of ochoko cups was itself such a hurdle that I quit the game, and making them easier to collect was one of the most important changes Team Ninja made to Nioh 2.

Within both the game design and player communities, the issue of difficulty is currently highly charged and controversial. I personally favor a game that one can actually play from start to finish; a complete experience is something I value from most forms of entertainment. Other gamers play mainly for a challenge; beating an extremely difficult game gives them great satisfaction. Team Ninja’s answer to this in Nioh was unsatisfactory, but in Nioh 2 I found it perfect. If I hit a wall, I could always pull out a cup and summon a companion. If I felt like testing myself, honing my skills, alone against a challenge…nothing prevented me from doing that. And in fact, keeping the higher difficulty as an option meant I often sought it out by choice instead of feeling worn down by having it inflicted on me.

Thanks to this considered rebalancing of difficulty, I was able to work my way through Nioh 2‘s dazzling and intricate levels, battling dozens of human and supernatural bosses as well as thousands of lesser horrors (some of which still fill me with dread even after I have fought them dozens of times). And in the end, with the confidence I gained from finishing Nioh 2, I was able to return to Nioh, narratively the sequel, and finally finish that one.

Or almost finish it.

Septugenarian John Dee still awaits, and I can see in every one of his hundred eyes that he intends to kick my ass.

 

First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sept.-Oct. 2020

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Game Writing FAQ

The following is a letter I prepared at Valve after years of getting requests for the same advice and information. I have not updated it much since leaving the company, but I still get these questions and I still send this out. I’m posting it here so that I can now just reply with a link instead of having to dig up the old document. It is now mainly of historical interest.

Thanks for writing to ask me for career or college advice.   Sorry for the boilerplate response, but I now receive these requests so frequently that I thought I’d try to put the answers in one place.  Forgive me if I don’t have time to answer your questions individually.

Q: What type of education did you receive before breaking into the industry?

A: I have “several years” of college education, mainly focused on English literature.  The only work-related skill I specifically gained in school was a typing class I took in junior high.  I don’t have a programming background but I occasionally try to educate myself in that regard.  When I was in college, programming meant typing your code into punch-cards and giving them to someone in the university computer center to go off and compile, only to discover that your second card had a bug in it.  I didn’t see a PC until I was out of college.  I used a typewriter, not a word processor.  None of the games in the arcades resembled anything I thought I could contribute to.  This should give you hope, however:  Continue to develop your skills in areas you love, and opportunities to put your talents to work will emerge. The thing you’re meant to do might not exist yet.  I am not a good source for educational advice.  We always advise that people who want to work in the industry are better served by creating games in a practical setting:  Work with a team to create a mod, and you will see if you have what it takes to actually see a project through from vision to completion.  We often hire mod creators who are brought to our attention by our fans, when they tell us:  “This mod is great, you should hire these people!”  It can be harder to find a way to contribute as a writer, but not impossible; and the fact that there are fewer positions for writers in the mod community is unfortunately a reflection of how few jobs there are for writers in the industry in general.  There are far more positions for programmers, artists and animators than there are positions for writers.

Q: How did you get into the industry?

A: I developed my writing independent of the game industry–I wrote short stories and novels from childhood on, and finally began to have some professional success late in my teens.  I was not really aware of the industry until I played Myst, which is also when I realized that I wanted to make games.  At that point I began playing, analyzing, and reviewing games, which led to an assignment for Wired Magazine:  Write an article about id Software, which was then making Quake.  This led to a variety of personal and professional contacts.  At around the same time, I was given the opportunity to meet and work with Haruhiko Shono and his colleagues at Synergy studios in Tokyo, to develop a novel based on the game Gadget.  I began putting out the word that I was interested in working with game developers to use games for storytelling, and this led to a few doors opening.  One of those doors opened into Valve.

Q: Was this your first career choice?

A: Games did not exist when I was considering careers.  I wanted to be a fulltime freelance professional writer, and that was what I pursued.  However, I discovered that I personally could not make a living at this, let alone support a family, so I worked a number of other jobs from bookstore clerk to legal secretary.  I did not get into the game industry until 1997, when I was 37.  That was when games had finally reached a point where I felt I had something to offer.  They were sufficiently mature as a medium to seem interesting to me.

Q: How does writing games differ from writing novels?

A: Working on games is a team activity.  Very few games are made by a solitary individual.  Yet most novels are written this way.  To be a successful game writer, you have to enjoy working with a team, just wanting to create the best possible game, recognizing the good ideas no matter who might have suggested them in the first place.  If you like being the sole creator, then stick with prose, where you can have complete control over your vision.

Q: How often do you work?

A: I work a regular week, Monday through Friday, and when we’re close to shipping, the days get longer and bleed over into the weekends.   My schedule is very reasonable at this point, but early on it was quite intense.  Seven day work weeks were not unusual.  I often went home to see my family in the evenings, then went back to work till late at night.  I was younger then!

Q: What is the salary for an average worker in your field?

A: I’m not able to comment on the field in general, or on specifics regarding Valve.  The International Game Developers Association has done regular surveys on this topic, which you might find through their publication, Gamasutra.

Q: What specifically do you do?

A: My job varies from frequent brainstorming sessions about things like overall world creation, character histories, engineering a plot that meshes neatly with gameplay, writing dialog, and helping direct voice recording sessions.  Some of our other writers have taken an active role in creating entertaining marketing and website material, or they have gotten into more direct roles in managing and promoting our games.  At times I have done level design to demonstrate story ideas, but with so many excellent visual designers here, I don’t do as much of that these days.  On an average day, I talk to a lot of people about what we’re working on, figure out if there are any tasks that need my immediate support, attend meetings that sometimes involve long-term planning, sometimes short-term goals, and I write a lot of emails.

Q: Do you work among many other people?

A: I typically work closely with a handful of people who are part of a larger team, but I do move around from project to project as needed.

Q: What types of equipment do you utilize?

A: Writing is technology-agnostic.  You can write in a Moleskine if you like.  At some point you need to make sure your work can be emailed and printed, given to designers and actors to read.  But it’s the least equipment-intensive job in the game industry.

Q: What does a script for a game look like?

A: Script format varies not only from company to company but from project to project and from writer to writer.  Some writers use off-the-shelf screenplay software to create something that looks like a standard screenplay; this is helpful to actors when they are reading lines in a studio, as the scripts are free of confusing game-specific text. However, internally, scripts must typically be marked up with a great deal of information, indicating the names of sound files, providing instructions to programmers and level designers. At this point, a lot of writers end up working in something like a spreadsheet or creating a custom database that lets them output the script in a variety of different ways for different users. Actors get something that looks like a screenplay; level designers get something more detailed. In every case, the writer needs to accompany the script and be there to make sure it is implemented correctly in the game, and to take advantage of unexpected opportunities for storytelling that might arise when the game is under construction.

Q: What is your least favorite part of your job?

A: Spending a lot of time and energy developing characters and story ideas, only to learn that the game has changed so drastically (sometimes overnight) that none of it is useful.

Q: What is your favorite part of your job?

A: The frequent sense of discovery, of pioneering, and the fact that creativity and innovation are highly valued here.  Working with smart creative surprising people is the thing that makes it fun to come into the office every day.  For me it is a dream job.

Q: Who are three people that you respect in this field that I could also get advice from?

A: I can’t give out names or contact information.

Q: Can you give me some advice about getting a creative writing job for video games?

A: Develop your writing for its own sake.  Even if the game industry were to dry up and disappear next year, following your passion for writing and telling a story will help you find a way forward.

I hope this is helpful to you.

Marc Laidlaw

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Underneath the Oversea: Now on Kindle

I don’t have much to add to that title. Underneath the Oversea, the Gorlen Vizenfirthe novel I wrote in 2018, is now in print as a Kindle ebook. You can see the cover and other details right here on the home page of my website.

Regular publishers wouldn’t nibble, let alone bite, so I hired a wonderful artist, Sylvia Ritter, to create a cover for me and I’m publishing it myself. I’m not a book designer so I’m not going to throw together a shoddy print-on-demand edition at this point. Perhaps there will be a high quality physical edition at some point. An audiobook, based on the freely available YouTube files, is in the works but there’s a lot more engineering to do and I’m not able to get to it just yet.

I wrote this under strange circumstances, after the floods of April 2018 destroyed the roads into our neighborhood on the north shore of Kauai and made it very difficult to go in or out for 14 months. I had started the novel just before the so-called “rain bomb” that sealed us in, and I was grateful to have it as a project to keep me going in those months of isolation. I thought of it as a life-line I’d thrown to myself, although I’m still not sure where I ended up once I’d climbed to the top of the rope. I am very happy with the book, but after a lifetime as a reader and writer of fantasy old and new, I feel very out of sync with the market. This one comes from a childhood love of Jack Vance and The Wizard of Oz, along with a much more recent love of Hayao Miyazaki and the films of Ghibli Studios.

If you take a chance on the novel, I hope you enjoy it, and tell your friends and/or leave an Amazon review. And if you have AmazonUnlimited, it’s free to read!

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Underneath the Oversea: An Awkward Audiobook

Over the past few months of lockdown, I have passed the time by reading my short stories aloud and posting them on SoundCloud and YouTube. Over the last couple weeks, I took the additional step of reading and posting my entire new novel, Underneath the Oversea, which was written in 2018 and remains unsold. In effect, this audio appearance marks its publication. It amounts to 28 chapters, or 7.5 hours of audio.

If you can tolerate the non-mobile listening experience of YouTube, or have a SoundCloud account that lets you download and travel with your files, then I invite you to enjoy these readings.

YouTube Playlist: Underneath the Oversea

SoundCloud Playlist: Underneath the Oversea

I do intend to clean up the files and package them as a single audiobook in the near future, so if you’d prefer to wait for that, I will announce it here on my blog when it is available. That will be priced appropriately for what is essentially an amateur theatrical offering. These are enthusiastic recordings but not professional ones…at points I am accompanied by a vocal minifridge, unless I can figure out how to neutralize the hum in future editions.

Also, once I’ve got a cover and a few other details worked out, I will package the text itself as an ebook, and possibly also tackle print on demand to turn out physical copies for the first time. So if you are not into audiobooks (I admit, I’m not big on them, although I enjoyed reading), text is in the offing!

More that matter, once you have found my YouTube or SoundCloud sites, you can find hours of other readings also organized into playlist–including many short stories, and the nearly complete collection of previous Gorlen Vizenfirthe stories. I say “nearly” because there is still one unpublished story, “Weeper,” which will appear in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in September of 2020.

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2019 World Fantasy Convention

I will be attending this year’s World Fantasy Convention, at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, from November 1 through the con’s end. I am not participating in any panels, but I will be reading (most likely a selection from my Gorlen novel, Oversea) on Sunday at 12:30. This is also the time the banquet opens for seating, so I expect a smaller than the usual small turnout; but if you are not attending the banquet then I promise not to describe succulent morsels that will make you wish you were.

I also plan on attending the Friday night Autograph Event.

See you there?

 

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Ectolibrium: Eld Early, Eld Often

It’s always cool to see a fun project come together among friends.

 

Ectolibrium, whose first installment is now available on Steam Early Access, is a collaboration between a couple of old online friends. Nate Spence is somebody I took around on a tour of Valve years ago; and Nicolas Huck helped me design my self-published Kindle editions. I knew they were game fans, but only recently discovered that they were working together on this indie game.

In the spirit of doing fun stuff with friends, and also because I’d just bought a Yeti microphone that was gathering dust, I asked if they needed any help with voices, and they ended up throwing me the role of the Eld…some kind of possibly fungoid elder alien being.

I’ve always enjoyed doing voices, though I am very far from a skilled professional, and could not have held up this kind of performance for more than ten minutes…whereas a pro can do odd vocals for four hours at a stretch. I tried to channel some Nihilanth reverberations, and (an accidental but probably more important influence) watched Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World the night before I attempted to come up with a voice.

I believe the Eld speaks only at the end of the first installment of Ectolibrium, and will be a bit more talkative in future episodes.

Thanks to Nate and Nick for giving me my big break!

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From the Outer Dark…to Your Ears

On March 24, 2018, I joined a small gathering of like-minded weirdos at the Winchester Mystery House to discuss and celebrate The Weird in art–film, fiction, poetry, paintings, wherever weirdness accretes.

The outward excuse for all this was the Outer Dark Symposium of the Great Weird 2018. I met a bunch of great people I only knew previously from the internet, and made many new friends as well. It was a blast. I took part in one panel discussion (and the great thing about the ODS is that there is only a single track of programming, so you never miss anything) and also read my story “A Mammoth, So-Called” ahead of its publication.

The Outer Dark Podcast has just posted its recording of that portion of the day’s events in which I took part, and you can listen to it here. The linked article supplies timestamps for various parts of the event, which includes the panel relating to weird themes in film and games, and readings by myself, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Gregory Norman Bossert.

Listen to it here!

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