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                      <p><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000FF"><i><font color="#904C10" size="3">Tell 
                        me a Story</font></i></font></b><br>

                      <div align="right"> <font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">By 
                        Russell &quot;<a href="mailto:radpipe@loonygames.com">RadPipe</a>&quot; 
                        Lauzon</font></div>
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                  <td width="45%" align="right" valign="top"> 
                    <h5 align="right"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#00025E">Vol. 
                      2, Issue 9<br>
                      January 24, 2000</font></b></h5>
                  </td>
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              </table><loonystart>
              <h5 align="right">&nbsp;</h5>
            </DIV>
            <div align="left"> 
              <h3><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Learning Process</font></h3>
              <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> When <b>Jedi Knight 
                </b>was released in 1997, it became an instant classic. Finally 
                here was a game capable of rivaling the champ of FPS games, <b>Quake</b>, 
                and some might argue it had even dethroned the king. Well, I won&#146;t 
                call the shot here, but suffice to say I love both games. And 
                all the kudos go to the designer on the project, Justin Chin.</font></p>
              <p></p>
              <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">They say that hindsight 
                is 20/20, and it&#146;s very applicable to game development. When 
                you make a game, successful or not, you have a pretty good idea 
                of what worked and what didn&#146;t. I asked Justin and his peers 
                about the learning process. What is the best thing they&#146;ve 
                learned from putting games together? How will it change the way 
                they make their games?</font></p>
              <p></p>
            </div>
            <blockquote> 
              <div align="left"> 
                <p><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Justin Chin: </font></b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">I 
                  don't think I've changed the way I do things. I'm just more 
                  experienced, and thus better able to see through problematic 
                  issues. I'll say one thing, a lot of people consider me just 
                  a story person, but I've always thought that every game doesn't 
                  need a story. Though, I also believe that every story can make 
                  a game. I can't really get into that without a lot of time and 
                  effort, but it's just something I believe.</font></p>
                <p><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Tim Schafer: </font></b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Think 
                  about interactivity more. Try to pose the story as a sequence 
                  of events instigated by the player, instead of a sequence of 
                  scenes. With the latter method, you end up with a bunch of long, 
                  non-interactive cut-scenes. Which we always do anyway. But the 
                  goal is to bring those down over time. Hopefully, we will eventually 
                  get rid of cut-scenes all together.</font></p>
              </div>
              <div align="left"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b>Marc 
                Laidlaw:</b> Doing Half Life, we really had no blueprint. We just 
                had a vision that was very hard to pin down or communicate except 
                intuitively. Now that we have a clear, tangible sense of what 
                this new form can do, we can continue to innovate and start feeling 
                our way into more interesting areas.</font></div>
            </blockquote>
            <div align="left"> 
              <h3></h3>
              <h3></h3>
              <h3><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Successful...but why?</font></h3>
              <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> No one can deny the 
                overwhelming success of <b>Half-Life</b>. How do you know when 
                you&#146;re successful? When you see that big fat check arrive 
                from the publisher. Now count the zeros at the end of the number. 
                Do you have a nose bleed before you&#146;re finished counting? 
                Congrats, you&#146;re successful. But is that all there is to 
                it?</font></p>
              <p></p>
              <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Where did the success 
                come from? Was it a great story? Stunning visuals? Gameplay rock 
                your world? I posed the question to my victims, and asked how 
                much story attributed to the success of their games.</font></p>
            </div>
            <blockquote> 
              <div align="left"></div>
              <div align="left"> 
                <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b>Marc Laidlaw: 
                  </b>In the class of single player action games, stories have 
                  gradually become more important, but I can still easily imagine 
                  forms of single player gaming that are successful and totally 
                  addictive without much more than the most rudimentary story. 
                  From the designer&#146;s point of view, a story helps you make 
                  all kinds of decisions about what goes in and what stays out 
                  of the game. From the player&#146;s point of view, I guess it 
                  depends on your mood or your nature. People naturally like to 
                  be told stories. Books and movies make it as easy as possible 
                  for the story to get told. But many games make it harder than 
                  it ought to be to get sucked into a story. A bad or overly complex 
                  interface can kill a fragile thing like a story quite easily. 
                  If I have to read a 200 page user manual first, the odds are 
                  low that I&#146;ll ever make it to the story.</font></p>
                <p><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Tim Schafer:</font></b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> 
                  How do you define success? In terms of creative success, story 
                  scores a 10. In terms of sales, I can't really prove that it 
                  has any effect at all. The benefits of having a well designed 
                  story are that the story gives you an organizational structure 
                  that segments and guides your production, and it gives you confidence 
                  that the little animation or puzzle your working on will add 
                  up to something worthwhile when it all comes together. When 
                  you're really into production, you can't see the forest through 
                  the trees, as they say, so it's nice to know that some point, 
                  somebody planned out the forest really well.</font></p>
              </div>
              <div align="left"></div>
              <div align="left"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Justin 
                Chin:</font></b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> Story 
                allows the solitary person in front of their computer/console/settopbox/gameboy 
                to experience, what some might say, an indelible element of our 
                human psyche, the heroes journey. You can't beat that with a stick. 
                But a bad story can kill my desire to finish a game or a good 
                one can make me want to play again. As for the story contributing 
                to the success of Jedi Knight, I'd say it contributed greatly 
                to it's success, with one caveat. Those levels where awesome, 
                they told the story just as much as any cutscene might. Mostly 
                in a way that they TOOK you to those different worlds. I think 
                that story development has only just begun to develop in games 
                there is a lot more that can be done.</font></div>
            </blockquote>
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              <p align="left"></p></loonystart>
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<p><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Credits: Illustration 
  &copy; 2000 <a href="http://www.3dpalette.com/dimension">Durrenberger David 
  (dines)</a>. This article is &copy; 2000 Russell Lauzon. All other content is 
  &copy; 2000 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. So 
  don't do it, or we'll make you cry, sissy.</font></i></p>
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