Interviews

Just Adventure Speaks With Terry Dowling
Conducted by Randy Sluganski and Robert Washburne

· A good friend of yours – Harlan Ellison – released his classic I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream as an adventure game in 1995. Did you approach him for any advice on converting your works to the game medium?

TD - It’s funny, but we actually didn’t get around to discussing it, though I did go to a signing with him in San Francisco when his game was released. This was just before I discovered Myst on my friend’s PC and saw the medium’s potential. But, curiously, we found ourselves in the same situation. Harlan’s such a creative all-rounder that he approached it pretty much as doing the script for a film or television project, which is what a gamestory ends up resembling most closely. It’s intuitive to approach it that way and that’s how I went about it myself. These days, what with film and television being so lucrative, storytellers always try to keep their minds open to what media are available for presenting their stories. You write cinematically, hear the dialogue in your head, see events in terms of camera shots, pans etc, even hear the soundtrack. The tricky thing is trying to imagine the final outcome and how it will differ from what you’ve originally envisaged in your mind’s eye.

So while the subject didn’t come up between Harlan and me, I was quite familiar with his scripts and television treatments from editing The Essential Ellison, and I’m sure that helped. Curiously, I did have gaming conversations with another close American writer friend, Jack Vance. We talked about what a terrific adventure or RPG computer games his novels The Dragon Masters or The Last Castle would make.

Here’s where I say that I’m really interested in what modern storytelling is doing and what it can do where computer adventures are concerned. I’m presently completing a doctorate in computer game narrative, and truly believe that computer games – and the adventure game in particular, despite what doomsayers are presently saying – are becoming as viable a vehicle for storytelling as feature films, television mini-series and graphic novels. Not RPGs anywhere near as often, oddly enough, and certainly not shooters, because the gameplay doesn’t become ‘invisible’ enough to the user, ultimately, for it to work as well. You keep noticing the physical act of operating the game as a game. Ironically it’s actually game design that’s lagging behind storytelling here – making puzzles feel like natural tasks in a complete story, crafting the level design so it isn’t noticed as that.

· You’re widely known throughout Europe and Australia, yet relatively unknown in the United States – which I find amazing as some of your horror stories are as good as anything Stephen King has ever written – why have you yet to find a market in the U.S.?

TD - Thanks for the kind words. I suspect it’s because I haven’t been a novelist to date. Only about eight per cent of writers earn their livings from their writing, and very few writers make a career for themselves writing only short stories, novellas and novelettes, which is what I do. Ray Bradbury and Harlan come to mind as managing it, a handful of others. I’ve been writing professionally for twenty-three years now and have had quite a number of appearances in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (I was the only author to have two stories in the 2001 volume; something I’m very proud of), but apart from having my first linked collection Rynosseros published by the SF Book Club back in 1993, I haven’t had US editions of my work. Hopefully that will start to change this year with the release of a hardcover collection of my best horror stories from Cemetery Dance.

· Of the three games you’ve written, which were original writings and which were based on published stories?

TD - Sentinel is the only game based on a previously published story – “The Ichneumon and the Dormeuse” – which first appeared in Interzone magazine in the UK back in April 1996. The Adventure Company approached Detalion about producing a quick game title for the end of 2004 and I suggested to Maciej adapting an existing story that seemed to have an intriguing premise and a strong ending. Schizm, as I said, had no story, characters or dialogue in place when I came aboard in 1999, but in terms of artwork, interface and level design it was already substantially done. I just had to adapt a story to it, which was especially interesting and rewarding to do.

For Mysterious Journey II: Chameleon (released as Schizm II: Chameleon in Europe, England, Australia and other marketing territories), the Detalion team wanted to continue the ‘schism’ idea from the first game and have some new kind of crucial dislocation at work. In Schizm the dislocation was having the two protagonists separated from each other, ultimately in more ways than one. In Chameleon they wanted to have two tribes at odds with each other: one pro-technology, the other pro-environment, thus providing a basis for conflict and different and interesting cultural designs. That was the extent of their briefing. The rest was up to me. I already had the idea of a prisoner trapped on an old space station in a decaying orbit and went ahead and developed that, turning the idea on its head a bit by having the pro-technologists as the good guys and the pro-environmentalists as more radical and nearsighted. Maciej and the rest of the team over in Poland discussed my story ideas, raised points, asked questions, made suggestions, helped me logic-test the story.

· Can you describe the process involved to transfer one of your stories into a workable script for an adventure game?

TD - Once the basic idea gets the green light, I start working up a few treatment pages for Maciej to show to his other team members and the publishers. It breaks the story down into a quick summary that can be used to pitch the game and explain what it is, how it proceeds etc to people coming to it cold. It not only explains what’s going on to colleagues and publishers but hopefully gets the interest going with the marketing and publicity people as well.

Then it’s a matter of thinking about how the storyline should be changed to allow for appropriate game rewards in the level design. Think of it as being like planning book chapters. You try to end a chapter on a key event, a suspenseful or significant moment. In game design terms, a ‘chapter’ (to call it that) for Sentinel, say, might end with the opening of a new domain within the tomb, or a key revelation by our guardian. The dialogue and the surprise ending is already there from the original story. Those are just embellished and modified to suit gaming outcomes.

Once the initial design meetings in Poland reach a certain point, Maciej then sends me the design plans and level schematics the team has come up with so I can see what game levels and visuals are going to be used and how I need to adjust my story for them. I then tailor specific comments to those settings. For instance, in Sentinel there are eight major settings including the tomb itself. We agreed that our Dormeuse should appear twice in each of those domains, either as animations, voice-overs or a mixture of both given the deadlines. This sounds a bit contrived and mechanical, I know, but you then judge when enough is enough, when it’s too much, and adjust the material according to feel. After those initial design meetings (all by email, remember; we’ve never even spoken on the phone), my job became refining the dialogue elements. Tregett, for instance, was originally going to be a desert domain till quite late in the piece. When it became a marsh world, I had to adjust Tamara’s text accordingly. Or Maciej would contact me and suggest having Beni make an additional comment here and there to make an area feel less lonely, things like that. For Sentinel I was able to do this sort of tweaking right up until the start of August 2004 (the dialogue was recorded on 15 August). You have to remember that we only had ten months to produce this game and on a very strict budget. I am frankly astonished at what Maciej and the team have been able to achieve in that time. I’m extremely proud of all our collaborations but, for me, given the production realities, what we achieved with Sentinel is amazing.

· How significant is dialogue in a game – where you can actually hear the characters – as compared to reading dialogue in a story?

Dialogue is very important because it not only gives information in what’s possibly the most natural and immediate way, but also defines character by what they say (and don’t say), how they say it, etc. Most writers will tell you that they run the dialogue in their heads anyway, actually hear the characters talking, so the differences aren’t always that apparent for the author. What becomes the main difference between listening to dialogue and reading it on the page is the time factor. It reads much more quickly than can be spoken. Hey, I’m the guy who scripted a cutscene in Chameleon between Sen and Arko the Nomad that ran nine minutes and ten seconds. Nine minutes and ten seconds, for heaven’s sake! What was I thinking! It’s a small animation masterpiece and it taught me so much. Now I try not to have any character speak more than thirty words in any one piece of conversation. I’m very pleased with how the dialogue is presented in Sentinel.

· What do you find more challenging: writing a story, writing an adventure game or transferring one of your stories into an adventure game?

Definitely writing an adventure game from scratch. You have to come up with a good enough basic concept, one that will appeal, have a good ending and carry the artistic and level design well. This is harder than it sounds because it also becomes a matter of logistics: what budget and deadlines are involved, of trying to anticipate what other limitations you might find yourself facing before they arise. In our case, the language difference has always been an important factor, for instance. Most of the design team don’t have English as their first language, so you keep wondering if you’ve explained things clearly enough? Just as important, have I understood them correctly? What may look a good idea on the drawing board may not lead to a good outcome. There was one instance in Chameleon where I misread a design map and thought that the Ansala museum and its approaches were located inside a mountain when in fact they were outdoors and above water, a central feature connected not by tunnels but by a network of bridges. It made no difference whatsoever to the storytelling or game outcomes, but something like that reminds you how careful you need to be when you’re not physically sitting in on those design sessions. I’ve learned that there are no silly questions. Everything must be logic-tested and verified.

Another tricky thing for me as a writer is preferring not to labor the point with explanations and endings. Good storytelling is full of ‘givens’ – things that the audience is just required to accept. Think of The Lord of the Rings, for instance, the movies and the original print narrative version. We were meant to take all those cultural and pseudo-historical details on trust. Think of Frank Herbert’s Dune. You’re just thrown into that exotic far future and then have to figure it out as you go along. I tend to work that way as well. But with the wide age and experience range of the modern computer game audience, you find that a lot of gamers aren’t always comfortable with that. Things need to be spelled out. I always tend to overestimate what people can grasp in my stories, because I’d rather extend the compliment implicit in that than underestimate them. In Schizm, for instance, I figured, hey, we’ve had all this talk about the Wanderer and the Good Servant, spent all this time trying to get into Matia’s Zone, then we discover this giant metal egg sitting there. When we find a way to open it, everyone has to wonder what the globe is that the fish balloon loads aboard the travelling ship, right? With any luck, they have to put two and two together and figure out why the fish-balloon ship from the balloon field is loading something onto a ship from one of the floating cities. It didn’t happen. A lot of people needed to be told that it was Matia sending that part of itself back to Earth. At one level that sort of elusiveness is my fault, my failing. At another, it’s theirs.

 

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