Gaming Fiction Day Four: Inferred Plot and Metaplot

Game fiction can sometimes have an “inferred” plot because of its popularity like many popular movies. Most people know Darth Vader is a bad guy. Writing about the rebels running from Darth Vader may seem like plot to you but really? That’s just a standard detail nowadays. Instead, those same rebels might be running from Darth Vader because they’re hiding a piece of jamming equipment that is going to screw up his cyborg life support mechanism. Now true, we know Darth survives, but how? Will the rebels make it out alive or will they be the ones responsible for delivering the plans to the Bothans?

Providing a layer of curiosity to your plot will help alleviate some of the challenges with an “inferred” plot, but sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes, the publisher will say “and the character X has to be included and he has to win the day.” Okay, yeah. This can stunt creativity and cheapen the story, but only on occasion and strongly depends upon a writer’s skill.

The other thing that often happens is that writers will be trudging along and then *poof* are told that they can’t write X because it doesn’t fit within the metaplot, or the parts of the story that they can’t see. A metaplot is an over-arching plot that covers several books, games, or other media like webcomics in a series like . Examples of metaplots are the Harry Dresden Files book series written by Jim Butcher, the Resident Evil series, or the In a perfect world, writers should be told what they can and can’t write about up front. But the creative world is far from organized, because there are a million zillion moving parts that affect other pieces even the publishers and creators don’t know about. Writers truly have to be extraordinarily flexible with their writing as a result, because the contract only protects so much. Additionally some authors, like myself, have to be very careful about how we put our feet down because well? Unknown writers have less clout that “known.”

In this way, you’ll have to design your story so that it can bend and stretch if it needs to. I know this can be really hard to stomach, because some writers fall in love with their work. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t love what you do, but writing game fiction is about sales. If you’re not writing to sell fiction, you might be doing what I did early on. I wrote to build my portfolio, get references, and explore something I was interesting in doing. In the end, though, if you see a World of Warcraft or Forgotten Realms or even a Vampire: the Requiem novel sitting on a bookstore’s shelf, remember that that book is there to be sold.

There is a ton of other topics to cover with respect to game fiction, and I’ve covered the bare minimum here: audience, theme and plot. Tomorrow, I’m going to cover something different but if you like the series, feel free to let me know and I can talk about this more to cover what I haven’t really touched yet: setting, characters, game mechanics, and so much more.

Game Fiction Series

Day One: Can you Define your Game Fiction Story’s Audience?

Day Two: Can you Identify the Primary and Secondary Themes of your Game?

Day Three: Do you Know how to Plot your Story Based on a Game?

April 24, 2008
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Writing Game Fiction Day Three: Plot your Plot

So now you’ve decide you’re going to write this really awesome story based on the video game Final Fantasy X. You love the character of Yuna, so you’re going to sit down and write a story about…but wait? What is your story about? Okay, you’ve figured out that Final Fantasy X is based on the idea that Zanarkand was at the height of technology but somehow “fell” to “Sin” 1,000 years ago. You and your band of merry adventurers are traveling on a not-so-merry quest throughout the planet Spira to get that final Aeon to relieve the world of Sin; only to do this, you have to sacrifice. A lot.

Last time, we took a look at what the theme of the game should be. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we know the theme of this story is fantasy quest with eastern philosophical overtones. We also know what the overall plot is, because either we’ve played the game or we’ve heard about it from someone else. So now what? How are we going to expand upon this already well-developed story?

In an open game environment like an MMORPG, RPG or even a board game like Arkham Asylum, it’s pretty easy to plot the plot provided the “rules” are followed. Things like monster weaknesses, powers, setting restrictions, and other minutia all come into play here. For that type of gaming fiction, it’s easier to think big and squish down the elements to fit within those particular parameters because really, the sky’s the limit on the plot.

In a closed game environment, where the plot has already been decided, your plot is exceptionally more challenging to figure out because a closed game environment has a time line of events. As a writer, you’ll have to determine the “when” of what point in that time line you want your story to occur. Once you figure out the timing, you’ll probably be able to recognize “where” in the game your story might take place and then “who” your character is interacting with.
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April 23, 2008
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Game Fiction Day Two: How to Fit your Story to the Theme of the Game

If I gave you a list of well-known movies, I bet that you’ll quickly identify what the theme of the movie is. For example, we know Indiana Jones is pulp, we completely “get” that Army of Darkness is a comedy, and we understand that X-Men III was supposed to be an action movie where Phoenix was…well…The Phoenix. Looking a bit deeper, we can tie specific elements of those creative properties to see secondary themes based on what the movie is about. For example, we know that Indiana Jones is about Indy playing “the hero,” to triumph over the forces of darkness.

Games, on the other hand, may not necessarily be that intuitive. If you think about what a game actually is, it’s really a set of rules that you either manipulate, avoid, or navigate through. In more times than I can count, the games I’ve been involved with have been designed to target as many audiences as possible. In other words, they are designed so that the player designs the theme so it fits with his (or her) style of play. You decide what kind of a game you want to play: action? mystery? political? With that layer of personal involvement, the theme in many games is really driven by the player not by the creator.

Writing game fiction to fit the theme of a game is very challenging because you have to understand not what falls within the boundaries of the theme, but what doesn’t. To get what I’m talking about here, let’s look at one of my favorite player vs. player video games: Soul Caliber III. Having played this game a hundred times or more I know in my deepest heart of health points, that this is an action game, an “I-can-release-some-stress-in-a-5-minute-death-match-fighting-game.” Now say that I want to write a story based on Sophitia, a character who guards a Greek temple and has a small sword and shield. I have the character’s backstory from different elements in the game, but is it enough? How am I going to write a story about a character so that it fits the Soul Caliber theme?
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April 22, 2008
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Writing a Story Based on a Game? Day One: Who are You Writing For?

This week is going to be pretty intense for me; I am rounding the corner on a novella based on the game called “Altheia.” Unfortunately, mapping out the story took a lot longer than I thought, so I’m a bit strapped for time. So for most of this week, I’m going to focus on my process for writing a story based on a game because it’s top-of-mind and something I hope you find interesting to read.

Really, this process could probably apply to any “shared world” setting like Battlestar Galactica or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but my methodology for writing game fiction tends to be more mechanical because it has to be by its very nature. For this particular story, I’m writing fiction for a game that doesn’t have a mass market setting. Because of that, my entire piece has to fit primly within the “rules” of the setting in order to give players a sense of whether or not they’re interested in picking up the game. In this way, gaming fiction has to be written for potential buyers of the game.

Publishers often offer stories written within a unique gaming world because they’re hoping to attract readers interested in a particular genre (games are almost ALWAYS genre-based), collectors who might follow a specific writer’s career, and gamers who love their game. Publishers aren’t stupid, though, because their concern is that the story has to fall within the constraints of their property, so they often hire writers who they can trust. So here, the game fiction has to be written for the publisher.

Whether you write for gamers or publishers, the true “end goal” of any story is to write a good story that readers will enjoy. In this way, the third audience for your gaming fiction is the person who is reading it. For gaming fiction, that person may or may not be a gamer, and writers have to keep that in mind in order to market to the slipstream audience.

Gamers, readers, and publishers are the audience of gaming fiction. If the original game was created by a big name in the industry, or is part of a mass market line like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Everquest, then you might have to add in two, additional audiences to the mix. As a writer of game fiction, you have to be a chameleon to satisfy your audience – all three, four or five of them.

April 21, 2008
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Game Setting Fiction: The Ins and Outs of Writing Gaming-Related Stories

One of the interesting things about gaming is the idea that their settings can be turned into some awesome pieces of fictional work. A lot of my own fiction started in gaming (or “licensed settings”) because at the time it was a lower risk for the publishers to use unknown writers. That certainly isn’t the case anymore, as big name authors are writing some interesting settings. This accomplishes two things, really, in the publisher’s mind. One, a more well-known setting allows publishers to potentially sell books to a built-in fan base and two, the publisher could sell more books to the author’s fan base.

Game fiction, however, has some pretty interesting aspects that you may or may not have considered before. On Flames Rising, I wrote a blog post about this phenomenon entitled, “Game Fiction: Why it Works (And Why it Doesn’t).” Here’s a brief snippet from that blog post about game fiction writing:

The reason why this (how to write gaming fiction) can be a challenge for a lot of writers is that fiction – good fiction – tells a story. Gaming fiction doesn’t always accomplish this because it’s written for a different purpose, and often by the same writers who write the game. Sometimes, this can be a real detriment to the game simply because not all game writers can write fiction. Even the publishers sometimes make it harder to write because they’ll say things like: “Hey, I want you to use this ritual and describe what it does!” or “Can you create a character with this level of experience?”

The minute you dictate mechanical elements into a piece of game fiction it adds a layer of complexity that isn’t always successful. Writing RPGs or any other type of game takes a mixture of technical and research writing skills. In many ways, it’s always a good idea to write the flavor text last, because even if you’re the same writer who’s working on the game mechanics portion as the game fiction, there’s a definite shift in thinking that needs to occur in your mind.

As more and more video games are going the route of gaming fiction, the points I covered are fairly important to keep in mind. Mechanical elements to creative writing can bog it down and create unnecessary noise to cloud the true goal of what any piece of fiction should do — tell a story.

April 17, 2008
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