[Writing in games] has to get better, and better, and better, and be more like the best dialogue lines from movies, but it’s done in an interactive, nonlinear system, that — let’s be clear — 99 out of 100 writers don’t even understand how to do, and never will.

So, it’s hard to find the talent, it’s hard to train the talent.

It’s good to keep this in mind.

We are extremely lucky that BioWare is run by two guys who are dedicated to the idea of story, so that’s what they want to do. They’re dedicated to the idea of dialogue and narrative, and that storytelling has to have great, punchy writing.

It’s hard to get the dedication from a [parent] company that’s never done it, to say, “Hey, we’re going to do it.”

[...]

It sounds like, the way you’re describing it, it’s almost more of a challenge in terms of content and commitment rather than actually being a big game design problem. Is that the case?

DE: There are numerous game design problems, but I would not say that they are insurmountable game design problems.

So much in game development, especially classical, ‘core’ game development, is about commitment. It’s about wanting to do it enough, even though it’s hard, and even though it’s not how things were done before. This goes way beyond writing.

Erickson later talks about Bioware’s three month writer training program, which I find very interesting, and how leading a group of writers is like being a magazine editor. Or, as Lee Sheldon would probably say, like being a show runner.

I see every piece of content, every single piece of content at every single stage, and make sure that we’re all keeping to a voice and a tone, the same way a good magazine editor would.

It’s an interesting interview.

(Please ignore the SHOUTING INTERVIEWER.)

He even has some things to say about games. Nothing mind-blowing, but interesting nevertheless:

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN DESIGNING VIDEO GAMES YOURSELF?
Yes. Last year I did in L.A. They’re doing that now. I went there and
proposed, I say, Listen, I want to make this type of story, are you
interested? They said, Yes, sure. I made two games of, and I am making a
game of the Meta-Baron, then they are doing. I think, “There is a new
artform.” Very interesting.

I don’t think that game ever came out. Pity.

They are living in a typical habitat for the sort of New Yorkers they appear to be: an enormous ’20s-era co-op with Central Park views (once part of a triplex built for the philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post), gutted to its steel beams and refitted with luxurious flourishes like 16th-century Belgian mantelpieces and custom furniture made from exotic woods with unpronounceable names.

But some of that furniture and some of those walls conceal secrets — messages, games and treasures — that make up a Rube Goldberg maze of systems and contraptions conceived by a young architectural designer named Eric Clough, whose ideas about space and domestic living derive more from Buckminster Fuller than Peter Marino.

The apartment even comes with its own book, part of which is a fictional narrative that recalls “The Da Vinci Code” (without the funky religion or buckets of blood) and “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” the children’s classic by E. L. Konigsburg about a brother and a sister who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and discover — and solve — a mystery surrounding a Renaissance sculpture.

What a fun idea. Be sure to look at the slideshow.

With stories this good, I don’t propose to spend quite as much effort dragging out their structure and such, or summarizing previous criticism. I can’t help, however, joyously remarking on the deft way Lovecraft turns Poe’s “House of Usher” inside out with this one. We get the same conceptual play on words, as Delapore descends simultaneously into the putrid bowels of his “house” (Exham Priory) and his “house” (the De la Poer lineage). Like Usher, Delapore’s line is extinct — his son dies of his WWI injuries. We get the same excitation of the sense of hearing as the symptom, almost the literal entry-way, for the horror. But unusually for Poe, “Usher” is not particularly fixated on Usher’s interior psychological life, whereas equally unusually for Lovecraft, “Rats” is very much concerned with the interior life of Delapore. In this story, Lovecraft proves himself able to master Poe’s tools and move on — it serves as the solid foundation for his triumphant farewell to Poe, “Charles Dexter Ward.”

In my own case, reading this story also let all the light in at once about the “house as violated human body” subtext that William Hope Hodgson used in House on the Borderland. Indeed, “The Rats in the Walls” is a great, if somewhat over-loud, haunted house story as well — the comparisons with, say, The Shining just jump out at you.

(Via Kottke.)

I find it amusing, but beyond that I have no strong opinion on the subject. However, there are people over at Making Light who do. The comments there are a good read (to read the ROT13-encrypted comments, try this bookmarklet) and highly informative, as always. I now know more about slash fiction that I knew before.

The question of the relevance of an author’s statements outside of the text is not an easy one to answer, but I tend towards considering it relevant. I am not saying I find it completely uninteresting to think about what one can or cannot read out of a text, but it typically has little to do with the story. The things people tend to want to find or not find in the subtext inevitably are political, and to me that quickly gets, well, boring. But then I would say that as a straight white male, wouldn’t I.

And perhaps I am slightly contradicting myself but adding that I am much less amused by Rowling allegedly saying Harry Potter is a Christian allegory. I am glad I finished the Potter books before hearing about that. I’ve never read the Narnia books, but the movie was pretty much spoiled for me because all the hullabaloo over the Christian allegoricness. Part of my brain kept trying to decode what was going on as potential Christian propaganda.

Anyway. At the time I write this, none of the commenters in the Making Light thread seem to have considered this possibility: What if the work of Harry Potter is more than just the text of the 7 Harry Potter novels? What it if it is not just expressed in the medium of the novel? Wouldn’t Rowling’s remark then become canon? What if the ambiguity is part of the work? Where does the work end? I admit that this doesn’t sound like something J.K. Rowling would do, but still, I find it an interesting set of questions to ponder.

Apparently Wall-E won’t contain any intelligible speech! Just R2D2-esque sounds. That sounds like a very interesting creative constraint: it allows the filmmakers to go back to pure animation without appearing to be weird.

There’s also a nice Wall-E-related website for a company called Buy n Large, where you can read about stuff like “BnL Annual Report: The Musical”.

(Via Kottke.)

Well, here you can see the first 4 minutes of The Kingdom, a new movie about the FBI and Saudi Arabia. The credits sequence is a great info visualization that explains the history of the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. from the 1930s until now. They manage to make it pretty exciting – I am imagining a lecture using this kind of stuff…

Anyway, while not revolutionary, it is a clever idea well executed, and it’s not very common to see so much information of this kind in a Hollywood movie, especially at the beginning.

(Via Making Light.)

What can I say? The movie lasts 3 hours. My ass hurts. The most frightening moment was furtively looking at my watch and seeing I had another hour to go.

Seriously. Although I had absolutely no clue what was going on, I was continuously amazed how Lynch makes movies like nobody else. The images, the locations, the people, the lighting, the sounds, the… story, for want of a better word, the atmosphere… at no time did anything happen that I could reasonably expect from having seen other movies (including art house and avant-garde movies). Nobody does barely lit rooms and ominous drones like Lynch.

Roger Ebert can explain the appeal of the movie have someone explain the appeal of the movie the way I can’t, which is why he is a famous movie critic and I am not:

As they pass before you, you recognize the familiar stock images, characters and dramatic templates — often employed to build suspense, deliver a shock, jerk tears — from a million other movies, especially the climactic moments in noir thrillers (like the one on TV at the start of “Blue Velvet”), melodramatic serials and soapy romances. There’s the dark hallway, the shadowy stairway, the gun in the drawer, the seduction scene, the portentious expositional dialogue, the bedroom/sex scene, the ominous foreshadowing…. But here they’re deliberately disjointed because the usual connective tissue has been moved, removed or replaced.

And I like that. I like it a lot. Just like Pirates of the Caribbean 3, except there it probably wasn’t intentional. To let causally unrelated images and sounds wash over you… it is refreshing. You can’t think, so you have no choice but to feel.

Lynch knows all stories are all in our heads; we make them up and then inhabit them. “Inland Empire” plays with our movie-fed storytelling expectations line by line, shot by shot, scene by scene, even reel by reel (pay attention to those changeover marks in the upper right). He toys with the building blocks — establishing shots, reaction shots, POV, and especially closeups — to get us to look at them in unfamiliar ways. It’s poetry: We recognize the individual units of meaning, but the grammar and syntax have been altered.

And in case you were wondering (I sure was): Inland Empire is a region in California. Pomona is inside the region. And we all know about Pomona after seeing Inland Empire, don’t we?… OK, we don’t know anything about Pomona.