The Secret Sauce of Video Game Story Design, with Ed Kuehnel

Jordan: 00:00

Welcome to Playmakers. I'm your host, Jordan Blackman. And this is episode six, where I interview award-winning writer and narrative designer, Ed Kuehnel. On every episode of Playmakers, we interview an expert in some part of the gaming industry, whether it’s related to the creative, development, or business aspects. And we go deep on that subject so that you can break out of the box you’re working in and achieve new levels of creative and business success. This is a great one with Ed Kuehnel. More on it after the little cool noise that’s coming up. That was the cool noise. It was cool, right? Okay. Episode six, Ed Kuehnel.

riter. Valiant Hearts won the: 2014

We also get into some structure stuff because Ed, in addition to Valiant Hearts, has worked on Leisure Suit Larry and Hunter: The Reckoning. I want to say Hunter: The Gathering—that's funny. In addition to those games, he’s also done some work with Telltale Games, and we talk a little bit about what he learned there as well.

Now, I made some games with Telltale when I was at Ubisoft, and Ed and I had worked together on some things in the past, so we had a bit of a rapport, and you'll see that when we get going. Ed reveals some personal stuff about his past and his history, and how he got into writing in games. From there, we dive into a pretty detailed discussion about story structure and how to design a story that works with your gameplay. Ed shares specific frameworks that he uses to craft great stories that work in games. I’m going to take a lot of the stuff Ed talks about in this episode and turn it into a handy story cheat sheet that you can use. You can find that at PlayMakersPodcast.com. Go there, and we’ll have a cheat sheet in the post for this episode for you to download.

I’m going to keep this intro short. Here is my conversation with Ed Kuehnel.

Jordan: 02:45

Ed, thank you so much for coming on Playmakers.

Ed: 02:48

Yes, thank you for having me.

Jordan: 02:49

Good to have you on the show. I wanted to start by learning a little bit about how you became you—how you became a game writer with over 50 games under your belt.

Ed: 03:00

Well, let’s see. My particular path sort of went like this. I always wanted to work in games or in something creative, like animated films or something. I’m 44 now, but when I was 15 or 16, I’d never heard the phrase game designer. I don’t know if it was being used at all. I just knew that I had no talent at all as an artist, and I think I knew that programming was not going to be where I would see a lot of success. But I played some of the early LucasArts adventure games made by some of my heroes in the game industry, like Ron Gilbert. I’m talking about Monkey Island and those games. You could play them, and they were funny and cool. And you could tell that someone had to come up with those jokes. Someone had to create the puzzles or challenges for the player. Someone had to put it all together.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that someone was Tim Schafer, who now runs Double Fine, and Dave Grossman, who for a long time was the creative director at Telltale Games and is now with a startup called Earplay. Ron Gilbert was sort of the creative director on some of those games, and he’s still out there making games. I kind of knew what I wanted to do from an early age but had absolutely no clue how to get there. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, where there was no game industry, no film industry, no television, really nothing at the time. I also lacked confidence as a kid. I didn’t have the confidence to say, “This is what I want to do, and I’m going to do it.”

I had a lot of issues as a kid with depression, and I was already on my way to forming an addiction around some coping mechanisms. My parents—God bless them—they’re great people, and I have a good relationship with them now. They always did their best, but they were not the kind of people you could say, “Hey, I want to work in video games, and I want to have this creative job.” That just wasn’t going to fly. They’re from New York originally, and they came from a blue-collar background. That didn’t make any sense to them.

Jordan: 05:32

Yeah. I think for that generation, they didn’t really understand games as a career possibility.

Ed: 05:37

It was just a nuisance. Sometimes they’d have to shell out some quarters so you could play games at the Red Robin while you waited for your table. But, to make a long story slightly less long, I finally figured it out in my late twenties. I was in Chicago, where there was a small game industry. I happened to be walking along ahead of this dead-end job that I hated, and I saw the offices of Bungie.

At the time, Bungie was still in Chicago. They hadn’t been bought by Microsoft yet, and they had made some really cool pre-Halo games that I loved, like the Myth series. Somehow, I knew this was their office. I could see inside—cool desks, posters, video games, and toys everywhere. And I thought, “Why not me? Why can’t I figure this out? Why did I give up on that?”

So, I started positioning myself as a good candidate for a job in games. I took some object-oriented programming classes, figuring I could at least learn enough to talk to programmers competently. I also started taking industry people to lunch, asking questions, and doing whatever I could to get noticed. I got lucky when High Voltage Software, in the Chicago suburbs, was hiring for an assistant producer role. On paper, I was maybe slightly overqualified, but I think I won them over with my passion and desire for the job. I was already in Chicago, and that’s how I broke into the industry. I spent five years there, and then I made a lateral shift to a more creative role.

Jordan: 07:36

What games were you working on at High Voltage?

Ed: 07:38

At High Voltage, I was a producer on Hunter: The Reckoning, a little Xbox title. I didn’t have much to do with it aside from being an assistant producer.

Jordan: 07:50

I remember it being reviewed well.

Ed: 07:52

For the studio at the time, it was probably their biggest success. Again, I didn’t have a large hand in it. Then we made a PS2 game for Disney Interactive based on the movie Lilo and Stitch, which was actually pretty fun. That was my first foray as a game designer. After that, I worked on Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude. That was the second-to-last Leisure Suit Larry game, and, well, it certainly helped bury the franchise—it was one of the final nails in the coffin.

Jordan: 08:29

There’s no way. That’s not buried. That’s coming back.

Ed: 08:32

After five years there, learning everything about how games are made...

Jordan: 08:36

That would get kickstarted in a week.

Ed: 08:38

Well, and the fact that Al Lowe did kickstart what was mostly, I think, a reboot of the first Leisure Suit Larry with some added content. Maybe that was the final nail in the coffin. I don’t know. So, five years there, I got laid off, moved back to Portland, and thought that was it. It was over. In fact, I took a full-time job at a company called Gerber Legendary Blades. When I moved back to Portland, I tried everything I could to stay in the game industry, but again, there was still no industry in Portland. Nobody was interested in hiring me for a telecommuter position or anything like that.

So, I really thought my career was over. I was really resentful because I had just spent five years putting my heart and soul into a career that, in Portland, Oregon, just didn’t exist. I felt like I had wasted five years of my life. I got a job at a company that made knives for hunters and the military, and I spent two years...

Jordan: 09:42

Gerber, the reckoning.

Ed: 09:43

Gerber, yeah. I spent two years going to trade shows, including the NRA annual conference.

Jordan: 09:53

I cannot imagine you at those trade shows, man.

Ed: 09:57

That’s where I met Ted Nugent. I got to meet Ted Nugent. That was one good thing about working there—besides, they gave me a paycheck—but I got to meet Ted Nugent at the NRA conference. He has a son, a metrosexual son named Toby, which surprised me. Yeah, I would’ve thought Ted Nugent’s son would have a name like Harley or Buddy, but it’s Toby. He didn’t look like Ted at all. But anyway, thankfully, I started getting pinged for freelance jobs from people I’d networked with or met. It started to snowball, and eventually, I was able to quit and do this full-time.

For the last 10 years, I’ve been very busy working full-time. I’ve worked on a lot of games, as you pointed out, because as a freelancer, you get pulled onto a project, work for a couple of weeks or months, and then when they’re done with you, you move on. You can sometimes work on multiple projects, which is really fun and exciting. I think I’ve worked on almost 60 games now. The diversity of projects is wonderful—working with different people keeps things fresh. That’s kind of how I got to where I am now.

Jordan: 11:17

You did ultimately get the chance to work with Dave Grossman, right? Over at Telltale?

Ed: 11:22

Yes, I got to work with Dave Grossman at Telltale. His team hired me, and I got to interact with him. What happened was, while I was at High Voltage Software, both Dave Grossman and Noah Falstein—two people who worked on the games that made me want to become a game designer—were freelancers at the time. We hired them, and they came out to High Voltage. They let us in on the secret sauce of how they would narratively and structurally plan out one of their games, like Monkey Island.

Jordan: 12:00

Well, now that you’ve said the phrase “secret sauce,” I’m going to be spending the rest of the interview trying to get the secret sauce.

Ed: 12:06

It's nothing too crazy, but I mean, they basically showed us, like, here's the process of how we would put together, a really cool sort of interactive story. So, I got to spend a week learning from these guys, which was awesome. And then later, when Dave Grossman became Creative Director at Telltale, I got to use their process for him, for Telltale, and, get better at it. I applied it to most, if not all, of the 60 games I've worked on. And that's another privilege of being a freelancer—you get a lot of chances to get better, make mistakes, and improve, just like a screenwriter who's hopefully written dozens of screenplays. Some might not be great, but it’s the repetition that makes you better. Instead of working on one game for two years and seeing it ship, I get to put this process in place over and over again.

Jordan: 13:05

I want to hear more about the secret sauce and the lessons you've learned. But before we get into that, I want to ask, what are some of the games and projects that have shaped you as an interactive writer? What are some of your favorite stories?

Ed: 13:17

Well, certainly, I mentioned some of those early point-and-click adventure games made by LucasArts.

Jordan: 13:26

Maniac Mansion, Indiana Jones...

Ed: 13:30

Yeah, Grim Fandango was a big one.

Jordan: 13:33

Day of the Tentacle.

Ed: 13:34

Yeah, those three had everything I wanted—they were funny, intellectually stimulating, and told a cool story, but didn’t take themselves too seriously. Nowadays, I'm still a Telltale fan. They’re different in that they don't really refer to their work as games anymore—they call them cinematic experiences. But they still feature amazing writing and storytelling, and I play almost everything Telltale makes. Their Walking Dead series was really great. So was Fables, the series they did based on the comic book. Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us was a great game and story—not necessarily because it’s the best zombie apocalypse story ever, but because it merged gameplay and storytelling into a highly satisfying experience.

Jordan: 14:41

I think it’s one of the best single-player stories I've ever experienced in a game.

Ed: 14:45

And I think it is that way, not because they reinvented the wheel of interactive storytelling, but because the characters feel three-dimensional. The dialogue is great. It feels very competent, like, this is how big-budget games should be doing it every time, right?

Jordan: 15:06

I think they did an amazing job picking a world that let them tell a story about the characters. It's almost like they recognized some of the issues with Uncharted and designed a story and world that turned those weaknesses into strengths.

Ed: 15:25

So much of good game writing requires intricate planning to ensure you’re able to tell a great story. Naughty Dog recognizes that action-adventure makes for great games and great stories—you just have to intertwine the two well, and you're in good hands. But so many people in games don’t do it well, which is baffling, right? Games are all about action, and they do action and adventure really well. So, you should be able to tell an action-adventure story paired with those mechanics. There's almost no excuse not to be good at it.

Jordan: 16:14

I think a lot of studios have trouble really knowing what they're trying to do as a group. And Naughty Dog clearly doesn't. One thing that comes to mind is, in the opening sequence—I don't remember the name of his daughter, or the names of the characters—but you actually play as her for the entire opening sequence, and, spoiler alert, she dies. But playing as her first really makes you assume that's not going to happen. It's part of what makes the story work and makes it so affecting when that surprise comes.

Ed: 16:48

It’s smart storytelling and also character development, which we're really short on in the game industry. We don’t take time to flesh out our characters and make them unique individuals. We barely spend time with them before production starts, and that’s why, so often, they're paper-thin—almost like amalgams of different characters or clichés, rather than fully fleshed-out people.

Jordan: 17:17

Right, because at least with a cliché, you can quickly get the player to understand who this is.

Ed: 17:22

You can, and I guess there are some advantages to that. Here’s your grizzled space marine—you kind of know what we’re in for. But I think it’s mostly laziness, or maybe ignorance. And not that I’m a master at this by any means; I had to learn the hard way, like every other game writer who didn’t have a formal education in creative writing. We're just in a hurry. We want to get going. So, who should be the main character? How about this grizzled space marine named Lance Firestorm? Okay, here we go. Production starts next week. Let’s not think about it too much further.

But it’s interesting when you’re in a room with a creative director at a game studio. You get to know them, you learn what their favorite films, comic books, or sci-fi novels are. Almost always, all the things they love about a particular film or book are because the author or filmmaker spent a lot of time figuring out who the characters were—what makes them special, unique, what contradictions they have, where they're from. Very few people in games do that, but I think Naughty Dog does, Telltale does, and a few others. That’s why their storytelling stands out ahead of the pack.

Jordan: 19:04

One thing that’s interesting as you list those studios is they tend to make a very specific kind of game. They don’t jump from genre to genre or innovate drastically on the gameplay side. I think that structure helps them, too.

Ed: 19:22

Sure. Studios always benefit from constantly trying to perfect games within a certain genre. If you have a writing staff you’ve hired based on their ability to tell cool action-adventure stories, it’s probably not a good idea to pivot and have them do something outside their strengths. Different writers are good at different things, and while people have some range, it’s just not the same. I mean, talking to clients or prospective clients, they tend to think a good writer can do almost anything, but that’s just not the case.

Jordan: 20:00

You wouldn’t hire Aaron Sorkin to do Saw XI.

Ed: 20:04

Right, exactly. I’m finding more and more that I’m not great at straightforward sci-fi or high fantasy, even though I like that stuff. It’s just not what I’m good at, unfortunately.

Jordan: 20:22

Let's talk a little bit about Valiant Hearts because I think it's a really cool story. Also, given what we’re talking about—the challenges of crafting a good story—it’s a pretty small game, right? I mean, I think it was originally conceived as a downloadable, XBLA-style game.

Ed: 20:43

It was going to be episodic, and each episode was going to focus on one of those distinct characters. So you had the woman who was Belgian and was an ambulance driver. You had an American soldier, which was a bit of a stretch because America didn’t get involved until pretty much the end of that war. You had, I think, Emile, who was a Frenchman—potential son-in-law—who was drafted against his will into the German army. He had a daughter. And there was going to be another character, who I think maybe has a cameo in the game, but he was mostly cut: a British aviator.

Jordan: 21:28

They’re all implemented with so much panache, and the international aspect is a really fun part of that.

Ed: 21:33

Yeah, Valiant Hearts is one of the coolest and, for me, just most fun and challenging things I’ve ever worked on. It was one that really pushed me. I tend to focus on lighthearted or straight-up comedic stuff, and I tend to do pretty well with it. I can keep the jokes going, no problem. Maybe there’s a little bit of comfort or arrogance there, like, “Yeah, I got this.”

Then you get to something like Valiant Hearts, where it's a serious story. The Ubisoft studio in Montpellier had made some great games in the past, and this game really meant a lot to them. For them, this is their war. For America, it’s World War II. For them, it’s World War I. They were coming up on the hundredth anniversary of the war, and they decided, “Hey, if anyone’s going to make a game about World War I, it’s got to be a French studio.” I think their superiors, maybe in Ubisoft Paris, were understandably not super thrilled about the commercial viability of an adventure game centered around World War I.

So here they are, making this game. I think they had started with somebody else, and it didn’t work out for whatever reason. So they had myself and Matt Entin, with whom I’ve done a lot of work, fly out to Montpellier and help them. I did what I do with a lot of clients, but this was much more difficult. We all sat in a room together with a giant whiteboard and basically plotted out the entire game in flowchart form.

Jordan: 23:30

I’ve seen you do one of those on a project we worked on together briefly, so I have some sense of what that might look like.

Ed: 23:36

So it looks just like this. You start from the end—you decide where this thing is going to end—and then you work backward.

Jordan: 23:44

I feel like we’re getting a little secret sauce right now.

Ed: 23:47

A little bit, yeah. This is what Telltale taught me to do. You start with the ending and work backward, deciding, “Okay, in order to get to the ending, what has to happen immediately before that?” Once you have that step down, you ask, “What has to happen before you even get there? What’s the immediate step prior to that point?”

You keep working backward, and you have all these branching points where the player can make different decisions that affect things. You come away with this big, ugly-looking horizontal flowchart with all these twists and turns, but it helps immensely. It’s the structure of your game—the backbone of your game.

o cover the entire war—from: 1914

Jordan: 24:49

Were some of these decisions made back when it was originally conceived as an episodic experience?

Ed: 24:54

Yeah, even when we were planning it, it was still going to be episodic.

Jordan: 24:58

It does make sense to me, knowing that, given some of what the game is doing.

Ed: 25:01

Yeah, we were going to hop, skip, and jump through four years of World War I, playing five different characters whose lives needed to intersect at points and branch off at others. We had to stay true to history, so we couldn’t just say, “Oh yeah, there was a battle here, and the French were going to win it.” We didn’t want to play with any history. We had our books out, and we were like, “Okay, on this date, this incredible thing happened, and we want to be there for it.” We had to figure out how to incorporate it into our timeline in a way that honors history while still telling an entertaining story.

It was a pretty daunting challenge, but we sat in that conference room every day for a week and did an episode per day until everybody was happy with what we had. By the end of it, it was exhilarating.

Jordan: 26:04

So is it sort of like a five-act experience then?

Ed: 26:07

I suppose so. It’s been a while since I played it. Of course, I played it when it came out, but they had cut one character and his episode, so to speak. I’m not sure structurally—I’d have to play it again to see if that holds true. It’s really a different experience having it be one game instead of episodic.

When Matt and I went back home, we were writing scenes. There’s not much dialogue in the game, but we were writing things like letters from soldiers to home from the front. Meanwhile, the team was developing the game, making changes. It went from episodic to just being one experience. They had to make other structural changes based on things like cuts to levels, schedule adjustments, new features, and rethinking things. That’s par for the course. But the end result was pretty close to what we had worked out with them, and I was really excited, proud, and happy to play it.

Jordan: 27:22

It's a great story, and it's this relatively small game that feels epic. Knowing that it was episodic kind of makes sense because the story has a lot going on. But also, somehow, it manages to have real emotional impact with these characters who don’t—like you said—do that much speaking. It's pretty incredible.

Ed: 27:48

Yeah, the talented group at Ubisoft Montpellier really nailed it. I wish we could have done more with Valiant Hearts. For me, it’s one of those games that really took me out of my comfort zone. There’s a theory that if you're good at comedy, you’ll also be good at drama if you push yourself, because they’re two sides of the same coin. That’s mostly true, although I like doing comedy because it’s easier. Valiant Hearts pushed me out of my comfort zone, and I’m grateful for that.

Jordan: 28:20

I’m really excited that you’ve given us a bit of the secret sauce because I want game stories to be better in general. I hope people caught on to that "starting at the end and working backwards" bit. I’d love to hear more about the kinds of rules, structures, tools, and processes that you use to craft effective stories.

Ed: 28:46

I have a process that works for me, and I’ve seen it work for my clients. First, we have to make sure we actually have a story. A lot of my clients come to me with an idea for a story or a story summary, and they confuse that with having a full story. So, they might say, “Okay, we have a story. There's this guy who’s a dragon tamer, and then a bunch of stuff happens. He fights this bad guy—we’re not sure of his name yet—and then he dies, comes back as a ghost, but then he kills the bad guy, and they’re both ghosts.” Something like that.

Jordan: 29:38

Where can I pre-order?

Ed: 29:40

You often have to say, "Hey, that's a great start. You've got an idea for a story, but you don’t really have a full story." We need a beginning, middle, and end. To get there, I use something from a great book called Invisible Ink by Brian McDonald. It’s a must-read for any writer. He introduces what he calls “Seven Easy Steps to a Better Story.” It’s a way to both simplify and give structure to your story.

The first step is to fill in seven sentences: Once upon a time, blank. For example, once upon a time, you had a dragon tamer. And every day, blank. Every day, he went about his business taming dragons. Until one day, blank—something happened.

Jordan: 30:34

That's the beginning of Act Two.

Ed: 30:35

Right, it’s like the inciting incident. Then, because of this, blank. And because of this, blank. You can keep going with the "because of this" steps, which make up the meat of your story—the rising action.

Jordan: 30:54

Right, that’s the rising action.

Ed: 30:55

For a video game, we might keep going: “Because of this, blank,” and “Because of that, blank,” and just keep layering it. Eventually, you get to “Until finally, blank,” leading up to your resolution. And then, “Ever since that day, blank”—that’s your resolution. If I were smarter, I’d have come up with a really cool example for you, but I think you get the idea.

So, those are the Seven Easy Steps. If you can fill in those blanks adequately, you’ve got yourself a story. From there, I would usually expand on that, adding more detail where necessary, until we have a treatment that everyone at the development studio can be proud of. A treatment that any stakeholder can quickly understand and say, “Yes, this is our story.”

It’s amazing. I’ve seen firsthand how much morale hangs on having a good story. When you have a developer working on a game that’s supposed to tell a good story, and if that story is a mess, some people think, "Oh, it’s just a small thing. It’s not that big a deal." But it really has an effect on the morale of the team. I’ve seen this firsthand—when you come in and help them straighten it out, organize their thoughts, and give the story some real structure, word gets out to the rest of the team. It’s a huge confidence boost. Part of that is because people then have a much better understanding of why they’re creating assets, why they’re making these sound effects, what this level should be, and how they can help tell the story. It allows everyone to feel like they’re participating in a meaningful way, where everything they do helps push the story forward.

So, we work with the treatment, and once we’ve decided we have a real story—not just a vague idea but a fully fleshed-out story—that’s great. But it’s of limited value until we can take the game’s mechanics and map out how to tell that story.

That’s when we get into this middle phase, which I call narrative design. It’s essentially about taking the game’s mechanics, which may include cinematics or other features, and plotting it all out step-by-step from end to beginning in flowchart form. You include all your branching and key interactive and non-interactive scenes, making sure everything has a purpose.

Jordan: 34:02

It’s about figuring out how you’re going to tell the story you've just made a treatment for, using the game mechanics you actually have on hand.

Ed: 34:09

What’s the player going to do, step-by-step, all the way to the end of the game? And exactly how and when is that story going to be told and pushed forward? This is the heavy lifting—it’s where game narrative designers shine, and it’s where writers from other mediums sometimes struggle if they’re not used to this part.

Ed: 34:34

After that, you’ll have full knowledge of where, how, and when all the writing needs to take place for the game. Then the writers can go off and write dialogue, while the rest of the team has this map and can start creating the assets and features necessary to ship the game.

Jordan: 34:53

That is incredibly useful information about the flowchart, those questions, and the narrative design process. One question I have about this—and I feel like this is the secret sauce, and I’m all about the secret sauce—is with the whiteboarding method, you work backwards, but with the Invisible Ink method from Brian McDonald, it sounds like you work forwards. How does that play out for you?

Ed: 35:17

That’s a good point. I think even with the story treatment, you could start with the ending and work backwards. But what’s more important isn’t the order in which you fill in those sentences; it’s that you have an answer for each one. “Once upon a time, what was going on? And every day, what was happening? Until one day, what changed?”

We tend to think of stories starting from the beginning and working toward the end—it’s just how we’re used to telling and hearing stories. But what really matters is that you can fill in those blanks.

Jordan: 35:57

I love the idea of starting with the end because, one, video game endings are so often just incredibly bad and unsatisfying.

Ed: 36:04

No one thinks you're gonna get there. Like, hardly anybody finishes, right? Sometimes the mindset is, "Oh, well, who cares? No one's gonna get that far."

Jordan: 36:16

But the other thing is, when you know the ending, I think as a creator, your control over the experience is much greater. You can tease, play, prod, foreshadow, and mislead.

Ed: 36:27

It’s a map, right? This flowchart is a map. And like when you draw up a map, you need to know where you're going. You tell your phone, "Hey, I’m going to this address," and it brings up the map, tells you the best way to get there, the most interesting way, or the way with the least traffic. You need to know where you're going in order to steer the ship there.

Jordan: 36:55

Now that we've solved all our listeners' story planning problems forever, what are some of the pitfalls along the way? What are some mistakes you see in games all the time that make you say, "Ah, stop doing X, Y, and Z"?

Ed: 37:13

I’m big on character development now. It’s something we give the least amount of thought to. I hear this from people who work at studios. Just the other day, a colleague told me he wrote up a one-page character description for an important character, and his supervisor was upset, like he’d wasted time. It’s crazy because I guarantee, if we sat down with that person and talked about their favorite films, they’d mention how much work went into character development. George Lucas did so much work on the characters in Star Wars. Imagine if he was envisioning Darth Vader and said, "Hey, what's Darth Vader's background? What’s his relationship to these other characters?" And someone just said, "Don’t worry about it. Just make him look cool."

Jordan: 38:13

I actually think we know what you’d get—you’d get Darth Maul.

Ed: 38:16

Yeah, exactly. I’m obsessed with No Country for Old Men. There are very few movies I’ll watch over and over again, but I’ve seen that one like 20 times. You can look at how the Coen brothers draw characters, and if you’re cynical, you could say there’s a lot of forced quirkiness, but I don’t think that’s it. I think they take the time to make even the hotel clerks interesting. This hotel clerk isn’t an amalgam of every hotel clerk in the world. They’re an individual person—maybe cranky, maybe high—but they’re a specific person. And so, all of these interactions are interesting. Of course, the main characters are extremely well thought out too.

Almost nobody does this in games. I think there’s just a handful of developers that take the time to decide who these characters are. If we get to know these characters, what makes them interesting and rare? I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this, but I read that Dustin Hoffman, when he was a young actor, was one of the Fruit of the Loom guys.

Apparently, he could be a bit of a ball breaker even back then. He was like, "I’m not just oranges. I am a specific orange. I am a singular orange. What is this orange about?" We don’t really do that in games. If you're a space marine, you're just every space marine we've ever seen before. These top-of-the-mind clichés are what we get most often.

Jordan: 40:44

I think that’s one of the things that’s so great about the work of someone like Tim Schafer—you do feel that all the characters have been labored over. It’s the craftsmanship piece, right? The characters aren’t just serving a purpose. They’re also, like you said, individuals. They’re created in their own right.

Ed: 41:05

To your point with Tim Schafer, I recall Psychonauts, the first game Double Fine made.

Jordan: 41:12

Love that game. Adore it.

Ed: 41:15

I loved it too. I remember this story—as he was preparing for the game and doing research, Friendster was still a thing.

Jordan: 41:24

I remember this story too, yeah.

Ed: 41:27

He made Friendster profiles for all of his characters—major characters, minor characters—because he wanted to see which ones would get along, which ones wouldn’t, how they might react to one another. Who does that? I mean, who takes the time to do that? Not many people, but I’m sure it contributed to the game being great.

And then, just in general, there’s not a lot of time for research. People work at studios under the gun, with really tight deadlines, and it’s really hard. They don’t have the luxury or time to do the research necessary to make their dialogue sound as authentic as it could be. It’s not a problem with every studio or writer by any means, but there is great stuff out there. Indie studios—Firewatch was great, and that’s Sean Vanaman, who’s a Telltale alumni. The story and dialogue in that game were pretty great. Being independent, he could take the time to do the research necessary to make it great. So there’s poor character development, not a lot of time given over to research—research is maybe considered a luxury.

I had this experience recently. I was working on a game with a culinary theme. I’d done a rev of dialogue on maybe a hundred different quests. It’s one of those games where the dialogue has an intro to the quest, an outro, and in between, maybe a few reminders of what the player should be doing to solve the quest. But we’re also trying to tell a good story. My first rev of the dialogue was very much like, "Hey, how’s it going? Boy, we need to bake a hundred pies today. The Pie Club is coming to the restaurant, and we’ve got to make a hundred pies because the Pie Club wants a lot of pies." Then we’d try to tack on a little bit of story development or character development on top of this.

When I prepared for my second rev, I wasn’t happy with it at all. I told the team, “Look, in this game, the player is a chef, right? It’s their job. You’re a chef. What do chefs do when they come to a restaurant? They cook. They don’t need any additional justification for it. It’s already their job. What do chefs or cooks talk about at work? They don’t sit there and narrate everything they’re doing. ‘I’m chopping a carrot. Now I’m boiling some soup.’ They talk about their relationships. They get pissed at each other. They complain, they gripe about their employers, or whatever. They’re human. We don’t need to explain why they’re making pies. They make pies because they’re freaking chefs.”

I call it “mission-itis,” where everything’s so hyper-focused on what the player is doing. I hate to pick on games because writing is hard, but there’s this game that came out—it’s a really fun game called Dying Light, and I almost finished it. I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t enjoy the story that much. The story literally has a guy parachuting out of a plane, landing in the middle of a city, and almost immediately, even though you’re this white guy landing in a Middle Eastern city where everyone is Arabic, you go up to some people and say, “Hey man, let me do some missions. I’m good at missions. Come on, give me a mission. Let’s go.” You can tell the whole game is written around what you need to be doing at that moment—these convoluted reasons why you need to go fix a satellite dish or kill someone or wipe out zombies.

It’s really boring, and I just think, you don’t need to do all this. The guy has a job, right? He’s a runner, and that job is justification enough for doing all the stuff he does. What we should be talking about is stuff that’s a lot more interesting. Yes, you have goals—go blow this up, go set something on fire, go shoot these zombies—but most of what we should be talking about is something more engaging. But instead, we spend most of the game talking about what you should be doing for your job, before, during, and while you’re doing it. With some more character development and thought, maybe we can avoid that kind of trap. It’s not easy—my sympathies are with every game writer in the world.

Jordan: 46:51

How do you make clicking on pies or growing crops about betrayal and love?

Ed: 47:00

That’s just it. If you’re playing one of these farm simulator games, it’s enough to say you’re a farmer. We don’t need a story behind why you’re watering crops. You’re a farmer—it’s what you do. And if you don’t water them, they die. The story should be about who you’re dealing with. Maybe it’s about your daughter running off with someone or...

Jordan: 47:23

You’re growing a bouquet for your daughter’s wedding.

Ed: 47:27

Or the bank that’s trying to repossess your farm. Something more interesting.

Jordan: 47:33

I’ve had so much experience struggling with that, trying to make great stories out of farming on Frontierville.

Ed: 47:42

And I’ve worked on some of those games too, so I get it.

Jordan: 47:46

And I think we did a pretty good job, actually. I think the team was very good at it.

Ed: 47:50

It can be done.

Jordan: 47:50

Any other things you want to mention about pitfalls?

Ed: 47:53

Part of my advice is, be dogged. There are times when I’m asked to do a writing task that maybe, on the onset, seems like less-than-glamorous writing—barks or voice calls. I’ve been in this position a lot where it’s like, “Okay, I need 15 things for this player to say.” For example, I worked on a bowling game before, and I needed to come up with 15 or 20 things for a player to say when they roll a gutter ball. And they need to be funny, short, and in character. This character is a unique personality, and that’s really hard, right? One-liners that are short, funny, have personality, and communicate that they’ve rolled a gutter ball.

What I often see writers doing is, you bang your head on the wall trying to come up with 20 original things, and eventually, your soul leaves your body. The last 10 or 12 just aren’t your best writing, and I totally understand that. This is where some of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies actually help me. I will sometimes stare at that empty cell in Excel for 40 minutes if I have to, but I want to make sure that all 20 of them are short, funny, communicate what they need to, and have personality.

If it takes me two or three hours, that’s sometimes what I’ll do. It just takes time. It’s about rolling up your sleeves and getting under the hood. Sometimes it just takes a lot of time. But when you do 20 of those, and they’re good and funny, it’s a great reward. It’s amazing to hear them in the game, be proud of them, and have the rest of the team be excited about what you did. Be dogged sometimes.

Jordan: 50:03

When making games, you can also get into “missionitis,” and sometimes instead of just trying to finish that list, you’ve got to take a break and come back.

We had Lev Chepelsky on the show, and one of the stories he shared was working on Hot Shots Golf. They had a team to do just these tiny little lines for hitting a great shot or a bad shot, and you never know what’s going to hit. It turns out that one of the most memorable things in the game was a guy saying “cream cheese” when you hit a great shot.

Ed: 50:34

Yeah, that can happen. I’m sometimes surprised by what hits or what doesn’t with barks and voice calls. More often than not, I have a pretty good sense of what’s good when I turn something in, and what maybe could be better. But it’s always a pleasant surprise when something unexpectedly resonates.

Jordan: 50:56

Yeah, I think that speaks to your craftsmanship and your experience.

Ed: 51:01

I hope so. Experience, for sure. It's hard to get good at the craft of game writing. Like I said, there are some universities where you can learn—like USC and other places—but we don’t have a hundred years of history to draw from like film. I haven’t read every book on game writing, but I feel like there are maybe a few good ones out there. We don’t have a "Save the Cat" for games that can just get you started. It’s hard. I’m lucky to have worked on dozens of games because not that many people get that chance.

Jordan: 51:42

And that’s also what makes it so exciting to be in this field—we’re still defining what it is.

Ed: 51:47

Absolutely. It’s fascinating to be part of the early days of game development. Some of the first people to make games are still making games—maybe not the very first generation, but definitely the second wave of game creators. Those guys are still out there creating today. You can call them, tweet them, and they’re still here. And now we’re already diving into VR. It’s amazing how fast the industry changes for how new it is. It’s mind-boggling. I have to tune it out sometimes. I’m not big on technology, so I just focus on my job and let other people figure out how VR is going to change storytelling. I’ll just ride their coattails.

Jordan: 52:50

And all you’ve got to do is subscribe to Playmakers! We’ll keep you up to date on it.

Ed: 52:55

Perfect. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on the show. And again, my sympathies and hats off to anyone out there working in games, whether you’ve been doing it forever or are just starting. Feel free to tweet at me—I'm always happy to help anyone I can.

Jordan: 53:11

And what’s your Twitter handle?

Ed: 53:13

It’s @EdKuehnel—E-D-K-U-E-H-N-E-L. My Twitter name is Danforth Mantooth. That’s me.

Jordan: 53:21

Excellent. Thanks so much, Ed.

Ed: 53:23

Take it easy.

Jordan: 53:25

I hope you found the interview informative and useful. If you’re interested in crafting great stories, I’m sure you did. Head to playmakerspodcast.com where you’ll find the blog post with all the resources we talked about, including how to get in touch with Ed. You can also download the cheat sheet that outlines the processes Ed discussed for creating great narratives in your game. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. That’s all for this episode of Playmakers. See you in Episode 7, and thanks for being a loyal listener to Playmakers.