"If you want people to follow your plot," Ken Levine told the audience, "it has to be really f***ing stupid."
His words weren't exactly eloquent, but the creative director and co-founder of BioShock developer 2K Boston got his point across: video games stories aren't valued very highly. "The bad news is, for storytellers, nobody cares about your stupid story," Levine said during a packed session at the recent Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.
Sadly, Levine learned this lesson the hard way with BioShock and admitted that most of the award-winning title's compelling, highly original script was left on the cutting room floor. The cut material included about a dozen characters as well as major plot points. In addition, the time frame of the narrative was shortened significantly - from decades to just a single day. For a game that was almost universally praised for its story, it was surprising to hear how much of it Levine and his development team were forced to cut.
Levine's presentation was ironically entitled "Storytelling In BioShock: Empowering Players to Care About Your Stupid Story." Speaking in front of a large audience, he described the up-and-down process of crafting BioShock's complex narrative and offered some advice and lessons learned about writing stories for games. "The audience has no reason to be predisposed [to liking a story]," he said. "How do we seduce them to care about it?"
Using some early gameplay footage and concept art, Levine took the audience behind the scenes of BioShock's creation to illustrate how the game's story evolved from early concepts and mammoth scripts that bear little resemblance to the best-selling game we know today.
Let Your Game World Do the Talking
Levine showed early gameplay footage of BioShock during his presentation, and it looked much like Rapture's dark, damp corridors that we see in the finished product. But something was missing - none of the art deco design or colorful utopian billboards and signage was on the screen. As a result, the demo's visuals were dull. "What is this world saying to us?" he asked. "Not very much." So Levine said the development team scrapped the build and started over to help make a more compelling environment that better illustrated the Objectivist-dystopian world. Levine's point was simple - since the environment is what the player spends most of his or her time looking at, developers need to make it say something. Having a rich game world to explore, he said, will reduce the need for cut scenes and plot details that could slow down the game.
The Devil is in the Details
One of the first lessons Levine offered was simple: details drag you down. Too much detail in a game's story will confuse players. Levine described how the original outline for BioShock's story spanned 60 to 70 years and included dozens of characters and major turning points like civil wars. "It's really painful to chip away," he said. "As time went on, we made our game simpler, simpler and simpler. In 2006, we basically took a knife and killed a bunch of major characters."
In addition to eliminating characters, 2K Boston also removed crucial events from the narrative. For example, players never actually participate in the New Year's Eve riots in Rapture but instead see the aftermath and hear first-hand accounts of the disaster.
Appealing to the Masses
Levine explained how BioShock was constructed to appeal to the widest possible audience, which he outlined in the three types of gamers. The first, he said, was the kind of gamer who loves Halo and Madden NFL titles and doesn't care about the story at all - they just want to shoot and blow stuff up. The second type of gamer includes people that enjoy a good narrative for their shooters, but don't necessarily want to follow complex stories with tons of plot details and character. And the third type of gamer is the hardcore fan who wants to go as deep as he or she possibly can into the story, extracting every bit of information available about the experience. The trick is, Levine said, you can't let the experience for the hardcore gamer get in the way of the Halo or Madden fan that just wants to blow stuff up. So how do you accommodate both?
One way that BioShock's development team created an experience that appealed to the different types of gamers was by making characters and plot points optional by way of the recorded messages. Players don't have to access the voice recordings littered throughout Rapture; instead, they can choose to zip through the game focused on the action or they can stop to soak up the storyline and delve into the mysterious background of Rapture and its inhabitants.
"We gave players the opportunity to opt out of a lot of our story," Levine told the audience.
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