VGHF Collection: Writing Wing Commander II

This is the fifth in a series of updates that will highlight five fascinating items from our first search through the Video Game History Foundation's new Digital Library. We're sure there are countless treasures to uncover, so be sure to dive into their collection and post what you discover to the forums!

It's our final VGHF update (for now!) we've saved the best for last… this one is absolutely fascinating! It's a June 1992 issue of The Journal of Computer Game Design (Vol. 5, No. 5), an early academic-style publication covering game design… and it features a four page interview with Ellen Guon that goes into a great amount of detail about her writing for Wing Commander! This is the kind of article narrative designers today should be reading, it's absolute gold that's still relevant today. And as she talks about developing Angel's story for Wing Commander II, you'll think she probably should've had a story credit on the movie.

Making It Real

Ellen Guon and Katherine Lawrence

[This article is based on the seminar that Ellen and Katherine presented at the 1992 Computer Game Developers' Conference.]

Ellen: This is a brief introduction to the "building blocks" of storywriting. I look at story as something you construct, not art but craftsmanship. You create and fit pieces together to create a complete work. We'll cover the basics now, get into finer details in the Q&A.

My name is Ellen Guon. I started out as a children's television scriptwriter, working on various shows: "Jem," "My Little Pony," "Bravestarr," and "Dinosaucers." I'm a published fantasy and science fiction author, with one book out and two more that'll be published this year. I started in computer games as a Project Manager for Sierra on game conversions, and then was a lead writer and occasional director at Origin Systems for five of the Wing Commander games. I'm starting at Electronic Arts in their educational games department in a couple weeks.

Katherine: My name is Katherine Lawrence, and I've been writing for television since 1985. My credits include "Dungeons & Dragons," "Jim Henson's Muppet Babies" and most recently, "Conan the Adventurer" which will air this fall. I've worked in series development at Marvel Productions and Filmation Studios. Development is where "Making it Real" starts.

First comes deciding what the series is going to be about. This usually means either obtaining the rights to a pre-existing character, like Spiderman or Conan, or starting from scratch by choosing a target audience. By target audience, I mean an age range, and gender. (Television executive perception is that there are shows with "boy appeal" and "girl appeal" though there has to be some cross-over to get good ratings.) You wouldn't expect 2-6 year olds to watch the same series as 8-12 year olds. Not that they don't but one shouldn't expect it.

Ellen: In a computer game, development begins a similar way. You'll have a basic premise, such as is the project going to be a flight sim, an adventure game or an RPG, and you may have an existing universe to work within. You SHOULD have a target market. If you don't have a market in mind, I suggest you figure that out before you start. In any case, you'll have similar guidelines to work within, just like a television show.

Katherine: Once you have the initial idea, and know who your audience is, you begin creating the backstory, the history of the characters, and the universe.

Let's take an example, and follow it through. We decide we want to create an action/adventure show aimed at 8-12 year olds, since that's what the network is most likely to buy this year, or so rumor has it.

Ellen: or in computer games, you know you want to do a flight sim, since that's what's selling this year.

Katherine: So we sit around and come up with the time period. Do we want "today," futuristic, or from history? We choose historical, something vaguely medieval. And since we're aiming it at 8-12 year olds, we want real adventure with risks, not strictly moral "feel-good" characters. We want characters that can DO something so the audience will identify with them.

Ellen: What Katherine is saying is KNOW YOUR MARKET before you start. Do your research. Figure out what's going to sell to your selected audience. Doing a story that's appropriate for 5-7 year olds won't sell in an 8-12 market. Once you know your basic direction, you can start figuring out the details. Like story and character.

Basically, computer game development is similar in this regard to television. A good place to start is figuring out what your universe is. Once you have that, you can narrow down to specific characters and story. Again, all of this builds out of your basic approach to the project.

In the Wing Commander universe, Chris Roberts decided that he wanted to create a space combat game, a flight simulator. From that basic concept, the universe of humans vs. Kilrathi evolved. Later, when Origin realized that players were interested in the story aspect of the game as well as the space combat, the game evolved into characters and involved plotlines.

Katherine: Once you identify the universe, and the type of story you want, based upon the target audience, you begin creating characters.

You need your heroes and villains. Because this is television, we have certain "rules." We need a strong mix of ethnic types and genders. And we can't have a lot of weapons with sharp edges since the studio and network might get sued if little Charlie decides to use a butcher knife to play Adventure! with his little sister as the villain from last Saturday's episode.

Ellen: While those same guidelines don't apply in the computer games industry, as we don't have anything like the network's "Standards and Practices" board, there still should be some sense of moral responsibility in your writing. The television guidelines are worth looking into just to see what guidelines exist. When creating heroes and villains, I tend to think in terms of shades of grey rather than black and white. "Flawed heroes and redeemable villains." There is no such thing as a perfectly altruistic person out there in our world.

Katherine: Well, perhaps Mother Teresa.

Ellen: If there were, would you want to buy a used car from that person? Likewise, no one thinks of themselves as being totally evil. To make a character interesting, as well as "real," a hero should have problems, even a potentially fatal flaw in his or her outlook or character.

Overcoming that flaw or problem is part of what makes your story interesting, part of the B storyline. (We'll talk more about that later.) And a villain should be someone whose motivation you can understand, maybe even sympathize with. A villain such as some of the world leaders we've had in this century doesn't think of himself as a villain, or as evil. They're justified in their own minds. It's these kind of innovations in a character that make you care about what happens to them.

The Journal of Computer Game Design The trick with this is to make the character flaws or problems believable, as well as use it discreetly. This was a problem in the "Back to the Future" movies, where they really slammed you over the head with Marty McFly's problems about being called a coward.

Katherine: What Ellen said is what works in television as well. Even the worst villains on "G.I.Joe" had their vulnerabilities and the heroes were never perfect.

Okay, you've got your main characters down. The next thing is to build the character inter-relationships. Not just who is in love with whom, but who has a grudge against whom, who yelled at whom yesterday, and what they want to do with the other character tomorrow. None of us live in a vacuum, nor should our characters.

Ellen: In WC2, Steve Beeman and I did this in a very direct and concise fashion. Those of you who've read Mike Harrison's "WC Strategy Guide" may have seen our one-paragraph character descriptions which describe exactly how all the characters interact with each other.

One character may be a lover to the hero or heroine, or a parental figure, or a sibling, or a rival, or anything else. Once you lay out these inter- relationships, a lot of the character interaction in the story becomes very clear.

In WC2, Ralgha/Hobbes and Downtown have a very special parental relationship. Ralgha is a renegade Kilrathi who rescued Downtown from slavery on a Kilrathi planet. Now Downtown has grown up, is a combat pilot, and they're serving aboard the same ship. When someone accuses Ralgha of being the murderer aboard that ship, Downtown very naturally is going to leap to Ralgha's defense. There are many other examples of this in WC2, which are natural interactions based upon the existing relationships.

Katherine: The next and final step to building real characters is character quirks. Those little things that aren't essential to survival, and may even be counter-survival, but are SO very human (or Kilrathi).

It's from these that stories can grow. For example, my first script sale was for the "Dungeons and Dragons" series from Marvel Productions. One of the characters didn't DO anything, and I figured it must bother her. So I came up with a story that depended upon that sense of isolation and uselessness she felt when surrounded by all the other heroic types. That's what CBS liked about it, and they bought it. (Yes, that's one of the secrets to successfully pitching story ideas in television: find the least-utilized character and build a story around him, her it.)

Ellen: In WC2 I used this trick of building quirks as well. Actually, Angel's "by the book" attitude wasn't a quirk that I put in, it was in the original game before I started working on the series. I thought about that, the kind of personality that's SO dedicated to everything being proper and military, by the book. What would happen to that kind of person when she realizes it's only a facade that she's put up between herself and the world, and it's crumbling down?

In SM2, when Bossman is killed, that's the first break in Angel's armor: the scene where she asks Bluehair (the player) just to stay with her awhile, talk to her. She doesn't want to be alone. Later, when her best friend, Spirit, dies, that destroys the last of the facade and prompts the love affair between herself and Bluehair. This is a case of the plot developing directly out of a character's quirks.

Katherine: Remember, there are almost ALWAYS reasons for personality quirks. That's why there are so many psychiatrists and therapists around.

Okay, you have your universe and your characters. Now comes using them to make the plot real. As Ellen said, and as in my example, plot can come out of character. It can also come from wanting to torture your character with a situation. (Sometimes I think all writers are sadists at heart, considering what we put our characters through.)

Ellen: Basically, stories break down into two kinds. In television we call them the A and B storylines. The "A" storyline is your action-based story. "B" is your character evolution story. A good plot needs both kinds of stories. Without both, you'll either have a non-stop action story that has no character involvement in it at all, or a story that's all characters that aren't DOING anything. "Steel Magnolia's," while a terrific film, certainly comes to mind as an example of that second possibility.

The best stories interweave the A and B plots into a single cohesive whole. If you can, try to intersect the climactic scenes of both stories at the same point. A good example of this is "Star Wars," where Luke finally figures out how to use that dratted Force and overcomes his various problems and insecurities (the B story) at the same time he's trying to destroy the Death Star (the A story).

You can create tension in your storyline by interweaving these two types of storylines. It's like a rollercoaster ride. What I prefer to do is alternate the high-tension scenes of both storylines, so that there's always some kind of dramatic tension, either in the action or character development storyline. My favorite movie that illustrates this is "The African Queen," which has Hepburn and Bogart professing their undying love for each other as they're about to be executed. The tensions in both A and B plotlines build upon each other, especially when Bogart asks the German ship captain to perform their marriage ceremony before he has them executed. As the Captain says, "I now pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution."

Katherine: Not that either just an A story or just a B story won't work. Flight simulations are just A stories, for example. But when the B story, the "character arc" is added, it becomes something "real."

When creating your stories, however, you should also look down the road to the "pay-off." How are you going to capitalize on what you're doing? As in "Star Wars" where we get the payoff of feeling good that the Death Star is destroyed, and also identify with overcoming fears and insecurities. You don't just need to have a conclusion, you need to grab the reader, audience or game player and make them not only take the journey with you, but perhaps even drag YOU along, they're SO involved in the story.

Ellen: The payoff is what you're building to throughout the story. In the A story, that's a physical victory, such as destroying K'Tithrak Mang at the end of WC2. The payoff for the B story in WC2 is a little more complex than that. At the beginning of WC2, you've been court- martialed, demoted, shipped off to the middle of nowhere, and basically had a very bad day. Everyone in the universe seems to hate you now, especially Admiral Tolwyn, who presided at your court- martial.

The A story of WC2 is simple: you destroy the bad guys' space station. The B story payoff is that you're restored to your original rank, your name is cleared, and most importantly, everyone thinks you're a hero again. Especially Tolwyn. Earning his respect is possibly the most major payoff out of the entire story, even though it may only be part of the adrenaline rush of the ending for most players.

The payoff is the single most critical aspect of your game. Without this, there won't be the emotional punch for your audience, a sense of satisfaction at the end of your story.

Katherine: For example, using "Star Wars" again, the emotional payoff isn't the destruction of the Death Star, but that ceremony before the assembled Alliance when Luke receives his medal from the princess, and fulfills his dreams. THAT'S the reason people went to see that movie again and again, not just the incredible roller-coaster ride of the adventure.

Now you've got your series or game created, have the characters, and interweaved plots. Is your job done? Not necessarily. As "Happy Days" and "Wing Commander" have proved, there's a definite market for spin-off stories. You can take all this work you've done and build on it. There are Secret Missions and "Mork and Mindy" as examples. When you've created a "real" universe with real characters and stories the game player or viewer like, use all that work and keep the audience coming back for more. That's the real point of "Making it Real."

Ellen: In other words, once you've put all this work into your story and characters, get the most mileage out of it that you can.

We've talked a lot about some of the similarities between television and computer games, and some "tricks of the trade" from television that you can use in games. But computer games are a very different medium, and there are some things you might want to consider when creating a story and characters for use in a game.

The Journal of Computer Game Design Computer games are interactive. Games have elements other than story, such as combat, puzzles and tasks the player must accomplish to win the game. When you're creating a story for a game, you want to interweave these elements into your story, just as seamlessly as you'd add the character motivations and quirks, the background for the universe, etc. Make these ele- ments PART of your story, integral to the plot, etc.

Katherine: Whereas in television your primary concern is coming up with sufficient cliff- hanging act-breaks to keep the viewers coming back after the commercials.

Ellen: Chris Roberts said it very well, "People buy WC for the flight simulator, not the story. But the story is the glue that holds the missions together, that makes you want to play just one more mission every time."

Katherine: And always keep in mind the ancillary rights. Video games have already been turned into television series, and there's no reason a really good computer game can't be turned into a movie.

But this is a two-way street. In another couple of years, some of you could well be up here, telling television or movie scriptwriters how to make the interactivity work. We all create magic with our writing, the only difference is the medium. That's what makes what we do SO important, and SO rewarding.

Lastly, we both highly recommend J. Michael Straczynski's THE COMPLETE BOOK OF SCRIPTWRITING, from Writer's Digest Books. A new edition is coming out this Summer (1992). It covers radio, stage, television and movies, and is one of my own resource books. It can be ordered from the Writer's Digest Book Club, or found in most bookstores, including the chains.