The Mathematics of Interactive Storytelling - Jon Ingold (80 Days, Heaven's Vault, TR-49)

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Because a good mathematician doesn't get from A to B. They get to A to B by the best argument, which really expresses the truth of whatever it is you're trying to express. So that's exactly what I'm trying to do in a scene and a dialogue sequence the whole time is find the most efficient version of this conversation, which doesn't bring in anything extra, which isn't needed, but also expresses the truth of the situation and the characters and the colour of it and whatever. Is it actually good writing? It's kind of like a mathematical proof. It's an argument, it's a thing which doesn't have anything that it doesn't need, but enjoys what it has. And I think that's huge for me.

SPEAKER_03 0:44

Today we're talking with John Ingold, the co-founder of Inkle Studios, creators of 80 Days, Heaven's Vault, most recently TR49, Overboard, Expelled, they've got the Sorcery Series, they've got a brilliant catalogue of adventure games under their belt, and they lean so heavily on really good, efficient design and really, really good writing to make their games just pop. I spoke with John today about how crucial writing is. It sort of goes without saying in video games how when good writing is done well, it can do marvellous things. And then also this really interesting conversation about the relationship between mathematics and good writing and the fact that you sort of need to be efficient about how you get to the solution for whatever your problem is, be it numerical or or with words. And also John gets a chance to gush about his his one of his favourite games ever, which is The Last Express, as it is mine. So we really enjoy getting into the weeds of that. This is a great conversation. Please stick around and subscribe. Rate the episode if you like it. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

We didn't really have a computer when I was a kid, and we got one eventually, but it was it wasn't very good. My dad got it for work, and it the very first computer we had was an old PC that. Yeah, that's what it did anyway. So when you were playing the game, you would type in a command to see if it worked. And if you typed in a command that didn't work, which happened all the time, then the game would just spit an error message at you straight away. So the printer would just go, you type and it would go zine. And then if you did something minor or common, that would be in the computer's working memory, and that would be fine, and it would just spit it out again. But if you did something significant, if you actually solved a puzzle, or if the command that you'd done was the right one or moved you to a new area or something, then the printer would have to buffer the output because it was producing a bit more output. So you would hear it before you could read it. You would hear the printer go because it was loading a big chunk of data, and then it would start printing out a page, and that was so satisfying as a kid, that feeling of like, oh, I've got somewhere, I've made it, because I can tell because the printer's making that noise. And then you go and dig up the print sheet to find out what it actually said. That's burned on my memory as a kid. We put that in TR49 when you go from panel to panel and it does this sort of transition animation, and we built it so that if you've discovered cards that are connected very closely together, then the distance, the physical distance it moves is short, so that if it does a big movement, it's that same thing. But you know you've got somewhere because it's traveling. And that was inspired by the game.

SPEAKER_03 3:34

I know exactly. I I don't even know when I was playing it that I was uh clicking that on a sort of cognitive level, but I know I definitely would get a rush when I had solved something and there was definitely something different going on on screen.

SPEAKER_02 3:51

Just that little bit of extra delay that says this is gonna be worth the wait, it's just hard.

SPEAKER_03 3:57

Um do you know what year that was? Just out of interest.

SPEAKER_02 4:00

I don't, I don't. Um so when I was nine, we were going to get a computer and we didn't. So it must have been after that.

SPEAKER_03 4:08

And by the time I was sixteen, we had a computer at work, so it must be sold out in 1992, so I'm just thinking about the the the decades of you know um changes in in technology since then, but the the premise, you know, and the what what can what one can what can be evoked by a game remains the same, be it the sort of the the sound of the printer sort of whirring up or this this you know uh animated sequence to sort of evoke a feeling from a player. Something sort of quite profound about that.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Yeah, so I have a fairly technical approach to that.

SPEAKER_02 4:51

I I often think that games are are much closer to theatre than they are to film, right? People always use film as the analogy for games because it's an audiovisual medium on a screen. But I always think of theatre because when you go to the theatre, a big chunk of what makes the world come alive is you as an audience member filling in the gaps of the things that aren't there, like believing that this set is actually a house and believing that that person is actually who they are when they clearly aren't, whatever it might be. And growing up when I did, games massively required you to do that. Like the box art would say it's a fantasy adventure, and then when you open it, there'd be two little trees and like one little house, and it's all blue and green and pink. But you you'd believed it because you were willing to make that effort, so you suspended your disbelief and you made this fantasy world come alive. As games get more and more like photorealistic and kind of complex and detailed, we like to believe that we're doing less and less of that imaginative work, that the game is actually presenting us with a with a reality we can just experience straight away. But I don't think that's actually true. Like if you play Red Dead Redemption, something like that, people say, Oh, I got lost in this wonderful Wild West wilderness. But if you look at the animations in the game, they're kind of clunky. The character walks into walls, he struggles to climb over fences, he's a computer game character in a computer game world, he's got all the limitations that computer game characters have always had. And that's not a criticism of the developers at all. That's just that's the way the medium works. But when you play it, you don't notice those things. They just disappear. And that's because we're doing the work, the imaginative work, to make them real for us. And I think in that sense, a lot of what we invoked in the 90s when we were making computer games with very bad computers and dot matrix printers and whatever, and what we're invoking now is very similar. It's what can we get people to imagine, and how do we prompt them to imagine it and believe in it, is much more interesting and sort of powerful than you know, how complex is my physics shader, which is nice, but I don't think it it doesn't carry as much.

SPEAKER_03 6:56

I guess that makes me think, like, say if you took a game like Red Dead Redemption 2, that's just like at the in terms of you know, graphics and quality, you know, photorealism, all of that stuff, attention to detail, it's so much of it, but it's I guess what I picked up from what you're saying is that beyond that, that particular game is also doing something else that is tapping into the the the very uh highly efficient machine that is our imagination, right? And it's like every game that has that same budget or whatever isn't able to do that, you know.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

Well, I think the the curious thing about something with a massive budget like Red Dead, Red Dead Redemption 2 is that in 10 years' time we'll look back at that game and go, yeah, it looks alright. Because we always do that. We never look back at a game and go, wow, that still looks as good and as photorealistic as it did 10 years ago. Tomb Raider, when it came out, was extraordinary to look at. And now it's clunky, boxy pixels, and we go, how could anyone even, you know, how could you even begin to play this thing and believe in it? But that's not how it felt in the 90s. The same is true of Grand Theft Auto 3, the same's kind of true of Grand Theft Auto 4. It time doesn't keep these games looking as good as we remember them looking, but it makes no difference to how we feel about them when we're playing them. So clearly the imaginative work we're doing is the important thing here, is the actual value, valuable thing here. And what I love about games, what I love about being an indie creator, is that we can trigger your imagination just as powerfully as anybody else on a millionth of the budget, a millionth of the time, um, so long as we do it right. And that's an interesting chat.

SPEAKER_03 8:39

Yeah, and that's sort of something I wanted to talk about, is that it's like, you know, well, you know, I I think like uh certainly in my work, like the invention of the most creative work I've done is built out of limitation of some kind. And if you're not distracted by, you know, the fact that you could pour away however much money on, you know, sets or graphics or CGI or whatever, you're kind of forced to hone in on like story and the things that you can generate and and build out from your own, you know.

SPEAKER_02 9:11

I think one of the things that I've always found because I've worked on a few 3D games and I've worked on 2D games and I've worked on text-only games, is that when you're in, say, a high fidelity 3D environment, you spend a lot of time just making sure that the basics work, that the character can walk around sensibly, that they can climb stairs without their feet going through the floor, just making that 3D world function. None of which actually makes the game any better. It just stops the game being worse. Like if the character walks through a wall, people go, okay, this game is broken. But if the character doesn't walk through a wall, that doesn't make the game good, it doesn't make it fun. Whereas what I love about working with story and narrative is that every single thing you do in the detail of building a story or a line of dialogue or a character or a world is always making the game better the whole time. You're very rarely fixing, I mean, you might fix a typo, right? But you might fix a spelling mistake. But most of the time, when you say, ah, this word is better than that word, it genuinely is better and makes the game better and makes the the point you're trying to make better, or makes the character funnier, or makes the line more exciting, or whatever it is. Whereas if I stop a character walking into a wall, and I have to do that for every single wall in the entire game, I'm only ever not making the game worse. I'm never making the game better. And I love it, I love that. Story is so good at delivering value so fast in all levels, like whether you're talking about the wide story of the whole game, or whether you're talking about just one little moment between two characters. You can make a moment between two characters brilliant, fairly easily if you know what you're doing. And I love the craft of that. That's really yeah. That's really exciting to me.

SPEAKER_03 10:57

It makes me think about again like the early era of film, you know, and again how it was like so rudimentary technically, uh when it sort of first came out versus where it's at now. But again, as long as you were tapping into um, you know, good story would be like Noseratu or you know, whatever, or a little bit further along, someone like Casablanca, you know, which is like films back then, they were kind of shop like plays pretty much, but you didn't need all of that enhancement of technology to kind of really engage an audience member.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Yeah. It's funny when you think about a film, like we've moved away from a fixed camera angle that looks like a yeah, exactly like a play. And did we do that because it's better? Or did we do that because now that we've moved away from that fixed camera angle, audiences get bored when they're looking at a fixed camera? Did we break the audience who was perfectly happy watching a fixed camera angle? Now we can't do that anymore. We just made filmmaking way more complicated. But has it made it better? Well, I suppose it probably has, but I sort of think like technical advancement for the sake of technical advancement isn't necessarily very interesting. So, you know, at least now that we can move the camera around, perhaps we can tell a story slightly more subtly or something. And that okay, that's a win. That's it.

SPEAKER_03 12:19

I guess you could say the same thing of going from two-dimensional gaming to adding an entire third dimension, you know.

SPEAKER_02 12:27

Yeah, although 3D brings so many problems with it that it's very hard to it's very hard to get really expert at telling stories with a 3D camera because the camera is always pointing the wrong way. Some people do manage it, which is very impressive, but I think yeah, I much prefer working in 2D where it's much more under control.

SPEAKER_03 12:45

And just, I mean, I love that printer story, and I guess it's like I mean maybe it's just repeat what we're just talking about, but all of the the the technology, like with text adventures, the technology was perfect to spark one's imagination and engagement and love of a story. You know, the fact that you sort of remember that so viscer viscerally and the feeling behind it. Um, even though we look at the tech from back then as being so limited, it had everything that it needed to create an immersive interactive experience for you, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:31

Yeah, I think I think So the thing about text adventures that's interesting is you have this way of talking to the game, you type in commands, and the marketing at the time was, oh, you can you can just tell it what you want to do. You can do anything. It's like a a role-playing game, it's like DD. And it's nothing like that at all. It's much more like programming. There are things you can type that will make the computer do things, but if you type them even slightly wrong, the computer will fail to understand it and it'll break. But in the same way as with programming, that if you learn how to program, if you get fluent at it, then you can make the computer do anything. And that's quite exciting. It's quite exhilarating once you know how to code because you go, oh, I've got an idea, and you can just do it. And a text game felt like that. Once you learnt the language that it understood, once you could communicate fluently with the game, the distance between you and the game was really removed. It was really thin. And you could just breeze through these worlds and explore them in depth and really be entertained and immersed within them because you got over that friction, you've got over that hurdle. Which I guess is the same in all games, right? Once you learn how to use the two joysticks on a PlayStation controller, you do feel like you're in that world running around, like really experiencing it. But if you give that controller to someone who's never played a two-stick game, they'll go around in circles, the camera will turn upside down, and they'll say, I'm not even slightly in this experience. And it's just about getting over that friction again. Is the friction with a text game harder than the friction with a PlayStation game? I actually don't know. It's quite hard to tell. Like, thumbsticks are quite weird. We're just used to them now. But yeah, definitely it's that once you do the effort to become fluent, once you get into the game, that's when the game comes alive, and that's when you have the experience that's intended. Until you have got over that friction, whatever that friction is, you're not really playing the game. In the same yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:28

And so I guess I'm interested in for you personally, like when you were playing these text adventures, what you know, I I'm interested the fact that I'm just so naturally drawn to video games, but so many people in my life not in the slightest, you know. And so like what scratch was that itching for you?

SPEAKER_01 15:58

That's a really good question.

SPEAKER_02 16:03

So I think I think for me, the thing that drew me to games when I was young particularly to story games, the thing that drew me to story games when I was young was that sense that you were on the cusp of the moment all the time. That sense that anything could happen next. Whereas when when you're looking at a book, you can see how long it is, you can see how many pages there are left, you have a sense of what the structure is going to be, and it's exciting, and you want to know what happens next and find out, that's fine. But you don't always feel like you're inside that moment and that the world is being built around you in real time. Whereas in a game, and it is a trick because of course it's not true, in a game, you feel like this moment has never happened before to anybody, and it's happening for me right now, and what I do really matters, and how I perceive it and how I choose to act in it right now really matters, just for a brief moment, and that's a really intoxicating feeling. I think that's what makes people come away from a game and they don't say, Oh, Mario did this or Mario did that. They say, I did this and I did that, because for that moment they were actually that person in that world doing that thing. Even if that person in the game is a completely different character, even if it has a personality and a storyline and dialogue, they still say I. And that identification becomes really strong. And it's it's about being in the being in the moment, which is to be fair, what film tries to do, what theatre tries to do, what books try to do. We all these art forms try to get you to just drop reality for a bit and be in that moment. And I think they all succeed perfectly well. They ask different things of the audience and they give different rewards, but I think with games there was that sense that that I genuinely couldn't necessarily predict what was going to happen next because it wasn't a fixed thing. And that I found quite addictive. And the conversation one has with the writer of a game when you do the thing they expected you to do, but they didn't tell you that you had to do it, and you think of it for yourself, and then it works. That kind of intimacy that you get with the writer of a game and the designer of a game that's quite special, I think, and I always quite liked that.

SPEAKER_03 18:33

That's a great, yeah, answer. Um, and so then what you know, what was your sort of driving force to then want to start creating your own work? Were you wanting to iterate on what you had experienced and play around with that, find new ways to approach storytelling, like expand the way the narrative and interactivity works for players? Like, I guess what I'm asking is like, you know, from what you were getting from games, what did you then want to, what made you sort of want to create more work within these?

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Yeah, I'm I'm definitely a a problem solver, like at heart. I'm a fixer. So when I was playing games, I would see the parts that work. There'd be little moments that really stand out as, oh, that that really works. And then lots of moments where you'd think, oh, that doesn't really work, or that's a bit arbitrary or a bit random, or a bit repetitive, or that's the easiest possible solution to this problem. And I've seen it before. So quite quickly, I started playing games and thinking, well, if I could, if I could edit this game, which bits would I keep and which bits would I change? How would I make it better? Like if I if I wanted to take, I don't know, the disc world adventure game. Okay, which bits of that were really good and really funny, and which bits actually just dragged out and I wish they hadn't done. And how can we make that better? And that constant conversation of how do we solve this, how do we improve this, where's the really good bit? It comes with a couple of assumptions, and I think the first one is that games are not fully cooked yet. And I felt that very strongly when I was a kid. Like this is something which is going to work, and it does work in moments, but it never works fully. It's never, it's never a solved problem. No one has made a game that just does what it's supposed to do completely, that tells its story in a way that I find 100% compelling or believable or whatever. But games have produced moments where, for a short period of time or a slightly longer period of time, everything works in sync. So, how do we take those bits and how do we string them together? What what what is it about those moments that work that really works? And so I started building games to try and find ways to find what worked and find what didn't, and find ways to kind of maximize the value of what we were making and building. Um so I was writing games independently, uh text adventures, when I was 16. I did that until I was about 25, I guess, um, before I joined the studio, before I joined Sony. And it was always just, oh, here's an idea for a way that a game could be structured that no one ever done, or a trick, or a twist, or a different way of looking at the way the player is controlling the character. And what are the consequences of that? And how do we make that work better? And yeah, I mean, I was still doing that. I'm still when I play a game, I very rarely play a game and go, oh, I loved it. I normally play a game and go, I love that little bit of it, which I think was ridiculously effective. How do we do that more?

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Um Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:41

And I wonder if you can put into words what you think the foundation of what you've achieved at the s the studio is that sort of because clearly you're scratching an itch for a lot of people. As well, right? Like you you all have started making you do something with your games that people want and they want more of.

SPEAKER_02 22:10

So I am always a little bit surprised when people like our games because I don't really design with the audience very much in mind. Like I'm not trying to deliver a thing that I know they want. I'm always just trying to solve a problem that I have. Um so I assume that the things that we put in the games that I like and that I'm trying to solve are the things that are working for other people. But they may not be, it may be something else completely. Um But I think Yeah, it goes back to that idea of being on the cusp of the moment. I think when we really when the games that we make really work, it's because they present you with some kind of freedom or some kind of choice or some kind of moment where you can do things in different ways. But we don't really tell you what those ways are. We ask you to say, what do you think might be a thing that one could do here? What would this character do next in this situation? And then we try to provide the tools for you to do those things, but without saying, this is a choice. You can do this or you can do that, you can go here or you can go there. So um so that people have to imagine what they think the next step of this story will be, and then when they can do it, it feels like they co-crafted that moment. It feels like they have some ownership and authorship of that moment because they thought of it first. They didn't just go, oh, A or B, A. A or B, B. You can't. So I I think the thing with an Inkle game is quite often that you you can't just click through it, even when it's something like 80 days, which is just choices on a screen, right? You can't just bang the choice. I mean, you you I suppose you can, but no one ever does. Um you have to imagine it to make it work. And so I think if we've achieved anything across the across the board with our games, it's perhaps games where we work very hard to make sure that you can imagine the world quickly and effectively. We work really hard on the beginnings of games and getting you into the character and into the world very, very efficiently without overloading you with tutorials and things like that. We we try really hard to make the beginning work as seamlessly and as smoothly as the start of a film does or the start of a good book does. Really draw people in quickly. And then the second thing is we try to make sure that the depth is worth it, that the effort that you make to play the game is worth it for whatever you get out the other side. So I always try to make sure that the character that you walk away with is more complex and more human than you expected it to be, or the world is older and more well put together than you expect it to be. And there are more links and there are more things to understand. My favorite writers are always the ones where I'll finish a book and then I'll wake up two days later and go, oh, I just realized that this is that, or that these things fit together, or that's all it's all it's all joined up much more under the surface than I originally noticed. And I always try to do that with the writing that we're doing. I always want there to be a little bit more that you can discover and to think about. And I think that comes across that kind of yeah, that that that it's it is hard work digging through a computer game, but it has to be worth it. And so I try to make I think we try to make sure that our games have value all the way down.

SPEAKER_03 25:35

And I think that's when they It's interesting to talk about the beginnings of game the the games, because I think about like Heavens of all or TR49 or 80 Days, actually, that within a a really relatively short amount of time without any long preamble, you sort of feel as if you're existing in an extraordinarily sort of deep and roomy like world, you know. I mean even with TL49, like you start you're just like the in this the space it's it's almost like the literal opposite of 80 days in terms of you don't go anywhere, you stay in one chair thing, but you still I mean I uh I I guess that's just down to and I think some of my favourite novels do that as well, where um you know I think about like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, you know, it's so sparing in its words, um, but within one page you sort of have a really visceral understanding of the world that you know it's like a post-apocalyptic world, but he barely describes the thing for you to sort of feel in it. I'm not sure what the question is, other than like I think for me, like um there are lots of different kinds of writer.

SPEAKER_02 26:54

As a writer, I am always interested in efficiency and kind of richness. So you have some writers who write very poetically and very floridly and use a lot of words to describe things or make things long and kind of complicated and spend a lot of time on a description of something. That's fine. I don't particularly like that because I always feel like, well, if you if you use that many words to describe the thing, it sounds like you don't understand the thing to me. And there are other writers who write very, very simply. Like they just want you to just get through the book as quickly as possible. Um so the words are common words, the phrases are common phrases, everything is something you've seen before repackaged, and you can read it at lightning speed. And I always feel like that leaves me more tired because I'm like, well, I don't really Okay, I've got the story, but I didn't really enjoy interacting with the book here. Someone could have just given me a plot summary and it would have been fine. But somewhere in between those places is a place where you use very few words, but they are always the absolute right ones and the absolute best ones, and the story comes through clear, like crystal clear, like it's cut in glass. And my favorite writers, I like that. So um, people like Raymond Chandler and Gene Wolfe, and um even like kids' authors like Susan Cooper, like they don't write much actually, but what they write is really well chosen. And so, especially with the beginnings of our games, I rewrite them mercilessly, like hundreds and hundreds of times over, just because I'll play through it and go, oh, that that's slightly clumsy, that's slightly longer than it needs to be. Let's bring it down. Oh, that's confusing. I didn't understand that that minor concept that came in here that needs to be set up somewhere in advance until I can get it as smooth as I possibly can. And then you give it to other people, and they're like, no, I've no idea what's going on, and then you have to do it again. But um yeah, that that trying to get something that it's like a well-working machine, but that doesn't mean it's boring.

SPEAKER_03 28:57

It just means it's perfect, and I want it to be perfect. Um there any examples in your games where you feel like it's just like the sort of perfect culmination of those different the writing and the story and the narrative and the mechanic all kind of coming together.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

Give me a second.

SPEAKER_02 29:21

Um The the parts of my games that I remember are the parts that were hardest to do because I spent the most time on them. So I remember when we were writing 80 Days, Meg did a lot of the writing for that, and I mostly just got the interactivity working. And we did uh one of the early stories was in Venice. I remember rewriting that one about 30 or 40 times. Just putting the choices in different places, pacing it longer, placing it shorter, because we were still working out what the rhythm of the game was, because we just had never read anything like it before. And I remember when I got that right, that it was just everything happened at the right sort of speed and it with the right kind of interactions. But there's nothing particularly special about that story. It's not even one of the best in the game. It was one of the first we wrote. I just remember it because it was a real struggle, because I remember how how much it didn't do what I needed it to do to start with, and how much it did do what I needed it to do once we'd finished with it. Which doesn't really answer the question of a moment that kind of brings those elements together in kind of mastery and synthesis. It's much more that I remember the times that it didn't work and like it was painful and it was difficult. Um moments when it does work tend to be quite easy to forget because they happen quickly. When you're at the end of a project and you know the character's voices and you know the rhythm of the interactivity, you can just knock this, you can knock this stuff out, you can make it very quickly. So there are conversations between Aliyah and Six that I adore that I wrote pretty much once because I just knew who they were and what they were talking about. So that doesn't really answer your question.

SPEAKER_03 31:08

No, well, it's no, it is interesting to see what because it often it's just about it's the same thing thing about asking that first question. It's often just like whatever the first thing is that comes to mind is usually the most interesting, you know. And I guess it just you know, because obviously like 80 days, it's like a mobile game as well, right? And like I don't know, I sort of want to ask like I think there's lots of um, you know, there's like uh interactive novels and point and click games and text adventures, all these different sorts of games that often do sort of sit on the fringe, you know, um, and they've got a very dedicated but quite small um fandom. And it does feel like with your games that you've had some sort of commercial success with say some a game like 80 Days, like making it available on mobile. And um again, I think there's just something about this idea that you've got people playing on mobile, something that isn't Candy Crush, but is like an adaptation of a piece of literature um that requires like a lot of reading. And yeah, I guess I just wonder what your reflections are on literally mobilizing.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

I really I really like mobile as a format. I really like it. I we Jerry as well. We founded Inkel to be a mobile company, and if I had my way, then the Apple ecosystem would be functioning brilliantly for premium developers like us, and we would all be doing perfectly well there. That's not quite how it played out, but I wish it was. I love the intimacy of the mobile format and the immediacy of it. Just right down to the fact that you're touching the elements on the screen. Like if you're moving an object from one place to another in an inventory, you're literally doing that with your fingertip. And I love the connection of that. And I love the fact that you can curl up on the sofa and read it like it's a book, and I love the fact that it's an it's a kind of it's a treasure box. Something like 80 days is a treasure box. You you don't know how deep it's gonna go. So you s when people start to play a text game, they tend to assume, oh, it's basically linear, the choices don't really matter, and it'll be over in a moment. People have quite sort of anything more than that is more complicated than I can imagine. So I'm gonna imagine the simplest possible thing. And then 80 days just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and you realize actually there is an entire world in here. And when I go to one place, I can't possibly go to the other. So you're always dreaming about what those are places, what those other places might have had in store for you. And then you put that in this tiny little thing. This tiny little phone. Like there's an iPad version and there's an iPhone version, and we built it for like the early iPhones, which are only like the size of, I don't know, a credit card or something. They're very, very small screens. But I love that. I love that you have this small thing that we're all totally familiar with that contains a whole world of story inside it. Isn't that what we want when we go to Twitter and things like that? We want this whole world of stuff to come out to us through this little thing, except that most of what you read on social media is kind of crap. So one of our ideas when we found it was, you know, for a game like 80 Days, let's make something which is like social media, except that every time you click the button, you get something really good. And it's always interesting and it's always new instead of being the same thing recycled over and over or whatever else. And yeah, I love that format. And I also love the second thing I love about mobile is that it's a way you can genuinely reach everyone. Because I think games often have a kind of cultural wall around them. People outside of games don't really want to know about games, and people inside of games don't necessarily want to share games. But that's kind of silly because if it's a good experience, then it should talk to people, not people who are sufficiently educated within the culture. So when we make something like 80 Days, I think one of the things I'm proudest about that game is that I know it was played by just people, just ordinary people who have no interest in games or wouldn't consider themselves gamers, who just gave it a try for whatever reason and found something that they liked and that they could understand. That's brilliant. And I think, you know, with something like TL49, that's on mobile again. It's obviously very different than 80 days in how you play it, but I would really hope that there are some people out there who just stumbled on it, figured out how to press the buttons, because there aren't very many of them, and discovered something that was much richer and deeper and more intelligent than they could possibly have expected to come out of their phone. And I would love to keep doing that. I would love to be amongst the vanguard of people making games more intelligent than people sort of assume that they are. Because games as a culture is really rich and diverse, but most people just don't know that. And most of the really interesting games, the ones that are doing really careful analyses of the human condition, are not the massive high-budget ones that get advertised on buses. They're the ones being made by indie developers and text developers and twine developers and small point and clip developers that sometimes only get paid by a couple of hundred people. And like, that's where I started. That was the things I was interested in when I was younger. And getting to a point where even if one in ten of our games manages to burst out of the games bubble for a moment and be seen by people who aren't in that space, that to me is a colossal win. Like for me as a creative, but also as games as a culture. And, you know, if I could change anything overnight, it would be the distribution ecosystem which produces that and maintains that wall between what's a who gets to play a game and who doesn't get to play a game. We put our games on Steam, and Steam is fantastic if you know what Steam is. But if you ask a person on the street, they mostly don't know what Steam is. So how do we solve that problem? Like, how can we get games on the VBC? How can we get games like that people can just play as bits of cultural art? And mobile ten years ago was a brilliant way of doing that. But and now it's not such a good way of doing that, which is strange because we all have phones. Um but I can't solve the distribution problem. I can only solve the problem of making a game that whenever the distribution problem gets solved, we'll have a game there where you can say, hey, give this to your grandma, I'll give this to your cousin who gives this to your whoever because they'll get it and they'll enjoy it.

SPEAKER_03 37:36

I w d I wonder if you often get to you get feedback from people who are like that the maybe one of your games is the first and only game that they've ever played or that hearing from someone who sort of stumbled upon it.

SPEAKER_02 37:53

Yeah, I mean we get we get emails from people maybe a couple of times a month, and they're quite a range, as you would expect. Um, but they include like very old people who say, Oh, I've never played a game in my life, but my daughter gave me this thing and I very much enjoyed it. And you go, that's fantastic. Or um Yeah, we get a lot of academics, actually, like who are not necessarily some of them play games, obviously, but they're not necessarily a very heavily gamified community, but who are drawn to Heaven's Vault because of its language and its archaeology. Or recently we've seen kind of historians drawn to TR49 because it's an archive game, going, oh, it's a game about librarians. We understand this. Um, and that's really nice. But it's hard to draw a trend because you're always talking to individuals about their individual experience and who knows what most of the audience that we have are like. We have no idea who they are.

SPEAKER_03 38:55

Yeah, and I I guess it's just also that thing of like that that's the people who reach out, right? But then you're never gonna hear from the people that and just moving on to so the company, and I guess I'd be interested to hear about well, maybe you could, and it it I I suspect it's not just like a a simple one-line answer, but if you were to verbalize what it is that you do. Um yeah, or just what you're bringing to the the the obviously, you know, you're sort of co co-founding this this company with Joseph and sort of what what the um Yeah, what you're bringing to the company.

SPEAKER_02 39:29

So um I call myself the narrative director, which is silly because I don't direct anybody. But um my focus on all of our projects is the storytelling and making sure that the story that we're telling is relevant and interesting and rich and deep and that the characterization is fair and real and true, and things like that. That isn't just a question of writing, that's also a question of design and kind of concepting. Um, like what sort of story are we telling and what what does this like if you're designing the mechanics of a game, you're really making a statement about what kind of actions matter within the world of your game. So in a game like Heaven's Vault, you're an archaeologist, there is no combat mechanic because if you gave an archaeologist the option of combat, you're somehow suggesting this is a world in which fighting is a reasonable way to acquire archaeological evidence. And whether you intend to say that or not, you accidentally did say that. So the whole design of the game has to support the character that you want to tell and the world that you want to create. So I think about that sort of stuff quite a lot. I work very closely with Joe on the design elements because he has a really clear design brain too. He's slightly more visual than I am. He thinks about the kind of the world and the tactility and the physics of things a bit more than I do. So quite often we'll will kind of bounce an idea between the two of us as I'm thinking about what's the characterful implications of this mechanic. And he's thinking, well, okay, what's the world physics implications? What's the art implications of this? And between us, we usually just ideas get better and better until we're happy with what we have. Um and then it depends on the game. Sometimes the game is just a lot of writing. Like I'm just day-to-day, just I have a ton of scenes that I know this game needs to include, so I start writing them and I figure out the characters as I go, and I figure out the plot, and I glue everything together. Um sometimes there's a lot of basically coding because it's interactive. We script everything in a way that tracks and responds to what the player is doing, and that's all in the script, so it's not in the code. So I'm effectively a coder as well of the narrative. Uh and then sometimes, like now, we're we're sort of between projects, but we're working on a new thing, or we're sort of beginning to think about the shape of a new thing. And right now I'm just walking around trying to find things I think are interesting. I have a sense that the story might be about this or might be about that. So I need to read this book or watch this film or talk to someone like this and just try to see which bits of that stick together. And I think I spend a lot of time doing that, just sort of collecting ideas and gluing them together and saying, oh, this isn't quite right, but what could we do with that? And just trying to be very open to what I see, which is quite a I mention it because it's it's an active process. When you're coding, you're locked into your computer and you're solving your problem and it's right in front of you, and it's you're just doing Lego, right? You're doing your Lego and you're doing your Lego. The world, the house could be on fire, but you're doing your Lego. And then this is the complete opposite where you have to say, Well, actually, I need to watch every detail because the person walking past me on the street might say something which I overhear, which is actually really a brilliant idea that I want to use, and that I can't afford to be focused on my Lego right now. I need to be open. So I really have to force myself to do that. But it's very joyful, it's an experience as well, so I don't mind it.

SPEAKER_03 43:12

And then in terms of the how collaboration works, particularly between you and Joe, like I'm and I'm sure it's different for every project, but there's obviously some kind of alchemy that happens when you both come together, you know, in the founding of the company and then you're early game through to what you're doing now.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

It's a funny thing. Joe is probably it's completely fair, it must be completely fair to say that Joe is my best friend, even though I very rarely see him. Um and we don't actually even talk that much anymore. But like he's someone who gets me very well, and I suspect I get him very well as well. But we think very differently. So I'll be thinking about an idea or a mechanic or a character or something, and I I when I have an idea, I tend to just share it with him. Straight away. We talk on Slack. It's a text channel. So I'll say, oh, I was thinking about this. And his response, you know, is sometimes he's not, oh yeah, okay. But it's quite often just we'll we'll find some aspect of it I haven't really seen. Like it might be something as simple as, oh, I could imagine what that would look like. But then again, it might be, oh, but hang on, what about this political aspect of it, or this way that that could be taken, or it's like this other game which does something. And the things he thinks of are never the things that I thought of. And they're always interesting and they're always intelligent. I think when we were earlier in the company, we kind of used to argue a bit more and sort of fight for our point of view. And I think as we've gotten a bit older and used to working with each other, I think we've started to realize that there's no point arguing because we're both right all the time. Like what we bring is always valuable. So if I ever don't listen to something that Joe has said, I'm always missing out. And I think he probably would say the same about me. So we do this process of just of yeah, it is alchemy, of just trading an idea up and kind of making it stronger and stronger until you get something which it might not work, it might not be a good idea, but it's certainly interesting. And then we try things. So I actually do quite a lot of prototyping of narrative moments, of scenes, of characters, of beats, of little mechanics in ink. And Joe's a relentless prototyper in sort of code and shaders and visuals and sketch up and sort of mock-ups and visualizations. And we just pull this stuff together, and after a while it becomes clear what the direction is. But it's very strange because we never really sit down and have a process. Like I don't think there's any of our games where we said, right, we are entering the pre-production phase where we will plan and organise and make a list of pillars and we don't do any of that stuff. We just sort of explore and listen to each other, and it's it's lovely. I I love my I think my favorite part about being in Inkel is the same as my favorite part of doing all the creative stuff I've done, which is the collaborative part of it. Like I've I've written a few novels, which sounds like the least collaborative thing in the world, but my favorite part of writing a novel is when I send it out to a few people who I know love the story and I listen to what they say. Because even in the process of writing a novel, you're still wanting to collaborate with people on some level in some way. And good collaborations are just they're astonishing what you can do when you're kind of working in sync with other people. It's really mind-boggling. Um and I think we've been very lucky with Inkle as well, with the other people that we've worked with, because obviously Joe and I are the kind of core of it, but um Anastasia, who does our illustrations, is also very good. She's a very different kind of character, but she brings an enormous amount that neither of us think of. And the other people we've worked with over the years, so I um when we were writing 80 Days with Megna Giant, she wasn't someone I knew, she was sort of a friend, but I didn't really know her very well. But by the end of that project, we were so close, having just sort of traded ideas so efficiently and closely, and that collaboration is still like one of the high points of my creative life. Um and I I love it, it's just such a thrill. So yeah, I like to think the Inkle is built on finding great people and letting them work together and and do better than they could do on that. That's just such a nice thing to be doing.

SPEAKER_03 47:25

Yeah, I mean, and my question you you just answered it was was going to be about the importance of you know what collaboration sort of brings to the um the table, you know.

SPEAKER_02 47:35

Yeah, I mean you you hear stories of a game director saying, no, it has to be my way and I want it this way, and I always think that must be the sound of someone who is who's worried that then they don't know what they're doing. Because if if you can't if you can't let other people bring what they bring, then you're gonna end up with something which is much less than what you imagined in the first place. You need people to fill out the spaces that you can't imagine. And yeah, give me a million pounds and I'll hire a thousand people.

SPEAKER_03 48:08

That's a great, that's a good saying. I guess I don't um is it was just a side thought that came to mind when we was talking with Joe. He sort of slightly he he sort of felt perhaps it was a bit of faux faux pas that he doesn't actually play so many games now as he used to, you know, and this idea that oh he's not necessarily oh, is he missing out and building up his repertoire and exposing himself to things to help make him self-better at his own work? But I think something I find really interesting um when I talk with with people like yourself who work in this industry, like it's like when I said to you about what's the you know, give me a gaming story or experience, you know, and it doesn't have to be childhood, but you know, you went back to that clunky old printer. Do you think that there's like a and so it in that conversation with Joe, it was like, and I know this is definitely the case for me as a filmmaker, there was sort of like a window of opportunity that opened up somewhere probably between like 1992 and like I don't know, 2001 or something, where like I was being exposed to all the kind of games and movies and books and things that were gonna sort of make up what would be the building blocks of inspiration that would then sort of take on with me for the next however many decades. And it's not that I don't take in more things, but I guess what I'm getting at is you know, like when you talk about those text adventures of the last few years, do you think there's a sort of a point in someone's life where they you're sort of building up what is going to be the treasure trove of inspiration?

SPEAKER_02 49:46

I mean, it sounds awful, doesn't it? It sounds awful to suggest that kind of people uh are young and interested in stuff and then they get old and then they're stuck in their ways and they don't want to do anything else and they're not interested. The way that everybody my age says, oh, all the best music was in the 90s, and you go, Yeah, you're sure that's not just when you were 16. Um it does seem to be the case that that's what people do. I think I can only answer for myself, really, but like when I was young, I had a lot of time to play games. I had no preconceived ideas about what they were going to be like, and I was very, I was very struck by things that worked when they worked. They were new and they were exciting and they were impactful and I remembered them. As I get older, partly I have less time to play games, partly I'm busy thinking about all the things I've been thinking about for the last 20 years. Like I found enough stuff when I was 16 to 25 that was interesting enough that here I am, 45, still thinking about it and still going, oh, I haven't quite cracked this. And right now there are genres of gameplay that weren't really around in the 90s. Um, and I could go and try and explore them and discover them, but I'm busy. I've got I've got this thing to think about. I don't need more to think about. And that's not quite the same thing as not being open to more inspiration and cultural ideas. It's I think it's more that one needs fewer of them because you've already got quite a lot. Like I've got an unprocessed bank of experiences and ideas and inspirations that I'm I can dig into at will, because that's what being old is. And so I don't need to add as many things to it. And if I did need to, then I probably would. If if I run out or the ideas start to feel repetitive, or if if somehow no one wants to play adventure games ever again, ever, and every game has got to have a back a deck of cards in it, and I don't know anything about card games particularly, fine, I'll go away and learn about card games then, because I'll need to. But unless that happens, unless the adventure game apocalypse actually happens, there's tons to be getting on with. So I try not to worry about it too much. I think like the most important thing really is knowing when you need inspiration for something and knowing where to go to get it. So if I'm working on a game about a certain kind of society, I might say, oh, I really need to read, uh I need to read a book that looks like this. That'll be a J.G. Ballard book. Or I need to read some history. I need to read about the history of the Medici's. That's the one. That will be the one that will apply to this situation. Or the Polynesian Islands. Like for Heaven's Vault, I read about the Polynesian Islands, and it was the correct thing to read about. And then Moana came out a couple of years later, and I was like, oh, I could have just watched that, but whatever. Um and like when I was younger, I wouldn't have known that the Polynesian islands existed, let alone that they were relevant. So I guess that's the advantage of being a bit older, is that you can target your research much more efficiently. Whereas as a kid, you just absorb everything because you don't know how it fits together. So I think that's it. I think I would argue that the amount of games I play now is a more of a normal number of games for a creative person to play, whereas what I played when I was a kid was a kind of abnormally large number of games. But actually, I think that's just the audio you have to do it in.

SPEAKER_03 53:18

Yes, I like that that answer. And I said it all my because it's not bad, but it seems like it could sound like wrong, but you know, that's why I'm always fan like the the amount of interviews. It's like I was uh this to interview, and I I got to speak with him as well, Richard Le Montchand, who was the co-lead. You talked a bit about Uncharted 2, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, co-lead game designer for Uncharted 2. And you know, it's not making whether it be someone who's like working at Naughty Dog, working one of the biggest franchises AAA out there, or someone who's like a solo day of work in their bedroom, they're both talking about Monkey Island, you know. It's like they it's like, but that point that you make is interesting where it's like draw constantly drawing back from this thing like from the early 90s, but at the same time um that's where the inspiration is coming from, but the iteration just continues and continues, you know, so it's it's it's it's not like um we're making carbon copies of those things that inspired us, but at the same time they're like the source of what what's sort of dri driving us somehow of our kind of present tense work.

SPEAKER_02 54:32

Something else that I find is that it's much easier to look at things that don't fully work to have ideas for what to try next than things which work really well. So if I'm trying to build an adventure game and I look at an adventure game from the 90s, I'll see moments of brilliance and a lot of places where it doesn't work because they were limited by the technology or the development tools, or they just didn't have that many examples to work off. And that gives me a really clear way of thinking about the problems. Whereas if I look at a modern adventure game, something that's really polished, was made to a great big budget, was made really successfully, it's much harder to unpick. Okay, what am I being impressed by just because it looks great? And what am I being impressed by because it's really fundamentally good? So actually, I find that I tend to play bad games more than good games. Bad isn't really a word, kind of clunky games, or like cheap, or slightly games that are too big for their boots, or something like that. That sounds horrible, doesn't it? I tend to play games that are less polished more than games which are more polished, because I find the polish gets in the way of the actual game and my understanding of it and my thinking about it. And old games, of course, tend to be much less polished just because of the nature of the beast. So yeah, I I think I yeah. So when people say, What have you been playing recently? It's often like, well, well, these things that I didn't think were very good, actually. And it was really helpful to me, but I don't necessarily want to tell you about them.

SPEAKER_03 56:04

And then I'm sort of just jumping over the place, but it was just for from my list of questions. The you know, you talk about branching narratives, you know, and we we were talking before the interview about the TR49 and how that's it's it's it's like a sort of series of sort of data points that the the player then themselves kind of explores, right? They sort of connect the the pieces of the story together. I would just what I love about in the same load of 80 days, it's like it's like it's the complete opposite of a corridor, say like shooter, right? Which I sort of love as well. We talk about like Bioshock, like you're you're starting a very, very narrow, like literally narrow pathway, right? You're in corridors under the ocean, um, and then you're never gonna miss a beat in terms of the story you're connecting with. I guess so. What am I asking? You you give the player complete freedom to miss so much, so much, like I mean obviously they're gonna miss because they they don't have a lifetime to like cover every single piece and say, like uh okay, like 80 days. But um do you sort of have an understanding of how it's works for people that no matter which approach they take, which route they're going for, same with TR49, the order in which information is put to them, everyone comes away feeling like they've been served a very tightly uh organized sort of uh story arc to go through. Does that make sense as a question?

SPEAKER_02 57:42

So people often describe our work as branching narrative. It's fair, but it's not really how I think about it. I come from text adventures, right? And in a text adventure, you're in a moment in the room and there's you can type a hundred different things to say what to do next. And both of them are irrelevant and won't work, but some of them will work and will push you forward. So those commands are your verb set, and it's a big, broad verb set. If you look at most sort of very tightly linear games, the verb set's very small. You can, you know, in the in the biggest in the strongest examples, the tightest examples, you can walk, jump, shoot. Those are what you can do. So if you're going to tell any kind of story where the player gets to be in the moment, it has to be a story which is entirely about walking at things and shooting things. And that tends to pretty massively limit what you can do. Because the player just doesn't get to express themselves. They can shoot or not shoot. That's what they can do. So I think of our games as being games with interesting and expressive verb sets, primarily, which are quite often expressed through choices which look like branching narrative, but I'm not thinking of them as branching narrative, because it's not that you know, if you say this to one thing to one person or you say that to one person, then the story branches and goes off in different directions and people have different experiences. That's what the player experiences, it's true. But from my point of view, it's just an action in the world. I'm in the world, I say a thing, the character says something back to me that might change what I know, it might change how they feel, those things are fine, but then we're still in the world. It hasn't branched. We're not in a multiverse, it's just the next moment in this world. Okay, what happens now? And so the thing that I try to control is the pacing of things. If I have a conversation, how long is that conversation going to be? If it's too short, it feels weird and throwaway. If it's too long, it feels boring and like it's gone on forever. So at some point, every conversation has got to end. And that should probably be before the player has asked every single question they might want to ask. But it's not so soon that they don't get to ask anything and they feel like it was a waste of time. So that that that pacing is really important to me. What actually happens inside the conversation is less important so long as things the player wants to ask about are offered to them and they have the verbs that they want for the situation that they find themselves in. So the player is constantly making decisions about what they think is important. Shall I ask about this? Shall I crack a joke? Shall I not? If you do crack a joke, you're gonna have less chance to talk about sensible things because you wasted your time cracking a joke. But maybe it makes this person like you more. Those are the kind of decisions. It's sort of lightly strategic. But it isn't branching. It's much closer to being a simulation that happens to be very woolly simulated rather than very mechanically simulated. Um when you put that in front of a player, hopefully what they do is they kind of barrel through it, experiencing something, understanding something, coming to the end of it, and it feels like a good arc because it's been a decent length of time, and something changed in the course of that scene, in the course of that moment of the story. But the one thing that people sometimes don't come away with is a full understanding of the story, a real kind of, oh, this is how the world works, or this is how robots work in Heaven's Vault, or this is why this person did this thing at this time. But in the world, we very rarely have a complete understanding of anything. And a game, I think, feels more real when I come away from the end of it, knowing that the things that I put my attention to, I understood, and the things I didn't put my attention to were there to be understood, but I didn't understand them. So I played The Witcher, and there are little potion things you can put on your sword that help with monsters, but I never bothered reading about them. I know that they're there, I know they're understandable, but I didn't understand them. That makes the game feel bigger and more real, not frustrating and like I missed a part. And then other people who get obsessed about crafting their builds or whatever, if that's a thing you can do, they'll tell me, oh, you missed this huge chunk of the game. But that doesn't matter, because I still enjoyed what I chose to spend my time on. So so long as the game is well paced and so long as it's logical, so long as it makes sense, as long as the world is simulated in this this this way, it's not just doing random things to keep you busy. So long as what my experience is and your experiences we can share and talk about, and they fit together and become bigger rather than contradicting each other, then we're good. We're fine. That's all we need. We don't we don't need to think of it as branching, we don't need to think of it as one true storyline, we don't need to give the player everything that they want to know because that's a bizarre idea in the first place. Um and then if they come back and play the game again and they discover more, great, that's fine. A lot of people say that Inkle games are designed for replayability, and that's sort of true in that you usually can replay them and get more out of them, but we don't really design it that way. It's more that I design it so that any given player making any given set of decisions will have a perfectly good game. And if that's you playing three times over, or if that's three separate people doesn't make any difference to me as it design.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:25

It's just interesting, it makes you think, you know, again, that like like some games that the commodity that they're selling is like, oh, you're gonna make a choice, and they're they're trying to leverage as much about the choice that you are gonna make as the choice that you're putting that you're not making, you know, so that you're almost like they're almost in the way that the game's marketed, constantly trying to remind the player that that it is almost like a multiverse, you know, that well, you've gone with this faction, so you're not going with this one. Um, whereas I think that there's a strength, like you were saying, about I mean it's a futurama. I I think Bender meets like God, and God says, like, if you do things right, people aren't sure that you've done anything at all. Um, and I suppose there's other than the fact that with your games, say like with 80 days, you are given like at the beginning choices about where you would go, but once you've gone there, that's the only reality. Yeah. That you're not thinking about what hasn't happened, or you're not. I'm rarely thinking, say, as opposed to perhaps like a quantidams game or something like Heavy Rain, once I've made the decision, I'm kind of thinking, oh, I kind of want to reload and go back and try this other thing. But with your games, it's sort of you're in it.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:46

In a lot of game design choice. Choice is considered in this very mechanistic way. It's you're you know there are two buttons, there's an A and a B button, and if you press A, you can't press B, and if you press B, you can't press A, and that's your moment, and you're gonna have to make a decision, and that might be based on stats or strategy, or it might be arbitrary, or maybe you're just expecting to do both of them, and the order doesn't really matter because you're gonna play the game twice. But the choice is this fundamental binary barrier between what happened before and what happens after. But from a storytelling point of view, or from even just being in the world point of view, how often do you make a choice like that? Like we make choices, we make decisions all the time, but very rarely do you make a decision which actively closes off the other decision forever. Like the classic canonical choice for a long time was the Paragon Renegade one, right? In the Mass Effect, do you help the beggar or do you kill the beggar? But that even isn't a good example because if you help the beggar, two minutes later, you can still kill the beggar if you like. It's true that if you kill the beggar, you can't then help him. That I guess does close off a reality, but killing the beggar is an insane choice. It has no purpose, it's got no right to be in the game in the first place. So if that's the only example we can find of a choice of That's genuinely locking out a future possibility, and it's a terrible example. What are we even talking about? Like, you know, people say, Oh, I'm gonna choose between this love interest and that love interest. Like, have the people having this conversation ever been dating? Like, you don't choose between one love interest and another love interest. If you have two people that you're dating, you date both of them until one of them goes wrong or one of them turns out to be right, in which case you didn't have a choice in the first place because one of them was the right one and the other one wasn't. Like, you know, we do make big decisions as people. We choose whether to accept a job or reject a job, but even then, like, you accept a job, you might leave it two weeks later, you might get fired again. This this idea of these permanent world-altering choices, it's fake. It's a fake idea. It doesn't exist. Like, we put it in the end of movies because Robert McKee tells us to, and it's this kind of idea that a movie should end with a big dramatic choice where the character shows their true character. But even then that's not a choice, because at the end of a rom-com, of course they decide to get together. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a rom-com. So I get very, as you can see, I get very agitated about it. And I feel like the whole concept of choice is talking about what the buttons do. And that's fine, because there have to be buttons, but that's not what the story is doing, it's not what the characters are doing, it's what not what the narrative is doing. And as soon as we say the world has now bifurcated into these two realities, I just think, what are you like, what are we talking about here? Because it's not reality and it's not a narrative, it's just some sort of tube map where we're trying to visit every station on the tube map. Well, okay, fine if that's what you want to do, but that doesn't look anything like storytelling to me. So, you know, yeah, okay, in 80 days, if you go to one city, you probably can't go to the other city. But if that's all you're thinking about after making that decision, then the city you went to must be pretty boring. If you're choosing between your two people to date, and all you're thinking about on date one is, oh, I wish what would have happened on date two, then you're at the wrong date. You know, it's not that's not normal, that's not how you should do things. So there is an element of when you make a decision, what it should do is whatever you get becomes more precious because it wasn't guaranteed for you. Like if you find love, it's precious because you weren't guaranteed to find love. So something went right, and that's why you should work on it, and that's why you should hold on to it. And and that feels to me like a human experience that's worth kind of trying to bottle and capture a little bit in the design of a game. But choice in the abstract just doesn't make any sense to me.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:42

I love this idea of say walking out in the middle of the date, you've chosen to go and try and talk to the other person, and you can't because there's just no dialogue option. It's like in real life, that's just cut off, you know, or they can't speak to you because they're sort of compartmentalized now as a non-interactive NPC.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:00

And it and it cuts off a whole avenue of really fun game ideas. Imagine a game where you're on a date with two people simultaneously in the same restaurant, and there's like a dividing wall, and you keep saying to one of them, Oh, I've just got to take this phone call and then going to the other. That's a great idea. But you can't do it if you have a choice-based model in your head.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:17

So it makes me think of Stardew Valley, actually. That's got a good dating. Um, the fact that you can actually date the entire town if if if uh if you so chose, but the fact that it doesn't sort of create this sort of idea of locking things out. No, I love that that reflection. And I guess that just makes you think about like at its core, like if there's a mechanic that is being used often in a game or something that has sort of um stuck around, it's like it it's there as a means to try and it should be there as a means to try and get the player more immersed, more connected with the story or the experience that they're having, right? Um I guess I'm just wondering what games you've played where you feel like that they they've sort of done a good job of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:04

I mean, I think it's always really difficult when you're looking at games. Because there's two things going on. There's people taking decisions about the design and the story and the emotion and the experience, and then there's people putting in mechanics that they've seen in other games because they like them. And those are two separate things. So, like a lot of games have running and jumping in them, not because in the world we do an enormous amount of running and jumping, but because we've seen running and jumping working in games. People get it, you can do it, and nobody questions it. So it becomes this kind of shorthand, but it's a little bit bizarre. I remember playing uh like Tomb Raider, I think it was Tomb Raider Underworld, one of those sort of middle middle Tomb Raiders. And I was playing it in my in my flat, and my roommate came in and she was very sarcastic, and she said, What are you doing? I said, Oh, I'm just I'm just uh I'm playing Tomb Raider. And she says, You seem to be shooting a tiger. And I was like, Yeah, yeah, the tiger's a bad. And she was like, Oh, yeah, yeah. It's famously okay to shoot a tiger, isn't it? And I was like, Oh yeah, I hadn't even stopped thinking about that. Like shooting a tiger. That's that's kind of and she was just like, games are stupid, and walked out. And I was like, well, in that moment, actually, yeah, you're right. Like shooting a tiger is a stupid thing to be doing. Um but why do we accept it as gamers? Well, because we've seen it a hundred times before, so we don't even stop to think about it. So I think it can be very, it can be really useful to try not to think about what other games are doing too much, actually, and think more about what do I want a player to be doing. So if I want to make a game where a player is a spy, I could play a bunch of stealth and infiltration games and think about hacking mini games or like stealth mechanics. Or I could think about being a spy and think, well, what do spies do? Oh, they they do dead drops and they send coded messages and they work contacts and they charm people and they have 15 different kinds of passport and they know the right one to use in each given moment. And that's a much more interesting place to start a game design from because then you say, well, how do I get that into something that a player can grapple with? And you might end up reinventing the stealth mechanic. But you know what? You might not, actually, because spies don't do much stealthing around, even though every spy game, people will immediately assume it's a stealth game. It's not really what spies do, actually. They more sort of lie and charm and I don't know. I don't know what they do. I haven't thought about it much. But I I think, yeah, I think actually starting again from the world is often more interesting. And then when you're saying, okay, right, fine, we have a stealth mechanic, how do you implement one of those? Then you go to a game and say, right, what actually works when you're making a stealth mechanic? Now that I've realized I need one. Right, okay, how do we do that? Because you don't want to reinvent everything from scratch, but you don't want to include things just because it's a sort of thing that games have. Because you can, but you quite often end up with these weird tiger shooting moments that don't really make any sense, actually, but you don't notice until you've done it.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:08

Amazing thing, I know with Far Cry 2, they talked about the mechanic of they didn't want people going around just kind of like murdering animals in this environment. So they made the the killing of animals as boring as possible. Like you could shoot them and they would die because if they they didn't have to sort of break the immersion, but they just kind of were just like fall, they were very intentional about basically making them just fall over, making it very unsatisfying, you know. But and is yeah, so I think about like like how come the first uh like the the what we association with what we associate with stealth is crouching for some reason, you know, as if like that's that's the first thing you'd want to do if you wanted to be stealthy is to lower yourself close to the ground, which would probably be the most like uh overt possible thing you could do in a statistic.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:55

I think what was so good about the uh the initial ideas for For Assassin's Creed, right? Obviously that's a huge franchise now with lots of complicated things in it, but like the idea that the best way to be stealthy is to stand in a crowd completely fresh. Like, I did they use it as well as it could be used? I don't know, but it's a great idea. And it, yeah, it's got nothing to do with crap check.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:15

It's a completely different approach.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:18

Just finally, I do want to talk about The Last Express because I just love it so much. You know, I think you talked about in the My Perfect Console. I can't remember what it's but it's it's sort of it's this this game that does so many or maybe not so many actually, but a few things really, really well in such a special way. But no one's ever really I felt like my my my thirst for finding a game that that is iterated on what what he did with that one is so strong.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:48

I guess I just wondered if you could sort of speak to that about you know So I think what I loved about The Last Express there's a few mechanical things I really loved, but what I really loved about The Last Express was it was a game fundamentally about the people in the room. The room is a train, but what really matters is the individuals and they don't really care about you as a player. They're just living their lives, doing their things, but their things are important and they're meaty and they matter, and then you find a way to tie your story to theirs. And everything else comes out of that. The basic assumptions of it passes in real time. Well, of course it does, because people are fundamentally bound to time. You can't remove time and still have human beings, and their relationships to each other are not opaque, but they're not visible either. People don't advertise how they're related to each other, but you can figure it out by listening to them, watching them, interacting with them. And then on top of that, it uses physical space quite cleverly as well, but that's the less interesting thing for me. And then just the sheer joy of it, there's a there's a violin concerto you can listen to that one of the passengers performs. There are conversations in various European languages going on because those are what the people are doing, and they've taken the time and the space to make sure that the people in the game get to do what it is they want to do, regardless of whether the player is there or not, regardless of whether the player understands what the point of it is. And then and then we weave a game through that, and then we kind of give the player a way of making those things matter to them and affect what they do. And it's a it's a sort of gloriously irresponsible piece of design in a way, because it spends so much time building a world regardless of what the player is doing. It's very upside down from what most games do, where they start with the player as a camera and everything just comes into view when it's needed. But I do think it's it's a wonderful beacon of what we could be doing. We could be thinking of games as spaces with humans in that we can go and be with and interact and learn from and influence and affect and enjoy. But rather than worlds with interactable objects in where we're the only sentient thing, including people things that look like people that we poke with questions when they give us answers. It's a very difficult design because time is remorseless and like people are kind of arbitrary. It can be very difficult to work out how to interact with people in a way that achieves anything. And the tighter your focus of your story, the more specific it is what the player needs to do, the harder it is to get it right. And I think The Last Express really struggles with that. When it has gates and puzzles, they they're quite hard because the possibility space feels quite large. But those are interesting problems. And this idea of an adventure game where you don't have puzzles so much as you're just trying to make progress on whatever front that might be, that feels to me like something we can work with and something we can do. And this idea of a world where the people don't exist purely to serve you, but are still interesting and worth getting to know. Yeah, that feels like something we can work with and we can do. So, you know, we when we built Overboard and Expelled, those are Last Express games. They just happen not to have a world that presented as a visual novel because it's much, much simpler to build it that way. It's still extremely complicated, as it turns out. But um there's the time, there's the characters, there's the kind of the way that you weave amongst them. Great. If I have my way, I'll make a thousand more games using that engine because it's fun to work with. And then there are games like Heaven's Vault we've made where you're much more moving through a space, but the people are quite rigid actually, they're sort of in their places. So I feel like the dialogue is on a in is in a good place, the way the people talk to each other in a good place, but it doesn't have that real-time aspect, it doesn't have that living, breathing world. But if you could take those two designs and put them together, that might be interesting. But it does sound complicated, and I do think there's a slightly white whale flavour to The Last Express. I mean, um Jordan Mechner famously did not get his money back on that project. And I I don't know if one could, but it seems like a yeah, it seems like a fascinating thing to try and to try and capture an approach.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:36

Who knows? Maybe our next game we'll do it.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:39

I mean that would be wonderful, you know. Probably just but I think um yeah, I mean I just adore and I replayed it last year and I found it very challenging actually that time round for the fear of missing out because you're just not used to entering a game and not being the centre of attention. You know, people just walk around in a circle until you're ready to come and uh interact with them. But um, yeah, stunning game.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:09

I would love to be able to find a way to break that assumption in players that just that they're they're going to be the centre of attention, that they deserve everything that the game has to offer them. Just to tell them that it's okay to miss things and it's okay that to be where they are. Because I feel like it's partly players being wanting to get their money's worth and wanting to see everything, but it's partly just they're worried they're not good enough. It's like, oh guys, you're good enough. You don't have to do anything to be good enough. And I just don't know how to do that. Well, I mean, I think there is an element of it, yeah, definitely. When we go into a game, you've either mastered it or you're failing, right? Like you come into it as a loser and you end as a winner. We talk about beating Monkey Island, which makes no sense at all. Like, you don't beat crime and punishment by Fedor Dostoevsky, do you? You finish it, you don't beat it. Um that whole language needs to go like come in, be there, experience it, get what you can from it, replay it if you want to. Like, it's a space to explore. Just chill out, it's gonna be fine. I I became a teacher because it was a job that was available when I came out of university, and it was useful because I got long summer holidays in which I could do creative projects. And like I had access to a photocopier and a laptop and things like that. That was all very useful, practical stuff. I think the other thing that teaching gave me is just an ability to talk. So I do presentations and things like that, but I don't know that it necessarily helps with writing. Being a mathematician, I think, has been huge to the way that I think about writing and craft completely. I think I said earlier that I'm a problem solver, and that comes from a mathematical training, really. Mathematicians are quite used to thinking about what do I have and also what am I trying to reach simultaneously? So, how do I take these things and build towards an outcome? And also what sort of approaches to this outcome might be useful to try and hit and try and join these two things up from both ends. And that way of thinking I use on a daily basis when I'm telling a story. Okay, I've got characters who do this kind of thing, and I really want them to get to a point where they're doing this, having an argument, making friends, discovering this information about the world. Okay, where could that come from and what would they do? Because if you just go, if you if you just try to hit the beat you want to hit, it can feel very artificial, and if you just let your characters just wobble around and do what they feel like doing, they don't go anywhere. So you have to match those two things up. But you have to match those two things up as efficiently as possible, as cleanly as possible, because a good mathematician doesn't get from A to B. They get to A to B by the best argument, which really expresses the truth of whatever it is you're trying to express. So that's exactly what I'm trying to do in a scene and a dialogue sequence the whole time is find the most efficient version of this conversation, which doesn't bring in anything extra, which isn't needed, but also expresses the truth of the situation and the characters and the colour of it and whatever. And then do that with every single scene. And I think that's really where I get my idea of what good writing feels like, is that actually good writing is kind of like a mathematical proof. It's a it's an argument, it's a thing which doesn't have anything that it doesn't need, but enjoys what it has. And I think that's huge for me. There's also some technical benefits, like because I'm a mathematician, I'm not very scared of programming languages. That's helpful, but it's not really interesting.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:00

And that association of mathematics with writing and narrative and it's obviously something for if you're not thinking about it, it's just for whatever reason separated as if it's a left thing and a right thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:11

People often say you have your scientific mind and your artistic mind, but I think if you go back more than a couple of hundred years, you'll find that all the scientists were artists as well. Like, because it was really just am I interested in the practical business of life? Am I a builder, a carpenter, a seamstress, or am I a thinker? In which case I'm a poet and I'm an astrologer. Like this idea that science and art are separate is totally a modern construction. It doesn't have any bearing in real. If you look at humanity, it doesn't make any sense. So let's throw that away.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:41

Yeah, it's a shame really, because obviously the yeah, I think you use the word efficient, you know, because again, it's not something that that that sounds like a scientific or sort of massy sort of word, but to be efficient with with story and writing and to sort of bring someone in as sort of quickly as possible.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:00

Yeah, I mean if you think about it like poetry, right? Poetry is the the apex of careful writing, right? Do you want your poetry to be efficient or inefficient? You want it to be efficient, you want it to work. If it's inefficient, people will stop reading it. They'll be confused or bored or wonder what the point of it is. But the idea that efficient being efficient is the same as being thin or like uncolourful or bland, that that that's that doesn't follow. It just means that everything that's there is there because you want it to be there, not because you put it in there by accident. Well, if you're a poet, if you're a writer, yeah, every word should be there for a reason. That's that's the basic requirement. And I don't think any poets would argue that, particularly. Maybe some would say, Oh, I write in a dream and I I write down what I say. Well, okay, fine, if that's what you want to do. But um, but yeah, I think if if you're the sort of writer who wants to craft something, then craft is about doing things well. That's all efficiency is.