Writing for the Game That Blew Your Mind | Jonathan Zimmerman (Life is Strange: True Colors, Reunion, Before The Storm)

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When I was hired, I didn't know that I was applying to write Life is Strange. And if I had, I probably would have screwed up the interview because at that point, Life is Strange was the game that just blew my mind. The best stories are so simple that you can sum them up in one sentence and yet contain like a universe of ideas within them. And I don't think that any game that I've ever played does that better than what they achieved there.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

Hi there, my name is Steven Lake, and welcome to the Examine Game. Today I am talking with Jonathan Zimmerman. He is one of the leads of the Life is Strange series. He's been on board with the series since uh before the storm, where he unwittingly got a job as a writer on it, not even knowing that that was the game he was gonna be working on. Um he then went on to become the narrative lead for True Colours and then working as one of the game directors on Life is Strange Reunion. He also worked on the Expanse a Telltale series. You know, I love talking with Jonathan, as you heard in the intro. He was a huge fan of the game Life is Strange before he became one of the custodians of this series. Um, we really get into what it's like to sort of land a dream job in gaming and what he's learnt over the years working on this project and his other ventures. Before we get into it, um I've created an email address, stephen at theexaminedgame.com. I would love for you to write me and let me know what you think about the show, the episodes, if there's anyone you'd like to see on as a guest, uh, if you have any feedback, thoughts, reflections, I just want to hear about it. It's a kind of one-directional thing a lot of the time doing this work, other than the comments, which I love reading. This is like my 16th something episode, and I just love doing this so much. It brings me so much pleasure. Like, I'm my own audience for this uh series, you know, because I want to hear the answers to these questions. But from what I am seeing, there is a another audience outside of me that is really into this, and I want to keep that up. I want to keep improving, I want to find the people that you want to hear from, so please do let me know. Uh, other than that, do subscribe and please rate the episode. It helps me so much when you do that on the likes of Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Thank you very much. I think we found each other. I mean, I'm I'm obviously very aware of your work, but I'd put out an interview of Nina Freeman, um, and then I saw you'd engage with that, and I obviously just jumped on the opportunity to sort of to reach out to you because I'm obviously, you know, such a huge fan of uh of your work. Um I was sort of looking back over, you know, your your Moby games, and I guess you've been in and around the Life is Strange universe for like nearly a decade now or or more than a decade.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Yeah, yeah, that's right. I came on at deck nine about ten years ago for Before the Storm. Um, Life is Strange Before the Storm, which was the second game in the franchise that released, and uh I was there through four titles that we shipped, three of them Life is Strange, and then the other one was called The Expanse.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

And so uh does it feel like you spent that I mean you have spent that much time with those those characters, you know, specifically within the the Life is Strange universe, but is it sort of strange to think that it's been like 10 years uh, you know, with Chloe and Max?

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Yes, well, yeah, it the the journey is sort of wild when I look back on it. Um I think originally when I was hired, I didn't know that I was applying to write Life is Strange. And if I had, I probably would have screwed up the interview because at that point I had really kind of rediscovered narrative gaming, or I should say I sort of discovered the new wave of narrative gaming that I wasn't as aware of because I was going to film school and I had kind of focused on other things outside of what was happening in the game space. And then kind of in this roundabout way, I found my way back to it. And Life is Strange was the game that just blew my mind. Like I just really um realized that there was this whole new immersive cinematic narrative style that was the kind of thing that I had dreamed about as a kid, and it it was suddenly there. And there were other games too, like the early Telltale Games and Until Dawn and things like that. But Life is Strange was the one that that really did it for me. And then uh I applied to this company that was called Idle Minds at the time, and they said that they were working on a narrative game and they were looking for people with a screenwriting background and not necessarily needing a coding background, but you have to understand interactive storytelling and branching narrative and things like that. And I'd done just enough to kind of have the pieces in place to be able to apply, but it wasn't until the very, very end of the process that I discovered that it was actually the prequel to Life is Strange. And that that was kind of the first mind-blowing thing. And then there were a series of those just over the next 10 years.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

A decade of mind being blown. Your brain must be uh shattered from pretty much, yeah. Um I I do want to go back a little further, but before I forget to ask the question about where were you in the process then when you found out that it was life is strange? Had you sort of been offered the gig at that point, or were you still under consideration?

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Well, yeah, so so it's funny. So um it was towards the end of the process. Uh so I had done uh a submission, uh, two-round writing test. Uh so it was a full scene script and then a revision to make the scene interactive with interviews on both rounds, and then a subsequent interview where they told me that it was for Life is Strange. And then um I actually wasn't hired off of that interview. I was told that I was uh the next in line, but that they had hired someone else. And it was probably the most crushing uh job experience I ever had because it felt like such uh serendipity. Like it just it felt like one of these preordained things. And then as it happened, the person that they hired ended up needing two more writers to hire. And so he turned around a few months later and looked at the candidates and then hired me. But um during that, during that time, then I was, of course, aware that it was Life is Strange. And that's when I like went back and played every narrative game that had come out in that period, because that opened me up to the the whole world that was out there.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

And so then if we go back to everything, we don't need to cover everything, but you know, you talked about when life is strange, when you found that game. It's for me, exact same experience. It was like, oh my god, this has like filled a hole, you know, in my heart that I didn't even know I knew I wanted, but I didn't know how I wanted it to sort of exist. I was like, do I want a really in in-depth point-and-click adventure? Do I want some like interactive novel? Or I I don't know, I just had a yearning, right? And that game um scratched that itch. But tell me a little bit about your like early days of gaming and what your sort of you know, because I think the thing that those of us who love video games sort of forget is like not everyone who engages with video games ends up like either devoting their life to it or it's spending all day, every day talking about it. So what was it about your early uh um interactions with gaming that really started to draw you in?

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yeah, yeah. No, I I definitely didn't expect it to become a career path at all because um I was always gaming from the youngest age and I was always writing from the youngest age, but the two didn't seem as if there was any way to marry them at all. Um I think like a lot of uh people in my age that become game writers, I was sort of obsessed with all the point-and-click adventures back then. So uh, you know, I would play like King's Quest on the school computer endlessly, and then I would play my dad's copy of Leisure Suit Larry uh from a way too young age. I don't know that anyone's old enough to play Leisure Suit Larry, but I certainly wasn't. Anyone who really wants to play isn't old enough. Yeah, exactly. At least from our, you know. Yeah, yeah. But I I it's funny because like when I look back at it, the things that I remember are like the crazy puzzles and the text inputs in the early ones where it wasn't actually point and click, it was a text box, and you had to get the phrasing just right in order to figure out you know, you to bring the sunscreen on the lifeboat, or else you die of heat exhaustion and just all this crazy stuff. And I like that blew my mind. And then um and then like Monkey Island, and uh I think whenever I am asked about my favorite game, I always say Grim Fandango, which um you know, I I don't know that like one answer could ever be right, but that was the one that just like stuck with me in a in a very significant way.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

And just so I just for context, tell me how old you were, roughly when were you playing Grim Fandango?

SPEAKER_00 9:39

Yeah, I guess I would have been 13. 13, 14.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

It's probably about because I'm just the reason I ask is it's like there's a there's a slightly elevated maturity to that to that game, you know, that I think when you're accessing it at that sort of age where you're sort of on the cusp of like understanding slightly more adult like themes or concepts. Um it's a bit like when you first get to watch the Kern Brothers or something, you know. You're like, oh, there's like these new feelings, you know, depths that you can go to, you know. Anyway, sorry to interrupt you. I just wanted to get that context.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

No, I I think that's that's exactly the right context, and and that that's cool that you could pinpoint pinpoint that just right because uh I was very lucky at that time to have a British friend uh who's actually South American, but he he introduced me to Monty Python and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and all of this stuff that I just had no access to. Like it's it's kind of um funny to think about how limited our purviews were in the the pre, you know, open internet times. And you just wouldn't know about these things if you didn't have that one friend. So that was that all kind of in my mind comes as a package deal. And I think that that is like kind of what expanded my consciousness into like what humor can really be, and um uh the the like I mean in in terms of Grim Fandango, just the the art style of that. I'd never seen anything like it at that time. So yeah, so that the those were the games. And then you know, there were things like um The Seventh Guest, um that I remember very like just blowing me away and missed and things like that. Um so it wasn't all narrative games, but there is definitely a part of me that that was just fascinated by these um interactive narratives. And then the the other side of the equation were to choose your own adventure books and I, you know, just reading like every publication that had branching immersive narratives and uh and then like discovering DD and things like that. But they were all these like puzzle pieces, and there was no part of my brain that thought, oh yeah, I I could just do that, I could put those together. Because it didn't it didn't feel like a job. Uh it didn't feel like uh the writer really was present, even though the the dialogue and everything was so strong, it just it it kind of felt like um there was this tech coder developer kind of kind of person, and that wasn't my brain, so it didn't seem like it it uh it it was actually uh a career path for a creative person, and then and then I it took way too long to to discover that that actually was it's it's uh it probably won't surprise you how often I've heard the exact same thing where it's just like this thing that you'd like love and adore, but that not quite connecting the dots as to the fact that there is someone like behind that game who is who is writing that narrative and and those those ideas and um and so did you ever play the longest journey?

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Was that in your repertoire? That might have been more that was probably a slightly more European um um one that just that that that came to mind. Um and so what was it for you you know, if you can put into words that you felt that like like um playing Life is Strange? It's it's kind of interesting, obviously, interviewing you because it's almost breaking up into two binary categories, right? Because I'm I'm very curious as your experience as a as a player of Life is Strange, you know? And then obviously we'll talk about you know your experience of of of making these these games as well down the line. But what was it about that game that hit you so hard?

SPEAKER_00 13:48

Yeah, really it was the aesthetics, I think, more than than anything else. Um because I was coming off of film school and um just watching a ton of movies and and writing screenplays, and and I think the the dream that that was always somewhere in the back of my mind when I was younger and reading Choose Your Adventure and things like that was the idea of like a fully immersive movie, like something that could be both um cinematic and um performatively expressive and everything that we love about uh a great film, and then also be completely immersive and that you as the audience could offer the story and the experience. And Life is Strange was the first game that I played that really accomplished it. And then I played like Until Dawn, which accomplishes it as well, but in a completely different way. Um but but I my my aesthetic as a storyteller and the things that I respond to um are more humanistic and more kind of um psychological and and grounded in realistic experiences, which then maybe expand out into unexpected, supernatural places, and life is strange just checked all of those boxes.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

I saw something I just lost myself in your substack. Um and you wrote that uh uh it was like about how the structure for Life is Strange is like Max, Chloe, and time. Um and then if you remove any of those elements, then you sort of you lose you lose what's at the core of of that narrative, right? I guess I thought that was really interesting and like uh painfully simple and true, you know.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Um yeah, yeah. Well, it I think um from your line of questioning, I'm putting myself back into where I was when I played it the first time. And I think since then I probably played it you know a dozen more times, but um it it really it washed over me in a very non-analytical way at that point, um, which I'm glad it did, because I I think my mind was um I'm a filmmaker, so when I watch movies, I think about them analytically, but when I play a game, I get to escape into them. And I've since kind of um challenged my own feelings about that, because I I I think that it's actually important to um turn off that that analytical part of your brain and just exist within within stories as a storyteller. But um but since since that first playthrough, what I have come to discover and is is a thing that I I hold up as a creative North Star, and I think I would, even if I never made a Life is Strange game, is exactly that simplicity that you're describing and how perfectly integrated it is at every single level and every single system of the game and the player experience. So um, I mean, at the the simplest level, the idea of actions, your actions will have consequences. That is a UI directive presented to the player at the beginning of the game, and it is also a statement of intent, a thesis, a philosophical concept that gets unpacked through all sorts of um directions from uh you know Chloe ending up disabled because of um the choice to save her father and so forth. Um and then and then ultimately into the final choice of the game, which then turns the question back on you, or I should say, rephrases the statement as a question and and asks you, did you have consequences? Do you accept your consequences? There there's I mean it you know, I think um it's been said a million times, but it's still true that like the best stories are so simple that you can sum them up in in one sentence and yet contain like a universe of ideas within them. And I don't think that any game that I've ever played does that better than what they achieved there. And there's so much more beyond it in terms of the plot and the characters, and there's so much so many brilliant things in it. But the thing that I come back to just as a writer and an artist is how they manage to just like craft this perfect diamond of a story idea and then express it in all of these ways that interconnect you know perfectly to the player. It's it's it's a very funny thing that I've I've been put in positions to get to think about my favorite game a lot. So it's like um I worry sometimes that when I talk about I almost sound canned, and and that there's the fear that it it comes across as like insincere or something. Um but it's just because I've thought I I like just I'm I'm practically like a PhD in this one game because I've lived inside that world and just thought about it so much.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

It it sounds the opposite of insincere, which is extraordinarily sincere. And and what I what I felt when I was reading your Substack. And this this really is um uh I I I don't know if I've ever made such an obvious statement before in an interview, but you really, really, really, really like narrative games, like you really care about them very, very deeply. You know, glad that comes through. And maybe that sort of um uh goes without saying, but it's I I I remember years ago I was on this um like uh thing to do it for Tribecker, this like before um you know, where you're workshopping a project and there were these these two guys on there and they both work for Valve, right? And I was amazed, I couldn't believe it. I was like hanging out with these guys who were Valve because they were working on this this film, and um I just kept on bugging them about Half-Life 3 and I'm trying to ask all these questions, you know. I mean, this was like years ago when people were still asking questions about the game. But I remember him saying it's like, Oh, you really care about video games, don't you? And I was sort of like surprised that he said that because I was like, Well, you surely you do as well because you work at Valve. But he just sort of he put he pointed in he obviously did, but what he what he I think pointed out to me was just the the the the depths that I tend to go when I'm thinking about this stuff, you know, and that's sort of what what I got from your um I think when anyone makes a decision to sort of write so deeply about games, it's sort of um it's clear that they sort of spend a lot of time thinking about it, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:56

Yeah. Well it it's interesting that you bring up Valve too, because that kind of um elegant depth that I I find so incredible in Life is Strange, is what I think of as a hallmark of the best Valve games, too, right? Like Portal is such a simple game, but it is so elegant and it's so deep and it has this dramatic narrative component to it, even though it's not explicitly a narrative game that is enriched by the player experience and by you know the UI and every every facet of it. Um so so I like to think of uh Valve as people that think as deeply and obsessively about their games as as I do too. Um but uh yeah, I I think that that is um it's some it's something that that games have that's special about them, not that it doesn't exist in other mediums. But because games bring together so many different experiences, when they all really harmonize, it feels different than a movie.

SPEAKER_01 22:06

Yeah, I got to chat with Eric Woolpore, the writer for Portal. Um, and he yeah, he did. I mean, what was really interesting about Talking with Pin was, you know, how uh was to find out just how much of Paul had been built before he came on board as a writer, you know, and that he was writing around the game that already existed that had had so little consideration into a sort of the narrative arc, but that things like, you know, the um, you know, trying to be sent off into the furnace and then escaping out the uh the the back door and things was already built into that game just as a you know level design element, and then he found ways to sort of add impact to that with with brilliant, brilliant writing, you know.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

I always wonder about that because I I I haven't worked on a game in that way, but I think I think that's most writers' experiences, at least traditionally, and it's such a different job than the ones that I've done. But I think the original Life is Strange worked much that way. Like obviously a lot more writing, but I think Christian Devine was brought on uh once the story was shaped and they had the movements and I think even like the big choices and everything, and and he was adding in character voice and dialogue, of course, and I'm sure he influenced the story significantly too. But the fact that it it was sort of like an additive role to pieces rather than growing it from the ground up is such a such a different thing. Sometimes in a writer's room, when we're trying to come up with a story, you kind of wish that you could experience that sometime. Like, what would it be like to have someone just hand me the the full arc and then I just get to kind of write on top of it and fill in those spaces?

SPEAKER_01 23:59

Yeah, that kind of sounds like a again, extremely different sort of way of going about things, and I guess then to come on to that about your experience of you know working working on these games, you know. Um what has been and and again, I you know it was interesting reading your pieces because you had these reflections on every game having a different you know um development and pre-production and production phase, and you've gone through this. You said you've shipped so four games, did you say? Yeah, yeah, four now, yeah. Um, I guess it's a pretty big question if we're sort of covering all of them, but I'm just curious about you know the the iteration of your process and what you've learned sort of like from from first going in and you know before the storm and and each project since then about you know showing up for these these characters that you're gonna be representing.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Yeah, yeah. Well the the kind of overall point that I was trying to unpack and explore with those Substack articles is how uh impactful these process elements are to the product that's delivered in the end, and that most players don't think about it and they shouldn't think about it because they have, I'm sure, far more important things. But if you're interested in why certain games take certain shapes and why we might make a choice to handle a story beat in one way in one game and a different way in another game, a lot of times the answer comes back to the kind of machinery of the pipeline, uh, as we call it, that that's behind making it. So, like to give a quick survey of it, like in before the storm, we were working pretty similarly to the original Life is Strange in that we had um VO capture that was separate from the um mocap. And the mocap was body performance, but the face performance was done in an animation system that the animators sort of dialed in and then worked on top of. So it was all these disparate elements of the performance, not to mention like then the uh cinematic artist coming on top of that and actually crafting like the staging and the camera work and everything. So in terms of how that relates back to the story, we write these scripts and then they're locked to disseminate to the artists, but then they're sort of like pulled apart to each of the artists to work with separately. And that allows us to respond piecemeal to individual pieces as they're coming together, but it also makes it a lot harder to kind of see the full picture of what we're making. And then the the other end of the spectrum is what we started on True Colors and ended up kind of building off of from every game after that, where we shifted to this full performance capture pipeline where we wrote the entire script, we locked it, we handed it off to the capture team, and then they captured everything at once. They captured the body, the face, the VO. Uh, they had camera uh not captured, but sort of planned out so that they could um stage accordingly. So everything was sort of locked in in a way that much more resembles um live action filmmaking, um, or theater, even. We had a lot of uh people with theater backgrounds working in that space, and there were a lot of similarities to just how the actors performed and how we prepared them and everything. Um so there are advantages and disadvantages there, but you can imagine that the experience of um bringing a scene to its feet in a full performance where you have to kind of get everything on that stage is very different from one where you're taking a facial performance from this animator, a VO performance from this actor, camera work from this cinematic artist, and then you're sort of blending them together and turning knobs and dials in the directions that feel right in the in the construction of it, but it's all kind of raw material that that you're pulling together at that point. So that that's like I'd say the most um impactful piece of the pipeline, and it completely uh dictated how we worked, how we wrote, how we locked, the kind of things that we wrote. Um obviously when you have uh face capture and full performance on stage, you begin thinking of your actors uh as much more human and and their emotions as uh much more part of the storytelling. So you begin underwriting from how you would previously. You rely on looks and reactions rather than needing to verbalize uh everything that's going through a character's head. So that that's a really big change, which for a game about emotions with true colors um turned out to be critical. Um and then just how you how you construct the work, you spend a lot more time uh locking the scripts and reviewing it with every member of the team and inputting all of the feedback and uh concerns and everything before you shoot the mocap, versus if you're doing it in the before the storm way, you're less concerned about those elements because you could go back and replace a line of VO. You could go back and reanimate this reaction or whatnot. You can piecemeal the pieces back together much more easily than when it's all this sort of singular capture.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

There's obviously, you know, in in the games you made moments that are like really stand out for the you know, the players, you know, that that just become really um, you know, well known and well loved. But I just hearing about you talk about all of those moving parts, are there any particular moments um across that your sort of catalogue of games where you sort of feel like okay, this is a really nice example of all of those moving parts like coming together really nicely to sort of pull something off, you know? And it's quite a specific question. So it might be something much smaller and and and subtle that that you're just extremely proud of for you and the team and everyone for sort of pulling it together.

SPEAKER_00 30:49

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, it it's a great question. And and I think it where my mind goes to, maybe because we're we're already talking about it, is sort of the the times where we were able to write something that set up the rest of the team and kind of the like the machinery of the production to be successful, versus the times where we maybe didn't and we wrote something that we really liked, but then it created a lot of challenges that we then learned from. So, like a small example of that is um one of the first scenes that I that I ever wrote was Chloe uh in the junkyard after being possibly expelled uh from Blackwell, depending on the choices that that the player makes. And she is um sort of reacting to uh many different smoldering elements of her life and relationships. And it's it's one of these sort of um classic cinematic shots where you start with her face um facing upwards, but her hair is dangling, and then you flip the camera around to find that she's leaning her head back over the bed of the truck that she's lying on, and in this very teenage kind of way, just kind of letting all the blood rush to her head as she as she lies back and then pull back to kind of see the expanse of the junkyard. And you know, for me, I was coming off of film school and screenwriting, and I was thinking a lot about evocative storytelling through the camera, and I felt really good about this shot. And um, and I still feel good about it when I when I see it and when I play it. What I didn't know at the time was what a massive ask that was to a lot of different uh teams in the development. Just having hair dangling uh in and of itself is extremely expensive and difficult. Um the shot itself was uh uh you know a big construction from the cinematic side, performatively placing our characters, lying down on objects, things like that. So a lot of my uh subsequent work from Before the Storm was like an education in how to achieve similar kinds of moments and take into account all of the elements of the production behind them so that you could, instead of you know, spending 10 points on one great moment, you could spend two points on five great moments that are still capturing a lot of what you're going for. So you sort of learn to like not just write to the story, you write to the team as well. You write to the to the tools and the machinery that you have there. Um I'd say another another learning experience is uh in the DLC farewell, uh, at the very end when Chloe is listening to the message from Max, we wanted all of it to be shot as a wonder. And in this case, it wasn't just my idea. This this was the whole writing team. We we really um envisioned this sort of perfect uh ending of just a slow push-in on Max on Chloe as she's listening to Max's message and and responding to it emotionally. And there's a reason why that's very rare in games, why you don't have extended wonders the way that you see in in cinema, um, because you can't hide anything, you know, any any uh animation glitch, uh any lighting issues, any any anything whatsoever. Um so that ended up being probably the toughest period for the animation team was that stretch at the end of the DLC. And that like that put the scare into me going forward of like, okay, I care about these people. They want to do the best work uh imaginable for the ideas that we put in front of them. And they're probably not gonna stand up and say, we can't do that. Uh so it's it's up to us to um really become experts in the consequences of what we write. And uh there are ways that we can achieve the same results that you know don't make people work nights and weekends to get there.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

It's interesting to use the word consequences, which is obviously a huge theme throughout the uh those games. It's just you can't uh you can't rewind time to uh do it differently, um, in your case. Um I was just interested in again you wrote a lot about the games and and um you know that there's this there's like choosing between realities, there's coexisting realities, there's reconciling realities. Um I was thinking about whether how much those games are about grief, and that they of obviously are, because there's so much of it in there, whilst at the same time, um because of Max's agency, limited agency, it's almost sort of like she's so much of the grief that she experienced, she's like choosing, right? Or she's choosing this kind of this this this grief over this other grief, except for when that choice is literally taken away, and you know, that like you know, well without giving you know spoilers, but but sometimes it's not a choice. Um what do you think that is like or what the I think there's so much appeal because the characters are brilliant um and the depth they go to and the the the the games that you've you've worked on. Um I just wonder what you think about what appeals to players about experiencing that ability to rewind, um, and what is so intrinsically um captivating about seeing Max make these choices, you know.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

Yeah. Well I I I think when it comes to telling stories about grief and trauma, um I think going all the way back to your question about what what appealed to me in in Life is Strange and in story games in general, I think there there's something uh that's so wonderfully literary about narrative adventure games that is very different from uh film and TV, actually. Like I I think I've been talking a bit about how much they are like film and TV, but there's this other way that they're much more like a novel than than a movie, in the sense that you're inhabiting a limited third-person perspective, we'd call it, from a technical standpoint. Like you're you're aligned, the camera's third person, but you're aligned within the experiences of a singular protagonist, and you're experiencing the world through a filter of their mind. And you're able to express that mind in all manner of different interactions, where I think the quantity of those interactions is actually part of the literary quality that that emerges from it, because that's that's how we experience the world. Everything that we interact with is a subjective experience through the filter of our own minds. And um for Max and Chloe, particularly the the history that they have been through separately and together is such a a major part of that filter and of their experience in every part of their lives. And as writers, we're able to uh weave that in ways that I think are are a lot more uh uh truthful about what it is to have uh trauma or grief that is always on the back burner of your mind, right? I I think um there are times where we express it performatively, where we have scenes of um characters crying and and emoting. But I think what is what is special about these games, and what I think these games actually do a lot better, is less in the immediate aftermath of uh of loss, but in what it feels like days later or weeks later or years later, and the way that like an object that might seem insignificant to another person to you can carry all of this depth of meaning because it brings you right back to the person that you've lost or the um experience that you had with them.

SPEAKER_01 40:34

That's really interesting. I don't think I've ever thought about that element of those games, and you're right, it's so um prevalent throughout, you know, the in in in terms of events that have have passed way before you were even had any agency over the story, and then events that have occurred, you know, at the top end of the series that are still having ramifications at the the tail end. Um I think that's a really interesting thing because as soon as you said it, it kind of like set up a light bulb in my head thinking. And and so much of that as well is wrapped up in, you know, there's so many um artifacts in the game, right? Um that are constantly drawing the player like back to remembering, remembering, remembering. I mean, it almost feels like the whole game is that in some ways because of, you know, uh the the whole series, because of because of Max's like brilliant, you know, in a in a um monologue. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:37

It's um the the emotional power of mundane objects in our lives, I think is something that that first game really got right. And I think it's in the DNA of a lot of games in the narrative space now. It's not just life is strange anymore because it's again, it's it's this great marriage of the player experience, the UI, the inputs, the verbs, and the literary expression of the interiority of of the player character. Um, but I think about you know those those missing girl posters of Rachel um all over Blackwell. And uh you don't know who Rachel is when you encounter them the first time. And as the story develops, what it means to you changes significantly as you discover what it means to Chloe and what Chloe means to you, and what she then comes to mean to both of you. And maybe then you go play before the storm and then you go back and play Life is Strange, and now it takes on a whole new meaning. So, you know, these objects have a way of carrying so much meaning that doesn't have to be explicated exactly with the dialogue, but the dialogue can kind of indicate the emotional connection that that the protagonist has to it. And that that's what kind of that's what the craft of writing these monologue lines is all about. It's like kind of the toughest job as as a writer in this space because you're confronted with like hundreds of these things over the course of a single game. And sometimes your reason for including them isn't purely narrative. It's like, okay, we've got a puzzle in this area, and the puzzle's not going to work unless there's like 30 other things around it. But what would make sense to put around it? And the right answer to that question is always, well, what would bring something out of Max or Chloe? What would be a thing that would hit them in some way? It doesn't have to be a major way, it doesn't have to be them constantly being reminded of uh their past and their trauma. It could be something very slight. It could be something about, you know, Moses and and his love of anime or uh Um Moses's pet iguana that's not there anymore. Whatever uh part of the world you want to get into with it, but it has to be something that um that that pinpoints an element within that that character.

SPEAKER_01 44:22

Yeah, I feel like I I almost need to go back just with with a new a new appreciation for the the the sort of backward facing, um, you know, backward reflecting nature of so many backs and what that do you know I mean that um yeah you know the joy of picking up and you're right, I think it's it's become more and more prevalent in games um you know nowadays, you know. Um I guess with that in mind, are there games that you sort of enjoyed playing over the last how many years that you feel are doing a good job of sort of iterating on you know what narrative games can do? And yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:03

Yeah, yeah. Well, um the the one that I the one that really affected me as much as Life is Strange affected me when I played it the first time was what Remains of Edith Finch. And by then I was already making games. Um so it it kind of hit me in a in a different way, which is just um a new way to express the same kinds of emotionality that we were searching for, but at a almost poetic level. So not not relying on uh dialogue and object interacts and all these things that we're talking about, but but um a gameplay experience, you know, uh sitting on a swing or being a bird swooping down, or all these other the the um the factory sequ the the fish sequence this that is so memorable. Um there's such an incredible emotional richness and the the poetry of them comes through the the players engagement. Um so that one just just blew me away. And and we we tried to incorporate some of that philosophy into true colors. I don't know that we ever really fully got there, but things like the foosball game and the um when you're you're looking at clouds uh with Ryan and kind of seeing the history of his and Gabe's relationship. Um, and and it it's it's the thing that uh sparks the uh emotion of joy in Alex for the first time with her power, uh comes through that. So we we we wanted to include that interactivity and like put as much of the emotional experience into gameplay moments like that as possible. And I think that that is a space for narrative games to get to that I'm not sure any have really fully done yet, which is marrying the narratively rich uh literary kind of storytelling of A Life is Strange with the poetically emotionally rich experiences of an Edith Finch, or more recently, mixtape, uh, which I'm playing, which I think does a lot of uh similar things to Edith Finch, where it's it's going for a very different kind of emotional palette, but it's expressing it through the same kind of um interactivity, unique interactivity. Um like I they they actually are doing a blend of of the two. Um so I I think that to me that's what's compelling about mixtape actually. But they're not doing choice-based um storytelling or um you know, that level of interactive dialogue. So I think there's still space to to like bring these elements together that that hasn't fully been done yet, but it's it's really hard because the machinery, to go back to like that analogy, the machinery to make uh a Life is Strange experience is very different than the machinery to make an Edith Finch or even a mixtape experience. Uh so it's gonna take a lot of work for some studio to kind of figure out how to bring them all together.

SPEAKER_01 48:32

Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about Edith Finch Finch in relation to mixtape because they're they are similar in the and and obviously the mixtape is called mixtape, right? It's it's like a series of vignettes, um, which which you know I can sort of see that same with Edith Finch, you know. Um there's obviously and and and uh I think games get paired often because they're tonally, they might have a sort of a tonal similarity, right? Even if the disparity between them in terms of literal like gameplay and story and you know character agency and what they're going through sort of couldn't be further apart, right? I think that's what's interesting about mixtape with um you know, uh people talk about that in relation to to Life is Strange because they're very different, um they're very different games. But they people do like to talk about them in the same breath, right?

SPEAKER_00 49:38

Yeah. Well I think I think they probably, from a marketing standpoint, are designed to appeal to a similar audience. But in terms of the actual experience of the game and and even the narrative itself, yeah, I agree. I I I don't I don't see a lot in common. I think the it says something interesting about the story space that it it in some ways is still almost viewed as like a novelty genre by the larger game world. So they look at mixtape and they look at life is strange and they look at lost records and they just kind of throw them all into the same bucket. But for players who love those games and care about them, they they think about them very differently and they might love one and hate another one and not get the third one, and there's a lot of different things that that might go into that. Um, so there's a lot more nuance there, I think, than like the larger games press tends to put into it.

SPEAKER_01 50:44

Um yeah, no, it's it's it's it's a really important um distinction to make. I think that is interesting, isn't it? I I wonder if that's because it's so easy to couple. It's it's just like you kind of wanna you wanna write something that you can try and communicate as best as possible to somebody what something is, even if it's not what it is, but it's it's a package nonetheless, right? Um yeah. And that can obviously then yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:18

Well, and and I do think there there's some wisdom in trying to um trying to cater to the narrative players rather than what I think uh narrative games have done for for a while, which is try to uh either position it as something for non-gamers, like grow the market by saying, you know, let's put it on Netflix and people that don't even own a console can play it, or try to sell a level of gameplay that may or may not be there, but try to, you know, say, this is for you, Call of Duty players, you're gonna love this. Like I don't think that that uh has been particularly successful. So I for me, I like the idea of um positioning mixtape to Life is Change players and Lost Records players and um supermassive fans and people like that, um, because I think there are a lot more players there than we sometimes realize. And it's because these games are not uniformly successful. Some of them do well. Dispatch is a great example of one that really hit and and some of them don't. Um, but I I I think that the audience is there. It's it's a question of like what are they looking for and what kind of doesn't pique their interest um versus what makes something stand out, like a mixtape or a dispatch or or whatnot. Like I don't know. I'm I'm not uh in that pay grade to make those kinds of big um business steering decisions about it, but I but I do think that like catering to the audience that already loves these kinds of games and making making the P ⁇ L and the shape of the game you're making fit that market is better than just imagining that if you position your narrative game as something that it isn't really, then you're gonna bring in all of these players that weren't there before.

SPEAKER_01 53:35

And then I I wanted to ask you about, you know, you're again like you spent over the last decade, I'm assuming in the space of 10 years, you've grown up or changed, or not grown up, because you would have been an adult. But uh you know, I think that's appropriate. Yeah, yeah, okay, good. Because I think I certainly have. Yeah. You know, as as have as have your your characters as well, the ones that that you know have gone on again. I know we keep coming back to to do you have a question you need to answer?

SPEAKER_00 54:07

Sorry, sorry, yeah, I do. Uh it's it's very important. Uh yes, you can have gum. Take whatever you need, but I'm on a call right now, so can you take it outside? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 54:18

Thank you. Sorry. I would have hated to have thought that that question was left unanswered.

SPEAKER_00 54:26

Uh it's because I hoard all the gum in the house at my dad's. So I've I've clearly this is the gum. This is okay, okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:35

It's not like uh it's just this the literal storage place, right? Um yeah, you know, again, I I I know I sort of keep going back to Chloe and Max, but you know, we obviously have to have the privilege of seeing them them um growing up and changing as well, right? I guess I'm just curious about, you know, I know of my work, you know, because projects sort of go on years at a time, and so you know, I've sort of seen myself change and evolve alongside the projects that I'm working on. I guess I'm just curious how that is for you. If those things sort of feel interweaved, or if I'm trying to sort of force some sort of poetic uh meaning there that doesn't actually um exist.

SPEAKER_00 55:14

Yeah. Well, you're talking to a writer who you know nar narratizes everything in in his life experience, like I imagine most writers do. So um I think you came to the right place for that kind of question. But uh Yeah, I you you know, I uh the thing that is very interesting to me from where I'm sitting right now is how unlikely Life is Strange reunion was both for the players and for the game's existence as a whole, and for me and for my returning to the franchise, because there really was no expectation that that was ever going to happen when I uh had left and and had made the expanse, and then we had all sorts of other projects that we were looking at and came very close to getting off the ground and we were gonna go in all these different directions. And there was just no part of me that that thought that there would ever be a need or an opportunity to get to make another one. Um and True Colors wasn't a Max and Chloe story, so it had really been quite a long time since I had told a Max and Chloe story. So when I I came back to it, it really did feel like this kind of um, you know. I don't I don't want to be too uh high fluent about it, but there's there's a little bit of like a hero's journey element to like return returning back to uh your homeland and you've changed so much. And and then uh and now you you're sort of seeing everything with different eyes than the person who you were when when you were there last time. And that that was that was amazing. Like that that was one of the great sort of creative experiences that I've ever had was was getting to come back to the franchise after everything that I'd done since then and getting to kind of relearn all the lessons from before and kind of reaffirm everything that I loved about it in the first place, and then also discover new things and and try to push it in in new directions. Yeah. No, I well, I I I I think what that calls to mind for me, and I I I want to say this carefully because I'm a massive fan of so many Telltale games and so many people who worked at Telltale and so much of what they they accomplished. But I think they reached a place where their games were starting to feel as if they weren't evolving and that the same formula was being applied to this new IP with these kind of superficial elements that were added on top of it, but fundamentally the experience was the same as the last one and the one before that, and the one before that. And it's what I really admire about a game like Dispatch, actually, is that they were able to take a lot of that DNA, but then say, what fits this new world that we've created here? Let's, you know, rather than rest on doing it the way we did it before, what would actually simulate the experience of being this character in this world and create the most interesting drama out of that? Um and I I think that when you are not asking yourself those questions in a really open way, which is really hard to do because it's very easy to ask yourself that question and then determine that the answer is the same answer that you've had before, and to and and to just keep doing it the way that you have before. And you can you can trick your mind into thinking that that's actually the right answer. So you really have to kind of force yourself to adopt this other external perspective that that asks, like, what actually what does this story actually want? What does this experience actually want? And if that leads you somewhere completely different than what you're expecting, then you have to follow that. And if you don't, then it's it's just death.

SPEAKER_01 59:53

Have you ever been at risk that yourself? Um sort of understood where you know there's there's that theory around like static and dynamic phases, right? Where like you have to be dynamic to sort of grow and change. But if you're constantly dynamic, you'll burn out because you're you're never you're never building on what you've created. So then you go to a static phase and you perfect what works, but if you stay static for too long, you get left behind, right? So it's that that is Robert Persig uh thing, I think, you know, that balancing act. I'm just curious if you've experienced that yourself and what the discomfort is that's helped you sort of push through to like, okay, I've got to shift now.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:37

That's interesting, yeah. So I think going back to what I was writing about in my sub stack there, part of why I started wanting to unpack that was realizing how much of that was driven by the mechanics of how we were making the games, which I think it is is a variation on on what we're talking about and ideally goes hand in hand. But like with True Colors, I think it really did um it married the drama of the story and the way that we were telling the story in a way that forced us to completely change the way that that we were approaching it. So I think um there, like we kind of I think we were hoping it hoping and expecting to be in more of a static phase of like taking everything that was hard won from before the storm and just sort of leveraging it in our next project. And then what ended up happening was that almost none of those lessons applied anymore, and that we were now in a completely different paradigm uh with the way that we were writing and and producing and everything else. I think the expanse is one where um we absolutely could have afforded to have more time in the conceptual phase to push the ideas that we had further than we did. And I think given the time that we had, we really tried. So we ended up having this whole space exploration component and trying to do a lot of dramatic storytelling through being alone in outer space, surrounded by the exploded carcasses of ships that carry, you know, human stories within all of these dead elements that you discover. And that was our North Star. But to get there, we had to use a lot of building blocks that were already in place. And some of them were the right building blocks, but I think if we had had more time early on, we might have discovered entirely different ones that would have fit the ideas in the story better. And, you know, I I'm very I I love that game, and I I'm like that's the one that maybe impresses me the most in terms of what we were able to accomplish with with the time that we had. But I I sometimes wonder if there's like more of a game uh within the the shape of of what we made. And the only way that you can get there is by having enough time to kind of um think, write, prototype, try out ideas in front of other people on the team, go back to the drawing board. And that's that is the most um underserved part of the production in in most developments. Um and I go into that that a little bit in the thing that I wrote because you have the need to carry a team from one project to the other, and simultaneously you have this need to have a core group of people spend a lot of time thinking about a game before you put that team to work. And how do you make those two things uh function simultaneously from a just a practical standpoint? And that that was always a challenge for us at Deck Nine. And I I think it's a challenge across the industry. I don't think any studio really has the perfect answer to it, unless they like have had such massive hits that money is just no object to them and they can kind of keep people on while they spend a lot of time figuring out their next game.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:46

I'm really glad we spoke about that. I think there's some really interesting, there's a lot of nuance in that that process, you know. Um I guess just finally what I was just curious to ask, you know, from a writing writer perspective, you know, are there are there any characters like of yours that you sort of like created, or the characters that you've been able to sort of take on and then build on that you sort of um feel sort of most connected to or that you just get the most? Well, yeah. I was gonna say the ones there's maybe there's two different ones. There's the ones that you get the most pleasure from from bringing to life, and then there's the ones that you perhaps relate to um the most as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:25

Yeah, well, Chloe is the most aspirational character for me. Like when I write Chloe, I think about how I would like to move through the world, which is which is quite different from how I almost always do in any circumstance. Um, but that's why she's so much fun to write. Um, because she's simultaneously very sensitive to the world around her, caring, compassionate, fiercely loyal to the people that that she loves, and also. Just incredibly strong and aggressive and unwilling to take a single ounce of shit from anyone that wants to give it to her. And she's I view her very much as an artist in that she's sort of constantly affecting the world around her. So like in Before the Storm, that's expressed with her graffiti, which I think is like a good teenage expression of that. In reunion, we try to express it in a number of different ways. Like, you know, in in uh Moses' office, she comes up with the name of a of a new planetary object that he may have discovered in in the sky and gets to like make her mark there. And she's just kind kind of constantly leaving her mark on things. And that's that's just the way that she moves through the world. So I think that there's like there's a bravery in that kind of creativity that I aspire that I aspire to. Um I think uh Drummer was maybe the most fun character that I've I've ever written. Um that was just fully um inhabiting a character that was so strongly rendered before and getting to to just kind of move her around through a new story. So there's there's something very freeing about that as a writer. Like your job is less uh pure creation, and it's more like have you done your work and your research to get yourself into the headspace of this very strong character, and then and then be able to react to new situations and new relationships and and things like that. And she's just such a fun badass superhero type of character to get to get to be with uh a very uh strongly rendered uh sense of responsibility and trauma that shaped her, that like working with Carage, she just like had all of that down to her pores from um from the show. So like every level of that from the writing to um the performance, like it was all just sort of taking this great raw material and and getting it into the right places for it to shine. Um so that that was that was particularly fun. Um I I really liked writing Lucas in um in the last game. Um Lucas uh is not a good guy. Um he uh is incredibly pompous and um really doesn't care about um the consequences that he has on the people around him. Um but there's something very, very fun about that level of um conceited asshole. But and like also trying to find the the humanity in that and where that comes from. I think I I think I really like writing like conceited boars for some reason. There's something about that that's like you could always find something hilarious to do with them because they're they're so oblivious to the way that they that like their bullshit is um being perceived by the people around them and they're just gonna keep going and going and going. So it's really fun to get to do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:45

And then like you said, find the humanity as well, you know, which is that um Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That that funnel balancing out. Um well this has been great. I've loved this conversation. I wasn't exactly sure where we would go with it, but I'm glad for for where where it went, you know. Um just tumbling in on I don't know, everything really. But yeah, it's it's been an absolute pleasure sort of getting to in in in in enjoy your games and you know I guess it I don't know if you if there's anything about what you would you can talk about in terms of future facing or or even if not specifically, but is there more things you want to sort of like experiment with or try or or iterate on with what you what you've built so far that you'd like to see happen in the future?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:33

Yeah. Um well I I think in terms of our conversation here and what you're doing with the examined game, I am right now very focused on the way that game writers and developers need to tell their own stories and like partner with people like you to tell our own stories. I think I think that there's this missing piece, which could also be seen as an opportunity within the like games journalism or just like player-facing stories about games, where developers are leaving it to everyone else besides ourselves to kind of talk about it. And players I think are really interested to understand at a deeper level where these games come from, how the people that make them think about them, what they care about, what they're what they're doing. Um I know that I am, and and I I I feel that when I uh engage. So it's not something that comes naturally to me, and um and it's not something that I think comes naturally to just about every uh developer that that I that I know. Um but I I I I'm beginning to think that it's really critical in sort of figuring out where this is all headed as we like are getting to a place where all of these forces are working to dehumanize the work and the people that do the work more and more. I think that we the the way that we can combat that is by being humans in front of them and and and just just you know speaking the way the way that we are right now. So I I love what you've been doing. Um and and I I hope that you keep doing it, and I hope that more devs uh do things like what you're doing uh and and writing articles and everything, because I it it's feeling uh like it's almost existential uh for for us to kind of like carve out our own spaces.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:55

Oh yeah, I really appreciate you sharing that. That's really good feedback just for me, actually. Because I know for me, like was like why have I done this? A selfish desire to ask questions that I want to hear answered, you know. Um, but the the questions I'm asked asking are you know pertinent and and personal and and hopefully meaningful. The the answers we're getting back are. Um, and I felt like there it seems like with video games, I mean I've always felt this. It's you know, my background's in documentary, but it's like, why is there such a gap in in having these sorts of conversations around this space in particular when we're hearing it from like musicians or filmmakers or writers or you know, ev every other area, but it feels like you know, and as I found like talking to yourself and and and many other uh you know, the other the other devs and people working in the industry, you everyone's so succinct and and able to communicate that. I think there was always this sort of misconception that people in the games industry, I don't know like what they can't like communicate, like human beings. I haven't experienced that yet. So I I think I think you're right, I think players want to hear that. I think the comments I see are really interesting about people's engagement with you all, uh aside from what you've created, you know, that they're like they obviously love the work, but then they love to hear about the work, and you know, I play games because a lot of the time I find a lot of relatability in them, you know, and then I like hearing these conversations because I find a lot of relatability in them, and I think that's what players are doing as well. So yeah, anyway, that was just some food for thought because you're right, but that there's there's be go out but go out and be a human because it's uh it's it's an asset that that you have to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:51

Yeah, and I and and I love like the the piece that you did about um chairs and just the the act of sitting in games like that that is it both completely rings true, obviously, to Life is Strange and um games that I've made. And and yeah, that came up a lot in the comments.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:12

Life is strange, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:13

Yeah, yeah. It's something special about them. But I I think you rightly apply it outward into a lot of games, not necessarily the narrative games. Um and and I I think I think it's it's a great kind of insight into an unexpected element of the player experience when we we think about like a gameplay loop as being like do something, get rewarded for it, do something, get rewarded for it. And and I think um the the ubiquity of the chair experience kind of challenges that that assumption that that no, there's actually other things that players are looking for that's not a hamster wheel. Um and and we we would be right to you know, maybe expand the way that that we think about a design loop um because of it. Um so that that is the kind of games criticism and theorizing that I love and I I want to see, I want to see more of. And part of the reason why I started doing my Substack is because I wasn't seeing a lot of it out there. And I just thought, you know, well, if if you're looking for it and you don't find it, then then go go do some of it yourself. So I I'm I'm really glad to have found you through your reaching out to me. And I hope that uh that you can inspire more people like you and and and bring the same really thoughtful uh perspective to the creative side of the work. Because I I really yeah, I think I think it's it it makes a huge difference in the way that players engage with the games and then the the people behind it and and caring about you know their livelihoods and and getting to continue to play games that they make.