WHAT WRITTING DUO TOM BISSELL & ROB AUTEN HAVE TO SAY ON
GEARS OF WAR AND HOW IT CAME ABOUT:
Gears of War now carries some weight with the name
that it dident have in the start. They came out of the gate running
though with its
iconic
“Mad World” trailer in 2006. What started as a
emotionally vacant series was grown into something much more over the
years.
There were a lot of sweat blood and tears in Gears of War 2 as
Epic tried to add some personal tragedy to the game’s
guns-and-muscles
leads, but after myriad novels, comics, and a spectacular third
game, the series came into its own as a story. Militaristic and
chest-thumping as it appears on the outside, Gears is a thoughtful
series and Epic is on the forefront of trying to make characters
matter in a sea of ass kicking action.
Tom Bissell and Rob Auten,
writers of Gears of War:Judgment, have been on a long wild ride to great game writing. After
meeting at
GDC, the journalist and the consultant set out to work in games.
Their collaboration with Epic and
People Can Fly is the realization
of an ambition to break the stilted video game storytelling model
of cutscenes and action. Digital Trends spoke with the two about
collaborating over great distances, the post-revolution mindset,
and how to tell a story about four characters that can seemingly
survive anything that doesn’t seem ridiculous.
How did the two of you start working together?
Rob Auten: "We actually met through a mutual friend at
GDC four years ago. At the time I was working on a project that
involved the
Vietnam War and Tom had just published a book on that conflict. We
had a long and loving conversation about some of our favorite
games, so I thought this would be the perfect person to work with
on this sprawling project. We kept talking and Tom sent me some
excerpts from his book Extra Lives. Eventually we got to a point
where we thought, you know what, let’s buddy up and see if we can
do
some damage together. We both liked the same games for the same
reasons".
Tom Bissell: "One of which was Gears of War".
Auten: "Gears, Farcry, Fallout 3. All those 2008 games
had just come out".
Bissell: "It took awhile to get some traction too.
That was the tough part. I thought publishing a book about video
games would make
me a widely sought after voice of reason when it came to games
writing, and that just wasn’t the case. (laughs). It took a lot of
banging our heads against the wall to get people to notice us. I
have no optimistic words for aspiring game writers out there. It’s
tough".
How did you guys come to Epic? What drew you to Gears? Did
Epic approach you?
Bissell: "That has to do with me profiling
Cliff
Bleszinski for the New Yorker in 2008. I got to know those guys a
little bit and met
up with Cliff and Rod (Fergusson, former Epic head of production)
socially a couple of times.
Microsoft called me out of the blue in
2010 and asked me if I would write an accompanying art book for
Gears of War 3. I didn’t know if I wanted to do it. I was teaching
at
the time and busy, but Rob said", “No man! Do it!”
Auten: "I told him if he didn’t do it that I would
do it!"
Bissell: "So I got to Epic for a week to work on it
and while I was there Rod mentions that they’re looking for writers
for the next
game. I said my friend Rob and I have worked on a couple of things
so we’d love to audition. Rod and Cliff were curious about this
rather bold, forward volley of mine. They gave us the audition and
they signed us on. But if I hadn’t been there that week, it never
would have happened. Luck was the determining factor".
"There were a lot of fingers in the Gears of War: Judgment
pot. How did the chain of communication work between you, Microsoft,
Epic,
and People can fly work? Did you communicate with past writers on
the series like Karen Traviss? How did it all breakdown?"
Auten: "For most of the process Tom and I were in
separate cities. You’ve got the guys in
Poland and the guys in
North Carolina, but
it ended up being pretty cohesive. What would end up happening was
that we would just go to Epic for a week every month. When we
weren’t at Epic, we would spend a lot of time on video calls. I
have never been in situation where it was so important to have the
video part of the call before. The guys at People Can Fly would
insist we were on video and insist we look at the camera and not get
distracted. It would be these early morning LA calls where at my
most laconic and distractable, so it was great to have these European
voices yelling, “Rob! What is it? What are you thinking?!”
"The end product of that was that we had this intense
relationship with the guys in Poland while simultaneously, just by
virtue of
going there and spending 16 hours a day in the studio meeting and
talking with everyone, we had a pretty cohesive dialogue. We only
spend a couple of days in the same room as the guys from Poland
but I feel like we know each other really well and work together
really easily."
Bissell: "I would like to say that you can’t
overstate how difficult it is to coordinate two writers in two
different cities with a
studio in North Carolina and another in Poland. This was a game
with a lot of deadlines, most of which were met with time to spare.
The fact that we were all able to do that together seems
extraordinary to me. This was a billion dollar franchise run by one
of the
biggest
video game developers in the world, Microsoft, and one of
the top studios. The fact that Rob and I never felt like we were
being controlled or told to do stuff or writing stuff to order.
They really let us feel our way through it in a way that was so
heartening. When we did stuff that people weren’t responding to,
they told us we had to fix that. I cannot say enough what an amazing
collaborative experience it was. I know that sounds like PR
bullshit, but it’s not. It was astounding. Now that I’ve heard so
many
horror stories from writers especially, I feel like we were really
blessed".
"It seems like Epic has worked hard over the past few years
to foster an environment that’s more inclusive for writers, rather
than
pulling in someone for-hire and never even bringing them in to
meet the staff actually making the game. What were some of the ideas
the two of you exclusively came up with that were incorporated
into the game?
Auten: "The most significant is the two new
characters. Everyone knew we wanted to mix up the squad a little bit.
There were certainly
other characters from the novels and the lore that we could have
worked with, but we said let’s just start from scratch. Let’s
make
characters the fulfill the needs of this story. Considering how
iconic Gears’ characters have become, that was huge. People who
play
these games know the names of all four principal characters.
That’s unheard of in video games. People don’t usually get to
know the
characters very well but these guys have stuck. We totally could
have blown that. It’s still untested. We love these characters and
we
hope other people do too."
"You’re right, the guys at Epic do have an interest in
working with writers and with us, we were lucky. They really got sort
of touchy
feely. We would talk about who these characters would really be,
their histories. Because of that, people who weren’t really
involved
in story would come out of the woodwork a little more. Animators
would come by and we’d have a whole conversation about how this guy
might walk. That kind of relationship gave everyone in the team
more agency, more of a voice, in creating what could be an iconic
character."
Bissell: "An eye-opening experience for me was when,
and this was late in the development process, one of the levels was
totally
scripted but we had one last scene that needed rewrites. We had
one more shot with the actors in the studio. Rob and I were at Epic
and we actually went through the level with the designer sitting
next to us. As we’re playing it, every time a line was fired off
that
he didn’t like he would wince. We’d say, “What you don’t
like that? Well, what do you want? What emotion do you as the level
designer
want people to feel here?” We did that with a bunch of the
levels right at the end, and it was night and day how much better
they got
instantly when the level designer and us could talk about what
emotive qualities these moments should have. I’m convinced that why
most video games have this emotional disconnect between the story
and play is because the writers and the level designers rarely have
these conversations. It makes a huge difference."
"Games have that flow for telling a story. It goes from
cutscene to play to cutscene. It’s very divided. What’s the
solution to fixing
that? What’s the alternative?"
Auten: "You’re giving us the perfect opening for our
platform! We’ve been talking about this very subject more than any
other subject
over the last six months. We’re hitting a point where games are
becoming these incredibly smart systems. Linear stories inside of
smart stories, the way that games communicate story to the player,
it just doesn’t fit. The days of somebody turning in a screenplay-
style piece of narrative writing for a game and expecting that to
morph into a successful game are over. Or we’ll soon be passed it.
In the same way as when physics was introduced in shooters in the
‘90s and everybody needed to use ragdoll, pretty soon you’re
going
to see it: A much more granular approach, a systems-based
approach, to what actually triggers the writing that happens in the
game
when. That will change the way the game’s are written
themselves."
Bissell: "Let’s talk about shooters, because shooter
stories have their own unique set of problems. The script part of a
shooter is
like the second layer of a soundtrack. It’s there for mood, for
bits of context, but I don’t think the script in a shooter is ever
going to be the main source of meaning in that kind of experience.
In that experience, the meaning all comes out of the action, the
intensity of combat. So Rob and I have been talking about a
shooter script that’s modular, that’s context-dependent, and has
a lot of
variation depending on where you fight, how you fight. No one’s
ever done a shooter conversation where you yell to the other side and
say, “Hey, we’re friendlies!” Shooter fights that aren’t
just here’s ten enemies, finish them off, cue music, move on.
There’s a huge,
huge place for a more emergent experience in shooters. My rallying
going forward is: Much, much better writing in games and much, much
less of it."
"The end of Gears 3 is a bummer, but it’s also this
beautiful condemnation of violence. Marcus Fenix is sitting there,
covered in the
ashes of his dad staring out at this ruined landscape, saying,
“Well, we’ve won. Now what?” Your war narrative has reached its
inevitable conclusion. Now you’re going back to the beginning.
How do you tackle that?"
Bissell: "No offense to you, my friend, but I really
reject the basis of this question. You know how Argo ends. You know
how
Schindler’s List ends. It’s never the what of a story that’s
important, it’s the how. Just because you know Baird and Cole get
to the
end of the story alive doesn’t mean that really cool,
interesting, twisty-turny stuff can’t happen during it."
Auten: "I read that question a little differently.
What you’re talking about is, how do you propose anything after
that timeline.
That’s a conversation we had with the guys in Carolina. There’s
this movie called Sans Soleil by Chris Marker that I like a lot.
There’s a discussion in it about what comes after a revolution,
what comes in the day after. You wake up the next day, and the
thought
is, “Well now the real problems start.” That’s what I think
is interesting about Gears. The were able to end it, but the question
of
what that civilization becomes is up in the air. This is a society
that’s fought a hundred year war against the Locust. Who they are
and what they become as a civil society is a really fascinating
question. For Judgment, though, we relished the opportunity to go
back
before that point."
"That’s very much what I was getting at. Forget all the
character questions. These are all interesting people. The fact that
Cole
Train became an interesting character in Gears 3 speaks volumes
about the opportunity to tell great stories with all these people no
matter what. The question is how does the post-war perspective
inform the way you write the beginning of the story?"
Bissell: "The great tension at the center of a game
like this is that the four characters the players control always kick
everyone’s
ass and yet the rest of the army seems to keep losing. That’s a
weird kind of gamism that you just have to accept. We dealt with it
by
showing in the COG the seeds of their misunderstanding about the
enemy they’re fighting. Baird, being a smart guy, realized this was
a
different kind of war that needed different kinds of methods. The
reason Helos Squad gets court-martialed is that they go against the
COG’s Pendulum War-era mindset. Baird, though, is in a
post-E-Day mindset. Like a post-9/11 mindset, Baird’s in a
post-E-Day mindset.
So the fun was showing that in Judgment."
"Epic is this very American video game maker. Gears of War is
this very American game, down to the fact that the fiction has its
own
spit-take version of the NFL. People Can Fly, on the other hand,
is a very Polish development studio. How has that Polish perspective
changed Gears?"
Auten: "The guys at People Can Fly are largely a
pan-continental and UK-bred crew. There is a European flare to these
guys, but
they’re also very culturally adept people. Their very conversant
in American culture, film, music, and literature. In a way, they
realize that even being based in Warsaw, in order to make games
for the world they would have to become more than what they might
have
been. There’s a really impressive cultural awareness in everyone
we worked with there."
"One thing I will say is that in this game we have our first
character from the UIR, which is sort of the Gears equivalent of the
USSR. A lot of fun that was had with that was making a more grave
character with a Russian sensibility to him. That’s the wink to the
game’s origins."
Bissell: "The architecture, especially in the first
level of the game, is this wonderful mash up of Prague and Warsaw."
Auten: "It’s a much less Anglican than previous
games. We’re talking about a relatively subtle palette here, but
they really opened up
it up to different sorts of buildings. It’s gorgeous."
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