April
Tuesday 28 April 2009 photo 1/1
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Dan Houser, skaparen av GTA IV är ett geni. Läs om ni vill ta del av en riktig klok mans tankar.
'Grand Theft Auto IV' writer speaks, part 1
Posted by Eric Gwinn at 4:30 p.m.
Late last year, I had a chance to talk to media-shy Dan Houser, vice president of creative for Rockstar Games, about storytelling in video games, specifically in "Grand Theft Auto IV," on which he was lead writer. We hit it off and wound up talking for three hours. And still I didn’t get to talk about everything I wanted to cover—that’s why after the jump I post the (very long) first installment of my interview with Dan. The conversation formed the backbone of an article I wrote last month about video games possibly becoming "the literature of the 21st Century," as Chris Swain, an assistant professor of interactive media at University of Southern California, told me.
One of the things I didn’t get a chance to cover back then was today’s launch of "Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned." It’s a new chapter to the mega-selling "Grand Theft Auto IV" that launched in spring 2008.
In "The Lost and Damned," you play as a minor character in the original "Grand Theft Auto IV": Johnny, member of the Lost Boys motorcycle gang. It’s a full-fledged game that will take about 12 hours to complete, and it’s best to play it only after you’ve beaten, or have come close to finishing, "GTA IV." I’ve only played a couple of hours of it, and the storytelling and voice acting are just as compelling as Niko Bellic’s story in "GTA IV." Oh, yeah, and there are new weapons, too. And you get to ride choppers. And there’s multiplayer and hidden content and. ... Well, I’ll let you discover that yourself.
Only Xbox 360 owners who have last year’s "GTA IV" can play "The Lost and Damned," after spending 1600 Microsoft Points (about $20) to download it from Xbox Live.
Consider this post the beginning of a conversation between you and me about games. With Chicago-based Midway recently filing for bankruptcy protection—even in a world with more gamers than ever—now is the time to talk games.
First up, Dan Houser, in Rockstar’s New York offices last November. He’s a big guy in his mid-30s, maybe 6-3, 230. Would probably have made a pretty decent midfielder. Slouching in a leather chair in one of the viewing rooms on the fourth floor, he rubs a meaty hand over his shaved head, almost as if massaging his thoughts to the surface. The more excited he is about his point, the faster he rubs his head. There’s no pretense, no arrogance. He’s definitely the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with.
I’ve been wanting to do this interview since 2004, when I wrote an article about how "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" was the first video game of its magnitude to feature a black lead character for the mostly white gaming audience. That’s where we begin:
Eric Gwinn: Been looking forward to this day for quite awhile, so thanks for sitting down with us.
Dan Houser: My pleasure. Thank you.
EG: Even video games, a lot of times, don’t care about the main characters, beyond the characters’ skills, the squad he commands. How do you get into that character’s head and get that character out to the gamers without interrupting the game?
DH: Firstly we accept ... that some people are not into it. They play games for different reasons. They get different things out of the game. Maybe they like exploring the world or running around. And that’s completely valid. We put a lot of effort into characters and stories in the game, knowing that some people will not engage with that side of the game at all.
And that’s find because I think we’re excited by the way that a game engages a player or tunes into a player as opposed to a reader, a viewer or whatever. That kind of active participation is really fun.
You’re involved in a different relationship with the player than you are in any other medium, so you give them freedoms that they don’t have when they’re watching a film or reading a book or looking at a picture or whatever. Obviously there are some people who love that side of games and they’re in the bag. They’ll follow the most boring stories till its conclusion, irrelevant of how bad a job we on the story side do or not. The people we’re worried about are the people on the fence.
People will say, "I’ve played that game," when they haven’t finished the story in a way that no one would say, "I’ve read that book," when you’ve read the first 50 pages. You might say, "I’ve started that book and it was boring or it couldn’t engage me." But the way you discuss it wouldn’t assume this kind of token knowledge of it.
It’s similar to a long book or TV series in terms of how you approach it, I think, rather than a film which is like a 2-hour experience where we’re constantly trying to convince the player that continuing to go on with the story is a worthwhile pursuit. The same guy is involved in writing the story as in making the levels and designing the missions. We all kind of work together very collaboratively on that stuff. That’s where you get such good integration on a GTA game. It doesn’t feel like the story is being imposed upon by people that don’t understand how games are made.
But the way I look at it, on the one hand, a great mission can save a boring section of story, on the other hand a great section of a story with some really killer, really fun and exciting cut scenes can mange you through a boring mission and we try to ensure there’s neither at any point in the game.
We’re constantly trying to balance the need for narrative and the need for action—it’s an action game—and never slow down the action through having too much exposition and using things, like there could be boring or slower-paced sections of the game—formerly we didn’t do anything. You’d have the cut scene, then you’d have the long drive. Now, partly because we can stream so much data in, we can stream in audio and have a lot of background story and to build up the world through just two guys chatting in a car while they’re driving to do something else, so you’re covering two bases at once.
Obviously, when the action gets very intense, you can’t do anything apart from focusing on the action and give the player the information they need to survive and deal with that bit of the action, but whenever it’s less intense, you can be dealing with plot, subplot, backstory and fulfilling a functional mission objective like "Go over here" all at the same time, and I think players can completely take that in and the amount of data they’re receiving, subconsciously, they’re not realizing, "Wow, I’m actually learning about this character’s history and I’m going to this place to see their boss whom I’ve just met and don’t know a thing about,"
The fact that all of those things are coming in make the whole thing come to life, and that’s kind of what the magic of it is—if it works, when it works well, that stuff all coming together at once is one of the things we’re aiming for, so that the whole experience feels cinematic and engaging and it doesn’t feel like there’s this big seismic difference between—"Well, here’s a cut scene, where players behave and speak one way and animate in one way, and here’s the game, where they’re totally different."
When we first went into doing this, they had to look different, because "GTA I," it was all top-down and in any video game back in the mid-90s, you couldn’t make cut scenes using game assets that would look tolerable and I think we realized that was going to become an important part of our approach through the development of "GTA III," where we devised that system of doing cut scenes using mo-cap data and in-game models, so there wasn’t this big difference between the two and that was when we realized, "Wow, the stories will get really exciting in this medium. This open-world game has this enormous power because you can tell a tight story and a very diffuse urban experience non-narrative story at the same time.
EG: You talk about exposition. Did you explore the possibility of starting the story in war-torn Eastern Europe, so we get the full essence of Niko—his relationship to his mom, everything—before coming to the United States, so there’s more doing than talking?
DH: Yeah, we ... it definitely crossed ... my mind and a couple of other peoples’ minds who don’t have to worry about making the art assets at various points.
But it really came down to in this game, where we had a lot of new power, it was decided that we could put in a slightly more expanded backstory than we’d ever done in the past, even in "San Andreas," which has the next-biggest backstory, or "Vice City Stories" has a relatively big backstory as well. But it was still backstory. So if you’re interested in it, you could discover it, but if you’re not interested in it, you don’t have to. It was felt like that would almost be a distraction.
Doing things like flashbacks in some games can work but in an open-world game it feels very cumbersome, so you then have to do some of that before the whole game started, which took away from, for me, what was the best visual—because also it’s a visual medium as much as a narrative medium and learning from both the visual aspect of filmmaking as well as narrative aspects of film and TV and books and a bunch of other things and trying to fuse them together into something that’s uniquely our own—is that moment on the ship where he’s coming to America on a boat and it was such a classic moment.
We wanted that to be the opening, these two guys talking about their hopes and dreams and all this other weird crap is going on in the background that gives it a very contemporary feeling—smuggling this and smuggling that, people smuggling and 50 different races and languages on this boat with about 8 people on it. That felt like a very contemporary twist on the classic arriving-in-New-York-by-ship image. That felt like a much better starting image for the game.
When you look out over the boat and there’s the city skyline, that felt like that was the way to start the game and on the other hand the way we were treating the back story is nobody really knows—and it was very important to us—that we wanted him coming from war-torn Europe and we wanted him coming from somewhere in war-torn Europe, that meant he was about that age and that put it on the Balkans but now you could put it somewhere else, but what we didn’t want was to focus on the details of that conflict.
It’s not important, the fact he was fighting on this side or that side, so we know he speaks Serbian but we don’t know on which side he was fighting. It’s very, very not clear because he was a kid in a militia and the whole point was that ruined his life and tormented him and afflicted him and created all these weird perceptions in the other guys. It doesn’t really matter what side they were on; they were doing what they were told and they didn’t know if it was wrong or right and that was very important to us because we didn’t want to get involved in real-world conflicts or real-world issues in this sort of distorted version of the world, so it was just, like, an event that happened in the past, where these were just pawns in someone else’s thing and what side they fought on and what their opinions were, they never talked about that. I don’t even have a clear opinion on it. We deliberately didn’t do that so the war was like a myth in their background. It was this shadowy thing where it affected them up close and personally but it wasn’t a political thing. It was like an emotional response to it. And that was how we wanted it to feel for them.
We didn’t want it to feel like, "Well, you know, but I lost this war because of this decision," and that wasn’t really relevant. We just wanted normal guys, foot soldiers, grunts in wars, 10 years later they’re not really able to move past that stuff. That was as much as that war was supposed to represent to them. It was almost pointless, the wrongs and rights of it were not really relevant here. It was just brought up because it was so horrible.
EG: That also gave you some freedom when he comes to America and he starts doing things and working with characters that ... he sees the objective he wants to reach, so he’s doing these things to get to that objective, just as a foot soldier would do in a militia.
DH: Yeah, we wanted him to feel like he was tough, hardened, emotionally damaged and physically very hardened and a tough guy who had doing bad things, but it didn’t really matter what those things were in terms of—we didn’t want to start casting moral judgments about political decisions he had taken, just the fact that they were bad actions, if that makes any sense. It wasn’t important what he was doing apart from they were bad things and things where he was naive and got made cynical by. And he got involved in organized crime in Europe, which is factually more important in the story because he gets sucked back into that world. But definitely the fact that he had this kind of military past was useful for why anyone would want to employ him as an operative for them in Liberty City—because he was very capable and cold and almost militaristic in the way he approached stuff.
EG: What in Niko’s character just kept him from saying, "Screw this. I’m going back home. Even though there’s less there. I know what’s back home. This place makes no sense to me"?
DH: I don’t know. It wouldn’t be much of a game if he did that (laughs). Of course, at a certain level, in any of these kinds of games when the person’s constantly having to risk their life, that becomes a challenge: What is big enough in someone’s life that you can justify suggesting they would constantly put themselves in this amount of danger? So we tried to build a framework around Niko and his previous experiences that would make that make sense or at least lead to enough of a suspension of disbelief in the mind of the player that they’re not going, "It’s ridiculous. Doing that for $100?"
It had to be more than money, it has to be more than anything financial because you’re like, "Well, then, just rob that person, and do it thousand times and you can make all the money, or you can do anything you want to do—money’s not worth this." So we always try to make it something more than money that drives the character through these games and this time it felt revenge was the best thing that would make someone like this motivated to do that and then also because he does care about his cousin and he gets sucked into his cousin’s life. He (Niko) turns up in America believing that it’s going to be like his cousin’s e-mails, Roman’s e-mails, and it’s nothing like that.
And then at the same time Roman’s very charming and seems like, oh, he’s only one—Niko’s sufficiently naive that he maybe believes that a couple of good breaks and maybe a few good rolls of the dice and we will be doing much better and living in the world of hot tubs and easy women they aspire to. And then quickly enough, they get dragged in and from the moment Niko realizes he’s being watched by various government forces, there isn’t really a way out. So you’re only really doing that first section of the game when it seems crazy but it’s still optimistic enough by the time Roman’s getting his place burned down, there isn’t really anywhere to go. Go home? You can’t because you’re being watched by high-level people in the Russian mob, not the clowns and lunatics you were working for. You realize high-level people whom you owe money to are back on your case, the government’s on your case, there’s nowhere to go.
EG: And he also wants to find out why things wound up for him, back in Europe, the way that they did ...
DH: Well, you still do ...
EG: ... so there’s someone he has to find.
DH: He knows that Bernie Crane, or Florian, is there (in Liberty City) and he’s still looking for him. In terms of thinking, "That’s not enough of a reason," by a certain point in the story, he’s trapped anyway. Clearly he’s prepared to risk a lot to try to find this guy, so clearly he was a big enough reason to.
EG: In books and movies, the author, the screenwriter controls the viewers view. But in interactive media, I can jump in and out of the story, I can even jump in and out of character. I can actually have Niko do things that may or may not fit his character. Because basically, he’s a good guy with a good heart who’s just been hardened by his experiences.
DH: Yeah, but he’s pretty tough. He’s very tough, though.
EG: Yeah but still, he’s tough, right, but he’s still ... . For instance, the kid who gets out of jail who has lost everything, he empathizes with him, he sympathizes with him. There is goodness in Niko. But in playing the game, I can make him do things that seem completely out of character, like going out and getting a six-star rating for somebody who’s trying to keep a low profile. How do you justify those seeming dualities?
DH: Beyond a certain point, you can’t. You can always break his character because you are in control of his character. So what we try and do is create a character that through knowing what the game is and what the various things you can do are, is to ensure anything that is breaking his character may be more extreme but just about fit in the realms of what his character’s possibilities are, which is why he has to be —on the one hand, in my opinion, it doesn’t work in the game if the lead guy is just an out-and-out jerk the entire game, it’s just not fun, it’s no fun: "Well, these people disrespected me; well, I’m going to go kill all of them. They did it again. I’m going to kill them again." It gets very monotonous.
He has to have some form of challenge or quest or story to work through when he’s fighting forces bigger than himself. But at the same time, because he can run around and do whatever he wants in the world, he can’t be just a classic hero. You’re trying to find the balance between the hero and the antihero the whole time and we do a lot of work to try and ensure that you get that balance right, so that when you are running around getting six stars or you’re off dating this girl or when you’re playing this story mission or when you’re just running around doing crazy stuff, it still fits in broadly with who his character is.
And it’s definitely a balancing act, because the more detail you give this character, and the more you put in reasons and justifications for everything about him, be it "Why would you be interested in dating girls?" or "Why would you be interested in doing rampages?" So you just try and ensure that it still stays within the premise of what you can do in the game, what the game’s about and it kind of works, and hopefully we pull it off. But it’s definitely a big challenge as we develop these initial lead characters, which is one of the things we do fairly early in development, and it gets more fleshed in when we do the full writing but there’s certainly a decent enough biography, at least in a few of our minds, before that process starts.
You’ve got to figure out: "That’s what this game is. What archetypes are going to work? What nuances can we give our guy that are going to feel still tight when you do start just to mess around?" We’ve got to have some kind of sense of fun, because there are lots of distractions in the game. At the same time, he’s got to have a moral code in a certain way and absolutely no moral code in another way. Finding that balance is definitely a challenge that comes out. Sometimes we’ll look at it as we’re playing the game to its completion and go: "It doesn’t make sense. This puts him really out of character." Even within relatively controlled bits that we’re more in control of, like, side stories and subplots and such like that, and we’ll rework it and reshoot a cut scene, change some dialogue or put a phone call or e-mail (into the plot) that makes it make sense. But it definitely is a challenge, particularly when you’re doing something on that kind of scale, where you’ve got a hundred missions, X side missions, e-mails, thousands of lines of individual dialogue, it’s all got to feel like it’s this broader personality, without it being so tight that you’ll go: "Oh, well, he’s a neurotic sociopath!" But it can’t be so tight that when you’re not doing that, it doesn’t work. That is definitely a balancing act that hopefully we get right. That was something that when we first made a character talk, in "Vice City," we were very conscious of and very nervous about, was how do you do that? You don’t want to break that bond between the player and his avatar by making his avatar so overbearing that he gets pissed off with him. So, we’ve always tried to find the good, without them all becoming the same person, particularly with the three very big ones—Tommy Vercetti, C.J. and then Niko—you always tried to make it that they work in that world without fully breaking the relationship between the player and them. You still want to feel like, "I am C.J., I am Niko, I am Tommy, but he’s still a cooler version of me in that world." So it’s a difficult balance.
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