Have you ever noticed that it seems that no matter what product you are now, you are spending a lot of time telling stories and doing content packaging?
Needless to say, quadratic elements are their core element. In addition to the second dimension, the head products of the size of "Glory of kings" and "Peace Elite" and some products with more light gameplay are committed to creating a world with strict settings.
In this regard, Tencent's trend is particularly obvious: Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent Group, has repeatedly mentioned "Narrative Design" in his speech, and made it clear that it is an essential element of Tencent's so-called "high potential energy product" - "It is a combination of worldview, empathy, human setting, and narrative, which can create a rich and participatory world through the design of game plots, characters and environments, allowing players to establish a sense of identity." ”
"Narrative Design" is also known as "narrative design", which sounds mysterious, but has actually been widely used in various industries. In the game industry, some of the narrative-oriented AAA masterpieces will also be implemented by full-time writers and designers.
In the domestic game industry, this link has received more and more attention - a team once told Grape Jun that the script of their products had been specially hired by the Hollywood team to polish and add interaction in the game. However, to say who has formed a system and done a pure fire, it may not be enough.
In this case, how does Tencent view narrative design? Recently, Grape Jun and the "Ask the Explosive Gamer" column group of Tencent Game Academy interviewed Lucia, a narrative design expert from Tencent Photonic Studio Group. She joined Tencent Games in 2009, was responsible for the world view architecture of the IP of "God of War", and led the team to set up the narrative middle platform of Photon, which supported the IP research and development and expansion of more than 20 products, and is currently responsible for the IP cultural creation work of "Peace Elite".
You can learn about this sharing through the interview video or the interview transcript below:
< h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > worldview cannot be complete, but the subject matter must be clear</h1>
GrapeVine Jun: Tencent's narrative team generally intervenes in research and development in what links?
Lucia: If it is the introduction of IP, the narrative can basically wait for the gameplay to be determined before doing it; if it is an original IP, from the moment it is born, the narrative team must be in place, and must participate in the early stages such as the definition of the art style and the design of the core gameplay.
GrapeVine: How is this idea usually born?
Lucia: There are two ways: the first is based on the goal and the result, that is, it clearly targets a wave of users and deduces the type and tone of the product according to the demands of the market; the second is based on subjective expression, which is more private and artistic, that is, the creator conveys the theme and spirit to others through the carrier of the work.
Many times, we don't know which direction the narrative design is going, which is essentially a lack of expressive desire. The stronger the creator's desire to express, the greater his promotion and influence on the work.
Grapevine: This direction can be understood as determining the theme, right? How important is this?
Lucia: Yes. Most of the situations we've encountered—whether it's a large team or a mini game—one of the hardest things for R&D is getting thematics from 0 to 1. Because this is the cornerstone of the narrative, it also determines the trade-offs for subsequent development, and it needs to be unanimously approved by the entire team.
Grapevine: What is the form of the theme?
Lucia: It could be distilled into a sentence, or a word. For example, faith, persistence, love, freedom, protection, etc., it is often universal and characteristic at the same time. Universality represents the extent to which it can resonate, and characteristics represent the viewpoint and value orientation of the work.
Hidetaka Miyazaki's "Dark Souls" and "Only Wolves" and other works
The theme of "life and death" is explored with the help of "immortality"
GrapeVine: Can it be understood as the basic values of the work?
Lucia: Yes. In addition, in addition to the research and development link, the theme is also very helpful in the publicity link. If a strong and powerful theme is identified, then the marketing events and media materials of the product extension can become the transmission and feeling extension of the game narrative tone.
Previously, colleagues with distribution lines lamented when chatting with me that some products could not find a grip when they went online, and did not know where the differences between products and competitors were, which was likely to be due to the lack of a clear theme in the early stage of research and development.
Grapevine: How long does it usually take to determine the theme?
Lucia: Immeasurable, usually discussed and polished throughout the demo phase.
Grapevine: In the demo stage, what does the narrative team mainly do?
Lucia: Two things, one is to build a worldview architecture to provide a feasible framework and design boundaries for the subsequent scale, and the other is to slice the narrative performance, in addition to the running function, to help understand the market perception level of the product.
GrapeVine: What is this slice going to look like? Is it to convey the feeling of the whole worldview?
Lucia: It's not necessarily a holistic worldview, it's going to have an abstract emotional conveyance — what impression does this work give me? This first impression is very important.
Even if it is only a very small slice, it will contain a clear narrative expression and illustrate the theme through experience. You can put slices on the market, through user feedback, perceive what to expect from the future of the product, and judge whether you need to adjust the theme and design direction accordingly - Black Myth: Wukong does just that.
Grapevine Jun: What levels of content are generally needed to support the construction of a worldview? What makes it complete?
Lucia: It's impossible to construct a complete worldview. In the case of our real world, can you feel the whole picture? Assuming that Antarctica is a lie made up by everyone in the world, you may not be able to falsify it for a while because you have not been there. The world is true and false, and it is ever-changing. And those vast "settings" will continue to increase with the expansion of our cognitive boundaries.
Back in the virtual world, the worldview architecture is also impossible to be perfect. Especially when R&D capacity is limited, the detailed design will definitely be prioritized in the place where the player can see it in the field of vision - as long as the map does not extend to the "South Pole", "South Pole" can stay in the text legend forever. After that, as the version continues to iterate, the experience of the worldview will become more and more abundant, just like the process of historical evolution and civilization precipitation.
Grapevine: How to define the boundaries of the worldview? Where does it start and end?
Lucia: First of all, we need to understand the concept and role of the worldview: the worldview is the view of the world. In essence, the worldview is a systematic solution to the subject's confusion and questioning of the objective world. How much confusion the subject has about the world (why) maps how much the subject needs for the answer to the question (what is).
Why, in reality, philosophical and theological questions always go to the same place, and are our ultimate questions? It is the person seeking a meaning. From the bottom of the perception, to the final metaphysical pursuit, this is a path for people to look at the world, and we do the worldview architecture in reverse.
Grapevine: This is also known as God's perspective.
Lucia: That's right, we're going to start from the "singularity" at the top: If I were God, why did I make up this world? What is the difference between it and the other worlds? Will this difference lead to contradictions and conflicts of events, leading to different meanings of people's existence?
In World of Warcraft, an alliance of multiple countries, factions, and city-states
and a tribe made up of orcs from the Outer Realms, the native race of Azeroth
It forms the two core conflicting camps of the game
Under such contradictions and conflicts, the level of civilization, camp power and goal pursuit in different regions will be different. Among these differences, which angle to seek as the entry point for the story will eventually be reflected in the player's emotional feelings, which is a reverse design process. Therefore, the result of narrative design is emotional feelings, while the design of worldview is rational logic.
In the early stages of construction, our highest priority was to deal with the "kernel requirement" to establish the connection between the core contradictions and conflicts of the world and the narrative theme. Because the core contradiction and conflict is that the player will directly feel through the behavior when experiencing it in the future, and the player's experience behavior must point to and echo the narrative theme.
Although the work of worldview architecture is complex, its core is the choice of characters or players in the face of various contradictions and conflicts under the narrative theme. Once this "kernel requirement" is solved, we can create countless characters, events, and story lines that are strung into the architecture and weave a vast web of worlds.
GrapeVine Jun: The setting around the theme and contradictions, is it not the more detailed the better?
Lucia: No, it's going to be phased. At the beginning of the project, we were talking about metaphysical things. If a work has ten generations and expresses the same theme, the theme must be discussed for a long time; the second stage is to build the structure and explain the theme; the third stage, when the details are split down, it is necessary to involve the content development.
But when the previous stage is not over, do not open the next one, which will lead to the wrong direction. For example, everyone is still discussing the stage of the theme, but the project has to start map production, there must be a map story design first, can you think of one first? But the direction of the story is ever-changing, and the theme is the entry point. The error of the entry point is likely to cause a waste of resources, and once the underlying setting changes, it will be fallacious.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > storytelling is not the same as narrative, conveying emotions is the key</h1>
Grapevine: In a game with a story line, what do you need to do first when you reach the story stage?
Lucia: The first step is to plan the length of time the user, which is the invisible scale of the player's experience of the world. Determine the result first, and then push backwards from the goal: for example, in the open world, the scale of story communication will be tightened, but it will interfere more with openness; but if you want to create a strong feeling, closed experience, you will take into account the problem of experience density, first determine the length and goal and then arrange the content;
The second step is to clarify the target effect of the narrative. That is, to clarify whether we want players to have an extremely intense and unforgettable experience after the game experience, such as extreme anger, extreme sadness, extreme fear, etc., or a more relaxed, free, and unrestrained feeling;
The third step is to disassemble the player's experience structure and emotional point delivery. The "Emotion Line" can help designers determine when new quests need to be delivered, how many levels are platform periods, and where the most important levels and BOSS resources are placed. The investment point of strong resources must also be the strongest place in the user's emotional experience, and in the same way, story content and multimedia resources will also be invested at this point. Therefore, the "emotional line" must be run into by the game planner and the narrative designer, and finally confirmed.
Finally, when creating specifically, it is also necessary to examine how detailed each story paragraph should be cut according to the length of the experience, whether it is 3 stories or 30 stories. We need to split in the macro beginning→ development → results, and constantly set small plot climaxes, so that users can maintain "flow" and let all experiences run through.
GrapeVine: Is this the content development method determined by industrialization?
Lucia: It's not industrialization, it's about the way of working that is determined by the definition of narrative. "Narrative design is not the same as storytelling" is a misunderstanding that I usually need to eliminate at the beginning of the narrative class. The literal meaning of "narrative" and "thing" in Chinese is "storytelling", which leads to our usual misunderstanding of narrative design.
Story is just a way of expressing narrative. Narrative is about the feelings you ultimately want to convey to the user. Putting aside the user's feelings and burying one's head in writing a story, it deviates from the original intention of the narrative.
Grapevine: What is the result of this misunderstanding of treating narrative as a simple storytelling?
Lucia: Too late, thinking that the amount of wild heaping can do a good narrative. For example, a blockbuster product may throw a lot of resources into the plot performance, but this does not necessarily add points to its narrative. We can't rudely equate the game experience with the film and television experience, user feelings are the focus, how to invest in the "emotional line" to the most cost-effective position, so as to form an amplification of emotional expression, rather than the abuse of resources, is what we need to be cautious and repeatedly think about.
This also leads to another misconception: doing drama animation is to tell a story. The plot animation is about feelings, such as whether the feelings we want to convey are sad or angry? Based on this feeling, how to write the script? After reading the script, did it make me feel sad? If not, just explain the plot clearly, this script is not qualified.
So we've been talking about the essence of narrative —through techniques, methods to achieve feelings, and it's always about the result. Talking about the process of results aside, it will go against the grain. The same plot, ten screenwriters can write in ten ways, but which is what you want? This is a narrative multiple choice.
GrapeVine: Are most of the narrative works backwards from the results?
Lucia: Not exactly. For example, or sadness, some directors will express it in the form of rendering sadness, such as "1942", you will feel torn when you watch it; but you see Kore-eda's film, the depth bomb, which makes you feel sad without a trace. It is also to create this strong feeling, everyone has a different style, we call it the discourse style.
It is a still from Kore-eda and "Thief Family"
Narrative discourse is divided into two levels: technique and metaphysics. Some methodologies will guide you how to use the technique, and some masters have become very proficient, even beyond the technique, and they have formed a style. Therefore, the invocation of discourse is the most interesting point in the narrative. In art design, installation design, you can especially feel this.
Grape Jun: Many people still have a relatively common problem in the process: how to avoid getting stuck when creating?
Lucia: It's a particularly cruel, difficult question to face — why is it stuck? Are you really uninspired? No. It is because some designs and goals are contradictory, and as a creator, I am reluctant to slash and slash.
For example, every year we have a lot of students doing mini games, and we will emphasize in class that we should not do it before we think clearly, otherwise we will not be able to change it when the time comes. They don't necessarily understand it in class, but when they can't do it, they find that there is a difference of opinion because the team does not agree on the topic.
In fact, the same is true for large projects, which is a matter of trade-offs, and large projects are not as easy to turn around as small projects. We may need several versions in a very continuous row, such as half a year to a year of effort, to make up for the previous design.
Grapevine: Isn't there a situation where you suddenly don't know how to write?
Lucia: The same question, first of all, the reason: why can't I write it? Is it because of the lack of a plot? Did you find that your character has changed from the original setting? Or is the structure already wrong, resulting in infinite delay in the follow-up, and there is no way to return to the core contradiction? Most likely structural reasons, or the wrong direction.
The solution is to keep asking: Why is this happening? Be tough on yourself, and you will eventually ask the root cause. In large projects or long-term research and development projects, this problem can easily be exposed.
Grapevine Jun: So if you don't dwell on the story, how can you do a good job of narration and convey the appropriate emotions to the player?
Lucia: There is no story, there is narrative discourse, that is, through the design of the communication method, the emotional feelings are transmitted to the player. For example, if you want to create a "sad emotion", you can not only let NPCs tell a sad story, but also directly put the player in a sad experience.
In Detroit: Becoming Human, the player builds sympathy for the heroine Carla by "experiencing" the day when she does all the housework but still has to endure injustice.
In addition to the operating experience, different media materials can also enhance emotional perception. Like a piece of music, an old photo, a beam of light that illuminates the darkness... Environments, props, lighting, color composition, UI, and more can all help improve narrative effectiveness.
Then go back and think about it: What is the narrative? It's about passing on the feelings of sadness to you. But is this something that can only be done by storytelling? No, you can understand that the person responsible for narrative design is more like a producer-director, responsible for the outcome of the experience, while the screenwriter is responsible for solving the story creation.
Grapevine: Sometimes conveying emotions can have a counterproductive effect, what do you think is the reason?
Lucia: There are two possible reasons, one is that the discourse is not coordinated. For example, some directors in the movie think that the plot is touching, but the audience finds it funny. Is that the actor's performance is funny, the lines are funny, or the soundtrack is inappropriate? Or is it obviously a sad, terrifying emotion, but it uses a sunny picture and a balanced composition? When the narrative discourse and the goal are inconsistent, it will interfere with the feelings you want to convey. What we have to do is to locate the cause first, and then modify the incongruous discourse;
Another reason is that there is a problem with the theme selection. For example, the emotion that the creator wants to convey, the user is completely without resonance, then no matter how well the narrative is done, the user will deny your narrative position from the beginning.
GrapeVine: In practice, how do we improve our narrative level?
Lucia: All three elements need to be promoted. First, the narrator's self-improvement. What do you want to talk to the world about, what do you want to discuss with your audience? A lot of people think, "I don't have anything to express," which is a very real, common status quo. And the source of some artists' appeal is that they even want to travel through time and space to discuss something with you. If we want to improve this, only by relying on a lot of reading, feeling and deep thinking can we know how to solve problems and where to start when facing them;
Hideo Kojima once said in an interview
The theme of Death Stranding is the "connection" between people.
Second, master the discourse of the narrative. There are many ways to do this, music, shots, composition, all have their own language. For example, when telling a story, the protagonist falls silent, what kind of instruments and chords should be used to show emotions at this time, whether to add open and unclear small triad chords, etc. All are exquisite;
Third, it comes down to the story itself. With the development of the film and television industry for a hundred years, the story has a relatively mature creative system. The methodology can help us achieve 60-70 points of user-oriented creation, but if you want to impress people, you will eventually return to the sincerity that the narrator wants to convey, which is the closed loop of the overall improvement of the narrative.
Grapevine Jun: So compared with other media, is the narrative advantage of the game in that it has a wider dimension and more discourse?
Lucia: Yes, because narrative is inherently linguistic. Linguistics studies "how information is conveyed through a medium."
For example, I am the "sender", you are the "recipient", and "letter" is our medium. You will find that even if I have a thousand words to say, the way I choose to express it may already cause the emotion I want to express to lose information at the starting point; and when you read it, there may be some information that is lost again because it is incomprehensible, but at the same time it creates new information in the imagination, so that the letter becomes richer, not completely equal to, and may even exceed, what the original "sender" wanted to express. On the whole, narrative research is "how to make users feel exactly what I want to convey.".
Under this premise, each medium has its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, the advantage of fiction over all other mediums is that it can manipulate time. When you read a novel, you are not equal to the real world—it can infinitely enlarge a second, or it can make a thousand years pass in an instant. And you can go to a person's soul through fiction, with unlimited imagination space, because the picture is made up of yourself;
When it comes to film and television, it gives up part of the imagination and part of the time that can be quickly changed, but in exchange for a stronger visual feeling and the subjective initiative of the director. The disadvantage is that it's less engagable, and you're still in a passive, indoctrinated process of thinking by the director. What you feel, mostly what he wants you to feel;
And the game is an advanced version of the narrative carrier. Earlier we mentioned the media forms of novels, film and television, so can architecture and space give people a strong narrative feeling? Of course, it is also possible - the glitz of Baroque architecture, the solemnity of Gothic architecture are the expressions contained in the space itself. It conveys this mood and atmosphere through the language of spatial structure.
The largest Gothic building in the world: the Cathedral of Milan
So can architectural language be put into the game? OK. Therefore, the carrier of the game is far more than other media, and the boundaries of performance are also wider. Basically, you can think that novels, movies and television are more closed, and games are more open.
Grapevine: What inspiration do you think the discourse calls of other media can bring to the narrative design of the game?
Lucia: Making games is backward compatible. If you want to have a strong narrative performance in the game, then we just mentioned these things, you must at least understand something, because each medium has characteristics, and designers need to actively choose.
To give a simple example: if the player is going to a location, you can do a beginner guide in the game and let him automatically find his way; but in some works, the player will use distant markers to let the player walk naturally.
This technique is often used in Journey
This technique has also been used by Disney – every area will have a tall marker, which is for the diversion of people. But when it's hidden in the narrative of the scene, you can't feel it, and there won't be a tour guide telling you, "Please evacuate this way." That's what we're thinking about – are you going to say it, or is it something else that's going to happen? That's the trick.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > rational thinking and personal expression, which is important to us all</h1>
Grape Jun: Creating IP and doing content packaging seem to be valued by more and more manufacturers, why do you think there is such a change?
Lucia: At different stages of the industry's development, the original intention of the project is different. For example, in the era of end games, everyone just wants to create new IP and gameplay, and does not consider costs very much. In the mobile game era around 2013, fast and new are the most important, because thinking too slowly has already fallen behind.
Later in 2017, the IP from ten years ago gradually matured and reached the stage of harvesting. Therefore, for two years, basically the entire industry has been doing IP mobile games. But when the fruit is picked, we will return to the problem of establishing our own brand and making original IP. So now we will certainly not completely pursue profits when we set up a project, but think more about the long-term asset value as ANIP and the popularity of products in the present.
GrapeVine: What do you think about the problem of content consumption getting faster and faster? Does this place higher demands on the narrative team?
Lucia: Content consumption is getting faster and faster, just the consumption of story material, but if there is a theme, it can leave the afterglow of emotional feelings, and it is enough in terms of resources. The core impression and emotional link are there, so that you can make a broader narrative based on it, or continue the follow-up product, and expand the player's emerging narrative ecology.
Grapevine: What do you think of the development of narrative-related positions in the industry?
Lucia: With the increase in high-quality projects, the current gap in literary planning is still relatively large. Literary planning positions are friends of time and need to be accumulated for a long time. In the period when the industry side changed hands, there was a wave of literary planning that could not persist, which is regrettable. At present, there are more than 10 years of literary planning talents in the industry, compared with other positions, there are few, and we are cultivating new talents every year.
GrapeVine: In the future, what do you think their development prospects are?
Lucia: We can compare the current situation of the industry in Europe and the United States: when their literary planners are forty or fifty years old, they will be narrative designers with cross-border capabilities, and may be film and television screenwriters, writers, game designers and other diverse identities. In Los Angeles, relying on Hollywood's unique industrial advantages, there are many such slash talents.
The vision of IP literature planning not only includes the narrative part of the game product, but also needs to consider how the IP core transcends the media and expands into other product forms of the IP industry chain, such as film and television, animation and interactive movies. With the improvement of the copyright system and the development of blockchain technology, the creative content industry will surely be the just need of the times.
GrapeVine: In the process of improving narrative designers, where are their key competitiveness?
Lucia: First of all, it must be comprehensive ability, and a single factor cannot determine whether a person is good or not. However, in the transformation from literary planning to architect, there will be a transformation of thinking: literary planning is relatively emotional, because he is only exposed to the facet of the story; while the architect is rational, and all the thinking he discusses with you is a framework and structure, and will not be reduced to the plot.
A lot of times it's hard to correct an idea: "I think writing a story is very subjective, huh?" I think that's right. "How do we judge whether a work is good or bad? In addition to looking at the results, we must also look at the method and logic. The core is still in reverse thinking, rather than after the self-congratulatory creation, the player does not buy it at all - for more advanced literary planning, we will ask him to say why he wrote every word he created.
Grapevine Jun: So in the stage of literary planning, can you start to think in a higher way of thinking?
Lucia: We look back at our own lives, for example, in the process of our children to college, you have to collect information, form feelings, and have experiences before you can start studying metaphysics. We must first accumulate emotional and figurative things before we can abstract and move up from the figurative.
Grapevine Jun: Do you think that the creators can pay more attention to their own personal expression when narrating?
Lucia: There are some personal expressions that will be limited in the context of the big platform. But within the scope of what we can influence, we still have to work harder to make changes. Of course, we don't mean to insist on the creator 's willfulness – if it's not a game artwork that shows the creator's independent spirit, it needs to always be discussed with the team and expand a native idea into a complete design system.
In the past, when we took classes, we would look at the history of artistic development from the development of the entire film industry: industrialization and platforming would slowly move towards the director-centric system, and the audience would go to the movie because they liked the creation of a certain director, the interpretation of the actors and the screenwriter's story, not because the film was invested by a certain platform. The same may be true of the gaming industry, where every creator is bound to emerge from history.
At present, our industry has not reached this stage. But will it be achieved in 20 years? I think in terms of trend and historical necessity, it is certain. The narrative designer is a friend of time, some of the masterpieces that touch your soul, it is the narrator who integrates his lifelong feelings and experiences into it, and is felt by the player, the theme of this narrative conveys and feels the effect, making the game jump from a cultural commodity to a work of art.