Re-release: Bioshock Creator Ken Levine on Judas, Writing and Narrative in Games | The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook

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Hey everyone, I'm Adam Orth.

Welcome to the Game Maker's Notebook.

Today I'm speaking with Ken Levine, co-founder and creative director of Ghost Story Games.

In this episode, we discuss fostering the first creative spark, using art as a healthy outlet for processing uncomfortable subjects, navigating the pressure of continued success following critical and commercial acclaim, revisiting narrative Lego 10 years later, and the complexities of AI and machine learning as game development tools in 2023.

Hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to The Game Maker's Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in-depth one-on-one conversations between game makers, providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.

The Game Maker's Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a member-driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment.

Again, welcome to the game makers notebook.

Thanks for coming.

Glad to be here, adam.

Good to see you.

Yeah, it's good to see you too.

We've got uh, a lot of friends in common and have uh have been going back and forth for a few years now.

So um, good to actually meet you face to face For the first time people, because you've been seeing them on social media for some, but I guess we've never actually directly.

No, I mean, a bunch of emails.

And obviously we have some pretty close friends in common, especially with Joe McDonough, who says hello, by the way, anyone who's not familiar with your work.

You're currently the co-founder and creative director of Ghost Story Games, which is an offshoot of Rational

Obviously, you've created some of the most critically acclaimed games in video game history with Bioshock series and your work looking glass before that.

So thanks for coming, happy to have you here and today.

I wanted to talk a little bit about.

I mean, I have a lot of stuff to talk to you about.

We'll never never cover it all, but I wanted to dig into your roots and heroes and impulses as a creative.

I'm really interested to find out how you started.

You and I have kind of a similar story about how we got into games by coming out to LA and focusing on something else, and then For me it was music.

For you, it was screenwriting.

But that, you know, for me, music starts early, early, early in my childhood.

And that was my creative like seed and impulse.

So take me back to your kind of earliest memory of something that you remember, kind of stirring your kind of creative interests and and where that took you.

Yeah, so i had, like i guess the earliest earliest is you remember like in school, like in fifth grade, you'd write a story and then you have to like bind it in like a little book.

You'd have to like make the binding and everything yeah, and illustrate it.

I wrote a story like some like alien invasion story, you know, on par with a fifth grader.

And I had no, and all of a sudden like everybody, like, and I was not like a super popular kid.

All of a sudden, everybody was like all excited about the story.

And I had, and I was like, okay, cool.

And I won the best story in the class or whatever.

And then, uh, next year we did it and I did it again.

I won it again.

And I, but I never, that was like fifth, sixth grade.

And then I never really thought about writing at all after that.

And until I was working at um and I I, I you know I was a big consumer of like comic books and um video games.

You know, I, I think I've talked about this before.

I've, I've been in, Video games are literally into video games since they started, you know, because, you know, I don't know how you are.

You were probably roughly in the ballpark with each other.

I'm probably very, very close, very close to the same ballpark.

I was when Pong came out and when and when Space Invaders came out and Pac-Man and all those games.

It was like immediate, immediate connection for me, and comic books and and, and you know, movies and all those things I loved.

And you know, I was there at Star Wars and opening weekend in 77 and was just like completely blown away.

But I had no sense that I had a creative sort of instinct.

And so I won I won those little contests in my fifth grade class or whatever.

And then that just nothing.

I didn't do anything.

I didn't write anything until I was working at this.

I was at the summer camp.

It's this camp called Bucks Rock.

It's sort of very it's sort of like what are those schools for? it was very open-ended schools.

Montessori.

It was sort of like Montessori summer camp.

And you got to just like go to the camp and they had all these different arts.

Like you can go do glass blowing.

You can go do pottery or go to the print shop and like and do like this magazine or boutique or whatever.

And you could freely wander around from productivity to activity.

There was no sort of structure and it wasn't like normal summer camps, like you'd have to get up and do swimming lessons and then you play sports.

You could do all that stuff if you wanted to, but you really got to drive it and there was some like talent show or something and i was like what, if i like, wrote something for it, And I sat down one afternoon.

I just wrote a play, a one-act play.

And it was like discovering a room in your house.

I was like probably 14, 15, maybe 14.

And I had been in theater at the camp.

I was doing like audio design, which mostly meant like carrying heavy speakers around for theater productions.

And I was behind the scenes.

And that was cool.

I like being around theater, but I never thought of myself as a creative person.

And then I wrote this play.

And then I put it on.

It was a two-person play, a very short one act.

And writing that play was like finding this room in your house you didn't know existed.

You know you have that dream ever where you find that room in your house like, oh my god, i didn't realize i had a whole, like you know, extra wing of my house.

It was like finding that and it was so, such like a electrifying experience.

And then i put it on and people really liked it and i was like oh, Maybe I can, maybe this is something I do, you know, and it definitely is like I was very lucky.

Like writing a talent of any kind is a real, you know, it's like you don't earn it.

It's a stroke of luck, right?

Like I've been trying to play guitar.

You can probably see the guitars behind me for like 30 years now and i'm i've got five of them right here.

So yeah, so you're i.

I am like i have hand-eye coordination issues so i just really can't play, but i love it and i've been playing for 30 years and i'm never going anywhere.

I can't write a song i'm.

That's not musical, but i love music.

But with writing it was just like i just lucked out.

I guess i just got whatever it is you know from you know whatever powers it.

Be that, let me have a little bit of talent there.

And so I just kept started.

I just sort of like then started entering contests.

You know, a writing contest like teenager writing contests.

And I started doing well in those contests, like national contests and things like that.

And eventually I got you know, like the point where like, I won some awards and Stephen Sondheim was involved and he wrote me a nice letter.

For those who don't know, he's a very famous Broadway composer.

That's pretty good.

And he wrote me this very sweet handwritten letter, and I wrote back to him, and he wrote back.

And then I got invited to New York to be in this sort of little program for the people who won these contests and I got mentored there.

And then I just started putting on plays.

And when I went to college and in high school I just would write plays and put them on and raise the money.

And that was a hugely valuable experience for a couple of reasons.

One is it taught me.

I think you probably agree this production is production, is production.

But you're producing games or plays, or even magazines or anything.

There's – what you learn in production is that you have a vision of something in your head, and then what does it turn out – how do you get it to be good with – it's never going to be the thing you exactly see in your head.

So how do you get it to be – to actually get produced while – what compromises do you make?

What changes do you make?

And I started learning those lessons.

I also learned sort of entrepreneurial skills.

I had to put on a play and I had to cast it and I had to keep a bunch of teenagers engaged who weren't getting paid, who would rather go off and drink beer and kiss girls or whatever.

And you learn how to – sort of how to work with people and how to try to realize a vision and how to make them help you realize the vision you have in your head and also how to collaborate with them.

And so by the time I, you know, got out of college, I had produced a bunch of plays.

You know nothing huge.

And I just learned about production.

And then I, you know, through that process, I ended up working at the summer theater at my college.

They had a big, cool summer theater.

Like a New York group came up and it's like summer stock there basically.

And I met a writer who's a well, fairly well-known writer and he was working there and I was just a carpenter at the summer theater.

I wasn't like employed creatively.

Um, And I was only a carpenter because I got fired from another – from like a waiter job.

So my failure as a waiter led me to taking this carpentry job, which I wasn't very good at.

But I met this writer.

I showed him my writing and he's like well, I'll introduce you to my agent because he liked my writing.

And then I got in the Hollywood thing and I've talked about that story before but It sort of was a sequence of events but started with just being like oh, I guess I can do this.

And it was much easier than when I tried to do a bunch of other things.

Were you looking up to anyone's work as kind of someone you wanted to emulate?

In those early stages, or was this just creative stuff that was pouring out of you?

It was total copying, right?

You know, so I went through my Neil Simon period.

I went through my Tennessee Williams period.

I went through my Arthur Miller period.

I went through my French absurdist, you know, period where I'm just copying and I'm and I would write short stories.

And I went through my Stephen King period and I went, you know, and you just copy right.

And then eventually you start figuring out what parts, you know, what you do well, right?

In that process.

But you have to, I think you really start just by, and it's like children, right?

Children start by imitation and artists start by imitation.

And eventually you learn, What makes you different?

And you never leave imitation behind.

Like I'm still stealing from the best, you know?

Yeah.

I'm always, you know, I consume a lot of art.

I'm sure you do.

And a lot of the audience does.

And there's always great ideas you can, you know, beg, borrow and steal from.

But eventually you become something that's sort of your own.

But it's still heavily influenced by all the stuff I consumed.

But I used to be very specific, like this is a very Neil Simon comedy, right?

This is a very bad Tennessee Williams style drama, right?

And then you learn, and you learn to trust yourself and you step away from those influences more and more over time.

But you never fully step away.

Yeah, I can relate to that exact same experience, having like been in bands my whole life.

And it's like, OK, this is my Kiss band and this is my Van Halen band and this is my Metallica band.

And, you know, you you kind of like. assimilate those things that are important to you.

And then, like you so accurately described, you start floating out on your own and you take little, little bits of those things with you and you start cobbling together.

You know your authentic voice.

And um it, And I think it's important, because those bands probably weren't as good as Metallica, right?

And they probably weren't as good as... Because you can't do secondhand somebody else's stuff.

Yeah, impossible.

Because you're never going to be as good as them.

So you have to, by necessity, find your own thing.

It's still always going to be influence, but...

Because you're never.

You like see a movie or you hear an album.

You're super inspired and you're just.

You know you're never going to make up.

You know you're never going to make Abbey Road or whatever.

Right.

You know, you've got to make your own thing.

And because you're never going to be like that kind of imitation is never going to lead you.

But it's super important for a young artist to use that to sort of find their footing.

So how did you transition that kind of creative inspiration from playwriting into screenwriting?

So...

Well, the first the first I had written this comedy was a very Neil Simon comedy about my family.

And I put it on in my school.

And when I met the agent, they're like, you need to write a screenplay.

And I had no idea how to write a screenplay.

So for those of those who have written screenplays, you're probably gonna laugh.

I wrote like a 63 page screenplay.

Screenplays was like 120 pages.

And I did it in the style of formatting of plays, which are very different.

Screenplays have a very specific format and and studios really care about those formats, like i was doing.

Like instead of you have, like the, the character name has to be here and then you have the bolt, the text that's indented and blah blah, blah and everything has to.

You have to do all this formal stuff where plays there's no real normal format for play, so The character name was on the side with a colon and I submitted this thing.

It was a movie of sorts, but it was really a film play, basically because I had no idea how to write a screenplay.

But I think there was enough of an interesting voice there that they responded to it, even though it was completely not really a screenplay.

And then I got a job writing a real screenplay when I got out of college. for a studio.

And it was like a, it was a rewrite.

Most jobs are rewrite jobs in Hollywood.

Right.

Um, and it was a romantic comedy.

That was a vehicle for the Christian rock singer, Amy Grant.

Um, and it was a romantic comedy where she's this perfect woman who's, you know, really nice and very Amy Grant, you know, a vehicle for Amy Grant who um, And she the devil sent to corrupt her, and the devil takes the form of this handsome man and they fall in love and she sort of converts into being a good guy.

And I was it was a rewrite of a script.

And frankly, this is not my genre.

And I did not do a good job.

And it sort of was like the beginning and end of my career, like like in one shot.

So.

I think that I really struggled to, um, figure that out.

And then I ended up to get more work.

I just go off and write.

I wrote like seven or eight screenplays like on my own, just spec screenplays.

And, um, and they were okay.

Um, but I don't think I had found my own voice yet.

Um, and at some point a friend of mine, and then I eventually just couldn't get work.

And I just went off and did sort of day jobs, you know?

And I I mean I was in computer consulting and graphic design, which I wasn't great at, but I there was a lot of work, cause I understood this is like the beginning of desktop publishing.

So I knew the computer, you know, I knew technology.

And um And then eventually a friend of mine got the money to do a play up at a college, a summer stock thing in Idaho.

And he's like, will you write a play for this?

And I hadn't written in a long time.

And he was an old friend from college who I used to produce plays with.

And I said, okay.

And I wrote this play and it just like came out of me.

And it was probably the first sort of like um it has.

If you read it it does sort of feel like has a lot of the themes you end up seeing in like bioshock not not specifically literal, but the commentary, the sort of commentary about politics and culture um, and the way people, ideologies work and the way People get swept up in political movements, was a big part of that story.

And it felt great.

And the play, people really liked the play and everything.

And I was like, well, I guess I'll go to New York and be a playwright.

And then I got to New York.

I moved to New York from California.

And very quickly, I found out it's not easy to become a playwright in New York.

There's no money.

That's not really how it works.

Yeah, especially for straight play, you know, for non musicals.

And then I was there in New York for two years and I was like, well, this isn't working.

And then I was like, I love video games.

Are there jobs like in video games?

Like, what do you do?

I didn't even know they were like, I never thought about how you make a video game.

I love video games.

I was playing all that was, you know, consistently playing video games my whole life.

And I was reading this magazine.

You probably remember Next Gen magazine.

And there's an ad for a game designer job at this company called Looking Glass, which I love, Looking Glass.

I love Ultimate Underworld and System Shock 1.

And I applied for the job.

And probably because I had experience in LA and Hollywood.

There was a time where there was like a lot of full motion video integrated into games.

So they thought there was gonna be this big merger of like movies and games.

And so they probably thought I could help them with that.

Cause I didn't have any other experience except loving games.

And I think I had a good theoretical understanding of how games work.

I can remember my interview.

We talked a lot about game design theory and I sort of intuited a bunch of it.

Um, I didn't read any books or anything.

I just played games.

And they hired me and I started working on Thief, what became Thief eventually.

Yeah, I mean, the the kind of.

You know the legendary time of that time and looking glass in those games and specifically all of the people and things that have come out of of that, is super interesting.

I mean, you know, it's really hard to go anywhere in this industry and not meet someone who's closely connected to that or someone who worked on Bioshock.

You know a lot of the peers and people and friends that I have, you know all kind of have some kind of connection to that as really kind of ground zero for you know, like a different type of game i think, than than i think we were used to getting and still today are not, is not the norm.

So those games still feel special when people make them, even today.

So what was it like at that time when you've kind of transitioned from all this screenwriting and playwriting?

Were you actually thinking about interactivity and and words before you?

You applied for that job at at looking glass.

It never occurred to me really until I saw that ad like that there was even I never even thought like I had seen like interviews with people looking glass.

I remember reading one about Terra Nova, which was one game that was in development then.

And there's all the guys who had worked on system shock one and ultimate underworld.

And I was really.

I followed them and I started to learn the names of people in the industry, but it never occurred to me for a second.

And I, that would be a field I could work in.

Um, mostly it just, for whatever reason, just never, I never put the two together.

I love this thing because I didn't really realize there are writers.

I think when system shock, one when the audio logs and the system shock, when I read those I was like Oh, okay.

There's writing the kind of writing I know how to do here.

Where, you know, it was my most narrative in games back then was pretty limited.

Right.

Yeah.

Because the technology limitations also, I think the topics and the themes that people would take on were really limited to.

You know, there was

And again, I think a lot of it's a function of technology and it's a lot of it's just like there were doors that nobody knocked on at that point.

Right.

And so, you know, when I got to Lookingglass, I.

It was really a I can't say what a special place it was.

It was like, really like walking into.

There's a there's a great Simpsons moment where Bart Simpson goes to the office of Mad Magazine.

Right.

And and it's just this old woman sitting at the desk and he's really disappointed because he thought it would be this place of magic and fun.

And then, like you know, alfred e newman opens the door and, like you know, comes out and he looks in the room and all the characters are like cartoon characters, like playing around and it was an office and it was a pretty bland office, but it was felt magical being there um, it felt like, i guess, to be surrounded by so much creativity and so much passion.

Like it was not a um, It was not a place for the meek.

I mean, there was people screaming at each other and yelling at each other and arguing with like passion, and people would stay there to, like you know, two in the morning and you'd walk around and there'd be somebody, like in their barefoot, walking around me and, you know, like food out of their fridge.

Sorry.

There's always a guy in the studio in bare feet.

Always.

Yep.

Yeah.

And um, you know, and it was all you know and it was very um, it was, you know a lot of MIT guys, a lot of very brilliant guys with you know, sometimes marginal social skills.

Right.

And, um, But they were so invested in what they were doing.

This was not a job for most people.

It was a real passion.

And I was so excited to be there because I was not a great worker in regular jobs.

I was kind of phoning it in.

But the moment I got to looking glass I was like there.

I was like okay, when's the last train back?

You know, when's the last subway back to my apartment?

Because I want to make sure I have to catch that, but I don't want to leave a moment before I have to, you know.

So I'd be there to, like you know, midnight or one in the morning sometimes, you know, two in the morning.

I've got a bike and I would like stay there to crazy times and just working.

I was just so excited to be there.

Um, And it was great and I got a lot of responsibility fairly quickly because I was game and eventually started working with many versions of the game that eventually became Thief.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, I think what's really interesting about what you just said is – and it's something –

In my research for this that I came across you talking about a couple things like this.

It's like it sounds like there was a lot of people at looking glass who came from other areas of and different industries that were lending their unique perspective and skillset into making a game, and that kind of stew of people is is where you know those, those special things, came from.

And I I I did see a couple things where you're um talking about your current studio and hiring writers who aren't from games, which I think is pretty critically important.

When I build teams, I like bringing people in who aren't from the game industry and who don't have either that baggage or the experience, Because that is truly a fresh set of eyes that lend something to what you're doing that that I don't think you can get when it's just like you know, here's the same team doing the next sequel, and the next sequel, and the next sequel like that diversity of of people not just who they are and where they come from, but like what they do is really important.

And I think that's probably one of the critical cornerstones of of what that kind of origin of all that at looking glass was.

Yeah.

I bring a ton of people in from like, you know, I brought in YouTubers, I think, write really well.

I will find talent wherever it is.

And if I'm impressed by the talent, I will give them a shot.

I'm not heavily reliant upon a sort of formal recruitment process because look especially as the game industry got bigger and bigger and bigger there's a lot of huge companies it's it's when you you know some people start their careers and they're working you know on a thousand person team or something right and they sort of learn game development as through no fault of their own as um this sort of big process where they Sort of have a little corner of it.

And I'm always looking for people like polymaths, who are excited about a bunch of different things, who bring a whole range of knowledge about different stuff.

A lot of game writers don't necessarily – you can learn some bad habits in certain companies and you learn the right way to do it.

And we sort of do it fairly differently, a lot of things very differently.

And I don't really know like, how differently companies do it, because I've been at my company for so long, you know, since I've only worked at two companies that you know really are Looking Glass and Irrational Ghost Story.

Right.

And it's when it's your own company.

So I haven't had that experience.

Like a lot of people have gone to work at seven or eight different companies.

So.

I think we have a pretty weird different way of doing things that's very particular to the types of games we make.

Because I don't believe in making a game company.

I believe in making a company that's to make this thing, right?

There's no such thing as a game company.

It's like, now we're the company making Judas.

And Judas is a different beast than some other games we've made and figure out how to make this thing and how to organize the company around producing this thing, rather than okay, we have a game company and we have a bunch of processes in place.

We're just going to do those.

The different games require a different process, requires different people, different kinds of thinking.

So you know, The studio's focus is to create immersive, story-driven games that ask something of the people who make them and the people who play them.

Is that still the credo that you guys are living by?

Yeah, I think that Judas is dealing –

There are some big differences, some substantial differences, between it and what we've done, but there's also a lot of similar things in terms of we like building worlds.

We like thinking through those worlds in incredible societies that we think through in real depth.

I want to know how things work.

I want to know how the economy works.

I want to know how romance works, i want to know how child rearing works, and i got to know all these things because and that doesn't mean it's going to be in the game necessarily right, or even i write it down formally but i i need to know how the economy works, you know.

So, if you look at our games we, we really try to think through these things and then So when the player is there, if they feel like they're in a space that could exist, and you know usually you know you play a game like even great games.

And I want to be clear, not every game should be our game.

Right.

But if you sort of play a game, say like Destiny or something, the world doesn't necessarily feel like a world that we live in.

Right.

It's like, you know, the.

The economies, the stores only sell the items you need to win the battle, right?

Where I like making words where like, well, what do people eat?

What do they drink?

How do they go on dates?

You know, how all these things, these are opportunities for storytelling.

You don't necessarily. end up using all those things.

And I don't sit down and write a formal Bible or something.

We just have lots of conversations about how things work.

So world building and storytelling are really important to us and always will be.

And immersing you in that space that you can never find in any other medium because you get to be part of it, is still very central to what we do.

Yeah, I mean the fantasy fulfillment of a game and going to a place that you can never actually go to.

That's a huge reason why people play games.

And very clearly from your work and from what you're describing here, you're putting a ton of time into those, those I wouldn't even say details, but like the the, you know how it all works, which doesn't necessarily go into the game.

And you know, I'm curious were you, were you the, To jump back to screenwriting and playwriting for a second?

Were you the kind of writer that was like OK, I'm going to write this huge backstory for each of these characters.

So I know these characters in and out?

Or did you start doing that in games?

I think I started doing that in games.

You know, so when I started looking on Thief.

I knew it was a fantasy setting, but I wanted Garrett and the characters to feel grounded.

What was his life?

What drove him?

It was money, right?

I needed money.

He was a bit of a dark figure, and that was actually a bit of a conflict on the team.

Darkness, like there was a he was a bit of a he's sort of an antihero.

For those who don't know the game you play games called Thief and you play a thief, a guy who breaks into people's houses and steals their stuff and sometimes kills guards.

And I wanted to honor that and not you know, and there wasn't a lot of antiheroes in games at that point.

But I always loved those stories.

You know, I sort of grew up in this, you know.

I started watching movies in the 70s.

My parents would take me to The Godfather 2 when it came out when I was eight or something.

They never shielded me from that stuff.

I always liked those stories more than the purely heroic stories.

Those films in that period of the 70s totally outlined what the the anti-hero is like, probably the greatest period maybe of of cinema.

Well, you have the noir period right, which is all all the guys who are returning from the war and the broken guys you know who coming back from, you know from France or from Guadalcanal, and they're all messed up and you know they're dealing with how broken they are.

And then you have the 70s, which is sort of, you know, probably again after a war, right?

Yep.

You know Vietnam, you have all these guys coming back and they see much different type of war, much different type of brokenness.

Yep.

Yeah.

But I think that's why that resurged.

And then Um, and that I was connected to that.

So the characters I tend to write I don't tend to write, you know, outside of when I'm doing something like I did a game called freedom force, which is basically based on the silver age of comics.

And that was very on the nose by design, you know, heroic.

Yeah.

Um, but you know, whether it's thief or system shop two or Bioshock Bioshock, inventor Judas I'm always much more interested in the messiness um of people and that's that's.

It's a weird intersection between like making like a first person shooter and dealing with those themes, because there's some, there's some fantastical elements of first person shooters that are just weird.

Like that you're shooting like dozens of people right, and you know people talk about that a lot and i think that to some degree, people understand.

The same way, when you see a musical, when people start breaking a song, you know you're making allowances for that.

That's the form right yeah, and yeah it's weird.

In bioshock it's weird.

I mean, i made a bunch of metal of honor games um, and we made a game called rising sun and it was set in the Pacific theater and it was like, really popular in Japan.

Right.

Um.

Just you know the the kind of affordances people give for entertainment um and and playing games, and having those experiences um can definitely lead you down tricky places.

And, uh, I think, I think that's super healthy.

Like you know people talk about, like apparently you know veterans play it.

You know people in war zones play a lot of first person shooters.

Right.

And I think the way of processing things and if you do read the research, and i think the research, all psychological research, is really hard to pin down.

So i'm not saying our industry is critically important because we do this, but i think that it's pretty clear that people can make that, that art is a place to process things and i think it's a very healthy place to process things and i think I believe that art has to, that art quite often needs to be messy and it needs to be complicated and it needs to be uncomfortable at times.

And so an artist need to be able to explore that.

Sometimes they're going to do a good job and sometimes they're going to do something that's not great.

But. the only way you get there is by having the freedom to try things.

Like if you know, I think, if I I still don't really know how we set up Bioshock you know like, because it's so weird.

And Take-Two was, I think, very.

I don't know why they signed it, given how badly System Shock 2 did at retail.

We had a lot of fans from it, right?

A lot of people in the publishing space were big fans.

But everybody knew how poorly it sold.

And they put a lot of faith in us.

And then I'm like, oh yeah, it's going to be sort of based on objectivism and and and and gene splicing and set in 1960.

You know, not like during World War II or anytime.

You know.

People know like this weird period between wars.

You know where.

You know before.

You know rock and roll.

You know this very strange time period that I connected to because I grew up around people who grew up in that period, like my dad, um.

It's very strange.

It's a really strange game, but I guess people think it works because I think we took it really seriously.

We took Rapture really seriously.

We took the story really seriously.

We took the characters really seriously, and we sort of committed to not making them messy.

Like, cause I think people are messy.

Right.

And, um, I think games, people weren't messy in games for a long time.

And a lot, you know, it's not just, it's not just me.

There's lots of people sort of move the ball down the fields and allowing characters to be messier and messier in games.

Um, that we're not.

We're not, you know, though we are sort of games.

Medium starts learning what it can do.

I mean, you go back and look at the early films.

There, you know, it's like the first films are like a train coming into a station right, you know, right.

And then they became film, stage plays essentially.

Then eventually, you know, then eventually you've got first wells and you've got you know the french, you know movement, you know the, the um, you know moving in the 60s, and then the.

All the filmmakers in the 70s are still around.

Right.

You know, and things and it evolves and you figure out how to use the medium.

Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn.

I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club.

This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from Earth.

I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections.

And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent?

And I really thought about it.

I was like no.

At this point it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it.

But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me.

And I left it on the mic.

That's great.

Because it served the story.

People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end.

It's like, yeah, dude, me too.

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Transcription by CastingWords Yeah.

I mean, and when you're talking about Bioshock, you know, and the kind of like the legacy of that.

You know, I went and just did a cursory internet search of best narrative games of all time which, of course, you know, these lists are totally subjective and they don't mean anything.

But you know, bioshock is in there with red dead, redemption 2, the last of us series, god of war, mass effect series, witcher 3, grand theft auto, portal and knights of the republic, on and on and on and on and um, how do you like, how do you grapple with, with that, i mean, i'm sure the answer is you don't.

But yeah but, like you know, bioshock has a, a legacy and there was a moment of time um, when Bioshock came out where, for the first time that I can really remember, both developers and gamers and press, everyone was talking about like themes in video games and like what's this about?

And you, you have said well, Bioshock is about all these other things, but mostly it's about, you know, raising questions and leaving, leaving these, leaving players with.

With these, you know things to wrestle with.

But you have.

You have that experience and then you know you obviously go on to do infinite as well.

But like How today, when you look back on it, and with what you're doing now, how do you navigate through what is obviously pressure to be repeatable?

Even though I know 100% you're trying to do something very different.

But how do you, how do you like, manage to do what you think is your, your best work every day, when you know, when everyone's sitting over your shoulder looking, you know for, for your next thing.

I mean, to some degree, the, the guy who made Bioshock, it's almost a different guy, right?

Like I don't really think of, I refer to it a lot in development.

Like I'll often say like well, go look at this part from Bioshock, mostly because I don't.

It's harder for me to explain what I want than just say go look at what we did here.

Cause I want to do the same.

Like there's certain aspects of this game that are very similar to the game Bioshock and there's certain aspects that are very different, but the parts that are very similar um, I don't want to have to reinvent the wheel, right.

So I'm like okay, like you know and I won't, you know, I'm not gonna be super specific you could probably tell from the trailer there's, you know, some similarities in terms of, you know, you've got a weapon in one hand and, like you know, sort of powers in the other hand and and how sort of you interact with AI to some degree.

About, you know, because I've been very invested in sort of a certain type of AI since we did in Thief, you know where.

You know Thief was sort of one of the first games after like, Metal Gear, the original Metal Gear actually.

Where AI's had a state besides aware of you or not aware of you.

They sort of have this heating up and cooling down.

So there's certain things that have been in my sort of quiver and that I go back to.

And the easiest thing for me to do is say, go, just go play this section of Bioshock.

It's much easier for me to do that than try to explain it.

Because I just want you to do that, something very similar, or at least that's a starting point.

But that's almost like saying, go play.

I'll say that in the same way I'll go play this other game that I didn't work on.

It's a reference point.

I did feel that pressure on Infinite more because it was a direct sequel to Bioshock.

And that's why I didn't really want to do another sequel again, because that's the kind of thing like well, it's a Bioshock game.

And so it has to be this and it has to be.

And there was a lot of direct comparison.

I felt that pressure a lot more than that.

And I didn't really like that.

You know, hey, I'm not complaining.

It's you know, it's it's what you call a rich man's problem.

Right.

If you have a game that people like enough that they want more of it.

It just felt weird because I didn't want to make exactly I didn't want to make the same thing.

But there's a lot of pressure to make the same thing.

But I think if you make the same thing, it depends on the type of game.

I think you do a lot of Call of Duty games because there's a certain mechanic that people just really like.

I think with Bioshock, a lot of what made it great for people or what made people like it was exploring the world and the freshness of the world.

And if you go back and you do Rapture again, that's much harder to do, right?

So I knew I had to make a new world for that.

But I still thought there was a fair amount of baggage that I had to deal with.

And you always have the bag.

Your career is a kind of baggage.

Right.

However, I'm not complaining.

Like the fact that people will fund me to make the weird things I want to make.

I'm everything else is great.

Like I like money.

I like you know, I like people liking my work, but the thing i like most is i get to go to work and i get to.

I have that incredibly rare privilege of looking forward to going to work every day, not every day most days.

Some days you just want to kill yourself.

We're all human.

We're all human um, but i never thought i've had jobs where i didn't feel that way and i remember the sunday night Being like, oh my God.

And counting.

Oh, it's Sunday.

Friday night was so great because I was done, you know.

And then Saturday was good.

Sunday, I start to worry.

And then Monday morning.

And and not many people, not everybody gets to do that.

And I'm eternally grateful that I get to live a life where I have that.

I was 30 when I – 29 when I got in the games industry.

So I had a period of my life where I did the other thing.

And I'm really grateful.

It's many years later.

It's almost 30 years later.

I'll never stop being grateful for being able to go to work for a job I enjoy, where I don't watch the clock.

Yeah, I guess in some ways the same thing that happened – looking glass also happened with a rational where other people have gone on to kind of carry the torch and and maybe that's maybe that's a way to not feel the pressure because someone else is doing it right and you're you're doing something something different now i mean maybe yeah i'm like i'm super proud of all the people who work for us have gone on there's so many great games that have come out of you know, alums.

Truly incredible.

Yep.

I mean, John Chase games are great.

Steve Gaynor's games, you know, so many other people.

And then people have not just made their own companies.

People go work at other companies and do great work.

Um, so the, the legacies there and like looking glass, you know, there's a lot of looking glass.

I'm a looking glass legacy, you know, and there are people are rational legacies and or one day there we go, story legacies.

But um But, I don't really.

Yeah, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself in the abstract.

It's, you know, I don't, I did a student, I did a, I spoke at a class at a college class yesterday.

And first question they asked me, it was like, oh, you won this award and something like that.

And how do you, what does that make you, you know, just how do you feel about that?

And I'm like I don't really – awards or shows and awards are kind of, I think, not really a great thing to spend a lot of time thinking about.

And I don't really go to them anymore because they – they're not I'm.

I like looking at steam reviews, because you get a huge number of people there, you know, giving their most honest opinion and they don't really have a any kind of bias towards what kind of thing they like or kind of you know like, and I'm appreciative of all that stuff, but I don't really think about it because you, you don't, you don't want to calcify into something you know.

Um, I'm Ken Levine and I do this and I'm that.

And And I do worry when I see a lot of – there's a certain humility I think you need to maintain to be good.

I do worry when I see young developers saying like I don't like when people question my design like randos on the internet, question my design.

Don't they know I'm a professional game designer?

And I think that belies –

It's a trap, right?

You know, the audience is never wrong, right?

You don't have to do what the audience says, but you know the audience will have a reaction to your work.

And every person has a intimate, specific relationship with the work.

I don't believe the game exists on its own.

I believe it exists in multitudes of every individual's interaction with it, right?

Because that you bring your own.

You know, when you go play a game or I go play One of your games, I'm bringing me to it.

Right.

And the game is the intersection of me in that game.

And I think you really should always be desperate as a developer, for that feedback, even if that and the great and the confidence you need is to be like I don't have to listen to it.

They can say whatever they want.

There may be something valuable there.

I'm going to get my feelings hurt.

I've had my feelings hurt many, many times. but I think you need to be open to it.

And I and it.

It doesn't.

You don't?

You're not special because you're call yourself a game designer, right?

You're special because you do the work of making something and be and you know I do.

We do a lot of testing.

I don't mean.

I don't mean focus testing like um Hey, here's an idea for a game underwater city, you know, but we never stopped there.

We work on the game.

And then, when it's nearly, you know when it's getting towards done, when it starts to express it, we start showing it to people.

You know, showing the game to both friends and family.

Then you expand out to people who have no.

There's no reason.

They have any need to say anything nice to you.

And boy, have I heard some, I heard some crazy, you know, some very insulting things.

But some of the most valuable learnings I've had is from watching unalloyed, unadulterated opinions that are often delivered quite rudely but extremely valuable.

I mean it's like my favorite part of development, I think, because for all the reasons that you said, But it's just so immediately humbling when someone doesn't do exactly what you think they're supposed to do.

And you're just like I got to totally rethink this thing because you know the old saying can't ship the designer with the game.

Right.

You can't you can't do that.

And it's like.

You know, I have met people who don't put the work in in that area.

And it's like you know, if you're a designer who just believes your idea is going to work, you're going to learn some hard lessons when you put it in people's hands.

I'm sure you've had this experience.

Pretty much nothing survives contact with the enemy, right?

Yeah.

Any idea you have usually sucks.

It's the iteration and the learning.

Yeah, even after having done it for as long as you've done it I'm in my 25th year, I think, at this point and it's like I still get knocked down, like every time.

And it's like time every single time, and it's like you never.

If you accept your, if you accept that and you give yourself over to that, it's it's like the first time every time and it's it's almost like a life force honestly, like i look forward to to putting it in other people's hands, because I know I'm not right.

I just have a thesis about what it's going to be.

And even after doing it for so long and I know some rules about some stuff, but even those hard, steadfast rules someone's going to just go nope and you got to go back to the drawing board.

And I learned about focus testing, really intense focus testing when I worked at Sony Santa Monica.

That was like where they had a process.

They always have had it.

But getting that process really early in my career as first QA and junior designer.

It had an immeasurable impact on me as a designer and a creative.

It's such a gift because they're telling you what you're doing wrong and they don't tell you how to fix it.

And if you think they're going to tell you how to fix it, that's probably a mistake.

But you're right, that thing you said about you can't ship.

The designer, Doug Church, and I were working.

I think we used to joke that we'd ship a readme file of why the game is fun, you know and you can't.

That was the joke that you can't.

And I sort of, I think I got that very early on.

And if you start building up defenses around yourself like how dare that gamer tell me?

You know, And I'm talking even if they say it in the most rude possible way, I'm not saying people should be rude.

I'm just saying they will be rude, right?

You need to manage that feeling.

And that feeling is not good, right?

I'm not saying that feeling is good or I love it.

And I'm so proud of my team.

We did one of the first.

You know we did our a focus session.

You know first where you're, you know it was over zoom now, but basically you know behind the one-way mirror kind of sessions where they don't even know you're there and they're talking to the game and i'm watching the team as some people are unloading on the.

You know certain aspects of the game and they were these.

A lot of the new guys too.

They were i sent, i sent.

I sent an email ahead of time setting their expectations and um, It's always tough the first time.

And they were troopers.

And I was so proud of them.

And we immediately dug in and like, OK, well, what do we learn?

What do we learn?

And people were great.

And, you know, that's how you ship the game.

You put it in front of people and you learn what an idiot you are.

Right.

And the mistakes you made, the assumptions you made.

And hopefully there's still – there's a diamond in that rough, right?

Yeah, but on the other hand, you take all that information and you fix it, and then you do it again and it works.

And it's like you go from that person just ripped all my skin off to we did it.

And that's like –

That is the ultimate feeling in game development.

And sometimes it's a big, complicated change.

And sometimes like we had a thing a number was set to three and we had the focus test and we changed it to six and we retested it and it was a number that affected a large part of the game.

I won't go into specifics, but we changed the number three to six and the all of a sudden the game got radically better.

In these people's estimations, and that's another thing i think the young designers struggle with is that balance is about 90 of the job.

You know you can make a game terrible.

You can make the best game terrible by changing a few numbers.

Like if all the enemies in doom had, instead of eight hit points, had a thousand hit points, Doom would have been terrible, right.

Yeah, and we live in a time today where those tests don't happen behind closed doors anymore.

They happen live in the game.

You know there's that kind of famous story Skyrim designer, david vonderhaar, call of duty.

You know they said they were going to change.

I think it was like a sniper rifle or something.

Nobody get mad if i get this story wrong, but it's the intent and you know change something, something minuscule.

The audience freaks out on twitter and and the forums, but it turns out it was just like what you know.

What you guys think is happening is just we changed the number by one value.

And, um, you know, I've never actually worked on a game where you tested it live like that.

And there's, you know, a billion people, you know, testing it for you.

That, that's, that's a whole different animal.

Yeah.

I mean for live games like that, especially in competitive games, those numbers are everything and you it's sort of a no win right?

Cause you get, you need to nerf something.

You're going to piss off some people.

I don't really make a lot of multiplayer games, so I'm fortunate.

I don't have to deal with that problem, but that's, That's a really hard problem, right?

Because somebody's going to get somebody's going to get mad to make somebody happy.

You're going to have to and you have to do what's best for the game.

And sometimes you don't know, right, what's best for the game.

And you're going to find out, especially if you're doing it live like that.

You're going to find out.

It's tough.

It's scary.

That doesn't sound that doesn't sound.

I don't know if my skin's thick enough for that.

I'm not sure.

Those guys have those guys have like titanium skin.

Yeah.

Community.

They know the game so well because they've been playing it for 20 years.

Right.

And you know, as long as people have been making it and they are so particular like oh, what is the?

What is the you know, zoom magnification of the ADS on this particular type of weapon.

You change that number and people lose their minds.

And it's because they love what you do.

Yeah, many times the fans seem to almost have the same information that the developers have.

And if you can fireproof yourself as much as you can, that is one of the best things you can do to yourself as a developer to get better.

Yeah. just being like, you know what?

People don't like, people are saying mean things, but you know what?

They're just words.

And, um, what can I learn?

What can I learn?

Yeah.

It took me a long time to to remember that you know you are making stuff for yourself, but you're also making stuff for the audience.

And like, it's, It's it's really important to to find that that balance in there.

And I think when you can't find the balance, that's when you get screwy.

Right.

I think one of the hardest parts of what we do and one of the rewarding parts is so we tend to have a lot of weird themes they don't see in a lot of games.

But I couldn't just be like – I had read one of Rand's books before doing Bioshock.

She sort of is where this – Andrew Ryan's philosophy is basically a copypasta from Ayn Rand.

And those books are like 1,000 pages long, right?

Yeah.

So I had to get across these ideas in a way that was something I thought was interesting and weird.

And obviously, I want to explore in the game.

I had to get that across in a very short – I had to make that extremely accessible to the audience because I thought it was cool.

I couldn't just be like, here are gamers.

Here's a thousand-page book to read.

I had to figure out how to communicate that in a way that was accessible to a very broad audience that wasn't going to sit down and read a thousand-page novel about capital.

And same with quantum mechanics in Infinite.

I had to figure out how to convey that.

I was a drama major, right?

I think Feynman said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.

So we had to figure out a way to convey it and we used metaphor and we used visuals and we used characters to get across his ideas.

Because the more esoteric the thing is, the more you have to work to make it clear to the audience.

Yeah, I think I think that goes with every element of games.

You have to over exaggerate things, you know, animations, audio, story, art.

All of it has to be almost like super exaggerated because you're asking, you're asking people to to come into this world, and it's very hard to do subtle in video games it's.

It's extremely hard especially, you know, when you have gameplay going on like so, you know, got home, for instance, used a lot of the same techniques from you know, from you know System Shock games and Bioshock games.

But there's no enemies, right?

So the player's headspace you know I call player RAM to process details is much higher, so that you can make a much more naturalistic game in Gone Home.

You don't have to exaggerate things in the same way you do when you're trying to get a story element coming across.

When there may be like the player, you know the player is going to be prepared to shoot things any minute.

Right, there's only so much energy there and attention they can give to these more esoteric concepts.

Yeah, i think um, i was directly influenced by bioshock's audio logs.

Um, for a game that i made called adrift, and It wasn't that dissimilar from Gone Home.

It's a person in an environment where there's nobody else and it's trying to tell a story and you're trying to survive.

I don't think I was very successful in trying to be subtle with the narrative stories I was trying to tell in the audio logs, because The environment, unlike Gone Home, for example, isn't just a house you walk around.

You're like in a destroyed space station in outer space.

And there's all of that competing with you know the subtle You have oxygen pressure on you right.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, everything.

And...

It was really – because I really like the idea of narrative seeds instead of over – going all the way over the other side.

That's just my personal style.

I like to give players something to chew on and then have them kind of – develop it um, which is not what you you do in your games and um, at least i don't think so.

I think you're much more um, conceptually firm compared to, i think you know, giving these little little ideas for people to to kind of create on their own.

And I think a lot of people do kind of credit you as the modern kind of father of the audio log.

And certainly I did not, I know, I know.

Yeah.

But you, you did it in a way that, um, made it like, I think more acceptable.

It's like, it's like a thing in all games now, you know?

Yeah.

Well, when I first encountered them in system shock one I was a game, you know I just played as a gamer.

I wasn't in the industry then.

And I was like, Oh, these are really, these sound like normal people on the ship.

Right.

And I hadn't seen that kind of naturalism in games.

And audio logs are great because it's such an intimate communication form.

It's basically diary entries, right?

And you really get to the heart of the matter.

And they're written like, like, like monologues from, from theater almost.

Right.

And like confessionals.

Yeah.

And I was very comfortable with that form.

You know, I'd written plenty of soliloquies and monologues and plays.

Um, and so I was drawn to them right away.

And um, And they're really good for filling, especially back then when you didn't have the visual elements that you couldn't really rely upon.

I mean, you know, you go back and look at System Shock 2 or System Shock 1 and it's weird looking right.

It's, you know, especially for somebody that wasn't a gamer at the time.

It's so weird looking that I remember showing it to my parents and they're like.

I can tell they're just like what am I looking at here?

They had no idea because they were, you know, my parents were born in the 30s, right?

They had no conception of this weird abstract visual.

Now, once i saw bioshock, they started to be able to get their head around it.

But the good thing about audio logs is they were a hundred percent authentic, because voice work before voice was a hundred percent before anything else was in games, right sound, digital sound and the you know, the system shock one came out with just text Audio logs.

They were just taxed because it was on floppies.

And then they released them for CD-ROM version where they actually recorded the people.

And it was all people in the studio.

So they weren't actors, really.

So they were quite naturalistic.

And Austin did a great job.

Austin Grossman, who's a novelist now, did a great job writing humans.

Humans in that very complicated situation.

And I was so drawn to that because I just wanted to write humans in these very crazy, complicated science fiction fantasy, whatever it is.

What is the average person?

How does the average person experience that?

You know, and so in Bioshock, you know I was channeling.

You know, you know my, my family, you know, was immigrants from Eastern Europe.

You know um you know my grandparents were born in Russia or or in um in um.

Some of them were born in um in um in Belarus.

And you know that experience and you know Infinite Bioshock was a story of of refugees, essentially World War II refugees, from World War II refugees.

And you know so I was writing from you know, sort of channeling a lot of accents and voices I had heard growing up, but just being able to be so honest and truthful, you know, in a video game with dialogue was, was so powerful.

And I still love, it's one of my favorite things to write audio logs.

A lot of times I, now I just write them.

I sit there with a recorder on my phone and I will just do it, you know, um, what do you call it?

Um, stream of consciousness.

I'll go rewrite it.

So it's better because it rarely comes out of your head.

Perfect.

But it gives you a sort of authenticity sometimes um, just by trying to say it, come up with it in real time.

Yeah.

It's amazing how, how long it can take to write a 30 second uh audio short is the hardest part of it, right?

Cause you don't have a lot of time.

Yeah, and if you a lot of games, i think go a lot of games, the mistake of going too long with them, and they also make the mistake of not grounding them audibly in the space.

They sound like a perfect recording in a studio and also, let the actor stumble, let them trip over their words, make it natural.

Um, and i totally, totally agree with you i, i think one of my Another one of my favorite parts of game development is the recording sessions with the actors.

I do agree with you there about it not being polished and perfect.

Once you start doing that, the authenticity is not there.

Actors also tend to do well with audio laws because again, they're familiar with monologues and soliloquies in a way that they're a lot of times actors don't.

You know, in the way you record games.

They're always out of order.

There's no like full script to hand to somebody usually, so they're like scratching their heads and saying what am I saying here?

You know, especially with like AIVO lines, like flake them on the left, you know like yeah, how do you ground that?

But audio log gives them time to ground their character.

So I find actors do really well with them.

Yeah.

It's a super fun time.

It's always the easiest part of the whole thing.

I have so many, so many things I want to talk to you about.

So I want to transition over to um 10 years later of narrative legos.

Um, so almost 10 years in.

Uh, you gave great talk in 2014 about thesis you had about um building narrative experiences in games that are driven by player actions, more so than kind of what we've seen before.

And I wanted to kind of talk about that concept 10 years later.

Like, how has that concept aged for you?

Has it organically evolved?

Have you seen anyone else using it?

Because you did you did say this open source, like, go, go do it.

How have you how does it sit with you these days?

And you know, has it, has it grown into into something that you're using or you hope to use?

You know all all, all secrecy intact.

Let me kawaii out it a bunch first, like like a kawaii on this, because it's very easy for people to think you're talking about a specific game design.

Yeah and are all all.

The thing is going to be in some game someday, so i want to say nothing.

I'm going to talk about that as a concept in a speech, not about how it relates to judo.

So i will say um, It is an important part, a central part of how we think, but I'm not going to say which exact parts.

Understood.

It was basically – so for Narrative Lego it was basically – it was called Narrative Legos.

But then somebody told me –

It's Lego.

It's not Lego.

So I always try to remember it's narrative Lego, actually.

The basic of the concept is about using modularity, right?

And using not procedural generation but handcrafting specific elements and then making rules about how those elements to combine to make larger elements.

A very simple version of something like this is XCOM, right?

If you look at how the maps are built in XCOM, they're built out of handcrafted elements that are put together to make a larger map based upon a role set.

So this concept is not like a new concept out of nowhere.

And it's called LEGOs because you use LEGO, like I just did it again.

You use LEGO to to take simple, to make relatively simple but hand designed pieces and by having those brilliantly designed pieces that you can make almost anything out of those pieces.

But it's it's different from procedural generation in the sense that it's not being generated at runtime, everything being generated, the rules are, they are stringing things together and constructing things at runtime, and that is um, I'll say that is very much a concept that is, I think, turned out to be very, very powerful for us.

And and it allows the biggest challenge we have.

So a lot of the thinking came from we were working on Bioshock Infinite.

And for those who know the story, you know you play this character, Booker DeWitt, and you have this companion character named Elizabeth and she's sort of the center of the game, part of it.

And she's the main character, even though you're not playing her, because she's the one who goes through the biggest changes in the game.

And at one point I was like it'd be really good if Elizabeth's opinion about you could change over time, depending upon what you do.

And the story can go in really different ways.

But we had no structure to support that.

And the amount of content we would have to make to support that would be massive.

Because we were basically making a linear game and i was like well, how do you really make truly dynamic feeling elements in the game without just sort of like building infinite and i think, the ball?

I haven't.

I don't know exactly how they built baldur's gate 3, but it seems to me that those guys just did the hard thing and they did incredibly well, which is they just sought to the various branching structures and they tested all that.

But i don't think there was a.

As far as i can tell, there's not a central new approach.

They took how to do that?

Except they just did the, they did the.

You know, they did the flawlessly flawless.

It's a brilliant, brilliant game um, and they, and they reward the gamer so much.

I'm like well, could you, is there a way to do that?

And do that in a first person game where the asset demands are even higher?

Right.

Is very, very tricky, especially with the.

You know, but you know, so they did it probably.

You know they did it by having done that kind of game multiple times.

Right.

And then built a tool set over time that they really came to understand.

And then they took, you know. five, six, seven, I don't even know how long it took.

It took a while.

Right.

And to make um and and the and the and the and the.

Work is there, but they work.

They had to do a very specific type of work to um to make that happen.

And there's a level of granularity.

There's always that only works down to a certain degree of granularity.

About about the Delta of the experience.

Um, If I go too far up my own butt here with technical jargon, just tell me for the audience.

But I think we're talking to a game developer audience.

This is that audience, so enjoy the journey.

If you watch the talk, it's like, if you want the game to be able to allow for big player choices...

It has to be able to heal itself when the game does something.

That the player does something the game doesn't entirely expect.

And you have to kind of build a game that doesn't actually have a lot of expectation of what the gamer is going to do right,

Sorry, the food's being delivered.

So you have to build from scratch a world that is being some degree constructed in partial at runtime.

Now, procedural games do that just by having everything be math, right?

What I call pseudo-procedural, which I've said in that narrative.

Legal is you build a bunch of content that you handcraft, but how that content is called forth and how it's strung together and how it's combined with other parts of it, even like down to like dialogue and different parts of a paragraph and different sentences being strung together at runtime from different recordings, like this is the theory that you can build that kind of the game's ability to react to the player um, in a way that's more specific and literal than purely procedural games like minecraft, which you know has to be somewhat abstract right, and it works brilliantly and they leverage that abstractness and but not as literal as say, you know, a mass effect or or even a balder's gate, because The amount of sort of one off branching you have to do there is very, very high.

And every time you do that branch, you really have to.

You can't do that.

There's a limitation to how much of that you can do because each one is so expensive.

But by using combinatorials you could potentially have the game construct itself to a exponential combo, combinations that still feel like handcrafted while not being specifically.

Nobody ever specifically built that exact moment, right?

No developer actually did.

Right now it sounds like a horse bucky, right?

Um, but it's actually.

I think a lot of people ask me like Oh, is it?

Is it AI?

Is it, you know, is it boy, how does that happen in runtime?

Unless you're really demanding, it's actually fairly simple.

It's basically a rule.

It's basically rule sets and tagging a lot of tagging.

I think I need to call in this type of art.

I need to call on um And again, I don't want to be too specific about how we use it, because I'm not – there's not me pitching a product or making any promises.

Just ruminating on the thesis.

Ruminating on the thesis.

It was sort of an idea that I had developed as a response to my frustrations with –

Wanting to do more infinite and realizing that thing just fundamentally couldn't, you know, in terms of player choice.

And that really required a rethinking of how I built things.

And so it started with a sort of theoretical concept.

And I wanted to talk back then because I knew it was going to be a long time.

And I knew that I want it. took the idea to be out there so if anybody else want to build on it great you know open source it basically um and um but you know because also i believe i know that a lot of people worry about their ideas getting stolen look ideas don't matter that much execution is everything so you could even if you took this idea and you ran with it you can make five or six mistakes that would crush you right so i have a confidence in our team to execute on things um and so i didn't care that the idea was out there i was hoping that people would run it because that's the kind of games i want to play i want to game feel games that feel narrative and reactive and it's a limitation but if you try to do the balder's gateway You kind of have to have all those things for you.

You have to know your technology.

You have to have done this type of game multiple times.

And you have to have amazingly talented people who are really dedicated and then a long testing process, right?

And I was like, could you – I didn't have those things.

So I was like, okay, well, I got to think of a system that might facilitate this.

So let's say, in 2023, you're making a very large game and you want to tackle the narrative.

Lego thesis.

How are you going to approach that?

Like have.

Have you experimented at all with AI tools and have you experimented at all with?

This is me asking you personally, not about you know.

Have you experimented with using AI to augment or help you in writing at all?

Like, like where do you, where do you sit on that topic?

And if you're making a massive AAA game um today, with something like the narrative Lego thesis that you know supposes a insane amount of dialogue, you know, based on the talk of the different, the different towns, and the orcs and the elves and the whole thing and the passions all of it.

Like, you know, is it, is it 50 writers or is it 10 writers and tools?

Like, how are you, how would you approach that?

I think I spent a lot of time with the AI tools.

I'm fascinated by what's, you know, tell by the game where lots and future and AI is a topic.

I was hoping that was going to be your answer.

It was kind of funny, because we tend to work on things especially, you know It's sort of things evolve organically and then you find that you've sort of history's caught up with you.

And I think we're all surprised by what happened with the recent large language model revolution.

I think there's a lot of fear right now about what it can do.

And it's like, if you look at the strikes, the WGA strike, the concern that large language models are right screenplays if that would have happened with the current technology, it would have happened already.

There is no good screenplay written by an LLM, and I think it's unclear to me.

Now, I don't want to be arrogant in the sense like, oh, they'll never replace a human, because obviously I think it's doing stronger work on visual art in terms of making things that are hard to determine where it comes from, but there's also copyright issues there and you know it's unclear what you know what there's a lot of lawsuits going on there's just a a recent um uh court case where they weren't allowed to copyright there's an award-winning piece of oh they entered some piece of art into a contest and it won they try to copyright it but they judge this court found you can't because um You can't, you know, there was a court case a few years ago about a monkey had taken a picture with somebody's camera and the person tried to copyright the picture.

But they can't because a monkey can't hold a copyright and an AI can't hold a copyright.

So that's going to be a big obstacle in a way for people.

I do think the AI is extremely useful, like in QA, like for instance, if you do like analytics.

So.

Can you train AI on the massive analytic database and then ask it open-ended questions without having to use complicated analytic tools to figure out the answers to those questions?

Like oh, how many times did the player shoot an enemy in the head while they were doing double jumping or whatever right?

That's a really powerful use of AI.

And I think that, you know, querying the schedule, right?

You know, querying large mountains, mountains of data.

You know, with open-ended English language questions is extremely useful.

I don't think it's, at least for me, I don't see it writing effective dialogue anytime soon.

Um, because what?

There's not a huge database, corpus of data to train it on like, if you, if you wanted to write an employee handbook right, it's pretty good at that, because employee handbooks are, you know, by definition, sort of, you know, marginally creative right already, but they also there's a huge corpus of data to train the aeon yeah, aeon greeting cards, you know, those are the kind of things that it's going to do pretty well, i think.

Say to it, can you, as at least right now, i don't want to be overly arrogant and saying like oh, i can't possibly replace them too.

I'm too much of a genius, everybody's vulnerable to you know like, i know there could come something, come along someday and replace me right, that's a lot cheaper than man, you know.

But there's somebody said, like the way, You're not going to be replaced by AI.

You're going to be replaced by a guy prompting an AI.

And I think there's some wisdom in that.

I believe it's a tool set.

It is a tool set.

It's fun to use, just the novelty of it.

But I've used it in a few practical situations, like I planned an entire family vacation day in Hawaii once.

Just waking up in Hawaii, no plans for the day.

You know, 10 minutes later, we had a full day planned.

Yeah.

That's a great ad.

I have corpus of data, right?

Yeah.

And I've used mid journey to, to get a visual idea across.

And I actually did write a short pitch document using almost entirely chat GPT, and no one knew.

It felt terrible to me.

It just didn't feel very authentic, but nobody noticed.

Or if they did, they didn't tell me it.

It's good at doing things that don't break the boundaries and don't because it's got a huge data set for that.

Right it's, that's all it's doing.

It's basically fancy autocomplete.

Yeah, you know, when you're writing your mail, your gmail, and you're like finishing the sentence for you like hey, i'd like to get this before end of business day tomorrow and it fills that out right um, it's because it's looking at a massive corpus of data people have been writing in gmail.

You know a billion, you know 10 billion emails over 20 years and it's trained on that.

The weirder your thing is, the harder it's going to be for it to do that, because it doesn't have the data set to train on and it struggles with that, like i've just and i've spent a lot of time just querying it um, And it's not clear whether it's a state of the technology or whether it's just fancy autocomplete.

It's an amazing trick, right?

Yeah.

It's a very powerful trick, but it is really just ultra fancy autocomplete.

And that's a big deal.

It's just I'm not sure how far it goes.

We'll see.

And there's other types of AI that could come along too, but I'm not sure.

I think people may be literally overly concerned about it replacing, you know, real credit.

I think it's like a tool, like remember we used to manually build our all pathfinding databases, right?

Now we have a tool, an AI tool that does that.

And we still have plenty of designers, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's a thing that we're going to have to reckon with someday, especially in our industry, maybe sooner than later.

But for now, it remains a curious distraction, I would say.

We're almost out of time.

I know you have food waiting for you, but i did and and i have 10 pages of questions to ask you, so we're not getting to those.

But i did ask some people on the internet some questions and they um, they had a couple, a couple interesting, uh ones that i picked out.

So don't feel pressured to go on a long descriptive thing.

But two questions I want to ask you.

Actually, maybe three.

How can you be sure your game at Ghost Story remains relevant when it's been in development so long?

Well, you can never, you can never be sure of anything.

Right.

Like, like the game is going to come out and people are playing and people are playing.

As I said, we're already doing a lot of testing on it.

And one is, I think the game is not a static thing.

Like it's not, I didn't know what the game was, you know, 10 years ago.

Right.

It.

Just building the sort of core technology base was extremely complicated and time consuming process.

You know, thinking through all the edge cases and and you know the more sort of systemic you get, the more edge case that you get.

And, and then, you know, I'm, I keep working on it, right?

And it keeps evolving.

And I believe in iteration.

I really believe in iteration.

I don't think anybody's come along with done anything similar to the narrative Lego thing yet.

And again, it doesn't really matter.

The tool set doesn't matter.

It's like what is the expression of it?

So i'm not super worried about it because you know i'm paying attention to everything that's going, i play everything.

Like i am a consumer of games, like i play everything.

And people kind of get exhausted and he was like well, if you play this, you play that, you play this, you play that.

And because i'm playing everything, like um, and so i'm very aware of what's going on in the industry and um, I think in the AAA space we've had some advantages because, given the scale of AAA games, this is not any creative fault of the industry.

It's just so expensive that the risk taking has been reduced, right, in AAA?

Yep.

Because you can't make a multi-hundred million dollar mistake, right?

It's really bad if you do.

I'm very fortunate that I built up enough confidence with Tech2 that they've trusted me to take a long period of time.

And I can try to innovate in a way that like I'm not I have no special genius.

It's I have a company that will fund a long development cycle. confident.

They're at least reasonably confident they'll get something of value in return.

And I told them up front it was going to be a long one.

But you're in the right place because ostensibly they take risks.

Yes.

Take-Two is a much more risk-tolerant company than a lot of companies.

And they understand that Their real value comes from building new IPs.

Sorry.

They can leverage your old IPs for a long time, but they've done a lot of their success comes out of innovation.

I mean, we all know.

So GTA 3 was probably maybe the most innovative game of all time, right?

Or one of the most innovative.

And to the fact that games basically, are all structured.

Almost all AAA games are now structured in that way, right.

In open world setting, almost all.

So they understand the value of innovation, but they also understand the risks and costs of innovation.

And I think that I was at a point in my career where I had done enough games that were successful while being at least marginally innovative.

They're willing to take a flyer on me.

But the way I stay relevant is I pay very close to attention to what's going on in the world.

And I'm confident we'll be relevant.

But that's not – you can't just assume that.

You have to pay real attention to what's going on.

Yeah, I think it's a good question because I think people do –

Do look at.

You know the very obvious nature of a five to six or seven year game development cycle as a consumer and say well, how can you know seven years in the game, in the game business is like whole, whole sweeping changes happen there.

So it's a good question.

But i think that i think that your answer about um, the inability to make a huge bet and take that risk is is kind of what yeah, meters that out.

Yeah, and many of those years are just r and d of the underlying system that were built um, so We started – we haven't – the characters and the settings, those are not 10 years old.

Those are much relatively, relatively more recent.

Right and I think the general gamer or consumer, still in 2023, which is our fault, doesn't really have a great understanding – of how game development works, because a lot of times, and including today's conversation, it's behind the wall of secrecy.

Right.

And, um, you know, we have to figure out ways to, to let some of that out.

Um, what do you see much easier?

Because, um, Well, it didn't take as long to make.

And also.

We used to show like bring sort of almost like tech demos to E3.

And that was the norm.

And at some point, people like, no, no, no, it has to be the actual game.

And I and I recognize and I'm not arguing.

I didn't argue with that at some point.

I was like, oh, I guess that's what people want.

So I stopped showing things earlier.

Yeah, because i didn't want people to perceive that.

So i was very carefully, even at the talk of that, you know, being about the downer lego and like this is not a promise, this is not a feature set right, because people take those things very seriously.

I prefer the time when you could be like okay, this is what we're thinking, but those times don't really exist anymore.

Nope, all right.

Last question um, What was the most important thing you learned on your way from Ken at Looking Glass to creative director Ken at Ghost Story?

I am managing people like the problem with if you want to really have creative control, you also have to. manage people you have to build a company like you have like nobody nobody nobody hired me to be creative director like we started the company john and rob and i and we're like what are you i guess i'm the lead programmer you know what are you i'm the product manager you know and and you know we're all hybrids but and i'm like what like what are you i guess i guess i'm the designer and eventually that became you know the designer and the writer and the And the and the director of the of the actors and eventually that I was like, oh, that's creative director, I guess.

It's sort of similar to a writer director in a movie.

But if you want to do that, like people often ask me, how do I become a creative director?

I'm like, well, don't ask me.

I had to start a company and just call myself the creative director.

I think but you then you. you have to then deal with all the business side.

You know I was the business guy back when, before we sold the company, and if you have the marketing side and the PR side and the and the employee side and the HR issues,

And and I'm back when I own the company or we're a private company and I had to make payroll and deal with all that and and the taxes.

And, that's the price you pay to be creative director.

Um, yeah.

Is you have to deal with all the other stuff that frankly, I'm not very good at.

And I enjoy, right.

I mean, no one, no one tells you about the 14 different kinds of insurance you have to have.

And what's an L versus an S corp versus what's a C corp.

And, And guess what?

You don't get to do anything creative today because you have to be on the phone with the state or whoever.

I do get asked a lot like, well, how do I become a creative director?

And it's like, well, I don't know.

It took me 10 years.

I think the easiest way is start a company and call yourself creative director, but then you have to do all the other crap we're talking about.

And I'm not complaining.

It is the price of doing business, but I wish I was better at that stuff.

I'm pretty good at being a credit director.

I'm not as good as the other stuff.

I'm not nearly as good as the other stuff.

Yeah, I learned all those hard lessons opening my first studio, and it did not go the way I

I wanted it to go.

And at the end of the day I was.

I was fighting with myself because I I couldn't do the creative part, because I was doing the

Well, you know, all the other stuff you do when you get the time to do it, right?

Yeah.

Tough, tough lessons to learn, even that far in your career when you think of.

I've had a fair amount of experience.

I know how to do this.

Wrong.

Total newcomer in those situations.

Adam, there's a hundred things that could have happened where Irrational would have closed, because I made this random decision versus that random decision.

There are so many existential threats that I'm super – you got it.

You got to also draw a lot of luck at the same time especially, like you said, if you're a guy who doesn't know what you're doing, running a company like I like I was, and it sounds like you were too.

Like you just totally.

Yeah.

Completely.

And over my head.

Yep.

Um, well, this has been an amazing, uh, hour and a half with you.

Like I said, I have so many more questions.

Maybe someday we'll do a two point.

Yeah, it was really fun.

Um, I'm really glad we got to do this.

Thank you for replying to my, to my tweet about it.

Um, I thought you were going to move away with, with not doing it.

I'm like, Hey, you want to do it?

No, I deleted it because you know I just didn't want people piling on.

You know I Just the way it happens on social media.

Either way, I forced you to do it anyway.

Yeah, you did.

But it was good to finally meet you and talk to you, and I really enjoyed the talk.

So thanks so much for having me on.

Yeah, and everyone's, I'm sure, looking forward to Judas.

Great trailer.

I love the name.

It's so loaded.

I mean, I love it.

And let's do this again when you have more to talk about.

Great.

Maybe when we talk more about the game and come back and go into deep, dive into all the concepts, but with actual specifics where I can talk about them.

Yeah, I'd love that.

Great.

Thanks, Ken.

Appreciate it.

Thank you for joining us for The Game Maker's Notebook.

For more information on the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, our podcasts and our other initiatives, please visit wwwinteractiveorg.

[Exploring Creative Roots, Narrative Design, and the Evolution of Game Development: A Conversation with Ken Levine]-[Re-release: Bioshock Creator Ken Levine on Judas, Writing and Narrative in Games]

📋 Summary

The Creative Journey of Ken Levine: From Playwriting to 'Narrative Lego'

Discovering the Creative Spark

The Looking Glass Legacy and Immersive World-Building

The "Narrative Lego" Thesis

Navigating Pressure and AI in 2023

The Value of Unvarnished Feedback

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Exploring Creative Roots, Narrative Design, and the Evolution of Game Development: A Conversation with Ken Levine]-[Re-release: Bioshock Creator Ken Levine on Judas, Writing and Narrative in Games]

📋 Summary

The Creative Journey of Ken Levine: From Playwriting to 'Narrative Lego'

Discovering the Creative Spark

The Looking Glass Legacy and Immersive World-Building

The "Narrative Lego" Thesis

Navigating Pressure and AI in 2023

The Value of Unvarnished Feedback

Conclusion

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📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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