PERSPECTIVE
Unreliable Narrator
Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales
SAM BARLOW
An accepted truth in our industry is that no one knows how a game is going to work until they make it. This is why games are always late and sometimes don’t work out, despite best intentions. But is this really the case? As I grow older and more contrarian, I find myself questioning this. I think we can imagine how a game is going to play before we make it. And we’d make more interesting games if we did.
I once met a successful film financier who had never lost money for his investors. It was straightforward, he claimed. Start with a good screenplay. Hire the best cast and crew you can. Shoot coverage. The key is that screenplay – this document, relatively cheap to produce, is a predictor of a movie’s quality, a blueprint for its construction, and is easily converted into an accurate schedule and budget. A writer may spend time to perfect the movie on paper before the messy business of making it. Our financier wanted to invest in videogames but was surprised to learn we had no real equivalent of the screenplay.