A few notes:

I am going to storyboard pretty much everything. Right now there are descriptions that are fairly specific, but I have pictures in my mind of exactly how everything will look. I’ll be coming back through and creating something like a comic book of each scene.

Some parts are not fleshed out. There are vague portions in which I say what should be there, but don’t actually have the detail, especially bits of dialog. The dialog currently there is all placeholder. Dialog is tricky to get right, especially in epic fantasy.

I am going to color code sections. Right now it’s all black, but I’ll be color coding the text to mark cut scenes, playable areas, scripted sequences, and script direction.

There are time continuity problems in this draft. You’ll notice from one scene to the next, the sun and moon are in nonsensical positions. One reason is that the story has moved around a lot. Another is that I tend to write visually: I imagine the action taking place as though I’m watching it, and in doing so I tend to capture the mood by the lighting I see, which depends on the time of day. So if I think something is ominous, I’ll make it dark. If I need a triumph then someone gets back lit by the sun. When you put it together, it doesn’t make sense. I’ll work that out in the next draft.

Here’s the link to the first scene, and you can follow the links at the bottom to see all the scenes that are posted:

Kōtiro Script: The Normal

So I really didn’t expect any help with the project because it’s not just a one off–it’s the project that I want to be tyrannical about. I want it to be pure, authentic, and inspirational… and how could I possibly find someone who feels that way about my pet project, other than myself?

Well, when you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, the universe has a way of saying “Yes” to you.

Enter Ryan Cole

In this case the “yes” came in the form of one Ryan Cole, of tellmesomethingnice.com. Given all the artistic purity stuff I spouted above, I was concerned about an area of weakness I feared I could not overcome: Music.

Too ignorant about it to make it, barely competent to listen. Where would I ever find someone who could live up to my impossible expectations of not only talent but passion?

After I had the Kōtiro game title logo made (forthcoming), Ryan saw it and became interested in the project–he is a musician (among other things) who had been looking for a game project to get involved with.

I tried to scare him off. I said I was a beast and tyrant… that I was obsessively pouring over myth and history to create a magnum opus game that really captured the essence of the Māori culture. That I was feverishly ensuring all the visuals and story were true to the culture, and I saw it as something of a moral responsibility to present the material authentically. This is not a cute little project for the faint of heart.

Instead of shying away, Ryan said he thought that the project sounded amazing, and he seemed inspired by my dedication. After that he jumped into the material in a way that I thought no one but me would. He’s been researching Māori and Polynesian music ever since, building tracks, and even recruiting voice talent and scrounging studio time .

I’m lucky to have him.

He has a blog dedicated to the music of Kōtiro, which you can find here. There is also a feed in the sidebar to the right, which has all his posts. You should go there and read some of his ideas, and listen to the tracks he’s been building.

Thanks Ryan, you rock.

• Writing – I’ve made huge progress on the storyline, and characters. I updated the character information a little today, but I want to flesh out the story a little more, then I’ll do a full update, including an awesome free tool I developed to help me keep track of everything.
• Kō’s design – Kō is almost complete visually. I have some portraits that’ll make you swoon, she’s looking like a real person now. I’m having some trouble with her top though. Once I figure that out, I’ll post all the visual progress.
• Other character designs – I’ve spent a lot of time fleshing out the other characters too, and I’ll be posting some visuals in a little bit. They should be interesting!

After waxing poetic about sexualized heroines in games, and extolling the virtues of courage in storytelling, I find myself backed into a corner.

Whatever I do, I will be an asshole. Here’s the story:

I wanted to create a good female character. Someone who was respectable, strong, competent, yet feminine. I endowed my creation with a strong trunk, breasts of normal size and shape, strong legs, feminine hips.

Well, first it turns out that athletic women are pretty skinny, especially from the side, which happens to the primary angle of this game:

(See the rest of the latest renders here)

So she may be skinny, but the activity of the game requires that she be really athletic, so I give myself a pass. She may be young, but the storyline requires that she be on the cusp of marriage so it’s out of my hands.

Still, I’m feeling a little uncomfortable about having a young, attractive female lead.

The Straw

Now here’s the “courage” part–the last straw that really makes me look like an asshole.

The pre-European Māori had very different nudity taboos than we do. They had essentially two articles of clothing: a pui pui skirt, which is sort of like one of those Hawaiian grass skirts, and a rectangular shawl that they would drape over their shoulders. They had other things like feather cloaks for special occasions and high ranking people, but those weren’t common.

Generally speaking, they didn’t wear clothes if it was at all inconvenient, and in fact had a cultural belief that clothing spread disease (which was often true in those days). Often warriors would go to war in the nude. Swimming was done in the nude. Lots of athletic activities which a skirt would interfere with would require nudity. Raining? Go naked!

Also, the concept of female breasts being covered differently than males’ is purely European. Often the small shoulder wrap would cover only one breast because of the way it was worn, over one shoulder.

The reality is that if she were on a quest requiring running, climbing, jumping, etc., Kōtiro would most probably go naked or nearly naked.

The courageous thing to do would be to own that, and to show a nude female main character. Because of my audience, however, that would also be sexualizing her in a way I specifically wanted to avoid. Not to mention the practical implications of getting people to distribute and play a game with nudity that is not also about nudity.

So, I’m either a coward or a pervert, and either way I’m a hypocrite.

I think what I’m going to do for the sake of my audience is cover her with a skirt and shawl and just ignore the fact that they aren’t terribly realistic in context. On the other hand, that clothing is still skimpy at best, so maybe by trying to compromise I’m being a cowardly hypocrite perv.

What would you do?

Let’s be perfectly clear here: most games solve this problem for women by giving them inflated boobs and tiny waists. It may have worked for Lara Croft, but in a field rife with bodacious tahtahs, exaggerated sexual anatomy doesn’t make a distinctive character anymore.

Aside from that good aesthetic reason for avoiding the cliche, there is also the ethical dimension. When we endow our female characters with anatomically impossible cleavage or hips you could serve a three course dinner on, you instantly discredit them; it’s as though they don’t have the personality or importance to make them genuinely interesting, so they rely on sex appeal to create interest. In fact, that’s often exactly the case. You knock the narrative wind out of them, as it were. They are now visual objects.

In a way, defaulting to exaggerated figures discredits all women; instead of thinking about what hair color they might have, the first question as a game artist becomes: how generous are her mammaries?

That leaves us with cardboard barbie dolls in place of real characters, and creates unrealistic expectations in people whose little ape brains, evolved out on the plains and canopies of Africa, are not equipped to filter this constant, life-long barrage of visual fiction.

Is this right of us? I don’t know.

What I do know is that it’s boring. We need new visual memes, and different methods of story telling that lift our female characters to a higher level of believability and emotional connection.

So here’s my question for you: what is attractive in a girl that’s not sexualized? What features can be accentuated that would tend to give credibility to our characters instead of take it away? How do we create characters who are not dolls, who are not physically perfect, perhaps not even attractive, yet are compelling and believable and magnetic?

Many flat stories, especially in games, are about a bad guy who wants control and a good guy who doesn’t want to be controlled. The reason it’s flat is not only that it has been done to death, but that there is no real conversation going on. Rarely does the “bad” guy have a chance to explain what’s so great about control and how it could help. Rarely does the hero have any qualms about stopping him.

Interesting conversations have meaningful arguments in them that take time to explore and explain. Both sides have compelling points and often there is only a tentative resolution. Maybe we ultimately decide that freedom is better than control, but we also realize what benefits we’ve left behind that control could have offered, so we have mixed feelings about our “victory.”

Imagine having a conversation to the effect of:

Friend: Control is bad, freedom is good.
You: Yeah, totally.

Then imagine stretching that conversation over the course of 5, or even 50 hours. That’s the recipe for pretty much every game with a lame storyline.

The Story as a Conversation

I’ll quote from the character primer:

…characters enable the story to unfold both physically and philosophically. You might think of the story as a debate between two opposing points of view about your central theme.

Those points of view are debated point-by-point, on different levels. Pros and cons are explored by the actions of the characters and the consequences of those actions. There is a logical thread that makes arguments about fact, and there is an emotional thread that makes arguments about feelings. There’s a supportive thread that articulates one position, and an opposing thread that articulates the other.

The idea is that each of these character pairs argues about the same topic, but in different ways, such that at the end of the story, we feel that the argument has been resolved.

So stories are a sort of debate, in which characters act out the arguments for and against both sides.

Create the Conversation

Here are some steps to creating a meaningful conversation:

1. Choose a central theme, or topic of conversation.
2. Write the two basic viewpoints about the topic. Personify the two points by writing about how a person might come to their position on the subject. These will be your protagonist and antagonist, but it’s not important to decide which is which right now.
3. Write some supporting points for both sides of the debate. It’s okay to make bad arguments as long as you also refute them with another point. Flesh out archetype characters to support the points.

Choose a Central Theme

Here are three great ways to choose a crappy topic:

1. Don’t pick a topic. It’s like prolonged small talk in which a conversation is happening but you’re not really talking about anything. The audience won’t care what happens one way or the other. How’s the weather? Oh, you don’t say. Snore.
2. Pick a topic that is one-sided. Killing babies, anyone? If there aren’t two meaningful sides to take, you’ll end up with a moralistic snore-fest. Your good guys will be good, your bad guys will be bad, and your story will be boring.
3. Pick a topic that’s trite. A conversation that you’ve had 100 times before is boring. Evil aliens are played out. We’ve talked about whether the human race deserves to live or die. We’ve talked about racism. Unless you have a new perspective or argument to make, shut up.

We can pick something trite like Destiny vs. Free Will, or Individuality vs. Conformity which adolescent audiences love. If we feel ambitious we can choose a more open-ended topic like “What is reality?”

For our example, let’s do “Optimism vs. Pessimism.” It probably wouldn’t make a great story, but it’s accessible as an example.

Two Basic Points of View

1. Optimism leads to a better life than Pessimism
2. Pessimism leads to a better life than Optimism

1. Bob is an optimist. He had nice parents, and a happy childhood. He feels like everything always turns out alright in the end.
2. Jim is a pessimist. His father was an abusive alcoholic, and he grew up poor, on a rough side of town. He believes that if anything can go wrong, then it certainly will.

Supporting Points

Optimism allows us to grasp opportunities without fear of failure, and keeps us hopeful when we do fail. It also blinds us to the folly of our plans, and prevents us from planning as carefully as we should.

Pessimism protects us from danger (emotional and physical) by allowing us to stay out of risky situations. It also keeps us satisfied because we expect the worst, so when something good happens, it’s a pleasant surprise. On the other hand, it holds us back from opportunities through fear of failure, and leads to a gloomier mental state.

Unlike what I’ve done here, you should really get into this, as though it’s a lively debate with points, counter-points, agreement to disagree. Be logical, be ruthless, use guilt, trickery, and deception. Be passive aggressive, be even-handed in defending both positions– you can use all that material!

This isn’t enough for a real story, but more points will present themselves as we write the story. This list is just the seed of the dialogue.

In terms of character archetypes, a reason character might try to figure out whether the reward outweighs the risk of optimism. Maybe he’ll try to figure out if there’s just one answer, or if it might change depending on hold old a person is, or how wealthy he is. The emotion character might not care either way because he’s too busy living the good life, or he might be paralyzed in a bad situation by fear of things getting even worse.

The protagonist probably begins in a somewhat naive state based on assumptions. A guardian[?] will offer supportive advice and insight that will give the protagonist (and audience) a sense of the finer points or deeper moral dimensions of the debate. The contagonist will serve the same purpose, but on the opposing side.

The sidekick[?] will always support the protagonist in the narrative, but in terms of the debate, it’s a great opportunity to create a parallel story thread that argues for the protagonist’s position, but in a different way. You can even have the sidekick support the character narratively, but make the opposite argument.

Larry is Bob’s best pal, and he too is eternally optimistic. He’d do anything for Bob. He’s started a business that he projects will make him rich within the year. The question for you, author, is does his optimism pay off, or not? The skeptic[?] is another opportunity for a parallel thread that makes the opposing case.

Sketch the story

At this point–with an overview of each of the objective characters, you will undoubtedly have some ideas about how all these people relate to each other, and how they might interact. Make some decisions about the beginning and end of the story, maybe some major plot points.

You also have some ideas about the setting (by the way, you should read this note on settings: History vs. Mythology), which affects the narrative in some ways, but rarely affects the actual conversation. Are Bob and Jim high school foot ball players? Proud king and timid prince? Are they mutant space aliens, or futuristic androids?

Place your characters in the world then begin getting to know them: their motivations, way of thinking, strengths and weaknesses.

Be Courageous

When you approach a story this way — in terms of an argument, and with characters who are beginning to have personalities, you will soon experience a bizarre sensation.

Stories and characters take on a mind of their own. One day, you’ll be writing, and decide that for the story to progress a character will have to do something. You’ll try to write that action down, and it just won’t work. The character will look up from the page and say: “You aren’t serious. Both you and I know I’m not going to do that. Try again, author.”

When your characters begin arguing with you, be proud. You’ve achieved some level of competence now — your story and the people in it are powerful and real enough to fight back against you. This is part of what it means to say a story “has legs.”

On the other hand, you know have a responsibility to these people. They each have a story to tell, and it’s your duty now to tell it with the dignity that they each deserve.

What that means is that the story is now free: you are now just a witness to the unfolding story, and your job is to report it faithfully, even if you don’t like where it’s going.

That takes courage as an author.

Kōtiro is a story about isolation and love. Being a sappy romantic, my personal position on the matter is that love conquers all. It’s the most important thing, and it trumps all other considerations. But that’s not what my story says. I realized some way into the narrative that Kō, who starts out agreeing with me, must change. She loses her naive optimism about the power of love, which I hate — I wanted to write a story about how being starry-eyed and infatuated will solve all your problems. The story proved to me that that’s just not how it is.

On the other hand, you’ve seen plenty of movies in which you slapped your forehead (sometimes often) and exclaimed: “What? She wouldn’t do that!” Just like authors get to know their characters well, audiences get to know them also, and form expectations about their personality. When the author violates the dignity of the character, they create a forehead slapping moment.

That happens because an author isn’t courageous enough to let the characters tell their story. He had a preconceived notion about the direction of the story, and ignored the protests of the characters who knew better. He was weak, and as a result he wrote a crappy story that makes a weak argument that no one believes or cares about.

Don’t be weak. Trust your characters to have the conversation you created them to have.

What is Mythology?

Mythology is a narrative explaining how the world came to be in its present form. This is also the frame most authors are writing from when they develop their back story: how did the setting get the way it is?

The difference is that the events in a myth are metaphors, whereas a back story is supposed to be a self-consistent historical account.

For example, there is a Māori story about Tāne, god of the forest, who ascends to the highest heaven to receive 3 baskets of knowledge from Io, the prime mover, or “self created.” Tāne, who himself is one of the most revered gods, has to undergo extensive purification on the way up and down. The story is instructive of the procedure to receive sacred knowledge from the iwi priests: one must have the birthright, receive permission, undergo the appropriate purification, go through the correct rites of initiation, and respect the tapu of both the institutions and knowledge itself.

The specific facts of Tāne’s ascent aren’t relevant to the message. In fact, the story changes each time an elder tells it, because in large part, the details of the account don’t matter.

What is History?

History, on the other hand, is an attempt to relate the facts of the past world in such a way as to explain the present state of affairs. Ideally, it’s not moralistic or metaphorical, it’s just an explanation of cause and effect.

It’s complex because there is never just one history — there are just people looking back, with their foibles and biases, and deciding what is relevant and what isn’t. It’s Americans believing they won World World II because they were morally superior to the Nazis, and it might well have been the Nazis looking back and saying the same if they had won. It’s people trying to make sense of chaos, and finding one or two main causes for events that probably had thousands or millions of tiny causes.

It’s never easy to figure out exactly what happened, and it’s impossible to figure out exactly why. Remember that.

The confusion

It’s common in mythology to tell “just so” stories. A good example is the hero Māui, who decided that the days were too short. How to solve that problem? He kicked the sun’s ass and told him to slow down.

It’s a common pattern for a hero to take some supernatural action that is very direct, works immediately, and has no unintended side effects. That’s okay, because the action isn’t a fact, it’s a metaphor. That’s not how history is though, and it’s not how your setting should be.

Don’t be confused: mythology is a metaphor for the status quo. History is an explanation for the status quo. If you use one when you should use the other, both your mythology and history will suck.

Some Considerations

1. History is biased. History is written by the victors, as they say. You as an author have to know what “really” happened, and you have to decide what people think happened. There’s a difference, and the gap between belief and reality is often ripe for stories.
2. Causes are complex. There is never a single cause for a major event in history. If you can explain a major world event in one sentence, you are writing a myth, not an account of history. Explain the many reasons and forces that allowed or forced an event to occur.
3. Groups do not make decisions. In bad back stories, groups will often decide something and take decisive action. The only group that behaves that way is an army, and the reason is that it’s actually a person or small group deciding and the army following orders. In reality, public sentiment is divided and takes time to evolve, and even when there’s wide agreement on a subject, many possible actions can be taken. Cliches like neighboring kingdoms that all have very specific cultural traits, all diametrically opposed, smack of myth, not history.
4. People are in power for a reason. Lots of reasons. No one just declares themselves dictator; it’s a process of building small pockets of support and infrastructure that eventually leave no one to fight back when power is finally taken. Think about why leaders, especially “evil” leaders, are in power.

Are you ignorant? Would you know if you were?

One reason I have a continuing passion for games is that they combine many of my interests. Digital and oil painting. Graphic design, information theory and architecture. Software development. Human-Computer interaction. Fiction and non-fiction writing. Math. Ancient cultures and philosophy. Music.

What does a person with such wide varied interests do? Why, make games of course!

But the same diversity that pulls me in, can also be overwhelming. Studies say that 10,000 hours of concentrated practice in a field is required before a person can become an expert. This rings true to my experience. There are certain fields in which I am an expert, and others that I only dabble in.

Levels of Knowledge

1. Total Ignorance. You might not even be aware of this body of knowledge, or if you are, only in a vague sense. My article on Text Fonts was an attempt to lift people from this state about typography.
2. Ignorant Incompetence. You know enough about the field to believe you are competent, but not enough about it to realize how far you have to go. It’s a wise policy to always assume you’re in this state, and always try to be getting out of this state.
3. Knowledgeable Incompetence. You know enough now to know what you don’t know. You know the right questions to ask experts, and you know when you should let someone else do the work. You can now recognize an expert when you see one.
4. Competence. You are good enough to tackle most tasks in the field. You often need guidance, but you understand the guideance in context once it’s provided. Your work is generally of acceptable quality.
5. Expertise. You know the field intuitively, can provide thoughtful advice to others about it. Your work in the field stands as an example to others.

Achieve Incompetence

When you tackle a field like games, which is actually a combination of many fields of knowledge, it becomes imperative that you at least be aware of your level of knowledge on a given subject. You don’t need to be an expert at everything. You do need to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses so you can form a realistic sense of the quality of your game’s various aspects.

The really dangerous area of knowledge is total ignorance. If you don’t realize there is even knowledge to be had, then you will undoubtedly muck up whatever you’re working on. If you are responsible for the user interface of your game, but you don’t know what a grid system is, you are somewhere between Totally Ignorant and Ignorantly Incompetent. The goal is to reach the level of knowledge in which you realize how bad you are, and can recognize good work.

Some areas are trickier than others. People are readily aware of sucking at art, but how many people are sure they can recognize good art when they see it? Aware that they suck, they may ask for help and get help… that also sucks. Knowledgeably Incompetent people have it better, able to ask for the right help from the right people.

If a particular field doesn’t grab you, you’re unlikely to breach this level. To become competent requires around 5,000 hours of practice. That’s 3 to 5 years of continual effort. Only passion can drag you through this territory because this phase in particular is quite painful: you are aware of how much you suck and how sub par your work is, and yet you keep trying for years until finally you hit something you like more often than not. It’s quite the challenge.

To be a great game director, you must be at least Knowledgeably Incompetent in every discipline required to produce your game. When you achieve that you will not have the requisite knowledge to actually produce a top-notch game, but you will know the contour of the relevant knowledge, so you can ask the right questions of the right people to make your game sparkle.

Self Assessment

So ask yourself, as you work on your game, how much you really know. If you find yourself tackling projects thinking, “Bah, how hard could it be?” then you probably have a lot to learn to achieve Knowledgeable Ignorance, and that’s your cue to stop what you’re doing and start asking questions.

The most difficult areas are those that you never think of, so be on the look out for critiques you don’t understand. If it never occurred to you to pay attention to the type face you use, start asking questions about type. If you never read about what makes an interface successful, start asking questions about information architecture and human-computer interaction. If you don’t know squat about music except what you like, don’t just cruise the web for free midis! Ask someone who knows what they are doing to help you!

Never get too comfortable because when you scale one mountain of knowledge, you often just find the next range that you couldn’t even see before. Good luck!

Edit: A reader reminded me of a great paper by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” It’s closely related to this article, and quite eye opening. I recommend it!

Read “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”

At its core, drama is about conflict. Tension between one force and another must exist to generate interest. We build characters that the audience can relate to in an effort to invest them in the conflict that arises out of the tensions we create. We tease the audience by oscillating between near-wins and near-losses for the protagonist. We grip them by raising the stakes every time something goes right or wrong. Just when all seems lost, something happens to push the story into climax where the tension is resolved and the “normal” is reestablished.

Here’s a little graph I whipped up to illustrate:

Variations

This is the basic form of a dramatic storyline, but there are as many variations as there are stories. Sometimes the story has no “climax” because the antagonist wins and the new normal is one that’s not so great. Sometimes the new normal isn’t just getting back to the first normal, as in the graph: sometimes the new normal is better than before, and other times it’s worse, even if the protagonist wins.

Notice that there are scenes sitting at regular intervals along the “normal” line. Generally, we pace the action we expose to the audience by having one exciting scene, followed by a slow scene used to flesh out characters or reflect on what has been happening. Sometimes these slow scenes are skipped toward the end of the narrative as we approach “all is lost” and “climax,” in order to maintain momentum.

One trick that modern writers have been using for around 10 years now is that of showing an exciting scene from later in the story as the first scene. Sometimes it’s “all is lost,” but it’s always a scene in which the antagonist has the upper hand. After that scene is shown with no explanation, we are treated to the “normal,” followed by the regular story arc.

This serves the dual purposes of engaging the audience with excitement to grab their attention right away, and to compel them to stay to find out what was going on in that scene and what the resolution will ultimately be.

Conflict Layering

Crafting a good conflict requires what I call “conflict layering.” A Jedi versus a Sith Lord is a conflict. It’s better if the Sith Lord is the Jedi’s father, because that introduces a counter-conflict: on the one hand you want to save the galaxy, on the other you want to save your father.

The more points of tension you can create, the more engaging (and potentially confusing!) the story can be. Sometimes that means giving texture to the primary conflict by introducing doubt (as in Star Wars), and sometimes that means providing sub plots that carry their own arc running simultaneously with the main arc.

This often means the difference between a good and a bad story. The most highly regarded stories are those that draw out sympathy from all sides. A mother who has to choose which of her children will live and which will be put into a Nazi oven. We hate the Nazi guard who takes that child. That guard also hates herself for what she does, but feels she must continue to feed and care for her sick son. But maybe her sick son is actually a psychopath who kills animals and rapes women at night. It’s not his fault though because his abusive step father raped and killed his older sister when he was younger, so he’s scarred. We still hate the guard, and we still want to rescue the child, but now we have reservations because of our sympathy for the all the characters involved.

This is just one example of a layered conflict, and how revealing more information in progressive scenes can provide texture to a story arc.

Drama in Games

Goombas guard the land around castles in Marioland, and Mario has to overcome them to reach his goal. Narratively, Mario’s normal was disrupted when his girlfriend was stolen by Bowser, and now he searches through castle, after castle looking for her. True to dramatic form, each castle is more difficult, or higher stakes, than the previous. After each victory, there are fireworks and brief rest before he starts again at a comparatively easy point in the game, working his way toward the more difficult castle at the end of the land.

Finally Mario reaches the final castle, kills the deadly Bowser, and is reunited with Peach, reestablishing the normal.

In a sense, games are fundamentally dramatic because they involve a conflict between the player’s goals and the rules of the game. That’s at the mechanical level. Layered on top of that is the story which often involves a protagonist overcoming great odds to reach his goal.

A great many games rely heavily on one drama or the other. Most gamers have suffered the stilted game play of a game with fantastic characters and a great story, just so they could see the resolution. Still more games have nothing but a cursory story, yet the mechanical drama is so engaging that we ignore the weak storytelling because we enjoy the challenge of the game mechanics.

I think the goal of a game designer should be to make both of those dramas compelling.

Game design should interweave the mechanical drama that arises from game play with the narrative drama that we create for the characters as backdrop. In a sense, the game play in this medium is our way of making the player “feel” the tension that the character feels. By creating progressively more difficult mechanics, we convey the sense of achievement, hope, and challenge to the player: the same senses that the character he controls feels about the story events.

The two dramas should operate in harmony, each keeping pace with the other as we provide greater and greater challenges for the player and character alike, until finally–the character having compelled the player to push all this way–the player pushes the character over the finish line, reestablishes the normal, rescues the princess, and lives to fight in another sequel.

In the story of Suki, goddess of rebirth, Tuna-roa, father of eels, rapes her while she’s doing chores near the swamp where he lives. Apparently she doesn’t mind because she continues about her chores, and only decides to mention it to her husband the next day, when it happens again, in the same way, at the same place. I guess she was annoyed at that point?

So, I guess I need to wrap my mind around a cultural concept that rape isn’t that big of a deal. Suki’s husband was pretty pissed, but the act itself didn’t seem to be a big issue.

It’s easy to shirk topics like this one, especially in video games, but I think that’s a mistake. I feel like I have a responsibility to the Maori culture and to the medium to tackle these topics. To understand the beliefs, and to use them to give some emotional depth to the story.

Maybe embrcing these subjects will bring games from their pulp status into the light of literary merit.