Category Archives: The Writing Life

Franchises: Buying In for the Long Haul

Marketing Nathan Barra The Writing Life 1 Comment

I remember reviews of the Wii that compared it to the Xbox 360 and the PS3, when all three consoles were shiny and new.  From a technical perspective, the Wii was an inferior console.  It lacked entirely in capabilities that its competitors were counting on as differentiating selling points.  Like millions of others, I still bought a Wii.  In fact, the Wii sold so well that it dominated the competition for a number of years after its release.  Why would a technically inferior console do so well?

Loyalty.

Nintendo holds a number of huge franchises that have always released a installment shortly after a new system’s release.  On IGN’s top 25 Videogame Franchises list, Nintendo franchises occupy the top two spots (Mario and the Legend of Zelda) and a handful of the remaining twenty three spots.

Authorial franchises start with a series.  With enough time, and if enough quality works are produced, the author’s name becomes the franchise, instead.  Even one series with the popularity of one of Nintendo’s flagship franchises, the Legend of Zelda as an example, is enough to build a very successful career on.  The question is, then, what can we learn from Zelda’s success?

#5. Successful franchises are cannon controlled.

To the best of my investigative skills, there has been neither a third party production of a Legend of Zelda game, nor a Legend of Zelda game produced for any system other than a Nintendo console since Nintendo started producing hardware.  Why would the license holder of such a huge franchise do this?  Isn’t Nintendo limiting their potential audience by not offering the game on PC or it’s competitor’s consoles?  The answer is two-fold.

First, Nintendo does not want anyone other than Miyamoto and Tezuka (the games’ designers) working on the franchise, lest they muddle the cannon.  The current prevailing theories as to the canonical timeline suggest at least three independent time streams.  This milieu and wealth of plot is too complicated for anyone else to handle.  One bad game, like one bad book, risks the entire franchise.  As to the second point, a gamer must do business with Nintendo’s hardware branch to play a Legend of Zelda game.  By limiting the availability of the game, Nintendo increases the profitability of all of its branches.

The Take Away: Upon establishing a successful series or franchise, it is essential to recognize the power of the IP represented therein.  I need to be very, very careful who I allow to work on it and how it is distributed.

#4. Successful franchises use iconic imagery.

TriforceTo me, the Triforce is indelibly linked to the whole Legend of Zelda series.  When I see that symbol, my mind automatically goes back to the games and how much fun I had playing them.  And you know, doesn’t those three golden triangles mean that this game is also a Zelda game?  Maybe I should stop walking through the mall and pay attention to that cutout in the window of the game store.

Point being, the Triforce is an excellent branding piece for several reasons.  First, it is strongly tied into the series, serving as a major focus for no less than six of the Zelda games.  It appears as a design element in many of the other installments of the series.  It’s a simple design that can be easily printed, embroidered, cast or otherwise incorporated into merchandise.  I am able to recognize it from across a crowded game store.  That’s some good branding.

The Take Away: If used properly, brands let me market my books, sell merch, and establish and communicate a reputation at a glance.

#3. Successful franchises inspire nostalgia.

The basic premise of a Zelda game is that a young boy from a rural village in Hyrule is called to save the world and sets out to explore a number of dungeons, killing monsters and collecting loot, until he faces off and defeats the ultimate evil of his time.  It’s a Hero’s Journey, every time.  Each game feels the same, and has the elements of puzzles and monster combat that I enjoy.  The familiarity is comforting.  Yet, there is enough variety in the storyline, treasures and items to collect, and milieu to explore, that it still feels fresh.  The learning curve from one game to the next is shallow.

Nostalgia also has value in that it can generate sales.  I remember, very fondly, my first game of the Majora’s Mask.  Because I enjoyed that game, I bought and played the Ocarina of Time, which I also enjoyed.  Each subsequent game has built up the nostalgic warm and fuzzies that I have for the Zelda franchise.  The release of a new Zelda game has pushed me off the fence about buying a new console before.

The Take Away:  Nostalgia is a powerful position from which to sell books.  If a consumer looks at my name at the bottom of a new release, and is flooded with a sense of nostalgic enjoyment, the book is likely sold.

#2. Successful franchises have staying power.

The Hero’s Journey is one of the essential story archetypes that speaks to the human condition.  It has resonated with people for thousands of years and continues to do so.  I want to start the game with Link and gain power enough to kill the ultimate evil of the day.  I can play, and read, that storyline over and over again, and never get bored so long as there is enough variety in other aspects.

Wise selection of archetypes is not the only element that can give staying power to a series.  One of my favorite things about a Legend of Zelda game is the underlying philosophy that serves as the theme for the game.  In Majora’s Mask, the world is destroyed at the end of the third in-game day, so you are forced to time travel back to the dawn of the first day repeatedly.  Whenever I play this game as an adult, I can’t help but ruminate afterwards about the nature of time, how I live my life and what I would do over if I had the chance.  In the Twilight Princess, the game focuses on the concept of twilight as the border of light and dark, and this imagery is dragged throughout the game’s other aspects.  To me, this speaks to the idea that the world is both bright and dark, and that, most of the time, we live in a world of moral greys.

The Take Away:  There isn’t one method to give staying power to a series, but it is essential for a series to have the endurance to become a successful franchise, none the less.

#1. Successful franchises have consistently high quality.

I didn’t start at the beginning of the Zelda franchise.  I started with Majora’s Mask, then went backwards in the release chronology.  I then follow the series to this day.  If Majora’s Mask had been the one bad game in the series, I would have done neither.  There are some other franchises which I started from the beginning, but ended up dropping mid-series due to a single bad installment.  When I build a franchise, what I’m really doing is building a brand, and for that brand to continue living, I must be sure that I deliver quality work, every time.

The Take Away: If I’m disappointed by the quality of a single installment, I may not come back.  Franchises trade on their name and upon garnered authorial trust.

 

MYST: The Game that Had it All

Action & Adventure Colette Black Fantasy Science Fiction The Writing Life No Comments

MYSTLong before Portal or Portal 2, there was MYST, played exclusively on the pc. I know Portal can be played in other formats. In fact, it’s probably preferable, but we never got around to graduating our Nintendo any higher than a Wii, so when my kids and I played Portal it was like the old days, on our pc. Watching my son’s fingers pounce around on the little plastic keys brought back memories. As much as I love Portal, especially the cake song at the end, I think MYST was better. It had EVERYTHING, and I think that’s a bit of a writing lesson:

Mystery: No info-dumping in MYST. You start out relatively clueless, with just enough information to draw you in, so you want to know more, and you want to solve the mystery. Most of the game was spent figuring  out puzzles, but the goal  pulled you on, because you had to find out what had happened in the world and you wanted each clue in order to put the pieces together and reach the end goal.

Point: Our novels need to hook our readers, give a sense of mystery, and excite the passion for discovery  in order to pull our readers from one chapter to the next.

Intelligence: MYST wasn’t some Sudoku or Word Find. The puzzles were hard and varied. It stretched my brain. For some people, that made it too much. They couldn’t figure out the solutions and so they gave up. My husband and I used to play the game together in our early married years–it constituted many of our date nights–and, I admit, we cheated a couple of times. But often, the puzzles would use our different skills. I remember one where we had to match the pitches to sounds on some other part of the island we were exploring. My husband figured out the pattern related to the problem, but I identified the sounds to find the right pitch. Good fun.

Point: Challenging our readers intellectually can actually make them more invested in the story, but push it too far and we might lose readers. We need to find the balance that gives us the widest audience.

Setting: Speaking of the puzzles, the music, and the island; the setting for MYST was incredible. Up until that time, at least to my knowledge, there had been nothing that compared. You’d step into a world and every color, line, and shape told you about the new environment.  Eerie creaks and groans added to the sense of mystery. Sometimes, I could almost imagine that I smelled certain things, the details were so complete. When I stepped into the game, I stepped into another world.

Point: We need to immerse our readers into the world we create, whether it be contemporary, fantastical, or far-future. The details need to paint such a complete picture that our readers taste, see, and fully experience that sensation of having stepped into another place.

Story: There’s more I could say but I don’t want to make a ten-page long post, so we’ll end with story. In the past, most games I played, I played to win. With MYST, it wasn’t about winning, it was about completing the story, finding the conclusion, and finally understanding how it all came together.

Point: It’s important that we set up our readers expectations right to begin with, so they have some idea of the type of journey they’re undertaking and where it will take them, and then we need to fulfill those expectations with a satisfying conclusion.

MYST series

The best part: After playing a couple of versions of MYST, I discovered they’d taken the game and turned the whole thing into a series of books. I don’t know if they were widely read, but I  loved them.  When my oldest son discovered the series, somewhere around 3rd grade (when the school wouldn’t let him read Harry Potter) he jumped to an adult reading level within weeks, all because he fell in love with those books. From that point on he couldn’t be held back. He voraciously read every fantasy book he could get his hands on. MYST not only made an awesome game, it translated well into an interesting book series. That game, had game.

Just as a side note, anybody else think it’s time for some Portal books…and maybe a movie?

 

Six Reasons Not to Turn Your Role-Playing Game into a Novel

Guest Posts The Writing Life 6 Comments

no dice A guest post by Kevin Pettway

As gamers, we (the author included) understand that our pastime is one of imagination and delight. We spend hours creating entertaining stories and encounters to flummox and amuse our friends.

Also, we are great students of the literature and media of our genre, be it fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else. We use books, movies, and comics to inform our games, and provide greater heights of adventure. It would seem the most natural thing in the multiverse to marry these two similar pursuits together, to carry the magic ring back out of the game and onto the page it came from.

What could go wrong? Oh, I am here to tell you.

  1. It’s not your world. If you bought that adventure, or used characters or settings you found in a movie or a book, they don’t belong to you. As long as your sticky-fingered thefts are limited to stocking the game for Wednesday night around the dining room table, no harm, no foul. I promise, Tolkien’s estate isn’t coming after your Fantasy Gurps. But as soon as you start looking to publish, either on your own or traditionally, you’re likely to run into problems. Problems of the You-Pay-Me variety, which as anyone knows are the worst problems of all. No one—not publishers, distributers, or storefronts (including Amazon or the like)—is going to handle Jane Smith’s Star Wars VII: the Return of Boba Fett, from Way Back in Time When He Was Really Badass, no matter how much fun it was to play with your friends.
  2. It is your world. Mostly. I hope you play your role-playing games with others. The point is, you probably play with other people. This is great for gaming, but much less so for a novelist looking for something to write about. You see, although you spent the hard time behind the screen writing down the names of every patron in the bar (which your stupid players never even walked into), the resultant product—the game itself—is a collaborative effort. That means your success is a six-way split, or however many players you have. The sticking point for this isn’t even so much about money. If you’re writing a book about your Vampire: the Masquerade game, there isn’t going to be any money). No, it’s about control. Unless your Call of Cthulhu campaign comes with a release form, all of your players are now partners and co-owners, which is a headache you do not want to imagine. All of which leads to…
  3. Your friends are idiots. Well, they probably aren’t all idiots. Not more than half. This does highlight the differences between writing for a game and writing for a novel, though. A role-playing character serves a very specific function. It exists to give voice to our fantasy selves, and keep us entertained, usually four to six hours a week. Without an active human being to inhabit them, they become limp as punctured balloons. The most well-fleshed-out gaming character is a two-dimensional cartoon next to any character from a book. If you’re doing it right, anyway. Take a character from out of your game and put him in a novel and they become capering idiots, dancing and leering for no apparent reason at all. That is because in the game, the players are only trying to entertain themselves. They can do any dumbass bullshit they want for no better reason that it’s incongruous and funny. The characters in your novel need to entertain and be understood by everyone. Think your players are up to that task?
  4. We are no better. Picture this scene: a party of adventurers is on their way to drop the Magic Shoe Insert of Dr. Scholls into the Pit of Really Hot Despair-Lava, when along the way they stop in a tavern for a soda. One of your adventurers has a lengthy conversation with the soda puller guy about whether or not he’s seen any Minions of the Fairly Evil One walking around town in those sneakers with the cushioned soles.

    Freeze the action!

    For this scene to work in a role-playing game, all you really need to know (maybe) is the name of the town, the soda tavern, and probably the barkeep (soda puller guy). Create this same scene in a book, though, and everything changes. Now you also need the characters’ first impressions walking in. What does the town look like? Smell like? What are the people doing? Where is the bar? Why do they have soda in a medieval European setting? Who else is in the tavern? What do they think of strangers? What are their allegiances? Do they wear shoes with cushioned soles or inserts? What does the tavern owner know? Does he have family? Are other goofy details going to become involved, like what he ate for breakfast, or the age of his parents? What does the town produce? Export? Are there any power struggles? The list goes on and on.

    In the game, the whole town has a limited, truncated function. Like one of those cardboard cup-sleeves they give you at Starbucks. But in a book, it has all the characteristics of a real place. It’s a ceramic mug with a double-cap mocha latte, extra foam.

  5. Nobody wants to read about your D&D game. And here’s the sad truth. Publishers of genre fiction have been including in their submission guidelines for years now that they specifically do not want to see a recount of your bestest game ever, no matter how awesome you thought it was. You simply were not the first person to come up with the idea, and it has already been played out—like those movies where the Tuff Guy/Curmudgeonly Asshole is forced to babysit a bunch of kids and turns into a wiser, more fun-loving assassin/drill sergeant/editor-in-chief an hour and a half later. No one wants to see that, but everyone can tell it’s coming. It’s not unlike getting trapped in a coal mine for three days with someone who wants to tell you all about his favorite Pathfinder character, and you don’t have a gun.
  6. Screw you, blog-writer-guy! I’m hearin’ a lot of can’t outta you, but I’m better than that! You don’t know me. I’m awesome! Naturally. If you were the type to be put off by some blog on the web telling you what you can’t do, you would never have read this far. You’d have stopped at number two and toddled off to finish painting your Legend of the Five Rings miniatures with brushes you made out of Cheetos. Since, on the other hand you did get this far, let’s go over some of the things you will have to do if you really do want to make this book:
    • Make it your own world. One hundred percent. It’s okay to borrow concepts, but change them and make them your own before you include them.
    • Throw away all the player characters. Your own characters will be much more interesting anyway.
    • Flesh out your world. The places where no action happens can be just as important as those where it does. The whole world informs everything that goes into your book. It’s world-building. Build that world.
    • If it’s fantasy, decide how the magic works. If it’s sci-fi, figure out how the science works. Horror? How do ghosts work? Understand the underpinnings of your world before you begin, and make it logical. The payoff is huge.
    • Come up with a real plot. Tell an interesting story. No world is so wonderful that you can just describe your book. Write from beginning, middle, and end with compelling characters. That’s your novel, not a game.

In short, you may use your game as source material, but treat your novel as something entirely new. The game might be interesting and add to your background, but it is not a shortcut to a real book. Not like plagiarism. That’s a shortcut. Or finding a successful author with a new manuscript no one has seen, and smothering him with a pillow. Also a shortcut. There are probably some others, but not writing your game. Never the game.

Guest Writer Bio: Kevin_Pettway
Kevin Pettway is a web-comic creator and writer who used his campaign setting as the basis for his books. He has never plagiarized anyone, but he might have smothered another author in their sleep for snoring too loud. Visit his website to find out more.

On Cannibal Dwarves and Other Character Problems

Character Leigh Galbreath The Writing Life 5 Comments

So, I’m sitting in a living room with a bunch of people I know only marginally, next to a friend of mine that I’ve known for years. This is a role playing group my friend has been a part of for years, and the campaign has been long established. In an effort to speed things along, I’ve inherited a player character, a dwarf, who seems awesome on the page, then I’m told, “And he eats his own kind after they’re killed.”

Um. Okay.  I can roll with that. I mean, I don’t have to play it that way. It’s my character now, and that little oddity was far outweighed by an ability to kick serious bootay.

I should have known, though. I really should have.

We proceed to play the game, and I start to realize that my character’s cannibalistic tendencies are the tip of the iceberg.  The next clue came when the game master brings in a non-player character who is supposed to be the group’s guide, the priest of some god…and he hates everyone.  And I mean everyone.  Come to find out, this guy is the group’s guide because they are cursed by said god for defiling its temple.

I figure, okay, I can roll with that, too. I like non-heroic characters. This could be fun.

And then one of the other players decides that his character is going to go perform basically a home invasion on a farm nearby. A couple of other players decide to go with him, and about half the room toddles off to have their jollies, and just when I think I can roll with that too, the first guy decides he’s going to rape the women at the farm.

Yes. He insisted on role-playing it. And yes, the GM let him.

I don’t know about you, but…seriously?

A few years earlier, I was playing D&D with some friends I’ve known for a long while. The guy running that game was laid-back enough to let us play any type of character we wanted, including non-heroic verging on evil characters. And then he proceeded to try and have a normal, epic-type fantasy campaign that requires characters other than non-heroic verging on evil. Just getting these guys to get together into the same room required one of the other characters to go completely against type (this irritated me). Never mind becoming a cohesive, cooperative group. In the end, we were all fried by a dragon, and some god or another gave us all a choice to either change into lawful good characters or die (this made me get up from the table).

After these experiences, I’ve come to learn a very valuable lesson. Well, three lessons, really, the first of which is never role-play with the first group–like, ever. The second was that role-playing evil characters can be, shall we say, problematic. The third was that forcing characters to behave against their nature is frustrating to the point of uselessness, but letting them run roughshod over you won’t get you anywhere.

The same is true when writing, I’ve found. Characters should always be true to their nature, and if you find you’re having to wrangle them into the plot, it’s possible they don’t belong in that story. On the same token, characters who decide to go their own way and get away from you can easily derail the story and probably lead everyone on a tangent that will mostly likely turn into a giant waste of valuable writing time.

And take if from me. Stay away from cannibal dwarves. Nothing good comes at the end of that road.