Greetings humans, Monki here with an interview I did recently with Flint Dille. Flint wrote the story for the Transformers video game and actually wrote some episodes of the Transformers cartoon back in it's heyday.
Flint is attempting to blend the lines between the various mediums we've come to use over the past few years. It's good to see people making these efforts to branch out and treat our medium like it should be treated...with respect as an art form.
I've got some more cool stuff coming up shortly, and don't forget, your last day to submit art for the "Pair-Up" contest is THIS FRIDAY! So get to submitting!
Enjoy the interview, I'm looking forward to seeing more of Flint's work in the future.
Monki: You've written for TV, Movies, novels and video games. Of those, which is the most difficult medium to write for? Do you have a preference for interactive material over a format like a novel?
Flint Dille: Great question. Truth is... And this is going to sound like an evasive answer, but it happens to be true. That all of them have their own challenges and rewards. The two opposite mediums are novels and video games. Novels are solitary, lonely, linear and complete within themselves. Video games are collaborative, extroverted, non-linear (even if the story is linear, the incidental dialogue is, by its very nature, non-linear) fragmentary and utterly incomplete within themselves. Movies and TV are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum depending on the context. If you're working with a studio or network they're very collaborative, if you're writing a spec script alone, it is solitary. They're both fragmentary (in that a screenplay is a very sparse document compared to a novel) and linear.
Monki: Some of your earliest work was with the Transformers TV series. What is it like getting back to the franchise and working on this game? Was it difficult to return to these characters you wrote for so long ago?
Flint: It's funny how life comes full circle at times. In 1985 I was working on Transformers, in 2007 I'm working on Transformers: The Game. In 1985 Dave Marconi and I wrote the Agent 13 novels, in 2007 they're being reprinted. In 1987 I was doing the Buck Rogers: Battle for the Future game, in 2007 I'm working on Buck Rogers again. Somewhere around 1987 Frank Miller was talking about this noir comic book, now I'm working with him on the Sin City game. It almost makes you believe in circular time.
As far as writing the characters, it was interesting. The best way I could describe it is that it was like a college reunion or something. A lot of time had passed, the characters had changed over the years. Some of them were fatter, had lost their rivets, others were eerily unchanged. There was one moment when I was writing an exchange between Starscream and Megatron when it all clicked for me. All the sudden, they were back. Then, one by one, other characters started popping in. New guys showed up and joined the party. Transformers always was a big party.
Monki: How careful were you with the story for the game? Were you allowed to deviate from the script of the movie? Has Michael Bay threatened your life in any way?
Flint: I've never met Michael Bay. I went over to his offices for the super-secret script reading. Great offices. Didn't see Steven Spielberg on this project, but I worked with him on animated movies. The good thing is that everybody understood that a game story has to be different than a movie story. It emphasizes different things. In some ways, this returns us to the first question. The great thing about games is that they allow you to explore the 'what ifs' of a world. What if I'd turned this way and not that? Games aren't really about emotion, other than throwing the controller against the wall. They're really about possibilities and vicarious thrill. If there's an emotion involved, it might be empathy when we get really good at designing game experiences. You get to walk a mile in somebody else's virtual moccasins.
Monki: When it comes to the side stories of the game, how much leeway were you given to create the plot? How much interaction did you have with the crew from the movie to keep the same sort of flavor for the side quests?
Flint: We were given a lot of leeway, but like movies… In fact, more so than movies, a lot of things happen in production.
Monki: Do any of the side quests in the game originate from some of your previous Transformers work or from the original cartoons/comics? Can you shed some light on what we might be able to expect from some of the non-movie plot?
Flint: No talking about the plot or your previously mentioned question about Michael Bay threatening my life might have a different answer.
Monki: Video games are becoming more like movies and movies are becoming more like video games. Where do you see this trend going over the next few years? Is this convergence the reason why you were keen on doing Transformers? (Or was it getting Peter Cullen to read your dialogue?)
Flint: The real truth, which echoes the answer to the first question, is that I view games, movies, books, comics, action figures, TV shows as all being one big medium. At the core of all of them is an intellectual property and the mediums are just different expressions of that property.
Monki: When writing for a video game what kind of allowances do you have to give to the person playing the game? Do you write your dialogue keeping in mind the person who so desperately wants to skip the cutscenes and get back into the game or do you write them for the story-driven gamer? Is it difficult writing for a medium that encourages constant action?
Flint: I'll start this answer with a plug for the book on videogame writing that John Zuur Platten and I wrote which will be published on January 10th (It was delayed as our publishers were bought) by Watson/Guptill. It's called The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing. We're embarrassed by the title, but it got slipped past us a long time ago via an email and we can't change it. The simple answer to the question is that you tune the game to the anticipated audience. We assume that people who are buying story driven games are interested in seeing stories, therefore aren't anxious to button past the cinematics. That having been said, the real goal is to integrate the story seamlessly with the gameplay so that the game tells the story. For instance, when I'm playing God of War and a Hydra comes ripping out of the rotting deck of a ship, is that a gameplay item or a story item? The answer is both. Part of the job of integration is to deliver cinematics at the exact moment the player wants and needs a break and/or a reward.
Monki: I've met so many people in the industry that don't play games themselves and that boggles my mind. Would you consider yourself a "gamer"? If so, what kind of games are you into? If not, do you think that effects your writing on a title?
Flint: Yeah… I'd say I'm a pretty long-term, hard-core gamer. I started on Avalon Hill games (not counting Monopoly and chess and the same games everybody starts on), moved to Arcade Games (my greatest accomplishment in life is making it to the secret bird level in Galaga at the cost of half of my net worth at the time), D&D bigtime (the first design stuff I ever did was with Gary Gygax - arguably the best game designer ever), Miniatures - specifically Chainmail (with Gary's soldiers), at one point or another I've owned nearly every platform starting with the Atari 2700 or Intellivision. My tastes are pretty eclectic. I have a 9 year old, so my playing for the last few years has been biased towards kids stuff (Star Wars Lego and Wii Zelda have been our latest favorites) because I like to play with him, or sometimes just watch him play and serve as an advisor. I tend to like 3rd person games better than 1st person games because 1st person somehow triggers my dyslexia I think. I am however agnostic about working on a 3rd person game or 1st person game. I sometimes obsess over RTS'. Lately I've lost a lot of perfectly good hours of my life playing Rise of Nations, stopping at the Enlightenment Age. Not sure why this has captivated me, but it has. I haven't had a transformative experience on the PS3 yet. I kind of mourn for the PSP. Have played a lot of fun stuff on the 360, but haven't played 'that' game. Of course, my "M" game experiences are limited because I try to play stuff that my son can play. I did play a wide variety of stuff for the DICE Awards. For some reasons, Rainbow 6 Vegas grabbed me and I want to play more 'Gears.' Cliffy, by the way, is a big Transformers fan. Still resents me for killing Optimus.
Monki: Do you keep in mind the limitations of the narrative structure of video games when you are writing? No single experience within a video game narrative will ever occur the same way every time...how do you deal with that?
Flint: It starts with the concept. What experience do you want to deliver? Is this a casual game for people who just want to hack their way through linear twitch or is this a sophisticated branching RPG with Next Gen AI? One is not better than the other. It's just taste or what you feel like playing that's better. One of the more annoying things about this business is that some people seem to assume that one type of game or experience is intrinsically superior to another. It would be like somebody arguing that the Thriller genre is intrinsically better than the Black Comedy genre. As far as I'm concerned, a good phone game is a higher achievement than a mediocre Next Gen massive multiplayer. The goal is to define a clear objective and meet it. Also, I have long since crossed the bridge to the fact that I'm in the entertainment business, not the game business. The overall objective of our products is to entertain. We are to do that through any and all means available.
In answer to the second part of your question, it's like any other medium, you have to imagine how your audience would optimally experience your game, then imagine how he will probably experience it, and then imagine a worst case and drive the hardest bargain with reality that you can. The great thing about game platforms is that most people who have them also have good TV's so you can expect that the fixings are there for a good experience.
Monki: What is the next step in the eventual merging of video games and movies? Do you think the average gamer is ready to make a transition to heavily plot-driven titles? What games would you point to as the next leap towards an interactive movie-like experience? (Knights of the Old Republic? Mass Effect?) What will video games look like in ten years?
Flint: I'll give you a trick answer to the last question. If I were looking forward ten years, I'd be making games for seniors. In about 15 years, baby boomers will start being seniors. Imagine the market, the wealthiest demographic in America with an endless amount of time on their hands. Sounds like a gold mine. My kids already play Brain Age with my mother.
Hopefully there will be dozens, or hundreds, of different kinds of games in ten years ranging from heavily plot driven games to heavily rule driven games to games with no rules or story whatsoever. Let's say there are eight billion people in the world by then, it'd be great to have enough kinds of games to have a good experience for all of them. Or more than one good experience for all of them depending on their mood. It would sure be great for business.
Hopefully, in 10 years we'll be PhotoReal and can be done with that quest. I personally tend to favor stylized, but that's just me. Hopefully, platforms will have stabilized and there will be endless engines and billions of gamers. There will be a market for everything that has merit. Probably a market for a lot of stuff that has no merit. There will be the big budget blockbusters and there will be YouGame with strange, esoteric experiences. They will interact and spark off of each other. We need the blockbusters to have a sense of cultural unity. We need the other stuff to have a sense of tribal identity. As Machinima shows people will make movies from games and games from movies and more and more we'll be using the same elements.
