How To Make Your Game Just Completely Hilarious: The Stanley Parable

not change change oh wait not that change not that change in regards to how comedy is utilized presented and created in the medium of video games and because games are like theater no wait no wait oh it's not even here is it here yes yes that bit there act one beginning of Act one starting great so I'm William Pugh I co-created the 2013 game the Stanley parable with a guy called Davey Whedon over in America but he's not here and I'm here so I get to just take all the credit it was me it was all me but um yeah just applaud oh yeah see this is just eager food for me right now ah yeah but you know ah enough jokes let's get down to the humor I'm going to talk about comedy and games that use comedy they're different alright comedy games a design from the ground up to be funny like surgeon simulator or goat simulator or somewhere and games that use comedy are mechanical games that add comedy bits and bobs to improve the experience overall so like a portal or portal 2 and there's a blurred line between them and I think that's probably where the Stanley parable sits but let's forget the Stanley parable for a moment let's go back in time in 2016 know in 2006 a friend of mine was in turning a valve software and back in those days before they were content to make million cosmetics pipeline right they actually made games and they split their whole office up into little cables and they fought brutally against each other in order to try and innovate the interactive medium now truly some of the greatest men and women were like for inside this arena of game design and I will regale you now with this never before heard tale like that ok so the first team was fast off the mask I was fast off the muck led by the writer Erik Wolpaw he had a vision for a game that transcended the mechanics driven monotony that pervaded the industry at the time he envisioned a game without gameplay with no restrictions for the writer when the rest of valve saw this he'd never have to write another combine soldiery loading line again he'd be free to lead the creative charge right with no restrictions without structure without the structure enforced by traditional notions of gameplay that we've held since like the 90s he could reach heights of storytelling and narrative freedom and immersion and jokes never before imagined by human beings or gamers not sure he might not have known what it was going to look like exactly but you know as old grandpa Wolpaw had told them many years before he said son if you don't understand what your concept will look like once it's built it lies outside of the conventions you hold therefore it will not only surprise yourself but your peers too Yeah right that's that's important by the way if you're writing notes write that one though because that's good but you know old man wall park had decide and it liked his job it wasn't a game developer but he designed safety devices for automobiles so his philosophy might not have suited his a kind of profession entirely but Erik heard those words echo in his head and so he got down to work however as he had spent most of the day philosophizing and thinking about heady concepts all of the technically talented people at valve had joined other teams so you just add a texture artist and Jeff the coffee go but they embraced their limitations like true Indies and produced a game with no barrier of gameplay or interactivity right a piece that allowed Eric's inner thoughts to be completely communicated directly to the player his masterpiece was completed quickly and he proudly presented Gabe with four jokes by Erik Wolpaw and we are going to look at that now oh yeah play watch now we have mixed up the next one this is a visual joke yeah yeah the last one returns back to the text yeah yeah and then that ends and the player turns around if they want to see the jokes again and jokes are only funny once right now Eric was playing with fire here sure he'd removed gameplay from the equation but did that make it any better I don't know he replaced the structure that half-life 2 gave him and replaced it with something else it was a step in the right direction but perhaps just writing good jokes wasn't good enough Gabe didn't really feel engaged by forge expiry corpore and decreed that making a good comedy game is a design problem as much as it's a writing problem and you can't argue with me about that because I didn't say that Gabe said that and he is like well smart and and he knows what he's talking about so you know it's good stuff good stuff right so Erik nodded his head to Gabe and agreed he knew that he wasn't talking about funny design like Octodad or surgeon simulator he was talking about creating a structure in the game that allowed writers to write jokes that fundamentally incorporated the notion of player interaction and that's what games are about okay they're like immersive theater the player is integral to the message that they're trying to convey and the jokes that they're trying to tell and if you make the player walk through a bunch of rooms and write jokes at them they won't feel engaged and connect with what you're doing Erik knew he'd had a you'd have to change his approach but hey that they'd worked out something about environmental storytelling what with the writing on the walls and Eric's design idea evolved to become left4dead a YA realistic however another force was looking at the edge of this meeting room the writer Chet Faliszek rubbed his hands together gleefully right and he ran back to his cabal and explained to them exactly how they should make their prototype he saw Eric's floor he cackles with malice and explained in an American accent which I can't do so making British we must let the writing inform the design and the design inform the writing chaps his underlings nodded and got to work they worked for five days and five nights and produce something that fundamentally improved upon Eric's game now Chet knew he couldn't just use the same mechanics and structure as the previous game and just slap more writing on the wall valve but you know valve law dictated show don't tell but Chet amended it to involve don't show huh yeah check it out play clicks on the door knocks responds they click again for spell the spell him and choke yeah yeah like it wasn't right in a play it wasn't right in a book he knew the play needed to be a meshed in the world he was creating he was making his game a conversation right and that's the end and then they might turn around and jokes can be funny twice if you changed him into a callback that was the cleverest joke of the talk I hope you enjoyed it so uh come on you Chet I surveyed the paradigm of interactive humor he'd created and he knew he'd done well so he took a copy home on a USB he walked into his house he went up to his attic and he placed the USB on a shrine he'd created to the spirit of games writing he spoke the magic words and the shrine came to life and a ghostly figure picked up the USB and plugged it directly into its ghostly laptop computer right Chet spoke to the spirit and said oh great spirit of games writing what do you think of this game that I created and the ghost spoke in this voice look Chet if you're writing a comedy game write it like comedy not like a sodding joke book yeah I'm talking about callbacks check a consistent character that develops over the course of the work design your game so the player is inherently involved this all ties into how you should be designing and writing jokes for you via games check involve your player and Chett responded with no but I'm already involved in the player it's like you're not committed and the ghost report responded angrily is like silence you are merely having your player act out of script with no options or granularity when it comes to player interaction you've done no better than your predecessor checked and then check responded alright hey hey come on I thought it was and then the ghost cut them off again saying whoa whoa whoa I'm not finished why is there no voice acting why are you telling jokes via text right if there's voiceover your actor will do 90% of the work they're also human beings and are unpredictable with this in mind you could write a lot of short extra jokes an incidental dialogue in the recording booth you will be surprised by how actors deliver things you don't have to think every extra bonus line you write is brilliant but good actors can make lines you think our average sing in ways you'd never expect knowing this you'll find a lot of great cheap content for you to tuck away behind corners for players to discover and check pause and ask are you Steve gamer and then they go shout not now that you're getting advice right from the billion ghost of writing or whatever I just just just pay attention all right adding this adding the extra content will balloon playtime's massively just be prepared for that by designing your game so it doesn't waste your players time keep the pace fast I mean I mean I add to fast-forward that video earlier because all your jokes needed the same repeated setup if the play knows what's coming they'll get bored and you're also missing a fantastic opportunity to subvert expectations now as checked and the ghost of spirit thing argued back and forth right neither of them noticed a figure slip away from the window that figure had heard everything he'd seen checks game he knew what he had to do that's right Tim Schafer heard everything he rode back to Double Fine on his motorcycle and called an emergency meeting they would start work immediately on a brand new game Tim Schafer's Joker AMA right so oh now Joe Kurama used some of Chet's door idea combined with Erics corridor gameplay but he added in an important twist at several points throughout the game the player would make a choice and that game would split soften and riff off whatever the player whatever the choice the play made and I don't have a copy here to show you but take my word for it that it was pretty special and too complex to actually make for just a talk like the other games but no it was pretty not no and it's real it's real and it was pretty special okay so it was structured like a small stand-up set but call backs and jokes were based around the player's actions rather than being predetermined six months before the game was built tim schafer play tested this for like 90 days and 90 nights iterating constantly he hid jokes everywhere he did they called him the joke hider back where I came from you know he'd go and hide funny textures and little skits behind odd interactions he'd see players try and play testing and he'd say stuff to his staff on a near hourly basis like they won't see them all but it'll make the game feel really kind of full of humor and nice you'll make it feel nice that's what that's what Tim sim sounds like I have limited voices but one errant designer said and brave defiance but Tim mr. Shafer joke hider why are we making all this content that players won't see why don't I just add a few extra design tricks and point out these secrets to the player like add a light over here to guide the players like eyesight pop a bit of signage to lead the player to the kind of secret so they can see more content and an old Tim Schafer was enraged by this he slapped his designer across the face I made a horrible mark ah he slapped him again back and forth back and forth he went all over the shop Tim Schafer looked at him and he looked with rage in his eyes right and he said something that employee would never forget though actually try and push players towards secrets via obvious design decisions the less special it is for them to discover them if you hide ten secrets and they discover one that one secret will be memorable and make their experience incredibly unique unique player experiences linked into viral marketing and YouTube Let's Plays and I know we're doing this for the art if we can help you know sell the game that's um that's a nice bonus it's nice bonus but Tim Schafer had got a bit secret crazy right so uh and he knew that himself like legends have it he stayed in his office until about 5:00 in the morning every night just adding secret joke after secret Jerry kept a secret joke and he was wandering home after a drunken night of drought joke writing and he lucked up to the moon and much to his surprise it spoke to him and it said Tim I didn't have that voice prepared they're just going to hear Matt Tim you need to be sensible about this hidden joke stuff you're too wild man too wild as a rough guideline you'll want to hide secret jokes that maintain the pace and feel of the area they're placed him if you want a section to be snappy heard some fun visual stuff rather than elaborate five-minute skits hey you could even add a procedural callback system that remembers the side jokes player of scene plays of scene and then Taylor's future jokes to involve that theme or reference and then Tim responded yeah yeah most of that's good but that last part sounds a bit hard to implement and write search I'm not doing that and the moon said yeah okay I understand and Tim said Tim said yeah and the players the players wouldn't even notice something that complex to do with like procedural joke callbacks and the moon said yeah in fact actually I bet you could just randomize those jokes and players would infer some sort of complex system on it I bet I bet they'd think your game will be doing some crazy strange back-end logic when all you're really doing is calling random dialogue variations Tim and then Tim said yeah but I bet if you made that game you'd probably be the kind of type of wanker who do it talk at GDC and then use some kind of fake story character nonsense to talk about your game as a metaphor huh and the mood and the moon agreed yeah and they'd probably go and reference that in a weird meta sort of way and and Tim responded yeah the audience would probably initially think it's funny and clever they'd like laugh you know but then they'd kind of quickly realize that it's just a ploy to waste time because he applied for the talk because he didn't have a I G he didn't have a pass and and he really wanted to get one for free and he he gave a really vague talk description and then he had to write something and he didn't know what to write and then and then the other one I can't remember which one said um but once he went down that road he'd be a bit stuck wouldn't he he could just be narrating to people talking to each other and then the other one said yeah he would be he'd need to do something really clever in order to segue out of this ah acta - yeah okay oh yeah the time live right I've written here at how long it will take me to get to this point and it's fine everything's going really well and so basically legend has it that all of Tim Schafer's prototype was stolen nobody knew who buy but Tim's multiple door nonlinear repeatable game featuring jokes in corridors was likely developed into some sort of commercial product that I'm sure is unrecognizable from that bland and silly description but alas we may never know what those despicable thieves did with that beautiful concept and what they perverted it into anyway let's talk a bit about the Stanley parable and on a different on a different notion so um now now it's the actual talk the spaces in between the choices are the best to design for me well I mean whenever I was designing a space with a player to choose a path in a game I knew it had to be a quiet space for the player to think about things to talk back to themselves where they'd never where they'd been before or what they thought lie behind each choice and then try with no information to justify rerd over blue or left over right and the spaces in between those of moments we're really fun to play with because the only technical kind of requirement of that of those spaces is that they just get you to the next choice so that's like time that you can do with anything you can like um like within the structure of the game you can play with anything you can like write anything basically you know and took it behind the corner so the player can like you know find it out so like early on we start by blocking out the corridors and then we just really played for a long time we like reiterated everything about three times and we're just gonna have a good play but I suppose in games where levels have to serve a greater definition of game play like having the area fun to navigate while shooting bad guys or leading the level to teach the player how to solve puzzles I suppose that would be much harder to achieve if your player gets distracted by a joke written on the floor they might forget some vital information that you needed to communicate to them about weapons or reloading or whatever but if you're making a comedy game you do really want to have it sent do you really want to have its central focus be kind of technically complex gameplay if the answer is yes then you can still use the hidden secret stuff in down time or in areas where you don't need the player to focus so yeah so in one of these moments that I made between the bigger choice sections it was this thing called the broom closet and here's the nice interactive part of the talk that I probably should have done at the start who has actually played the Stanley parable ah okay that's really hard to judge who has not played the Stanley parable okay I'm really sorry everybody for all of you but yeah well might as well just go don't don't know why you even came here no don't actually leave kids like no it's no it's good it's fine that was a joke it didn't hit as well as I thought it would but but okay we're we gone I really enjoyed players like going through the kind of broom closet going in waiting have the narrator talk to them it felt like a step outside of my design philosophy a bit because during the core of that skit there's no actual tactile interaction going on the player is just kind of waiting about but the only option they have at like that time is to leave the broom closet and the only option they have is when they're going to do that and that somehow makes it feel like a back and forth between the narrator and the player even if we're just playing lines with like a time delay however I also do think that the broom closet flirts a bit with an unhelpful facet of comedy games and that's waiting dialogue waiting dialogue is fun guys we get it you know we're like your plays waiting around and the right is alike we've got nothing to do for 90% of development so we'll write loads of funny little jokes for the characters to say well like the players not doing what the game's about but if you only hide extras in waiting around then you're tying content to play it in action and if you let the player play about like tie content to exploration and play again we're talking about like games as a conversation rather than asking a player to sit still and listen to the writer moments of quiet are also important and the space without waiting dialogue can definitely like provide that uh so we had to kind of make a determined effort to try and cut down as much as we could on on waiting about and rewarding players for waiting about so we tried to kind of incentivize them through like experience for them to like if they see something weird click on it if they like see two doors opposite each other try closing them both and maybe you'll get a little joke or a section so it was kind of a way of trying to teach the players to to play about and to kind of have a bit more fun and not try and find content through boring means and and if you get your playfulness from players waiting around they'll miss 90% of it in the latter half of your game and that really skews the distribution of joke stuff to the first half and and you'll want players to be focusing on learning how to interact with your game if you could find a way to do both these at the same time like that'd be pretty cool it's kind of like improvisation in a stand-up comedy set they'll often play around in the first act and the audience will be like oh wow this is cool and then they'll the audience will be kind of out of energy by the second half and then you just got to kind of go and talk serious stuff it's matter it's about my talk if you didn't get that yeah the energy thing yeah that's us gonna feel that so another thing to think about is repetition jokes heard again and again they're not only not funny they're annoying if your player moves through an area more than once or if your game is designed so they will have to repeat content listen to me now randomized assets add variants in every way that you can repeated content usually stems from a facet of your design that just kind of has to be you can't design around it is what your game is and it's okay nobody's perfect and you can't always design a game you know that that isn't repetitive in some aspect and in fact a level of repetition gives you a bunch of great options to subvert and call back but in reality you can't always redesign the entire basis for your game to fix the flawed assumption about your game so my advice would be to not think well if people don't like this then they just don't get the game this is just how it is you need to be applying as many like plasters and band-aids onto that gaping design wound as possible if you can find twenty really really tiny things to make it a little less painful then you better be doing all of those 20 things and thinking about how you can find 20 more so the problem with the Stanley parable was the opening section if you play 10 endings that's about 45 seconds of repeated content each restart that's seven point five minutes of dead time like time where your player is getting nothing new from you and that just that like that might cause players to get bored say okay I've seen enough content I've hit a lull and then you know you don't get the fundus of players kind of experiencing all of your stuff together and you know keeping their head in your work throughout the entire piece and like not splitting it up into chunks or whatever so and actually previously we did actually kick the player back to the Start menu at the start of a each ending and that was insane that added like like 10 10 minutes to just loading times which was completely useless so the 20 things that we did to make this section better the opening section in Stanley was to add a lot of randomized herbal like elements from the narrator dialog to the layouts itself that this not only added to the like the mystery feeling of the game but it also sprinkled more jokes into the repeated sections and gave the game a feeling of being fresh every restart it wasn't kind of knowable you can understand what it was and that kind of felt even if the player was playing for the ninth time it still felt like okay I'm back at the start things have changed what's changed what have I done previously to make this change and I referenced this earlier where we did where we did like all this random generation stuff but players thought that we were being much cleverer than we were and they you know feel that Oh something I did in this ending cause the office lay up to change and whatever so you know you don't always have to go the complex route you can you can fake it and people won't know so so one of the randomized bits and bobs we put in the opening section was a phone in an office that just started ringing none of the items in the office ever made any noise or allowed you to interact with them much so when the phone rang it gave the players this new interaction with the world that they'd not had before is off to the side though hidden in one of the cubicles so if players want to go searching they can but if they want to rush in rush on and get to the next ending there's nothing stopping them anyway so you pick up the phone and we do a little skit about this box delivery company and you talk to them on the phone and you like press numbers and the skit ends with a player ordering like 500,000 boxes to the office and you know they think AHA that's funny what what an inconvenience for the office ha ha ha and they put the phone down and they move on and they play then extending or whatever but then the next restart we do a callback to that joke and instead of randomizing the office we instead force it to fill itself with boxes everywhere and it doesn't really change anything gameplay wise but it starts a precedent for those little independent jokes but eginning to like link together to form something more and even if you just do a few of them that really that will start the player thinking like okay maybe something more complex is going on and that helps into the lying thing lying lying okay you're not idiots it's clear as day that we stole the concept from Tim Schafer's Joker ama check fellow sex presents five jokes by Chet phallusite and for jokes pirate will part ok we stole it but you know what stealing it's really really easy I've stolen like 10 jokes in this talk and you won't ever know and you laughed like idiots you thought that was funny when in reality I I did very little work for that and you all thought you enjoyed it you didn't enjoy it but you thought you did and that's good enough so you know as long as you stealing is really easy and it's so as long as you don't find out you don't get found out it's fantastic so like if you get called and and if you do get called out on something just say hey dude it was a really kind of formative piece of work and it took a lot of inspiration for it from it so so I'd like you all to repeat this line with me so you can steal jokes in the future the phrase is ok so I'll I'll say you respond hey dude it was a really formative piece of work and I took a lot of inspiration from it I am a creative individual now idea is unique inspiration is that my [ __ ] no not copying off you know actually I didn't even write this bit is because I've actually got like this much left and they just put the 5 minutes up but you know we've that killed time and I get to end on this great joke so if you need an example for how to use that line it's a yeah The Simpsons episode in the box Factory where the guy shows you know them around and shows them like the the line to walk along that was a really formative piece of work and I took a lot of inspiration from it and online I've seen nobody call us out I'm stealing their so uh yeah steal your jokes you know you can never write that many good ones steal them no one will find out and if they do just lie thanks for listening to my talk we have two minutes left we can do one question a soul question is whoever goes fast is it go run others walk out oh yes hello and the one question is can I ask that question you can ask that question are you Alex Bruce yeah did he tell you to say that yes so I'm just gonna kind of like there was no really great ending bit there so I'm just kind of just gonna kind of walk off stage

Channel: GDC

Views: 314,455

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: pLbmZT70rtA

Length: 29min 6sec (1746 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Legitamte]

I shouldn't be surprised that the creator of such a meta game would have such a meta presentation--it did a great job of supporting his points. Very entertaining!