Читать книгу Slay the Dragon - Robert Denton Bryant - Страница 7

Foreword

by Larry Hryb, Xbox Live’s “Major Nelson”

VIDEO GAMES are big business. As you will soon learn (if you don’t know already) the video game industry is HUGE. When I tell people that the industry I work in is a BILLION dollar business—they are amazed. I then follow up with another factoid: It’s bigger than Hollywood. That’s right. At only 44 years old, sales of the video game industry regularly eclipse the 125-year-old motion picture industry.

Yeah. That big.

While I’ve always been “into” video games—from that first time I played Pong at the local Sears department store on their “Video Arcade” system (just a re-branded version of the venerable Atari 2600) to the countless hours spent after school at friends’ houses playing NFL Football on Intellivision—which was really nothing more than a series of dots on a screen. We had to IMAGINE that they were QBs, linebackers, etc. Hours and hours pushing dots around the screen with our hands and our imaginations.

I attended the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University to study television, radio, and film production. There, I learned about traditional story development and using technology to bring ideas and characters to life: Write a script, go to the studio and shoot it with very expensive (tube) cameras, VTRs, etc. I practiced the art of storytelling, character arc, and all the hallmarks that make for a good linear story and program. I would study that by day, and return to my dorm in the evening and play video games. (It was upstate New York. What else was a nerd to do in the winter?) I could FEEL the creative and technical fields were on a crash course in gaming.

One day we would have video games with the fidelity of movies and TV. One day there would be far away worlds we could explore for hours on end.

Fortunately, we did not have to wait too long.

I started working on the Xbox team in late 2003—when we were deep into planning “Xenon,” the console that would become the Xbox 360. I was working on the “platform” (the systems that games run on) with some of the smartest people I have ever worked with: software developers, testers, network engineers, hardware engineers, and more. ALL incredibly smart and talented, but VASTLY different from the creative environment I studied in and was used to. These men and women WERE the left brain. I was used to the warm, fuzzy, vague, right-brain way of thinking—but that was not what this was. I learned to measure, analyze, and make data-driven decisions, not just ones that “felt right.”

I also got my first look into game development.

The next building over from where I worked was a studio named Bungie that Microsoft had purchased a few years earlier. They were working on Halo 2, a follow-up to their massively successful game Halo for the original Xbox. I would often go over there for meetings and I noticed something: The lines between technical and creative were just not there. It was one team of about one hundred people in a huge U-shaped room who were all creative and technical, sitting next to each other and coming up with creative ideas and making them “real” with computer code. Right before my eyes I saw something amazing: The two disciplines were working closely together to create that magical world I dreamt of years before while at Syracuse.

But, it was slightly different. As this book will show you, television, films, and radio are linear storytelling. The viewer (or listener) passively sits back and watches (or listens) to the story play out at a prescribed pace and with deliberately chosen camera angles and movements. In video games, it’s completely different. The players are at the center of the action. THEY decide when and where to move, look, and take action. They can spend ten minutes in a hallway. Or ten seconds. The players can open this door, then that door, then go out this window. Or they can just go out another window. Maybe they turn around and go around the building. The pace and direction are entirely up to the players. This non-linear interactive storytelling is one of the many innovations that video games have created.

The book you are holding in your hands is for anyone who wants to learn about this new way of storytelling that really is an evolution of traditional storytelling. If you’ve written a screenplay—this book is for you. If you’ve ever played a video game and thought, “Hey, I have a great idea for a story”—this book is for you. If you want to get a better understanding of the multi-billion-dollar industry that is now a massive cultural and economic force—this book is for you.

I love video games. I love that a person playing a game can create stories and character connections with deep emotions that can be greater than movies. When I played Red Dead Redemption—an incredibly popular open-world game set in the great American West in the late 1800s—at the end I cried.

My wife walked into the room when I finished the game and she asked, “What’s wrong?” All I could muster up was the ability to point at the screen and say “It’s over. It’s finally over.”

We’ve all felt a little something at the ending of a good book or a movie, but this felt deeper. It was MY character I was controlling. I was the one that made the story go forward at my pace. I got to know the main character, John Marston, so well because I was controlling him. In many ways, I became John Marston. Especially after the countless hours of gameplay and story decisions I had made. When I got to the end it was overwhelming. (I won’t spoil it for you but if you finished the game, you probably had the same experience.)

In linear storytelling, the story and character arcs are straightforward and the ending is the same for everyone, and in video games that can often be the case. But it becomes much more personal, since in video games you actually control the character and pace of the story.

Video games often allow the player to control the direction of the narrative, and in some games the outcome is directly based on in-game choices you, the player, have made. Video games can employ some extremely sophisticated storytelling where three different people playing the same game can have three different experiences and results based on their own in-game decisions. Very powerful stuff.

This book will show you what a game is and explore story and game genre, plot, character development, and much, much more. In my years of working in the industry this is the closest thing to a bible of creative video game story creation as I have ever seen. This is an amazing industry that I am proud to be a part of where you really can make your own real life adventure. Anything can happen. I love telling my old Syracuse classmates that I came to Microsoft and I was part of a team that won not one, but THREE Emmy Awards. A real life Emmy Award for working in the video game industry. That’s how far we’ve come. (Kudos to the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for recognizing the importance and power of video game technology.)

Enjoy this book. Enjoy the journey of creating your stories and characters and making them come to life in a game for players around the world to (hopefully) enjoy.

I hope we get to meet someday and you can tell me about your own wonder and successes in the industry.

All the best,

Larry Hryb

Twitter: @majornelson

Seattle, Washington

February 2015