How to unfuck your narrative pipeline (Part 1: Backstory Debt)
Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the process
Creating a good narrative-experience is hard enough at the best of times. The thing is though - it’s not that hard. It’s more craft than art. This will sound sacrilegious to some, but how and why stories work has pretty much been figured out. I’m not saying there’s no room for innovation - there is and always will be, because every story reflects the world and an infinite range of human experience. What I’m saying is, there are building blocks - and getting the basics in place should be easy. Robert McKee has made a career teaching them - and you can buy his books! I also recommend the fantastically insightful and inspiring Wonderworks and Daemon Voices by the mensch Philip Pullman.
Yet, all too often we self-sabotage the process by not respecting the basic, proven tenets of storytelling. So welcome to the first part of what I hope will be an on-going series about how not to sabotage your narrative pipeline.
Now, I have a wealth of personal experience with things going well, and not so well, and I trust that you’ll understand it’s not appropriate for me to name names. If you’re a writer, narrative designer or any other function that’s been held back by slow and/or poor narrative dev then you’ll no doubt be familiar with how agonising it can be, but perhaps you haven’t seen the twelve or so variations of it that I have and so don’t realise how much better it could be. Let me learn ya - now let’s start at the beginning.
Worldbuilding/backstory is holding you back
Look, not every game needs detailed worldbuilding, but some do - and plenty on either side of the divide have too much of it. The real problem however isn’t necessarily quantity, but rather the perceived importance of doing it early/in pre-prod. And perhaps the perceived importance of it altogether. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against backstory - hell, I wrote a whole chapter on it for the Advanced Narrative Toolkit (see bottom of this article for an excerpt*) - but it has to be done right.
Put simply, worldbuilding/backstory should only exist insofar as it serves your front story. That’s because it’s the front story that players experience, and it’s that which you need to make compelling - with the bare minimum of backstory helping keep your fictional world/history/character (etc) cohesive.
The reason an over-reliance on backstory can be so pernicious is twofold. Firstly, it takes a long time, and that time scales exponentially the more stakeholders you have involved. The same goes for the complexity of it, which is a vicious feedback loop. The second and probably more important is that it can warp the priorities of the narrative itself, holding back a great plot or ludo-narrative moment because of an unwillingness to ‘break’ (and then have to re-do…) the existing backstory. Another corollary of ‘backstory mania’ is that, the more time and energy you’ve put into backstory, the more people feel the need to get value from it by surfacing it in the game - boring exposition and lore dumps being a classic, all too common symptom of this.
Complexity = Waste
The more complex a system - and a sufficiently complicated backstory is a narrative system - the more time and energy it takes to change anything, because of the cascading effects of said change. Break something in a complex system and the whole thing could fall down.
Change also has a real cognitive load. I’ve been in writers rooms where we’ve misguidedly spent entire days trying to define the backstory of a character before we even know what the core narrative of the game that we want to tell is. Then when we’ve started defining the game narrative - y’know, the thing that you actually have to build - it becomes clear that one of the backstories doesn’t work. Cue another x amount of hours/days spent refactoring not just their bio, but everyone else’s because that’s how relationships work. Then, we’ve brainstormed a scene and someone suggests something based on the old bio, because writers rooms are intense and it’s hard to always keep in mind all the latest developments - cue more wasted time - to say nothing of the documentation issues.
Or worse, you collectively come up with a great plot beat and someone raises an objection based on a three page long character bio. Let me kill some darlings, because your characters can do whatever you want them to, and their backstory can and should fit the action, instead of dictating it. I’m not a fan of Tom Jubert’s assertion that ‘narrative is gameplay’s bitch’ but nor should narrative be an albatross around gameplay’s neck.
All this stuff just compounds throughout the process, constantly accruing ‘backstory debt’. It burns writers (and concept artists!) out, it inevitably causes continuity problems, and it wastes time and money.
I’ve seen this happen time, and again - on teams big and small. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Stay Flexible
There’s an easy, obvious solution. Sketch out the bare minimum of backstory, and don’t set it in stone until the last possible moment. Let the action, and gameplay, help dictate what backstory you need before you worry about defining it. Remember also that as soon as something is written down, other people will feel the need to comment on it - which itself has exponential time wasting effects - and as soon as people start commenting on specifics, they (knowingly or otherwise) are tacitly endorsing the general shape of things. This can lead to the wrong kind of momentum and make it very hard to wind back the clock.
Leaving the beginnings until later can feel counter-intuitive - after all, don’t stories start the beginning?
Let me share a really positive example of how a game I’ve worked on handled the backstory dilemma. Röki is a game based heavily on Scandinavian folklore, which is smart because it means that from the offset, most of the backstory is already written. Fitting characters like the Tomte, a cantankerous but mostly benevolent harvest/farm spirit into the game was a relatively simple exercise of deciding how to put a visual spin on them, and what aspects of their associated folklore were most suitable for basing puzzles around (See Appendix ^ for info on ‘the soup puzzle’).
The core trio of the cast - protagonist Tove, her brother Lars, and father Henrik - have a dysfunctional family dynamic but a super functional development story. We decided on their inciting incident (SPOILER: the tragic death in childbirth of the mother) and let their psychological profiles unspool naturally from there. Moreover, we engineered a playable flashback scene, late in the game, that reveals this story beat on screen, removing the need for ham-fisted exposition via dialogue while allowing for subtle bread-crumbing through environmental storytelling throughout the game. All told, it was an elegant storytelling framework that - like so many of the design decisions Alex made - allowed us to stay nimble, creative forward momentum, and do more with less. RockPaperShotgun wrote:
Like all great folklore stories, there is a quiet devastation lurking beneath Röki’s picturebook world, elevating this mythic tale of gods and monsters into the pantheon of all-time adventure game greats
And while that obviously isn’t all down to the story, it’s absolutely down to the overall design philosophy that the story came out of. By contrast, I’ve worked on a mid-sized indie project that spent so long in the backstory weeds because the creative director wouldn’t put his foot down that we frequently missed production and community user-test milestones. The game ended up being canned because it ran out of funding. I can’t say one is a direct outcome of the other, but it sure as hell did not help, and it was infuriating for everyone involved in the meantime.
Don’t live in the past
To re-iterate, an over-reliance on, or overvaluing of backstory can have far-reaching negative effects for production and creative. This can be bad enough on small teams, but on larger teams it can spiral into a serious issue. ‘Backstory debt’ is real, but it can be avoided by strict time-boxing (e.g. ‘Ok, one week on backstory, then we move on and adjust as necessary’) and a firm belief that the front-story will inform what and when you need more of it.
I know it’s not easy to push back when a creative director or similar wants to dig deep - or after a writer comes back with a three page bio of a character’s whole life - but try and remind them why you want to put it off. It’s precisely the opposite reason to not caring, or wanting solid foundations, it’s because you don’t want your collective hands tied when it comes to actually designing the entire rest of the game.
APPENDIX
* [Intro from my chapter on worldbuilding - I’ll do a proper post on it down the line]
World-building is often framed as an iceberg, with a small visible tip. That metaphor doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not a question of deciding what is, and what isn’t visible. Better I think to borrow Philip Pullman’s analogy of narrative being a path through a forest. A symbiotic relationship – without the narrative path, you are lost. A path with no forest surrounding it would be functional but bland, devoid of a context rich with texture and mystery.
As with most game design disciplines, world-building is alchemy: part science, part art, and plenty of random, dumb luck. That unpredictability is half the fun, and knowing how to ensure a solid foundation is the other.
^ Tomte lore has it that they kind of adopt a farmstead to live in, and while mischievous, won’t do the farmer any actual harm so long as they’re treated with respect and occasionally given offerings of porridge. So when protagonist Tove encounters a ruined farmhouse with a broken waterwheel that she needs to fix, it wasn’t much of a leap to insert a puzzle based around summoning a Tomte that could help her. We foreshadow this puzzle at the start of the game, while mechanically bringing the backstory to the front by asking the player to help Tove cook dinner - she’s only a young girl mind - for her infant brother Lars, and her passed-out-drunk dad. This little puzzle succinctly demonstrates the family dynamic and communicates that she’s had to shoulder an unfair amount of responsibility. So when she encounters a cooking pot, some oats, and other similar items related to the Tomte puzzle, it’s already been seeded in the player’s mind that she knows how to make basic meals - and it means that when she completes the puzzle and summons a Tomte, there’s an emotional and thematic link.