I just read a lovely article thanks to a friend and several things came crashing together in my brain. Said article was called "
" and, essentially, was a giant, "Here's some stuff I've learned about creating art."
It's no big secret that I have, at times, fancied myself an artist, so it was good to read an article that spoke directly to that part of my identity that has not been getting fed like it should have been.
His last point, however, stuck with me.
10. Creativity is subtraction.
It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown vs. what is.
In this age of information overload and abundance, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out...
It's something I've heard, for sure. That creativity is choosing what to not show or tell as much as it is choosing what to show or tell. But, all of a
sudden, a bunch of things started mashing together in my brain.
I've recently become slightly obsessed with Echo Bazaar. For those of you who are unfamiliar (which, I'm sure, is most of you), it is an online game that uses the intervalled actions of social games and mixes it with cleverly written narrative set in Fallen London. Here is the text from the About page:
1889.
Three decades ago, London was stolen by bats. Dragged deep into the earth by the Echo Bazaar. The sun is gone. All
we have is the gas-light of Mr Fires.
But Londoners can get used to anything. And it's quiet down here with the devils and the darkness and the mushroom wine. Peaceful.
But then YOU arrived.
Welcome. Delicious
friend.
You learn almost nothing from that block of text. That doesn't tell you that the game is based around 40 actions a day that regenerate at one a minute. It doesn't tell you that new narrative threads are opened up by how it tracks various stats. And it certainly doesn't tell you anything about the world. At least, not on the surface.
You see, the brilliance of Echo Bazaar is that it tells you nothing. It treats you like a citizen of Fallen London and expects you to keep up. Stolen b
y bats? Literally? No. It couldn't be. Or could it? And what exactly do you mean by "delicious friend" and why do I imagine the eyes of the speaker looking sort of hungry?
I have been absolutely driven to play this game. I want to solve every little mystery. I take little cues from seeming insignificant details. What was just said about Mr Wines? And I wonder if that's related to the Fourth City in some way... And if that's the case, then the Starveling Cat must be...!
The restraint that the designers and writers showcase is exactly the thing that allows me to string together these mysteries and have fun. They know who the Masters are. They know where each of the Bazaar's former cities are. They knew that Hell is, in fact, connected to Fallen London far before I ever figured out that it wasn't just a metaphor.
There is, to me, something primordially attractive to this model of storytelling. As I think about it, this is the model most of my favorite properties have used.
As a child, I was obsessed with Zelda games. Like, seriously. I wrote fan fiction and everything. Back in the late 90s as Ocarina of Time was getting ready to come out, I remember Miyamoto (the series' creator) stating that it would be, chronologically, the first in the series.
"WHAT???" said little Kemp (and about half the game wo
rld with him). "They're not just a bunch of games with similar gameplay, titles, and themes? They have a metanarrative??" And so we went to work.
Analyzing each of the games, trying to figure out what the correct order was using evidence from inside the games themselves. When Miyamoto came back a year later and, in an interview, gave his "official timeline," most of the Zelda fansites I frequented had already disproved it months before. He was wrong about his own games! Is that even possible? Did it even matter? And why the heck did I care?
The genius in the Zelda games is in the story that isn't told. I was (and still am, honestly) attracted to the series precisely because there was all t
his depth to it that was unexplored. I could put the pieces together myself. And I did. A lot.
I read this article by Leigh Alexander a few days ago and she says it this way:
When games were more abstract-simple designs and massive worlds with yawning gaps in between each fragile plot point-they engaged us more, because they became worlds we could own. When all of the work of creation is done for us, when every element of lore is written in, when every object in the game world is explicable and available for interaction, there's nothing for our hearts and minds to do except ride along. And that's beautiful and well, but it's just not very engaging.
She goes on to say:
But if a game wants me to care-if it wants to grab my heart in its fist the way I used to feel-it needs to engage my imagination. Present the skeletal threads of a backstory without feeling the need to fill it all in, to connect all the dots for me; give me characters I'll only get to really know in my wildest dreams. Give me a world that's richly realized, but don't feel responsible for making it all interactive.
I have never been able to put the pieces together quite like that. Why is it that, despite my love for world-building and environmental storytelling, I've never been able to get into Fallout 3? Maybe because of these reasons. There's just too much detail. Too much to play with. Not enough just to accept.
It's like the difference between Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series. Tolkien wrote volumes of history and an entire language to support his world. Lewis just wrote what was and left it at that. And I've always been more attracted to Lew
is' world than Tolkien's...
When it really came home for me was how I connected it to my own creative process. Since I was small, I've been trying to build worlds. Back in high school, I worked on ideas that provoked me to make up languages, societies, religions, magic systems... Anything to help justify and give meaning and rules to a world - a place for real cha
racters to exist.
It's the exact same thing I used to do with Zelda. You see, in my head, there are these almost self-existent ideas. If you write or create anything, you know what I'm talking about. Half the time, my job is simply to find those and record them accurately. But the challenge and the fun comes from connecting those. From taking those points that feel like they've already been authored and figuring out how they go together.
On my wall right above me right now is a long string of post-it notes.
Each of those is a little story beat for a thing I've been working on for a long time. See the blank spots? That's the challenge. The actual notes are story nodes that, in my mind, are as true as the tsunami in Japan or the 2008 election. What I find joy in is completing the story. Finding or creating the ties. Explaining the characters' choices after the fact.
The question is... is that something that I should be doing for a career? I love constructing these elaborate worlds and mythologies and metanarratives. But, when it comes down to it, I just don't like those games that much. The games and stories that truly draw me in are the stories where those things just aren't explained. They're there, surely, but they are never explained clearly.
Any good fantasy/sci-fi property has a series bible - that document that spells out all the secrets and shows the creators how the characters are in their internal selves. But you know what? The audience never gets to see that. I can't think of a single world bible that has made it out into the public. And that's okay. It shows itself by natural character interactions and subtextual dialog.
But still. Who hires people just to flesh out backstory and build worlds? And does it matter that I probably won't like the games that I make nearly as much as the games like Zelda or Echo Bazaar? (You know, the ones that really engage my imagination...) Will I be okay making games that don't engage me as much just because the process of making them engages me? Or should I learn how better to craft the games that I enjoy the most?
I dunno. Things to think about.
