A Prickly Problem

It happens on every creative project with a large team of collaborators. You can find them in AAA games or in any big-budget movie franchise. Someone has put a cactus in the pine forest…

I don’t mean a literal cactus in a pine forest. I’m using a metaphor that this essay will beat to death. I will keep beating that dead horse until I make glue, and then I will use that glue to stick enough lights on a Christmas tree to illuminate my concept.?

The point is, I’m going to use a metaphor a lot and contort it in various ways. But don’t worry. It’ll make more sense than that last paragraph.

Planting the Forest

During the creation of any game, creators make thousands of decisions that contribute to the whole, be it in narrative, game mechanics, character rigging, voice acting, and on and on. Every person on every team contributes bits and pieces that fuse together to form the player experience.

So, when I think about narrative design for games, I think a lot about the big picture. I want to be certain that the item names, dialogue, or plot choices that I make are engaging and follow the internal logic of the characters and story, but also that they align with the vision of the game’s world, suit the genre, and support larger narrative themes of the work. I call this “seeing the forest and the trees.”

Let’s lean into that metaphor a little: The smaller choices any creator makes are planting trees, spreading bark on the forest floor, frittering ferns about the place, and so on. The player’s experience of the game is a walk through the forest. They’ll see many of the small choices as they pick their path through the game, but they never see all of them. But if everyone has done their job, the player leaves with the experience of the forest.

A Wild Cactus Appears

At some point during the development of a game, a cactus erupts from the ground. A cactus can appear for any number of reasons, from practical to farcical, but the point is that someone or a team of people have created something that doesn’t fit.?

It might be a subtle succulent that blends into the other foliage and hides in some nook of the game, or it might be a giant saguaro standing boldly in the player’s main path. Either way, if the player brushes up against it, it becomes a pain point in their experience that makes the player feel like something isn’t quite right. Sometimes the appearance of a single cactus causes players to throw down their controllers in disgust, while at other times players might roll their eyes at dozens of cactuses because they enjoy the experience of the walk through the forest. In whatever form the cactus appears, it affects consumer perception of the game and can depress sales.

The cactus could be a mini boss tougher than the end boss. It could be an anachronistic element in the scenery. It could be the voice of a character not fitting their body. It could be a character taking an unlikely action because of bad writing. Whatever the nature of the cactus, it arises because of a lack of communication and misalignment among the team.

Seeing the Same Forest

Take the idea inherent in my metaphor: Even if everyone agreed it was a forest, what’s to say it wasn’t a forest of cactuses? Even if we all agreed beforehand that it was a pine forest, if you’re not specific, it could be the cactus creator’s vision is of a desert forest where a cactus and pine tree might very well stand side by side.

If you’re the vision holder for the game, you have a responsibility to communicate that vision clearly, succinctly, and regularly. If you’re supporting the vision holder, you need to ask the right questions so that you can share their vision and develop the details your team needs to do its job. If you’re an individual contributor, you need to look up regularly from your assigned tasks to be sure you’re still doing work that aligns with the vision.

Different teams and individuals will need different levels of detail about any given concept around which they are expected to align. For some people, a vague understanding of the main pillars of the game and some buzz words are enough to get started, but even the most disconnected creator will eventually need more context.

Let’s return to our forest metaphor for a moment.

? Forest:?A short PowerPoint presentation about the pillars of the mechanics, genre of the setting, and theme of the story.

? Pine Forest: A Word doc or PDF compiling comparable games with the unique ideas for mechanics along with an overview of this new game’s story and characters.

? Subarctic Coniferous Forest: All the above, plus supporting, more detailed documents with images of key characters and locations.

? Boreal Forest of the Alaskan Coast: All the above, plus full plans for the plot, player progression, and enticement and reward systems, detailed character backgrounds, the golden path, and so on.

It’s a lot. And you can’t do it all at once or do it all alone. Yet you must often get started even though you might only be able to align on part of the “Forest” stage. Regardless, you need to get closer to filling out a full vision for the game as quickly as you can, or before you know it, you’ll be surrounded by cactuses, coconut trees, kelp, and Venus flytraps with no clear way to smoosh all these creations into a cohesive whole.

But even with a full set of documents, it must be presented in a navigable form. People need to bite it off in chunks rather than being force fed by a firehose.

And there will still be gaps. You’ll discover a lot of places about which you need to learn more before you can create the right thing. But having a specific vision and proper documentation means that members of your team who go looking for answers to questions on their own will be more likely to find or develop the right answer.?

Incommunicado

Often a gnarly cactus grows when an individual or a team works alone for too long. Even though they have all the tools they need to stay aligned with the vision, it can be easy to get into a creative grove, get excited by an idea, and not realize that their creation has gone off brief.

Dealing with these cactuses can be a prickly problem. Those involved didn’t see the problem while they were creating the cactus, and they aren’t likely to see it right away even when it’s pointed out. Even the most amiable creator who readily admits fault (a rare and precious gift to any team) might find their ego bruised or feel ashamed for having wasted time and resources. If you’re working under a lot of pressure, the appearance of a cactus might be considered a problem that could cost people their bonus or even their jobs. It’s understandable then that the cactus might have its defenders, both among the creators and the creators’ friends.

Whether you are the vision holder for the game or an individual contributor, pointing out the fact that someone else made a cactus can be dicey. That’s a big reason why I wrote this article. I hope to give teams some friendly language to discuss the sensitive issues when lines get crossed.?

You can start early in the development process by asking “Is it a cactus?” about all kinds of elements. The answer will often be “no,” but sometimes it will be a little less clear. By examining the elements that make a concept wobbly, you can make choices that shore it up and—crucially—build those into your documentation about the vision of the game. Having regular conversations about aligning with the vision of the game will take some of the pressure off when a wild cactus truly erupts onto the scene. And remember, the reasons for creating a cactus are almost always innocent. And sometimes, they’re really good.

The Cool Cactus

After some early mistakes and adjustments, you now have a fantastic vision for the game and built up elaborate but accessible documentation to keep everyone updated and aligned with your mission. You know now that the Boreal forest doesn’t really reach the Alaskan coast, and you’ve adjusted your vision: The Cove of Spires in Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward, Alaska.?

Perfect!

Then it struts into view to the beat of its own theme song, wearing dark shades and expensive shoes. It’s the coolest cactus you’ve ever seen. It’s wildly off brief, and the worst thing is that its creators knew it. They were inspired by something else cool they’d discovered in some other game or seen in a movie, and then they took the idea and improved it a thousand percent, creating something that feels fresh and looks magnificent.

Perfect…

What do you do now? Well, you’ve got four options:

1.?????Adjust Your Vision

2.?????Alter the Cactus

3.?????Transplant the Cactus

4.?????Jam It In

Maybe you can figure out a way for the cactus to fit into your game. This is going to require multiple teams to make adjustments, and you might ruffle a lot of feathers. People who align closely with the vision laid out for your game will be particularly upset. The key to getting buy-in from such people might be counterintuitive: It might feel natural to praise the work of the cactus makers to convince them, but that could easily backfire. The people who have been doing their best to color in the lines won’t appreciate it when it seems like someone can just fingerpaint all over everyone else’s work so long as it’s “cool.” A better tact might be inviting them into the process of solving the problem created by the cactus while showing them the benefits of its inclusion. Their work might have been perfect as it was, and now they are forced to redo it, so consider teaming them up with the cactus makers to do the adjustments. This way, the cactus makers see the effects of going off brief and they help with the extra work they’ve caused. If the teams that must make changes see the cactus makers lending a hand, you might even end up with a stronger team dynamic.?

Perhaps the cactus can be changed into something more appropriate (turning the cactus into a plant that might live in the forest). Or maybe there’s a way to fit the cactus into the environment by cordoning it off and highlighting its separate nature (putting it into a greenhouse someone built in the forest). This requires the help of other teams, but hopefully with less potential damage to the team dynamic and the overall vision for the game. However, this might come at the cost of some coolness of the cactus. Change it enough and you risk losing the very qualities that made it attractive enough to include in the first place.

You could simply set the cactus aside for later. This is the best course of action when you can honestly tell the cactus creators that their work is brilliant but too far off brief, and that they have the chance of including it in some other project. Indeed, you might find that at a later stage of the game’s development or for an expansion of game, it suddenly makes sense to put in that cool cactus. However, if there really is no place for their cool creation in the game, and you have no reason to believe it can be included in anything later, be honest. Sometimes people give the perfect answer to the wrong question, and you don’t get any credit for that.?

What’s that you say? There’s a cactus standing on one of the spires in the Cove of Spires in Kenai Fjords? That is weird! But also, kinda cool, right? I mean look at it: It has sunglasses on and its own theme song!...

Okay, so the last solution really solves nothing. It betrays your vision of the game, ruffles the feathers of folks who adhere to the vision, and it might rub players the wrong way when they sense how out of place the cactus is in your pine forest. But in this case you’re betting that the cactus’s coolness overwhelms whatever reservations they might have about its inclusion.?

If you jam it in, consider if there are other places in your game where you can plant cactuses. If they’re cool enough, cactuses can be the feature, not the bug. Your game becomes the awesome experience of something like the Alaskan Coast sprinkled with cactuses, creating some new alien environment. Turn into the skid, hit the accelerator, and see where it takes you. But realize that you might lose some folks along what is sure to be a bumpy road.

The Cactus Only You Can See

“It’s a green plant with needles. That’s exactly what you asked for!”

You’ve pointed out a cactus as diplomatically or as bluntly as you feel you must, but other people don’t understand what “your issue” is. Uh oh.

Either you’re misaligned with the vision, or they are. Either way, somewhere along the line communication broke down, and now you’re not seeing things the same way.

Conflict over creative choices can very quickly start to feel personal, so when you’re seeing a cactus and someone else isn’t, take a step back. Take a breather, go for a walk, listen to music, meditate, sit in your car and scream—do whatever it is that you need to do to view what you see as the problem with as much distance and detachment as you can muster. And then, set aside whatever rational arguments float to mind and instead try to open yourself to a different perspective. You don’t have to take the perspective of the other party. That might be too hard if you’ve already got firm convictions. Instead, imagine a third point of view. Look at the problem as if you are an alien come from space, or imagine what you’d think of it if you were someone from a different background, sexual orientation, or age.

When you’ve gotten the necessary distance from the problem, examine your assumptions. In what ways does it align and look more like a pine tree? Where might your understanding of the vision for the game and someone else’s have diverged? Is the issue a matter of emphasis, where perhaps you’re valuing aspects of the game’s vision differently? Is this an opportunity for both sides to learn something new about the game and have those discoveries expressed to the rest of the team?

It might make sense to take the issue before a team leader or a broader group to get the opinions of others, but you owe it to yourself to do that with an open and collaborative mindset. After all, you might be wrong, they might be wrong, you could both be wrong, the process might be at fault, or you might have received different marching orders for some reason. Perhaps they were out sick when there was an important meeting, or maybe you just missed a memo.

Succulent or Saguaro?

Often the cactuses we see in games or movies exist because of the most banal reason: deadlines. It’s an inevitable fact that creative projects run out of time, and the timelines for digital games can be particularly punishing. There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip as everyone rushes to the finish line.

When you’re scrambling to make the release date, you need to spend your time solving the problems where your efforts will have the most impact on the player’s experience. A whole glade of saguaros presents a huge problem for your Alaskan forest, but if it is tucked away off the main trails, it might be less problematic than the succulents strung all along the golden path. On the other hand, there are succulents native to Alaska, and maybe the ones you have in your game are close enough that you really should figure out what to do about those saguaros. It’s all about how much impact your solutions will have on the player’s experience.

To make such decisions, you need to agree about the size of the problems you face. Is that cactus a succulent, a saguaro, or somewhere in between? If you’ve built up a strong shared understanding of the vision for your project, you should be aligned on what constitutes a problem, but by their very nature of being cactuses, they are outside the scope of your defined vision.?

There might be a pithier way to describe this process, but here’s how I think about the steps:

1.?????Examine:?Examine each cactus for how prickly a problem it presents to player perception.?

2.?????Discuss:?Discuss it with the team so that you all share similar standards for when other problems inevitably crop up.

3.?????Align:?Align on the solution to the issue.

4.?????Assign:?Assign the problem a priority based on size (succulent, stenocereus, or saguaro), and then assign the tasks of solving them based upon resources and impact.

What’s a Stenocereus?

It sounds like a dinosaur, but it’s medium-sized cactus, and it alliterates. So, in the spirit of beating the metaphor to death, it’s a way to categorize the medium-sized cactus that crops up in your game. Perhaps a prickly pear works better, or maybe you don’t need it. Either way, please give some thought to your cactuses and pine forests as you work on your game.?

And with that advice imparted, let’s all bask in that twinkly light from the Christmas tree.

You can see this post and more stuff on my website.