Hi. My name’s Ian Mayor I’m a writer and I love
stories.
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| Games writer Ian Mayor |
Although I dabble in comic book writing,
screenwriting, copy and prose; for about ten years now I’ve spent my weekdays
as a computer games designer and writer (a role that’s often called “Narrative
Designer”).
Narrative design is an odd gig but an
increasingly common one, no two games writers I know of got there the same way.
Here’s my story.
In a prior life I wanted to be a screenwriter.
After a degree in Film and Television Production at Manchester Metropolitan
University I buzzed around the North West’s amatuer filmmaking scene (which
involved a lot of bars) before spending a couple of years writing and directing
educational films. If you’ve ever seen the memorable “Manual handling and lifting
techniques” by Bolton College Consultancy Services I wrote the opening line “Most
accidents in the workplace are due to improper manual handling and lifting
techniques”. Around that time I realised that I wasn’t truly pursuing my dream
and that a change of day job might be in order. I cold-called a games studio in
Warwickshire, who, unbeknownst to me, had recently advertised for a freelance
writer.
Back then, (December 2000, yeesh) computer
games seemed like an odd step for someone with serious writing ambition. This
was the Playstation era, games were everywhere and I was amongst the first
generation who had grown up playing them. Although the medium was being
explored as a venue for storytelling, few outside the industry could see the
potential or value in interactive narrative. This was never a problem for me.
Unlike my outgoing, sporty siblings I’d grown
up bookish, creative and a bit oversensitive about about it all. I drew, I
acted, I obsessed over Batman comics and when at age 8 my brother and I got a
16K ZX Spectrum for Christmas, I played games.
Gaming requires a greater investment of
imagination than you probably expect. Brace for tangent.
In his book “Understand Comics”; cartoonist
Scott McCloud wrote about “closure”, a functions of the human brain which helps
us make sense of the world. Although he does it in a very different way, I’ll
Illustrate the concept thusly.
You enter a room with a smashed
window, a ball is on the floor surrounded by broken glass.
Think, for a second, about what occurred in
that room at some point in the past. Now, you’ve just done a complex thing,
effortlessly. You’ve made a story, filled in the gaps with your own knowledge
of how the world works and solved the simple “whodunnit” of how the room got in
that state.
I’ll bet you did more than that, tell me...
what did the room look like? was it day or night? I’m cheating a little, you
filled in those gaps as you just read them. Of course, as readers we do this
all the time but we rarely think about the mechanics of it, closure is powerful
stuff.
Although you use this same function playing
current games, back in ‘82 when your avatar could be a small group of pixels
allegedly depicting a spaceman your brain worked overtime to make sense of the
game.
Due largely to technical limitations games of
the 80’s were usually light on context, “story” was often printed on the
cassette case inlay that the game came in (which you wouldn’t have because you’d
pirated the game off a school friend). But to me, and many like me, it made no
difference, there were stories in games before anyone put them there.
We all love stories and will invent them
where they don’t exist. In what’s left unsaid in prose, between the panels of
comic books, the edits in film and in the abstractions of gaming.
To me, this says something universal about
storytelling which everyone who crafts stories should be conscious of. A writer’s
greatest tool is not her mastery of words or his understanding of structure, it
is the readers/viewers/players mind. Your chosen medium is just a method of
delivery.
And so, nearly twelve years after that first
writing job, six weeks in a barn-house office near Hatton Wood, I’m still in
games. The writing led to a full time design position with the same company and
(a brief break aside) the rest of my professional life.
Games is still a young medium and an exciting
one, games developers have produced some amazing stories, and though I concede
we’re yet to deliver a narrative masterpiece, I believe it’s coming.
