A publication dedicated to exploring interactive storytelling.

Mary DeMarle - Game Writer & Narrative Designer

This is an ongoing NDE series featuring interviews with Game Writers in the Trenches™. The game industry is riddled with the unsung heroes of interactive storytelling. As game developers are increasingly looking to create meaningful virtual narrative experiences, listening to the real-world wisdom of these writers can help everyone on the development pipeline understand their trials, tribulations, and needs, in hopes of enabling them to do their job as they know best. Today’s game writer is Narrative Desinger’s Network member Mary DeMarle, coming fresh off her latest hit “Deus Ex: Human Revolution”. Having a long career focused on the craft of game story, Mary comes to the table with a long-field perspective on the evolution of our craft. I’m hoping to see what we can learn from her experiences in the trenches of game development.

Congrats on your new title “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” (DXHR)! I have to admit I’m a big fan. What was most challenging about the project as its lead writer?

Thanks for the congratulations! Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a very ambitious project on all levels, and the whole team is happy to see we didn’t “screw it up” (as many fans worried we would ). But to answer your question: as the lead writer, managing the sheer density of story material was a big challenge. We had to create a huge amount of content (both dialogs and texts), and ensure that every little detail remained consistent across the board. Details are critical to ensuring a consistent, immersive world, and when you have a lot of writers working on separate parts of the experience, keeping track of the little things can become a real headache.Beyond that, from a more focused writing perspective, I’d say that two elements of the script proved to be the most challenging.

The first was designing and writing the social boss fights – interactive dialogs between Jensen and various story characters in which Jensen needs to convince the other character to help him in some way. These were challenging because they combined the delivery of character and back story elements with an underlying gameplay mechanic that had both interactive and random components, and which would ultimately generate “win,” “neutral,” or “lose” outcomes at the end of every conversation round. Making all possibilities merge into a cohesive dialog despite the fact that different choices often revealed widely different information, and you never knew which answer was going to come up, was mind-boggling at times. (more…)

Transmedia storytelling is a new contemporary embracing of a classical paradigm in entertainment that enables the imagination via story-driven extensions into a ‘world’ in which a player seeks to be further immersed. The keys being there – enabling the imagination and allowing the players to further immerse themselves where they have that desire. Transmedia storytelling is not marketing and merchandising based extensions into an existing franchise which is being further exploited. It’s a narrative framework that invites the player in and allows them to co-create, if only through their imagination. Transmedia storytelling enables viewer/user/players to be, rather than seeming to be in an authored interactive world.

This is a new definition of transmedia storytelling I just uploaded to http://www.quora.com/What-is-transmedia-storytelling based on the definition I created in my 2006 USC School of Cinematic Arts MFA thesis paper “Transmedial Play”.

RioSeminar Transmedia Stories Panel

On September 27th 2010, I had the honor of speaking on the Transmedia Panel at the RioMarket portion of the Festival do Rio, an international film festival in Rio de Janeiro. The event was quite spectacular, well organized and full of the kinds of creative folk that insure great discussion, a good time and challenging perspectives. Little did I realize that Brazil was such a hotbed for transmedia storytelling. The audience was lively and the panelists passionate. Overall it was a higly compelling experience full of adventure, though the panel itself did little more than wet the palate of audience and panelists alike.

Mediated by Tania Yuki, Senior Director of Product Management at comScore, panelists included:  Mauricio Mota director of The Alchemists, Daniel Pierra, director of the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), yours truly Stephen Dinehart, Director of NarrWare, and Leonardo Sá, head of multimedia for the  Brazillian oil giant Petrobras. Last but not least was Rene Santos da Silva, a favela based teenage entrepreneur, whom has had much sucess with his local newspaper “A Voz da Comunidade” (The Voice of the Community). (more…)