You might love video games, but how often do you think about the people who create the characters stories that make them so compelling? Eye-popping graphics are great, but what's a video game without a cast you care about and a world worth saving? For these, you can thank C.J. Kershner, a writer who has worked on many of your favorite video games, among them Far Cry4, Homefront, and Assassins Creed. In this conversation, Kershner explains some of the most important aspects of his job, and shares some advice for other aspiring video game professionals.
You have what seems like a wonderful job. How did you get involved in the business?
It is a wonderful job! Games are such a powerful medium for creativity and self-expression that it's hard for me to imagine doing anything else right now.
I started making levels and mods in 1997 for games like Half-Life and Deus Ex. My maps were amateur at best and 99% of the mod teams folded before releasing anything substantial, but it was a useful learning experience.
After college, I wrote for a number of literary magazines (one of my pieces was even published in a humor collection alongside Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalt) and ran a podcast, but I needed a steady job given the cost of living in New York City.
I had good leads on a QA job at Kaos Studios, which was the only AAA developer in town at the time. A connection from my mod days knew someone on the inside and forwarded my resume.
I started as a tester in 2007 on the studio's first game, Frontlines: Fuel of War, and quickly took on as many additional responsibilities as I could – everything from testing the editor stability, to preparing builds to send to the publisher, to setting up the daily studio-wide multi-player test – while also sending spec scripts to the designers and creative director to let them know I wanted a chance to do some design and writing.
Shortly after Homefront's debut at E3 2009, I got that chance. The conditions at the studio were right and I had the support of my colleagues, so I left QA and took on the majority of the writing responsibilities for the game.
I moved to Montreal after Homefront shipped in 2011 (Kaos was closed by parent company THQ a few weeks later) to work for Ubisoft, which brings us to the present.
What prepared you for this job as far as business and personal interests and projects go?
Very little can prepare you for the challenges of game development other than making games. Playing games is important, analyzing them even more so, but I learned almost everything on the job in high stress, sink-or-swim situations. QA taught me to be thorough, think outside the box (you're not trying to play the game, you're trying to break it), and to be always in the moment. Being able to accurately reproduce a bug requires you to be aware the steps you took to cause it. Understanding how all the parts work together helps you further pinpoint the issue and offer possible solutions.
That said, I didn't go in totally unprepared. A lot of credit goes to my parents. I come from a highly literate family: My mother, who introduced me to games on our IBM 286 PC, is a voracious reader, and my father was a journalist and editor for his entire life. They encouraged me to read and stressed the importance of clear, effective communication.
When I started, there was no such thing as a formal education in game development. There were maybe two technical colleges in the US that offered courses, and one of them had that ad about “tightening up the graphics on Level 3”. Now there are dozens, with bachelor's and master's degree programs.
My pre-teen dream was to go to DigiPen, but I discovered I loved screenwriting when I was 15 and that became my focus through high school and college. I taught myself by dissecting every Hollywood script I could get my hands on, which was a lot harder then than it is now, and I received a well-rounded liberal arts education with a focus on English lit and film theory. My advisors encouraged me to take courses that interested me, even if they weren't related to my major, so I ended up taking classes like Meteorology and two years of Russian language.
In retrospect, I wish I'd taken a few more computer science classes, since so much of making games relies on programming. I do some coding, but a lot of the low-level, fundamental stuff eludes me.
A few pieces of advice I often give to aspiring game developers:
If this will be your first job in the industry, you have to live where the work is. Very few companies are willing to relocate entry-level hires. Again, I got lucky that I already lived near the only studio in the area.
Go to industry events, as small as the local indie drink night or as big as GDC, and meet people. Listen more than you talk. Seek to make new friends rather than business contacts. But do get your own business cards, even if it's just your name and e-mail. Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People is the first book I recommend to people who ask how to get a job in games.
Make your own game, as a team or solo. Do a game jam. The availability of free tools like Unreal, Unity, Construct, or Twine, the quality of the documentation and tutorials, and the channels for digital distribution is unprecedented.
Absorb knowledge and embrace curiosity. We are living in a golden age of information availability, but you have to train yourself to constantly wonder about major and minor things like: Why are manhole covers round? How does the stock market work? and What are the latest advances in aeronautics*?
As a corollary to the last point, cultivate interests outside of games. Too often we fall into the rut of referencing the same source materials. Get out in the world and do stuff.
Everything will be pertinent eventually.
What are some of the titles that you've worked on? Which among them have you enjoyed the most?
My best known titles to date are probably Homefront and Far Cry 4, but I've also had the opportunity to contribute to Rainbow 6, Assassin's Creed, and Your Shape (yes, the fitness game) series.
I can't pick a favorite because I love them all for different reasons. Homefront was my first major game as a writer, the team was tight knit, and I got to wear a lot of different hats during production.
Far Cry 4 is an absolutely gorgeous synthesis of Himalayan landscape and culture, and I feel like I could wander for hours just taking in the texture and flavor of the game's environment.
And Shape Up was a fun change of pace from the action games I typically work on. It was my first time working with full-motion video instead of animated models, and a chance to write some short, feel-good character stories for an under-appreciated platform (Kinect).
Those of us on the other side of the screen may not understand the kind of work that you put into a project like this. Where do you begin your job and what is your work process like, typically speaking?
Where we begin depends on when we're brought on, and the work involved varies from day to day and project to project.
If we're brought aboard during the conception phase, regardless of whether it's a new IP or an established brand, we'll tend to focus on things like high level plot and characters, fictional timelines and infrastructure (what we call “world logic”), and establishing pipelines with the other departments – like AI, audio, and localization – for how the narrative content will eventually be integrated into the game. We'll meet with producers to establish deadlines for deliverables and, once the characters are approved by the directors, we'll begin writing scripts and bios for casting.
After the planning is done, we'll switch to content production mode – writing the script for the single-player and multi-player components, the tens of thousands of ambient and combat AI lines (“barks”), and all the in-game text. If we've done our scheduling right, we'll finish our scripts a week or so before they go to the actors for rehearsal and recording, but often times we're writing until the night before the shoot and running over to the stage with the latest drafts in hand. We're often called on to supervise, and occasionally co-direct, the motion capture and VO sessions, and there's little else that compares with the magic of working with actors on a set.
All of that usually takes until the last few weeks of production, which is when the script is locked and sent to be translated into dozens of different languages. Since we can't touch anything in the game anymore, it's not unusual for us to help the marketing department write the scripts for trailers and ads in the run up to launch.
And then the game is released to the world. The studio typically provides us with copies, but my ritual is to go to a store and buy one on launch day. It's an amazing feeling to be able to hold something you helped make. I hope there's a way to preserve that feeling as more games distribution goes digital – I like having the box to put on my shelf.
Are there any challenges when it comes to video game storytelling that perhaps don't exist in other mediums?
There are so many challenges in games that don't exist in other media. Interaction, as sort of a catchall, is a huge one. How do we manage the tension between “gameplay” and “story” without disrupting the flow? How do our mechanics generate meaning for both our audience and our characters? Is the experience the character's story or the player's? We're also limited in what stories we can tell by what actions are available to the player, which is why its so important to have a clear creative vision and to collaborate with all the other departments.
But another unique challenge, and one that's not stated often enough, is that we have to build the entire world from scratch. It's a blessing and a curse – we're not limited by reality, but we also can't rely on it for shortcuts. As an example: Our artists have to make every rock, tree, flower, and building plus all the variations. Another artist or level designer has to place them, or a programmer needs to write an algorithm to distribute them, in a way that's both naturally pleasing and also serves the needs of gameplay.
Another example: If you're shooting a film or TV show, you don't need to create your own laws of physics or write all the conversations happening in the background of a scene. Your actors won't suddenly start walking into walls because their brains don't work (they may walk into walls, but usually it's a hangover). They will never walk through the wall. This sort of stuff happens in games all the time; usually we catch the worst bugs before the game ships but sometimes we don't and, even if it's a one-in-a-million glitch, it always ends up on YouTube.
When you're working on a game set in an open world, how do you prepare for the wide range of activities that a player might get up to?
Open world games are all about content. I know a lot of people who get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff to see and do in a game like Far Cry, Grand Theft Auto, or Skyrim. Races, hunting, item retrieval, mystery investigations, sightseeing... it's a big list.
The activities and side quests are a close collaboration between design and narrative. Designers will propose a quest and the writers will determine the best way to fit it into the story, and we'll go back and forth iterating gameplay ideas and refining the scripts until we've achieved harmony between the two.
I tend to describe it as weaving a tapestry – providing dozens of threads that the player can pick up and follow, but that all come together to form a meaningful whole.
Video game settings can go pretty deep. Many of them involve elements of religion, politics, and other (sometimes fictionalized) aspects of real-life culture that have to be presented in a believable and authentic manner. What is like working with these kinds of issues? Do you ever envy the first generation or two of game designers who worked with relatively simple properties, like side-scrollers and shoot 'em ups?
Working on games with real-world connections is both thrilling and terrifying.
A lot of people questioned Homefront's decision to use North Korea as the antagonist, but there isn't another world power that has the same level of anger that the DPRK harbors for the US. Need more proof? Look at their propaganda posters. Their saber-rattling made front page news almost every week we were in development. We posited Kim Jong-il's death and their nuclear tests within two weeks of the actual occurrences. Regardless of what people thought of the premise, I feel vindicated that our research was solid. Since then, I've read somewhere that Homefront is one of Kim Jong-un's favorite video games, which would be AMAZING if it turned out to be true. I would love to challenge him to a few rounds of multi-player.
Dealing with politics and religion is always rife with potential offense. In the case of religion, we take as much care as possible to create our own mythologies, to avoid referencing any real world beliefs or deities, and if we're going to make a joke about faith to do so in a way that's not mean spirited. We're not always 100% successful – writing about cultures other than your own requires lots of research and empathy – we're certainly trying to move the medium into more mature topics and discussions.
I greatly admire those early creators, who laid so much of the groundwork – both technical and philosophical – that we take for granted today. And I suppose I do envy the simplicity of the games of yesteryear, not because they didn't have to worry about high minded cultural issues but because the limitations imposed on them by the hardware often resulted in a high degree of abstraction. When systems and graphics were crude, your imagination worked to fill in the gaps. To me, Prince of Persia is just as immersive and atmospheric as Uncharted, despite having nowhere near the same visual fidelity.
And I will probably never stop playing Tetris. Such a beautiful, challenging game from such a simple set of rules.
Can you tell me anything about your new projects?
I'm currently working on the next installment in the Assassin's Creed series. I can't say any more than that, but expect an official announcement soon!
Where can we find you online?
I'm @cjkershner on Twitter or you can visit my website at www.cjkershner.com
*Answers:
Why are manhole covers round? Because manholes are round.
How does the stock market work? It doesn't.
What are the latest advances in aeronautics? By the time you read this a plane powered completely by solar energy will have hopefully completed its crossing of the Pacific Ocean – a journey of over 5,000 miles.