Eric Nylund is the director of narrative design for Microsoft Studios. He has worked on dozens of video games, and has been involved in two game console launches, and most recently Kinect. Today, Eric shares with us the early inspirations that got him passionate about video games.
I guess like so many other kids I was hooked on tabletop role playing games before there were affordable personal computers. I started out with the “basic” box set of D&D. The interesting connection to video games was that I learned there could to be a robust narrative thread within a game. This wasn’t simply rolling dice and moving pieces, or having a handful of cards with an abstract rule set. You had a character… in fantastic settings … doing heroic things.
It was like I was a little kid again playing with imaginary friends (perfectly legitimized, though, for this tween, because this was a “serious” game).
Soon thereafter I got a a RadioShack TRS–80 (one of the first affordable personal computers). The first program I wrote was a character-generation program. Alas, that early PC didn’t even have a hard drive and I hadn’t yet bought the cassette drive … so I had to retype the program every time I wanted to use it!
I then got hooked on the Infocom series of text-based adventures–from ZORK (you’re in a dark room) to more sophisticated offerings like A MIND FOREVER VOYAGING. I was intrigued with these early text-based games, but also frustrated. Yes, there was an entire world in these games, but the interface and design were too abstract for me to get immersed.
The first video games I truly fell in love with, though, were series of Sid Meier’s games: Pirates! (1987), and of course, Civilization. You had all the world and history to play with — what wasn’t to like?! Also for the first time I could see characters on screen, and there was even a romance plot (sort of) in Pirates. (For a young teenage boy this was super cool because, you know, without a pirate swashbuckling adventure to make the romance palatable … it’s just plain icky).
And speaking of romance – anyone remember the original Baldur’s Gate games? I still marvel at them. Those games did more with simple character portraits and world-class voice acting (“Boo – go for the EYES!”) than many modern games do with light-years more advanced technologies. Those were the first video games that reconnected me with my tabletop RPG past and got me thinking that those narrative adventures I so loved could be replicated within video games.
In a similar vein, the original FALLOUT game influenced me because it took the possibility of a robust narrative thread and twisted it into a post-apocalyptic science fiction world.
From then on I was hooked on video games.
Today we create narratives in video games as a matter of course. Heck, we design entire franchises around story components. We have star casts, motion capture, facial animation, and pixel wizardry verging on the edge of technological magic.
The way we put together stories is vastly different than from those early days. We worry about pacing on the split-second level, camera systems, lighting, transmedia components … but if you listen carefully, somewhere in there, you can still hear the clatter of a D20, the whir of an old cassette drive, and maybe, just maybe, the screams and laughter of us adults still playing like little kids running around with their imaginary friends.
Eric Nylund has a new book out, THE RESISTERS, science fiction specifically written for kids 8 to 12 years old (and adults who still act like kids) who love both video games and reading.
