Slay the Dragon. Robert Denton Bryant

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      CHAPTER 00

      LOADING …

      When Desmond Miles is kidnapped by a sinister corporation, they use a machine to send his consciousness back in time, where he is forced to re-live the adventures of his ancestors—a secret society of assassins. Can Desmond survive and stop the evil company’s plans to change history?

      After his airplane crashes in the middle of the Atlantic, Jack discovers a man-made underwater Utopia called “Rapture.” But the city has gone mad: its gene-splicing-addicted citizens attack him, monstrous “Big Daddies” try to kill him on sight, and Rapture’s autocratic founder will stop at nothing to maintain control. Can Jack escape to the surface before he becomes an unwitting pawn in this sub-marine madhouse?

      After landing on a gargantuan, ring-shaped planet, the Master Chief, a genetically enhanced super-soldier, must battle a fanatical civilization known as the Covenant. Can he stop them before they can use their super weapon to destroy all life in the galaxy?

      DO THESE BLURBS sound like the plots of Hollywood’s upcoming summer blockbusters? They easily could be. Each of these story lines forms the basis of a multi-million-dollar franchise with a global audience, shelves full of licensed merchandise, legions of cosplaying fans, and side-stories in multiple media.

      But these are NOT the plots of movies coming to a theater near you (not at the time of this writing, anyway, although Halo: Nightfall is a TV series). These are the story lines, worlds, and characters of blockbuster video games: Assassin’s Creed, BioShock, and Halo. They are huge franchises born from video game stories. These games are interactive narratives that take place in very rich worlds populated with involving characters that inspire players to continue to interact and explore even after they’ve “beat the game.” Video game stories and characters—their intellectual property (or “IP”)—are the next great frontier of our collective pop culture imagination. Video games have finally come of age. Great stories are being told.

      We’ve only mentioned three so far, but you can probably name many more: Call of Duty, Borderlands, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, and God of War.

      Does that list seem too hardcore?

      Let’s not forget the billions of dollars amassed by such family-friendly game franchises as Skylanders, Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, Professor Layton, Ratchet & Clank, and Clash of Clans. That list goes on and on as well.

      Where did this all start? When did games become more than games and a place where great stories might be told? Just as the movies can be traced back to the success of a lovable tramp, we think the first “box-office star” … the Charlie Chaplin of the arcades … was a plumber who helped to launch a thousand quarters, quests, multiple sub-franchises and a billion dollar industry: MARIO!

W00T! A.K.A. WOW, LOOT!

      Consumers in North America spent over $21 billion on games at retail last year,¹ and that’s just on traditional “games-in-a-box” played with game consoles and personal computers. Worldwide and across all platforms, including mobile and tablet games, the number has been estimated at $93 billion.² (We’re not great with big numbers, but here’s a comparison: for the same period, worldwide theatrical box office revenue was $35.9 billion.³) Even though thousands of “free to play” games are available nowadays, passionate players are still willing to spend big on games that engage them.

      Furthermore, everyone plays video games now. Think about that. Video games have been around for almost 50(!) years, and for much of that time games have been made for and played by teenage boys. But we play games at all ages now: Roughly a third of gamers are younger than 18, a little more than a third are older than 36, and the remaining third are in the 18–35 year range. And the gender breakdown is almost even: 48% female, 52% male.⁴

      The audience for games has exploded in the last 10 years, with the advent of touch-screen smartphones and tablets, as well as easy-to-use download stores like Apple’s App Store, Google Play, and Steam. And we can’t forget Nintendo’s million-unit-selling Wii console, whose groundbreaking wiggle stick controllers helped thousands of parents and grandparents to play video games—many for the first time. But while more people than ever are playing video games, not everyone identifies themselves as a “gamer.” (And that’s okay. We’ll discuss this later on.)

      With this huge and diverse audience playing games, some Cassandras are now foretelling the END OF HOLLYWOOD AS WE KNOW IT.

      It is not. Video games (and interactive fiction) are merely the latest media for writers to use their storytelling skills. We have a generation that has grown up with games. The Xbox has replaced the cable box. Hollywood is not going anywhere, but neither are video games. We believe that—just as television learned from film and film learned from television—it is time to examine the similarities and differences between games and film as storytelling media. The new writers in Hollywood have grown up with games in their homes and in their purses. From mobile to desktop, games are part of the pop culture conversation.

      The emerging and the established writer in Hollywood—or who dreams of Hollywood, or dreams of storytelling anywhere in the world—should know how interactive narrative adds to the conversation and adds to the content.

A CRIMINALLY BRIEF HISTORY OF STORYTELLING TECHNOLOGY

      Writers have always been drawn to new tech. From cave walls to the printing press—if there is a new way of delivering a story, storytellers will (usually) embrace it. Gutenberg’s press was first used to print the Bible, but many other works soon followed. As books grew less expensive over time, newspapers, magazines, and “dime novels” were even cheaper—as they were designed to be mass-produced and distributed as widely as possible. Charles Dickens—a master of serialized storytelling and therefore the great-grandfather of binge watching—delivered his novels one chapter at a time in cheap, disposable weekly or monthly magazines. Devoted fans of his work and his characters would bark at him as he walked through London: What have you in store for poor Pip?

      When radio emerged as a mass medium, writers began scripting radio plays: comedies, mysteries, science-fiction, adventure, melodramas … you name it. Families gathered around the radio each night and listened to stories (and sometimes musical numbers). Orson Welles, who had made his name as a stage director, used this new medium in a legendary way when he staged H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds as a radio play, without telling the audience it was a play. America thought they were listening to a music program when the performance was interrupted with a special news report: Martians were invading the Earth via Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Welles’s cleverly disguised narrative made use of then-familiar radio tropes to cause a national panic, if only for one night.

      Remember those two names: Welles and Wells.

      When film arrived around the turn of the twentieth century, it was a novelty. Early projections of trains coming into a station alarmed viewers. Wanderers in penny arcades would put coins into kinetoscopes to watch what we would now think of as animated .GIFs. (BioShock Infinite uses a silent movie within the game to tell part of the story. The machine the player sees it on: a kinetoscope.)

      But there were СКАЧАТЬ