Character Development and Storytelling for Games (Game Development Series) [Paperback]

Lee Sheldon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2004 | ISBN-10: 1592003532 | ISBN-13: 978-1592003532 | Edition: 1

This is a book of ideas and of choices. Knowing which choices to make is not teachable. It's part of that creative instinct we call talent whose secret voice guides us every time we sit down at the keyboard. All stories are not identical. They are shaped by all those unique facets of the human beings who write them. All any writer can do when he wants to share his knowledge with others is be as open and giving as possible; and hope others can learn from that. You hold in your hands most of what I know about writing for games and much of what I believe and practice no matter what kind of writing I'm doing. It is meant to inform, to instruct, and maybe even inspire. It is as much about game design as it is writing for games. The two are virtually inseparable. The book itself has been designed as a quest. We are all of us on a journey toward a destination for which there is no single road. --Lee Sheldon, Author

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lee Sheldon began his career in Hollywood writing and/or producing many popular television shows including "Star Trek: The Next Generation", "Charlie’s Angels", and "Edge of Night" in the 1970s and 1980s. While continuing his Hollywood projects, Lee branched into writing and designing games in 1994. His work includes solo games such as the award-winning The Riddle of Master Lu, Dark Side of the Moon, and Wild Wild West:The Steel Assassin. Since 2000, he has written and designed massively multiplayer worlds for companies including Cyan (URU) and Disney (Virtual Kingdom). He has just recently completed a secret code-named project for Microsoft. Upcoming projects include a genre-breaking single player game for Atari and a new massively multiplayer world. Lee, from Palm Harbor, Florida, is recognized as one of the leading experts in the games industry on storytelling and character development in games. Since 1993, he has given a full day tutorial on these and related issues at the Game Developers Conference, and has appeared on panels and given presentations elsewhere. He is a charter member of the exclusive invitation-only Game Design Workshop that includes most of the major game designers in the industry. He is the author of "Impossible Bliss" (0595194818), a mystery novel.

Product Details

• Paperback: 488 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology PTR; 1 edition (June 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592003532
• ISBN-13: 978-1592003532
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,234 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #94 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Game Programming

More About the Author

Lee Sheldon is Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has written and designed over 20 commercial video games and MMOs. His latest book is The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game. His book Character Development and Storytelling for Games is required reading at many game developers and in game design programs at some of the world's most distinguished universities. A new edition will be published in 2012. Lee is a contributor to several additional books on video games including Well-Played 2.0 from Carnegie-Mellon's ETC, Writing for Video Game Genres from the IGDA, Game Design: An Interactive Experience and Second Person. He is cited in many publications; and is a regular lecturer and consultant on game design and writing in the US and abroad. Before his career in video games Lee wrote and produced over 200 popular television shows, including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Charlie's Angels. As head writer of the daytime serial Edge of Night he received a nomination for best writing from the Writers Guild of America. Lee has been twice nominated for Edgar awards by the Mystery Writers of America. His first mystery novel, Impossible Bliss, was re-issued in 2004. Lee began his academic career in 2006 at Indiana University where he taught game design and screenwriting. At IU Lee first instituted the practice of designing classes as multiplayer games; worked on the serious games Quest Atlantis and Virtual Congress; and wrote and designed the alternate reality games The Skeleton Chase and Skeleton Chase 2: The Psychic funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; and Skeleton Chase 3: Warp Speed funded by Coca-Cola. He continues as creative director of the narrative-driven MMO Londontown; and is head of the team working to build the Emergent Reality Lab at Rensselaer. Most recently he has been a design consultant and Lead Writer on Star Trek: Infinite Space; Lead Writer on Adventure World from Zynga; and currently Consultant/Writer at Harmonix.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting, but could have been shorter, June 25, 2006

By 

Fletcher Dunn (Chicago, Illinois) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Character Development and Storytelling for Games (Game Development Series) (Paperback)

I really enjoyed this book, and I think it's definitely worth considering if you're interested in how stories can be told in video games. I've bought plenty of books about video game design and storytelling. (I'm a programmer who's been making video games professionally for about 10 years -- I wish more people would include their personalbackground in their book reviews...) Some books on game design are written by people who obviously have more "static media" backgrounds like books or movies, and don't understand the fundamental problem of making a story in a situation where the audience has freedom to do what they want. Another problem that a lot of people don't understand is that people playing a video game don't necessarily WANT a story, in the sense that they are playing a video game because of the interactivity, and not to watch a 10 minute cutscene to learn some back story. If they wanted to watch a movie they'd pop in a DVD.

I think the author really understands these difficulties. You want to make an emmersive worl, but you need to do it very quickly. So he talks about dialog, and how to convey as much information as possible in as few words as possible. He talks about how to get the player to sympathize with a chaacter, from the situation that characetr is in, to the design of the character art, to the words that the character says. All of the information is very practical, not like some books that leave you with a bunch of high-level nonsense that doesn't work in a real game. I really appreciated that he wasn't one of these "video games are mindless because they don't tell a story" type of guys. Or acting as if video games need to learn how to tell a story in order to "grow up" like movies or TV have. In a straight up action game or fighter, you don't need as much of a story as you do in a more adventure game. Playing a video game is a just a different experience, and the story has a different role, it's NOT the holy grail like some people think. Rather than trying to tell you how to convert video games into novels, he describe ways that you can inject story without taking away from the inetraction. I think he makes a good case that in almost any game, you can introduce just a bit of characetr depth and relationships, without stopping for a ten minute cutscene, and it adds value to the game.

This author's background was originally in TV, but he also has considerable experience in video games. I felt like he has a good background to be writing the book, and was speaking from experience.

The only negative comment about the book is that I found several of the chapters to be very similar. Like you'd be reading a chapter, and you'd think, "Hey, didn't I just read this exact same thing a few chapters ago?" Actually, you didn't, this chapter is covering a very slightly different topic. In other words, I think he could have consolidated a few chapters, which would have saved me some time. I suppose this makes it easier to jump around, since you don't rely on information from previous chapters. But I found it a little repetitive.

All in all, a really good book for anybody interested in video game design or storytelling in general.

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars almost didn't read it..., November 5, 2004

By 

Atle Brandt "-atleb" (norway) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Character Development and Storytelling for Games (Game Development Series) (Paperback)

because I started with the appendices, including an "oppinionated bibliography" - that almost had rushing off to the shelves (and the library and amazon) to grab a bunch of other books to read.

When I got down to reading the main work - it was just as captivating. He writes well, there are jokes mixed in and a good strucutre. Some minor typos/mis-references (a missing appendix c) and a bit overdone on the "define this word" stuff, but it doesn't detrect from the overall message.

The best part? Make your rule then break it. If you willingly break a rule, chances are the result will be much better than if you happen to ignore it beacuse you are unaware of it.

Draws heavily on ideas from many fields, so the content has value outside of "pure" game design (ie for animation, machinima, role playing, adapting books to hobby-theater)

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book for all writers, December 14, 2004

By 

Francois Dominic Laramee (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Character Development and Storytelling for Games (Game Development Series) (Paperback)

I've known Lee Sheldon for several years. He is one of the most pleasant and knowledgeable people I've met in the game industry, so I was very much looking forward to this book. Suffice it to say that I wasn't disappointed.

Writing for games has a lot in common with writing for other media (e.g., character and theme) and a lot that is unique to itself. Lee does an excellent job of covering both aspects - so much so that I would recommend this book to writers with absolutely no interest in interactive media. (I've read my share of writing books over the years, and this one stands at the top of the heap.)

Of particular interest to me were chapters 3-6 on character and chapter 14 on modular storytelling, the most elegant way I've seen of organizing a linear experience into a non-linear structure. The book also does an excellent job of discussing storytelling in massively multiplayer games and provides extensive background material, much of which is intended to set up and justify Lee's modular storytelling model - rather more background than necessary, actually, since you should be sold on the need for something like modular storytelling long before he gets around to explaining it.

The book's does have a few faults. For example, a couple of the later chapters feel out of place, and the text is dusted with a handful of puzzling and sometimes repeated typos (Eowen? Kalishnakov?) But these are of little consequence and should not detract from your enjoyment.

Highly recommended.