Inside Out and the Perils of Game Writing

My family and I saw Inside Out a few days ago we loved it. My 11-year-old daughter pronounced it the “best Pixar movie EVER!” for obvious reasons. Me? I laughed, I cried, and I wondered why game writing can’t be as good as a great family film.

It’s not as if the bar is that high. I’m not taking anything away from Inside Out when I say this. Its script is smart, witty, and inventive. What makes Inside Out a family film is that it paints in broad strokes. It has a simple message. Its characters are well-defined, almost stereotypical. The story is universal, accessible.

None of this is easy. But game writers are good at telling simple, accessible stories with well-defined characters. Mario, Bowser and the Princess. Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man. Nathan Drake and Lara Croft. We can do characters and stories that entertain kids of all ages, so what’s the missing piece?

From Toy Story To Inside Out

Let’s take a closer look at Joy, the protagonist of Inside Out. True to her name, she’s light-hearted, confident, a sprite in the classical if not pixeled sense of the word. She also believes that Riley must always be happy, and it’s this trait that drives the story. It’s a firm view of the world that’s about to have a nasty collision with reality.

Many of Pixar’s best characters share this trait, including Woody, Marlin, and Carl. Woody is sure he’ll always be the most important part of Andy’s life. Marlin believes Nemo can’t succeed on his own. Carl can’t let go of his house and his past life with Ellie.  They are conservative characters struggling against a rising pressure to change, and their triumph comes when they realize they can change while still remaining themselves.

This is an old dramaturgical trick, the foundation of comedy. But it’s not something we embrace in the game world. We see it occasionally, in a limited form, as a dramatic reverse (“I’m working for the wrong side!“) or a shocking twist that makes us re-evaluate our play. But it is rare to see a game protagonist take stock and realize there’s something wrong with how that character has approached life.

Agency is a problem here. We spend a lot of time teaching players how to interact with the game world by rewarding the actions that are effective. It’s hard to take away those rewards and put pressure on the player, to force the player to re-evaluate past actions and try new strategies.

Or is it? When you put it that way, aren’t games doing that all the time?

Multi-colored Balls

In most games, shifting incentives and strategies is a key part of the action. You meet new enemies and new bosses, then must find new weapons and strategies to defeat them. Great game levels don’t just raise the difficulty, they demand learning and new responses.

What we game writers need to do is to treat the emotional responses and changing worldviews of the characters less like some nebulous “story” and more as another problem in game design. A game level or chapter should provide specific challenges to the player’s tactics and the character’s world view. We should be unlocking new weapons in the emotional arsenal and providing opportunities for the players to use them.

None of this will be easy, and there are commercial considerations that will push against any effort to make games into a rich emotional experience. But one of most important themes in Inside Out is that life isn’t just one dominant emotion after another. Growing up means being able to feel more than one thing at once and use those feelings to manage our lives. If we want games to grow up — if we want games to be as well-written as a great family film — then we need to learn how to color with both action and emotion at the same time.