News & Blog - MA Interactive Storytelling Design

The MA ISD cohort was recently invited to participate in a dialogue and character workshop for Larian Studios. For anyone who may not be familiar, Larian is most famous for creating role-playing video games, like the incredibly popular Divinity franchise and the award-winning Baldur’s Gate 3. We were all so excited for the opportunity to meet, learn from, and ask questions of Chrystal Ding and Adrienne Law, lead and senior writer respectively for Larian Studios UK.

The workshop had two major focuses: authentic characters and meaningful choices.

Chrystal summed up the goal for writing deep, nuanced characters in one sentence: “a good character idea can be sold in a single sentence and takes a Ph.D to explain.” To practice, Chrystal and Adrienne gave us three minutes to randomly create a character, give them one of three possible problems, and write one line of dialogue to explain that problem to the player. We came up with some pretty wacky stuff!

Then, Adrienne described a player’s freedom to make impactful choices as this: “play, choose, live with the consequences.” Our job as writers, then, is to facilitate the player’s ability to play and choose, and to show them the consequences of their playing and choosing. To explore this further, Chrystal and Adrienne instructed us to write five possible player responses to the line of dialogue we wrote, ranging from the best to worst case scenarios. Turns out, that’s really hard! And intentionally so, because it’s what Larian writers do every day.

Above all else, this workshop was an opportunity for a group of nerdy, passionate storytellers like us to learn from the best of the best nerdy, passionate storytellers. We cannot thank Chrystal, Adrienne, Tara, and the whole team at Larian enough for inviting us to participate!

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As part of our Writing Interactively studies, we recently had a guest workshop from Amy-Leigh Shaw. Amy-Leigh works as a writer and narrative designer at Sweet Baby Inc, and has experience writing for AAA and indie games. We were able to discuss what we thought a narrative designer did and gain insight into how this role actually functions within a workspace. Using a game she has worked on, Marvel’s Spiderman 2, she focused on the purpose of creating the illusion of depth and authenticity within the confines of a game.

‘When you’re walking around New York in Spider-Man 2, and you hear two people in cat mascot costumes, competing with each other to advertise their respective bodega chains, why is that important? What is the purpose of that? – It’s about creating depth and implying the existence of worlds/life.’

At the beginning of the workshop, Amy-Leigh had us choose one card from a selection of tarot cards and decide on an owner for the object on the card. If someone hadn’t been successful in coming up with an answer, it was put to the writer’s room, aka the rest of the class. The reason for this being that our weekly task was to come up with an item of narrative ephemera relating to the item, its owner and a narrative we came up with. Narrative ephemera is a piece of in game documentation and can be used as part of a working portfolio. To quote Amy-Leigh, ‘A good rule of thumb with portfolios is to remember that we’re trying to express to another person that we understand what’s involved in the job they’re asking of us, and that we have the breadth of experience to handle it.’

Tarot cards provided by Amy-Leigh Shaw

Following the workshop, Amy-Leigh stayed to answer several questions from the class and help brainstorm ideas for the task. Several of us followed over to the open talk she held in conversation with our own Rob Sherman that afternoon. Joined by numerous undergraduate students, we listened intently to Amy-Leigh’s insights and advice into the gaming industry.

We want to thank Amy-Leigh for being such a friendly and welcoming face and inspiring the next generation of narrative designers! You were a wonderful guest and we hope to see you return to guest on the MA here in Exeter in the future!

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