The wisdom of Chris Metzen

Today was a great day, because I discovered that Blizzard (creators of Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft) has released the second episode of their podcast, and in it was included a very long interview with Chriz Metzen, their lead designer and the guy in charge of the stories for all three franchises, some of which have been excellent and all of which have wound up being "read," if you will, by millions upon millions of people all across the world. Needless to say, I was excited to hear his thoughts on storytelling.

He actually spent about five straight minutes of the interview talking about the creation of the storyline for Starcraft, which is one of the better videogame storylines of the 1990s and can duke it out with Warcraft III for the honor of best RTS storyline I've ever encountered. I'll post a few quotes from that section of the interview that really struck me:

"as momentum really started picking up on the science-fiction thing, the group response is like ‘well, let's simplify this, right. People, they understand space-ships. They understand creepy, spidery aliens. They understand psychic brain aliens, right? So let's just cut down to the core motifs that are really classic in science-fiction. That's where we should start."

"the way you build a world, it starts with tanks and fighter jets and just cool-looking alien shapes and ultimately that starts growing into a setting. Who's this? Where's that vehicle from? Who pilots this?"

"It wasn't the story-line, specifically, the linear flow of events, the overthrow of the Confederacy, Kerrigan, Raynor, the Protoss, the destruction of their homeworld. A lot of that stuff wasn't clear from the get-go. We were just making the broadest science-fiction universe we could and trying to make sure it really resonated with people"

"the whole ice-skater debacle was going on with Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. ‘Haha, how funny, we'll make our super assassin named Kerrigan on this one map.' And it was a total throw-away character but as we started discussing it and really getting in to this character, we kept coming back to her; she had a lot of gravity. It really created a cool, kind of triangle of tension between Mensk and Raynor and this emergent Kerrigan character.

Ultimately, it was pretty late in the game when we decided that she would be betrayed and become the Queen of Blades."

The rest of the interview can be seen/read at http://us.blizzard.com/blizzcast/archive/episode2.xml

To be fair, the storyline of Starcraft was meant chiefly to serve a commercial purpose. At the end of the day Blizzard's goal is to sell as many units as possible, and as storytellers people like Metzen have to keep that in mind no matter what.

But seeing the process that they went through from an insider's perspective was very educational for me simply because the result of it was so commercially successful, and I am a subscriber to the school of thought that says, "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, so what?" or in clearer terms, "Art that nobody cares to look at, listen to, read, or think about is pretty much worthless." More on that, perhaps, in a later post.

Regardless, Metzen's style of world-building is one worth trying out--of beginning with a setting and then waiting for characters to emerge out of it. To use a Lego analogy, of building something neat out of the blocks and then figuring out why the little men live there instead of figuring out who the little men are and building them a place to live. And his words on Kerrigan are especially worth remembering, because Kerrigan and her specific story arc wound up being the most compelling part of the Starcraft storyline (if you haven't played it, go find it and do so---the single-player campaign takes maybe ten hours, less if you use some cheat codes). "Throwaway characters" as he puts it, can turn into incredible characters very easily, and minor characters can often inspire readers as much as main characters, all the more so because the details of their lives are left to the imagination. See the Wikipedia entries on Wedge Antilles and Admiral Piett from Star Wars if you don't believe me.

At any rate, I'm still working through what all this means in terms of writing fantasy, but it at least raises the question of whether it makes sense to find out what people will want to read and then layer one's particular thematic, artistic, or moral concerns on top of it, rather than the other way around (as I think a lot of writers, especially young ones, try to do). It also, interestingly enough, comes at a time when I've been extensively working on the backstory of my world (following writing a research paper on Tolkien that was an epiphanic moment in my writing career) and re-formulating my pitch into one that emphasies the uniqueness of my novel's setting in addition to its characters (following the first negative face-to-face reaction I'd had to my tried and true pitch centering purely on the main character of my novel).

As always, I'd love to hear the thoughts of others.