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Amy Hennig - Gamelab 2018 Honor Award Interview

We sat down with veteran writer, designer, and director Amy Hennig to review her career and talk about narrative and titles such as Uncharted 4, Soul Reaver, or the recently-canned Star Wars game by EA and Visceral Games.

Audio transcription

"We are at Gamelab 2018, and it's an honor to be here with you, Honor Award 2018, Amy Hennig. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you, David. It's really nice to be here.
I guess you're here, other than the Honor Award, to talk about scriptwriting, narrative mainly."

"How would you say narrative and scriptwriting in games have changed in the past ten years, given your experience?
Well, actually, I would say in the last ten it hasn't changed that much, because it was sort of around 2006-2007 that we started working on Uncharted, and that's where we really established, I think, a lot of the principles that so many game makers follow now, in terms of making narrative and sort of cinematically inspired games."

"But, boy, I could go back 30 years, my first game, and it's like, you know, we didn't even have audio, so, like, I mean, we didn't have any voice or anything like that.
And so, you know, in the last 30 years, games have grown so much from, you know, a few pixels and a few sound effects all the way to, I would say, experiences that rival film."

"We have so many tools at our disposal now, and really, there's no limitation to what we can achieve in terms of getting sort of a cinematic result.
You know, when we're thinking about storytelling and narrative and nuance with the character performance, that's the biggest thing, I think."

"Even between Uncharted, one of the most recent games I was working on, where, you know, that barrier of the uncanny valley with character performance, it's just gone, right?
That an actor can choose to just, you know, have a little blink or cut their eyes a certain way, and that that can tell the story right there."

"And we weren't able to do that before, right?
We had to be a lot more on the nose and a lot more expository in our storytelling.
So now it's like a premise to do this, like, the proper way now that you can do it.
It's more sophisticated, yeah."

"What can you tell us about the path of going from writer to creative director?
And for a writer that's perhaps not interested in games, how do you think they could be choosing games more and more nowadays?
Well, look, it's tricky."

"So I became a writer and a director at the same time in games.
I started out as an artist and an animator way back in the early 90s.
And so those two things have always been linked for me.
And I've been saying that if you think about the people in the industry, and there's not many of us who have been so fortunate to really be able to craft stories."

"Most of the time we are both creative director and writer of the thing.
And I think what that means is, and the reason writing can be such a challenging job in the game industry is it requires a certain amount of authority to be able to craft a story."

"You know, in any game project.
And so when I talk to young writers about wanting to get into the game industry, it's always a tough discussion because you either have to also be striving to be a creative director, I think, to be able to have the level of control and authority that it requires to orchestrate this thing and to shepherd something to a conclusion."

"Or you need to find a partner who is a great creative director who respects and utilizes you.
And so I think being a kind of a hired gun writer is very difficult in games because so much changes as you go.
And you find that the writing and the game start diverging."

"And a creative director will keep those things in sync every day.
So you need to find a good partner and a creative director or you need to be one, I think, is the answer.
Now that you mentioned several roles in the gaming development, you also mentioned you were animator, designer, first off."

"So how do you think that helped you understand how to implement the interactive narrative into the game proper?
Because perhaps that vision isn't shared by, as you said, hired writers.
Yeah, well it's not even the vision.
I think it's also the facility to be able to speak to all the different disciplines and the authority to do it as well, right?
Because you don't want the story to just come through the writing."

"You want it to come through the art and the level design and what the player's feeling as they play the game through the mechanics, right?
So yeah, I mean having such a long career and starting as an artist and an animator and all of that, all of these, I've done everything but programming, all of these disciplines, they inform what we do as creative directors."

"And that ability to talk to the different disciplines and realize that telling a good story in games isn't just about writing a good story, right?
It's what it's about is telling story and having the player feel the story through the level design, through the mechanics, through the audio, through the art."

"All these things play a role and if you can't speak to those disciplines in any sort of a knowledgeable way to express your direction, the game's going to suffer for it.
It really is the job of the creative director is to be able to empathize or understand every single discipline so that you can help."

"It's like a conductor conducting an orchestra, right?
And you may not be able to play all the instruments, but you have to understand the instrument to be able to speak knowledgeably with the people.
That is their craft."

"You're usually presented or known as first Uncharted trilogy director, writer, etc.
But I see many, many, many fans recalling Soul Reaver, Legacy of Kain, and they loved the work you did on those games.
Looking back at those games, how do you remember that process, those stories?
I'm very proud of the work that we did on the Soul Reaver and Legacy of Kain series."

"I've said in some ways I'm probably proudest of Soul Reaver in some ways out of all the games I've worked on because it was very challenging, very ambitious, but the unity and the union between the story and the gameplay was so aligned that the story informed the gameplay and the gameplay informed the story in a way that was very pure, which is very hard to do."

"So I'm very proud of that.
I worked on that for, gosh, eight years, that series, and that's really where I cut my teeth as a writer and a director, because before then I had studied English literature and I kind of imagined that I might want to be a writer when I grew up, and that I studied film."

"But the stuff I worked on prior to that, the Atari game, things like that, and the Michael Jordan game, the Michael Jordan platform game, none of these things really utilized that education.
So that was the first chance I got to write."

"Of course it was very deliberately sort of overwrought and flowery, kind of poetic language, but it was fun.
I met a lot of lifelong friends on that project that I worked with for another 20 years, and it taught me a lot about how you craft a story in such a large game and how you connect the levels."

"It's stuff that served me well when I went to Naughty Dog and continued with the Uncharted series.
Now that you mention Uncharted series, I don't know what's your personal opinion on the fourth entry, and where would you personally take the series from now on, if it was your call?
Oh, gosh."

"Well, look, I worked on Uncharted 4 for over two years, and so the fundamental story there with all the pirate utopia and all that stuff is all the research that I did and kind of the structure of the game was laid out."

"So I still feel a sense of love and ownership of that game even though I didn't get to finish it.
Look, any creator is going to make different choices than someone else.
I mean, you have to put your stamp on it, right?
So they did certain things that wouldn't have occurred to me, but they're not lesser decisions for it."

"They're just different.
How would you continue it?
I mean, it's tough because they kind of wrapped it up with a bow and had to flash forward."

"But, look, I think there's a lot of material there that you could continue with Cassie with a daughter.
You could do flashback stories with Nathan Drake.
I mean, look, you can just look at Indiana Jones."

"There's really not a limit, right?
You can always jump back in and tell a story with an older character, and that gives a whole different color to it, which is kind of cool.
And you can do sort of the young Indiana Jones version of Nathan Drake if you wanted to."

"I'm excited that it sounds like the filmmakers are going to do that, actually, with the Uncharted film and go back to an earlier time and stuff like that.
So, look, it's funny."

"Even being in Barcelona, it just reminds me how much I miss it because all the architecture.
It's like we visited all these cathedrals, and I'm like, yes, that's from Uncharted 1."

"You just want to climb everything and take cover.
There's the romance of architecture and ruins that was always sort of the driving force behind Uncharted, and I would not be against doing more of those games if the opportunity arose."

"Talking about unfinished games, I have to ask you about Star Wars.
You've been working for several years.
I don't know if there's anything you can share about the vision you were working on about how it was shaping up so far."

"Yeah, I think so.
Look, there's a lot of things I can't talk about, and I'm no longer with EA, but I have good relationships with all those folks."

"It's a very challenging game to be, a very expensive type of game to make in a time when the industry and publishers are looking for different kinds of bets right now than sort of linear, finite story games."

"So it was always a tough sell.
And I can talk about the stuff that we had already talked about publicly, which is in the same way that Uncharted was a deconstruction and a love letter to classic pulp adventure cinema."

"When I started at EA, my first task working with Lucasfilm as well was to deconstruct Star Wars and say, well, what are the component parts, and how would you reconstruct that as a game?
One of the biggest differences from, say, Indiana Jones or an Uncharted game is that the Star Wars stories in the films and in the game are fundamentally ensemble stories, that the other characters are co-protagonists, and that you only achieve your goals and escape your misfortunes and things like that by working together, because you're always outnumbered and outgunned."

"And so one of our guiding principles was actually like the Death Star escape from A New Hope, so that the only way they can escape the Death Stars by working together in parallel."

"And so it very much has the DNA of a caper film or even a heist film in some ways, like Guns of Navarone or Where Eagles Dare or Dirty Dozen, the fact that you've got this sort of ragtag crew of characters that by working together in parallel, like Obi-Wan getting down the tractor beams while Han and Luke and Chewie break into the detention bays in disguise, taking all of those verbs and saying, well, how do you tell a Star Wars story in interactive terms?
And that's very much what we were doing."

"And it was set in a sort of scoundrel world.
And it was coming along very well.
Unfortunately, it's one of those things that's kind of heartbreaking because you spend, obviously we were distracted by some other things over the years, but over three years on it and working very closely with Lucasfilm, who I'm still working with as a contractor and have a great relationship with, it's just sad not to be able to share it with people because I think it's the game that you would have expected I was making."

"And it was really coming together.
But, you know, maybe in another life we'll see what happens.
Maybe some years' time we get to see or to learn about it openly."

"Closing one, we've seen you naturally close to Mark Cerny and to Sony guys, of course, given your experience and your work time with them."

"They've been talking about, both Mark and Sean Leighton, they've been talking about the PlayStation legacy with many anecdotes, etc.
Any closing comments you would like to share on this PlayStation legacy and what it means to players?
Well, look, I mean, I admire Sony so much and the PlayStation because they have always been and they continue to be a home for creators that want to tell stories and they fundamentally understand that storytelling and narratives are important and I would work with them again in a heartbeat."

"I love them and I feel like we're very much kindred spirits.
And, you know, I'm excited about the stuff that the future may hold, you know."

"And I love their commitment to VR as well because I think that in the same way that games were a frontier for me 30 years ago, VR is an exciting frontier right now too for me."

"It's a medium and a language we haven't written yet and I'd love to be part of that, maybe with PlayStation, who knows.
Thank you so much for your time."

"Congratulations again on your award.
Oh, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it, David."

Gamelab

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