In Peggy Weil's class (CTIN 532), John Underkoffler's presentation on designing the world of Minority Report was inspiring. After seeing the polish in John's bible, I now have a target to aim at.
But a glimpse at a few pages from one sample, even an excellent sample, is difficult to generalize an education from. So I went fishing on the inter-tube. Here's what I found, minus the overflow of Christian literature. What have YOU found? I'd really like to hear.
Programming Games with DirectX's mention of story-bible is only a casual introduction:
http://books.google.com/books?id=2Rp8-ynM_sUC&pg=PT66&lpg=PT66&dq=%22story+bible%22+-god+-christian+%22the+bible%22+-christ&source=web&ots=395Yhm2ZBg&sig=0lrA4v3A1lgFGWl5zZE3M4g5Jvs#PPT68,M1
Game Design: Theory & Practice is also cursory:
http://www.paranoidproductions.com/gamedesign/about.html
Half-Life's writer warns against relying on documentation during production:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030808/carless_pfv.htm
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As for the sometimes-cherished, often-maligned "story bible", Marc suggests that, well, it only works up to a point."The story bible is just a way of communicating a vision of the game to the rest of the team. For us, sometimes the bible is effective, sometimes it's not very useful at all. Early in the design process it is very useful, and in the end, when you want to pin down exactly what you've done (for the benefit of posterity, sequels and third party developers), it's useful again. But for a long middle section, you have to rely on something more like telepathy to keep the team in sync. Did I say 'telepathy'? I meant 'lots of meetings'."
This "pinning down" of a document about the Half-Life world helped when the Half-Life expansions started appearing and they, naturally, needed to feel like they were in the same game world.
"""
The only actual story bible I found was He-Man: Masters of the Universe, which is neither recent nor interactive.
http://www.he-man.org/cartoon/exclusivefeatures/exclusive-mastersseriesbible-intro.shtml
Although doesn't it look like an acceptable format and style?
Maybe not.
Mike Rossmassler found a bible for the videogame, Doom.
http://planetdoom.gamespy.com/classicdoom/doombible.pdf
On my bookshelf, the most complete "story bibles" I know of are the source books for pencil & paper role-playing games that I grew up on. Talislanta is particularly anthropologically minded. Traveller is exceptionally scientific. Warhammer Fantasy is quite consistent. Shadowrun (by FASA) is an excellent genre mash-up. Call of Cthulhu RPG encapsulates Lovecraftian horror; and the d20 version is particularly well-researched. In the Lovecraft mythos, the sourcebook The Complete Dreamlands is a self-contained fantasy environment (based primarily on The Dream-quest of Unknown Kadath). After the fact RPGs have been licensed for Diablo and EverQuest; these books are suitable as world bibles. White Wolf has made a consistent effort to emphasize story-correctness in their RPGs, which bleeds into Vampire, Changeling, and the mythic medieval Ars Magica.
In my own experience, I led the "story bible" for the US version, Dark Ages (http://www.darkages.com). At first I edited a lofty legend and amalgamated tropes of Lovecraftian/Celtic mythology with original gods, history, and epic plots. I started, though (as I'm starting for Monkey Middle School) AFTER the game mechanics. Just as humans living on earth create ideologies AFTER Earth (and its physics, chemistry, and biology) already exists, I try to create the game mechanics first and then design a metaphor as a mnemonic to evoke that gameplay.
What I loved about playing pencil and paper RPGs as kid was telling stories. I wanted to encourage that kind of player creativity, so I started an online library and edited a few hundred works of fan fiction and art (http://www.darkages.com/community/library.html). So while the adapted legend, the original religions, quests, and political system were written and coded by me, most details of the history, philosophy, supernatural science, political science within the "atlas" (the library, actually) were written by players, after the fact. Players were happy to generate fan fiction, but to maintain consistent quality and content, I had to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Comments (5)
I've written bibles for several game franchises. What do you want to know?
Brannon Boren
Posted by Brannon![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://interactive.usc.edu/members/ekennerly/nav-commenters.gif)
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September 28, 2007 3:51 PM
Posted on September 28, 2007 15:51
Brannon,
Thanks for offering!
A few questions that have been on my mind are:
1) Is there a set of subjects that are frequently needed by a development team? (Such as character bios, geography, architecture, technology, history, economy, or politics)
2) Especially at the beginning of production, what topics in a bible were most useful to the development team? (If you had to pick just a few)
3) To help ensure the vision is shared, is there an organization of the topics or publication format that has been particularly convenient for the development team to read and view?
4) To better understand what can go wrong when a bible is written too rigidly, what portions of a bible have needed the heaviest revision, have been too cumbersome to maintain through revisions, or were too constrictive of the development team's creativity?
5) To get a sense of the agility of an example document, (A) in the first draft, about what portion do you originate in anticipation of future development needs, (B) in sequent drafts, about what portion do you add as needed when that topic is explored by the development team, and (C) in any draft, about what portion of the document is derived from developer suggestions, feedback, or comments?
6) To get a sense of the level of detail, can you give a couple examples of the approximate word count for a bible along with that game's name?
Posted by kennerly![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://interactive.usc.edu/members/ekennerly/nav-commenters.gif)
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September 28, 2007 6:30 PM
Posted on September 28, 2007 18:30
1) That's very dependent on the game team and the game. A sci-fi game requires you to go into more detail about the limitations of the technology, because it'll be an important part of the story. A consipracy-themed game needs a lot of history, chronology, information about the secret organizations, and so on. Character bios are universally needed, though the level of detail varies.
2) Almost nobody has a real bible at the beginning of production, usually because nobody bothers to write or assemble one. Most of the information lives in assorted design docs and in the designers' heads. The world's parameters are a good place to start though, especially for games not set on Earth in modern times.
3) I write Story Bibles in Word using a template with styles. The organization depends on the material to be covered. World, nations, characters, technology, magic, whatever.
4) Ideally the bible doesn't have stuff in it that's likely to be outright contradicted later. Stuff goes i nthere when it's settled on. The bible will start small and grow over time. Years.
5) All of those things depend on the game and the team.
6) The last time I worked on the Halo Story Bible, it was just shy of 100k words. The Quantum Redshift Story Bible was about 30k words. The Crimson Skies Bible was 5 volumes, probably well over 120k words but I'm not positive. Depth of the setting is a big factor. The intent was to do fiction for Halo and for Crimson Skies, so the universe, technology, and characters had to be far more fleshed out.
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October 1, 2007 11:38 AM
Posted on October 1, 2007 11:38
Your experience gives a clear format, focus, and depth of the topics that a story bible covers.
Thank you for sharing!
Posted by kennerly![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://interactive.usc.edu/members/ekennerly/nav-commenters.gif)
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October 1, 2007 1:15 PM
Posted on October 1, 2007 13:15
Writing for Animation, Comics, and Games by Christy Marx touches on bibles.
While there is no standard, she says animation bible works well for games (179).
And a good game bible has:
"game-world creation
game backstory
game story
character biographies
mobs, monsters, bosses" (179)
She provides an example videogame story bible, THE LEGEND OF ALON D'AR PS2 RPG, at her site: http://www.christymarx.info/
Perusing the book, it's advice makes a strong case that the writing tradition and techniques are suited to teach bibles of worlds for interactive works.
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March 4, 2008 11:02 AM
Posted on March 4, 2008 11:02