RL: Steve Hickner and the Importance of Timing

Last weekend, Ringling had the pleasure of welcoming Steve Hickner, Dreamworks director and storyboarder, on campus. As a Game Art and Design Sophomore, I attended his lecture about ideas, films, and storyboarding with a little trepidation. What use could storyboarding be for me? We were doing a cinematic breakdown of an Assassin's Creed trailer in our Game Design class, but I still couldn't quite understand what the importance was. You can't storyboard a video game, I thought. This seemed like a lecture for the CA majors, not for GADs. I knew we had to make a trailer for a game as our eventual thesis, but that seemed so far away, and the focus would be more on the gameplay rather than the cinematography, I had hoped. Perhaps I was missing the point?

But as the lecture went on, and we viewed more and more instances of re-storyboarding and re-storytelling, I formulated a differing opinion. In all of the storyboarding, as much as the shots and the cuts were important, it all really came down to timing to really tie something together. A lot of the thesis ideas presented by the CA students had, while not perhaps jokes in and of themselves, a progression and a punchline that needed to be realised in a way that resonated with the audience and didn't fall flat. To maintain the balance between anticipation and appreciation was a serious task. Like a comedian prepping for a joke, setting up a scene and pacing things just right are integral for a game as much as any other media. You can't just straight-up barge into a boss fight first thing in a game (unless you're something like Dark Souls, then you can do what you want. But the point is knowing the rules before you can break them).

Later on I found an article written by Warren Spector named The Commandments of Game Design which seemed like a perfect addendum to this thought process. A veteran of the industry who has worked on Deus Ex and System Shock, Spector has written a series of essentially Do's and Don'ts that are applicable to most areas of game design. He addresses the idea that a game is more like a dialogue than a movie: it's something to be spoken to, and interacted with. With these things in mind, we can't just storyboard our way into a good game: we have to consider things from a variety of different shots and angles, not just a one.