Interviews// Gears of War 3: Writer Karen Traviss

Karen Traviss: The difference with games compared to TV and movies is that you can’t control the pace. And that’s really quite a sobering thing because even in novels you can control the pace to a certain extent. They can engage the book in any way they want. They can read the end first, if they want. When you watch a film, you experience that film at the pace the director intended. TV is much the same thing.

For games, you have no pace. You can sit down and play it in 15 hours, or you can do one level and come back six months later. You can spend forever getting through a level, or five minutes... you can’t control how the player paces his or her own experience. All you can do, then, is make these little self-contained beads that string together into a coherent story.

Not only have you got to worry about pacing, you’ve always got to allow for the reader or viewer not noticing something. A lot of people just skim a chapter, or they’re making a cup of tea when the telly’s on... But for games, you know that’s part of the way they happen. No two players go through a level the same way. They might miss that thing on the wall, might go through a different door, they might skip the cinematics... they might have forgotten what happened in the last chapter because it’s been six months since they last played it.

So you’ve got to re-tell the key points of a thriller over and over again without sounding repetitive, and you’ve got to do it in every different way. You’ve got to do it in the cinematics; in the in-game dialogue; in the chatter; in the environment with little things on tables or the wall; in the way the characters change throughout the same level. And you still have to have that ‘Oh my God’ feeling at the end. It’s really challenging.


SPOnG: You’ve written video game related novels, and now a video game - what’s your opinion of video game movies, in terms of writing quality? Have you seen any at all?

Karen Traviss: Yeah, I have... they could be so much better. We have low expectations of Hollywood. Take the way they’ve dealt with some short stories. Hollywood doesn’t do novels very well. They’re too big. Short stories are perfect for two-hour movies. They take a perfectly good short story, with a knockout ending that reduces you to tears, and they change it. They dumb it down for the audience, when the audience could have actually taken that strong ending.

When I talk to fans at conventions they always say ‘yeah, but Hollywood always screws everything up,’ so there’s no real expectation of what’s going to happen. Having said that, given my professional investment in Gears of War, if I saw a Gears movie that wasn’t absolutely bloody ace, I would go at them like a nuclear weapon! This is a sacred thing to me.

I don’t know, I’m trying to think of what I’ve seen... Resident Evil! I just watch it and think... please, it could be so much better. I didn’t mind Tomb Raider too much, if you actually look at the cast. You can’t go wrong with Chris Barrie. If you get a good cast, it’s terrific. I think, like most cinema-goers, I don’t expect Hollywood to adapt books or games very well. Comics, they’re good at. But then it’s basically a movie storyboard isn’t it? It’s much harder to visualise a game in a non-linear medium.


SPOnG: You’re a military author that has branched out into writing quite a number of science fiction and gaming novels. What is it about game fiction that fascinates you?

Karen Traviss: Well the thing is, the video game industry has a method of working and deadlines that fits the way I work, in terms of visualising things and the cognitive process. I quite like that, so I’ve sort of instantly fallen into that niche. I like character-driven stuff - every story on the face of the planet should be character-driven. If people want hairy, foul-mouthed macho fiction, with massive packs of armour and weapons, they’ve inevitably come to me at some stage (laughs)!


SPOnG: Are there any video game properties that you might want to tackle in the future? Maybe more science-fiction stuff like Deus Ex?

Karen Traviss: I generally don’t look at them, so not really. Deus Ex is actually done by a mate of mine so...


SPOnG: I can imagine you don’t want to touch that then?

Karen Traviss: (Laughs) I think he’s doing pretty well. I never look at other things, because then I’ll start to take a fan’s approach to it. It’s got to be cold. The absolute perfect way was the way I got involved with Gears - I didn’t have a clue what it was. I’d seen a tiny bit of it that had hit me right upside the head and realised that there was real quality there. It just oozed passion and creativity.

And then to work with the people behind it - much of it is all about the people you work with. I never was one for suffering during the working day and saying it was worth it for this or that. Now that I’m older, there is no way I’m wasting the few days I’ve got left in my life working with morons! I want to work with the best people, this is why I’m choosy. And you don’t get any better than Epic and Gears, really.


SPOnG: Thank you for your time!

Karen Traviss: Thank you!

Gears of War 3 is being released Tuesday worldwide. But you already knew that.