Hannah Nicklin (Salt Sea Chronicles) on Ensemble Storytelling and Building Equitable Workplaces

Episode Description

Hannah Nicklin is the creative director at Die Gute Fabrik, an award-winning game studio based in Denmark. Their latest game, Salt Sea Chronicles, was recently announced to release later this year. Hannah previously worked on the narrative design, writing, and production of the game Mutazione.

Outside of making games, Hannah is an artist and performer, her book Writing for Games: Theory & Practices released through CRC Press in 2022 and she also holds a PhD in interactive practices as anti-capitalist practice from Loughborough University.

We talk to Hannah about her team’s latest game, Salt Sea Chronicle, an adventure game that uses an ensemble cast to tell a complete, multi-genre story. In addition to talking abotu Salt Sea Chronicles, we also go deep into explore how Die Gute Fabrik is trying to create an equitable workplace for its team, and how to live a more fulfilling creative life.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

You can follow Hannah Nicklin here.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us theoriginstorypod@gmail.com

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

• Episode Transcript

  Phil 0:13
  
  What's good everybody? Welcome to origin story, the podcast that interviews creators about where they came from, to understand how they got here. My name is Philip Russell and I'm with my co host, Ben Thorpe. Ben. This week, we talked to you Hannah Nicklin, the Creative Director at degusta fabriek, the game studio who made Mutasa, Yo Ma, and just recently announced Salt Sea Chronicles. And this conversation, I think, was really interesting, not only because you got to learn about a new game that was that was just announced. But I don't know about you. But we really got into this, like, ideas around equitable workplaces. That really floored me. And I've been thinking about it ever since.
  
  
  
  Ben 0:56
  
  Yeah, I feel like I had a great conversation and very excited about the game and the game aspects and his approach to, you know, storytelling and world building. But I, I also keep waving like, I'm really interested in this conversation about, you know, the importance of structure and workplaces and how we, how we can go about actually creating equitable workplaces. And that was the stuff that I think yeah, for me, too. I was like, wow, let's get into it. Like this was great.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:27
  
  Yeah. And it was a conversation that I don't think we could have anticipated where we ended up and if anything, I feel like this episode, maybe compared to a majority of episodes in the show, is this, like, good even outside of the particular products or, you know, project that we're talking about, just like the whole idea around, you know, making like inclusive, equitable workplaces, and how we can maybe rethink how do we approach our practice and career? I think this is the episode for you. If you're somebody who's interested in like hearing some really, really like great takes on how you can better approach the art that you're making. I think Hannah does a really good job of kind of unpacking her own ethos around it. So yeah, really excited for you all to listen to this conversation. And how about Ben we talk about it more and the post show.
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin is the creative director at degusta fabric and award winning game studio based in Denmark. Their latest game Salt Sea Chronicles was recently announced to release later this year. Previously, Hannah worked on the narrative design, writing and production of the game with Tatsiana A. And outside of making games Hannah is an artist and performer and her book writing for games theory and practices released through CRC Press in 2022. She also holds a PhD in interactive practices as anti capitalist practice from Loughborough University. Hannah, thanks so much for coming on.
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 3:28
  
  You're welcome. Sorry for putting so many times you had to say practice into your intro. That was a lot of practice. And, and yeah, just to say that diggin fabric is now also based in the UK, I have sent sort of return to the UK in the midst of the beginning of COVID and stuff and set up a UK subsidiary as well. So we're a joint venture between two cold rainy islands.
  
  
  
  Phil 3:51
  
  Awesome. Yeah. I was curious if, if y'all are mainly remote now or for if the team was kind of spread out. So
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 3:57
  
  we're fully remote. We have people from around 12 countries working on sorcery Chronicles currently.
  
  
  
  Phil 4:03
  
  Awesome. Yeah. Cool. Well, you know, obviously, you all just announced Salt Sea Chronicles, I think last week from when we were recording this. And I'd love to just hear a little bit about how you're feeling like you just announced this big new project you've been working on how you doing?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 4:19
  
  Sure. Yeah. So it's obviously Chronicles is this new story driven adventure game set on this flooded world where you explore as like a whole crew. So it sort of answers some of the sort of little kind of worries we had about my testimony. And that wouldn't have been wonderful if you could have played as every character in that ensemble rather than just one. In some ways, it being ensemble cast story, but only being able to play as one character and it sort of belied the content a little bit. The form was building the content. And so for that reason, this sort of is very much a step up in our storytelling ambitions because it allows you to play as every character in an ensemble cast as You explore this mystery. That's that challenge has meant that I've built a whole writers room full of folks from diverse practices and backgrounds in order to produce the amount of writing that it demands in order that you can feel rewarded in choosing a different character to explore with or choosing to go to a different location. And yeah, we're feeling super stoked about the reaction so far, people seem to immediately get it be really excited about it, see how it picks up the baton of metacity oni and tries to be more ambitious with it. And we're we're really thrilled we have a steam next best demo up right now. But I imagine that's probably sort of gone offline by the time this podcast goes out. But you can head to sort of salt sea chronicles.com and take a look at our trailers and you know, lots of cool pictures and stuff. So yeah, just keep following us on the D Gouda fabric social socials to hear more and see trailers and all that kind of thing.
  
  
  
  Ben 5:57
  
  Yeah, you know, Phil, and I both had an opportunity to play the demo. And maybe you can talk about I mean, I played Montecillo, and a and one of the things that I think, stuck out to me beyond just the ensemble cast, and maybe we can get you to talk about that more as well. But if I remember correctly, Mutasa, IANA, you you can kind of traverse around I want to things that was standing out to me is you get to the island, or you'll get to different areas. And there'll be little options that pop up, and you just kind of click on them. And that'll move the story forward. And that felt like a different approach to me. Talk to me about like, what's happening there?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 6:30
  
  Sure. So one of the things we wanted to do, and this isn't necessarily a problem with Casio need, but a wider I think adventure game problem is that we're very attached to walking in adventure games. And for some adventure games, walking is a part of the experience. So potassium, there's something very contemplative, about walking around about, you know, discovering the plants in the background as you do. But I think it's kind of assumption we don't need built into all of them. And that's very much like an adventure game walk of shame that I wanted to avoid, you know, like, you missed this clue. And now you have to go all the way back to the other end of the island, right. So, in Salt Sea Chronicles, we have this traversal system, which sort of allows you to sort of teleport to each conversation or node in in the space really quickly, and like a couple of taps of a shoulder button, or pressing the arrow on PC will move you from like one screen span to another. So you can super quickly explore the space of a location. And in doing so, that allows us to lay the story much more organically, we don't have to be worrying about like that linear pathway that the player is going to walk and then be annoyed if they have to go back again, right. So we can sort of lay clues across the space in a way that is exciting, thrilling, that empowers the player, because we mark those clues quite quite clearly. So you can choose whether you want to dig into them right away, if you want to move time forwards and lose access to the little conversations that maybe you haven't looked into yet. So we tell the story more organically across space, as well as time using that sort of teleportation kind of exploration system.
  
  
  
  Ben 8:18
  
  It feels like a really, to me like like a very bold choice. I think you're saying, you know, a lot of adventure games feel like they're really married to that. And I didn't even realize it, I think until I was playing this where I was like, oh, yeah, I'm used to. And again, I think on the one hand, there's like a feeling of having to traverse through things makes you feel like you're grounded in the space. But then also, like you're saying, there's this other flip of like, oh my god, I have like seven screens to get through to get to the thing that I missed. So how did you come to that decision? It feels like it's a big, you know, a big weighty decision or like, yeah, what was that like?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 8:54
  
  So there are a few things that we do to still try and keep the player grounded in the traversal part of that exploration as well. So we have this really, it doesn't look complicated, but it was really complicated to me. We have this line drawing system. So there are some like snappy kind of punchy interjection style. Quick click in click out style little observations you can read. So you don't move for those. But for chunky kind of conversations or observations, your characters when they move will draw that line in the space. So there's a sense if they've had to, you know, go zigzagging up a volcano, as opposed to, you know, a quick thing from here to here within the same space. So we do try and sort of conceptualize the traversal of the space still, but the decision it just happened really early and it happened quite clearly. In part because we had so many characters for you to explore with. It also allowed us to, you know, the amount of time we would have spent having to animate To, like 10 different possible crew characters, like from beginning to end, there are 10, you can encounter and you won't encounter all of them in one playthrough. You don't have to take them on board either. But the maximum is 10, which would mean each of those indifferent pairings would have to be able to walk idle, come to a stop comfortably in pair like, it just would have been a whole other like three years of like development or shoot of our size. So in part, it really really frees us to be super light in how we lay the story to give you a sense of empowerment as a player to lay the story super organically. But it also freed us to spend resources on just telling a really good story with the game and the writing. And, yeah, I think also just a shout out to the amazing animation from our two sort of animators, Emma Kelly and Rosanna one did an incredible job wringing the places to life as well. So I think that finally in terms of just making the places feel real and weighty, even though you're not like trudging around them. Like they, they just have all of these little sort of, we call them mouse delights, which they'll still work if you're on controller, obviously, if you if you navigate to a node, the mouse delights around, it will be sort of triggered. And like if you like hover over a cat in Los Gatos, it might yell at you, or it might roll over on its belly, you know, like there are loads of those things, which I think really bring the spaces to life. And obviously knows in Angus, noses, art direction and anguses brilliant sort of work leading the department has just meant that the like the the perspectives they choose, and the way that they've sort of chosen this sort of cutaway kind of print aesthetic also gives a weight to the spaces, which I think also means that you don't lose a sense of reality in them.
  
  
  
  Phil 11:57
  
  Yeah, you know, something that I found really interesting, playing through the demo is like, you know, at the beginning of the year, I started working out early games on Thursday suitors. And like learning a little bit about narrative design and things like that. And, you know, we recently talked to Josh Sawyer, who was the Creative Director for sentiment. And something that I thought was really interesting that that conversation was, we got into this whole idea of like dialogue choices, and that whole conceit of like this will be remembered kind of thing that you see in a lot of games. And something that we talked about was how impediment is not only like, let's say you're talking to a character, it's not only that the character you're talking to might remember, any given choice you make, but it could just be somebody in the vicinity of of the space who was going to be affected by that choice. And that kind of offered them a bunch of different narrative design options that they could that they could implement in the game, and something that I found really interesting in Salt Sea Chronicles, and correct me if I'm wrong, but if I remember correctly, when you when the characters are talking, you make choices for all the characters in terms of like, what, what they say,
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 13:13
  
  yeah, absolutely. And actually, so we were super influenced here by the quiet year, which is, like a sort of really, really cool slightly cult following, like tabletop RPG made by buried without ceremony, which I think is, is just a company for a single person could possibly every older. Apologies, if I've got that wrong, please correct me in the liner notes of the podcast. But one of the super cool things that the quiet year does is that at the beginning, before together, you draw the space in which you're going to play because you start with a blank piece of paper. And part of the instructions for the beginning is like everyone draws a resource. Everyone draws a, a geological factor on the map, that kind of thing. But one of the first things it does is it asks you to take two roles in playing as the game number one, you are obviously going to be invested in individuals and in the community that you're sort of playing as but number two, it asks you to play as the community to introduce challenges to the community, which is then rewarding to face and to think about. And I very much wanted to take that theory to telling an ensemble Kasturi with an ensemble. So when you make choices in the game, I hope that you should see my choice documentation. Like it was a thing that I spent a long time working on precisely how to articulate it. Jake Elliott, one of like, I have lots of like peer mentoring chats to folks in in games to sort of Yeah, keep my practice honed and stuff and Jake Elliot and I sat down and he really actually helped me articulate what I was going for because he had this sort of outside perspective on it. And what it essentially is and we have all these rules about you know nouns, verbs, adjectives, how it articulates. But it boils down to the fact that part of the pleasure of choosing this game should be being surprised sometime as to who the response actually pertains to. And like, it very rarely says like, IRS does this or stew does that as a choice. Instead, it will usually have a, you know, like, I don't know, defend or offend might be like two choices that you can choose. And part of the pleasure is discovering, like who that pertains to, that's part of the pleasure of choosing but also part of the politics of choice in the game. Because it, we want the characters to feel whole, real and authored, the choices you're making are not about changing the essence of who people are, it is about guiding this community and seeing how the situations you put them in shapes their the pathways that you tread, but also shapes them in turn, right. And this also keys into another like formative thing when I've been sort of directing the game creatively. I also often come back to an article by Senator Feki, called something like why the real reason like fans hated the final series of Game of Thrones. And she draws this, this difference between psychological and sociological storytelling, which you could probably just as easily articulate as like hero driven versus ensemble driven. But it becomes like a really useful metaphor, and that psychological story telling is all about the hero and how the hero's ego and agency shapes the world and the world bends to them. And in the context of games in the context of giving a player agency, then you're asking the character, the player to play as a character, and the environment, the NPCs, the story bends to their will. And I'm personally not particularly interested politically, and what that says about the world and how we live together, right. And it can be fun, but it's not what I want to put at the heart of the games, which I direct. And in this context, sociological storytelling, is what it means to be a person in a community in a society, and how all of those things forge You and you, you affect them in turn. So at the heart of the storytelling in this game is this sense that some things are outside the agency of the player, you can't change who the characters are at the start. But you can shape them through the experiences that they go through, you turn up it's in, in locations, and just as often as you are pursuing the mystery, you might meet problems which you help people solve, or you support them in solving themselves. And then finally, the mystery is external to you. Because the mystery is being held by other people and others actions. So while everyone is investigating the same mystery, as players, the pathway you choose through the investigation is entirely yours.
  
  
  
  Ben 18:04
  
  I really love all of that. And I'm wondering if you can talk about like, I think the the idea of like, obviously, you're making the choices about when you go to the island, and I assume, you know, whenever you're going to the various locations, you're picking to people, but when I was noticing when I was on the boat, and I was moving between conversations is that, you know, who was even there would completely shift? It was it would be like completely different people. And so I'm thinking about like, as a player? Am I you know, when you think about ensemble cast, am I playing, you know, role playing as characters or for you is that we are role playing a collective, we the community itself is kind of like what we're playing?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 18:45
  
  Yeah, I mean, we even have a statement of intent at the very beginning of the game. So when you click new game, you'll get a little like statement intent, which says, Look, we're not asking you to pretend you're one of these people. We're sort of inviting you to care for this community and guide them and see what happens through the sort of choices that you make. Right. So and sort of turning to the the layers of choice that you're speaking about there. Like an easy way for me to sort of pitch this game at the beginning when someone hasn't heard about it at all. I say like, imagine Star Trek TNG, right? So if you imagine that like the matassini was was Star Trek DS nine because it was like one community exploring a trauma in that community and how it sort of echoed through regeneration. Whereas like, this is Star Trek TNG maybe without the Manifest Destiny. Star Trek TNG. You get to choose like, but imagine that Star Trek TNG, but you get to choose which planet you visit who beams down on the expedition and what you say when you get there. So when you play the game, like like there's kind of like a double chapter beginning like a double episode. You don't like a pilot episode. So when you start you'll sort of have to heist your ship and then you'll crash land somewhere because you sail into a Storm spoilers, but it's not very, very late in the game. So I'm happy saying that. But thereafter you will make choices do you want to follow clues to the grace or CSAIL? And there is no clear wrong or right answer, you're not going to break the key. And by making one of those choices, you're just going to have a different experience. So there's that big one. And then each of those chapters is very much shaped around a key expedition character. So if you go to the grave, she will lead with Iris because Iris is a rather someone who's really into radio, it's like a hacker, but for radio, essentially. And that is a place where radio is like their thing. If you go to the grace Malpais will leave lead because it's the person who's missing is more peace romantic partner. And the grace is somewhere where you go to six sanctuary but also to mark the passing or someone's become missing. So it's natural that more pay leads, they're the same as Los Gatos the demo is students because it's choose home community. Two things that allows us to do one provide a coherent character development for all the characters throughout the game, to it allows us to be super genre focused per chapter. So like, you know that this is a homecoming chapter, or you know that this is a, like a fish out of water kind of chapter. Later on, there are Romeo and Juliet chapters, there's a Scooby Doo style chapter, you know. So it allows us to make storytelling, which you recognize the genre of, and even if you're new to the world of salt sea, you will at least be familiar with the genre that you're in right now. And that gives us a really strong handhold to offer the player. So structurally, that's really useful. But yes, it shaped a wonder character, but then your your choice of Expedition character, the secondary, like a little conceit is a tender is a little boat that you use to get from the big boat to to an island, right? We're saying that there's only two seats in the tender. So you've got to choose your secondary. And that like a couple people might opt out, like maybe, you know, Mel hurt his arm in chapter in between chapters one and two, so isn't particularly interested in going anywhere until his arm is healed. So he wouldn't be an option for the expedition in chapter two. But you have this opportunity to choose from the people who are willing to go sometimes that's all the way up to four characters that you can choose from, sometimes it's just one or two. But the idea being that we have written a version of that chapter entirely differently for if you choose one character than if you choose the other. So there are, you know, say there are 300 files, which represent a conversation in chapter and three characters to choose from, if you choose one, 200 of them are now no longer available to you. Well, now, some of them might take a similar pattern, you might discover the same things, but there are whole conversations which are unique to those two pairings. So you sort of you make a big decision when you choose, like, which location to go to make a medium decision when you choose who to explore with. And then you have those fine detail decisions you make when you choose like which pathway to take through a conversation.
  
  
  
  Phil 23:13
  
  Yeah, I was curious, when I played through the demo, I only got to play through at once. And one of the things I was curious about was in that screen where you get to choose which person you're going to bring down with you. You know, this game, to me seems very interested in language. And we see that not only in like the typography and how that changes, but also there's, you know, moments and dialogue, where different kind of local terms will be defined on screen. But one thing I noticed is that the different characters you can choose from they also have, you know, proficiencies and different languages. And I was curious, like, if you were to go to a location where maybe you chose somebody who didn't speak the language, like how that plays out if you're able to talk about that at all? Sure. I
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 24:01
  
  mean, I think I think the thing that we always turn to in those choices, there's no wrong or right choice, just an interesting one, right? So a really good example is the mile, who is a historian and a kind of anthropologist, he speaks a kind of archaic tongue called altom. And if you go to the grace, a lot of the guides there are sort of fluent in an old term because they have the repository of most of the books that survived the flood, and the books are written and altered for the most part. Now, you might like on the comparison screen, you can compare the location to the characters like motivations, you get a little rumor about the place and you get the quote of why the you know, like what Mel says about wanting to go to the grace, and then you can compare the languages. Now, you might think on taking melters to the grace that the alternate is going to come in super useful, but you might need to character and they'll be like, Why are you? We use this to read old text, but we don't talk it. Like why are you talking to me in this archaic language? Do you just showing off like, this doesn't impress me there is a character who will say that to you. character called tema, who's who runs the paper records reclamation and printing efforts on in the scriptorium. So like, again, it's really not about making or breaking your playthrough. It's just about how we can play interestingly, with your choices, like you give us a choice, and we try and play interestingly with it for you.
  
  
  
  Ben 25:37
  
  I, I am really struck by I think like how much writing you're talking about kind of going into this, but what was that? Like? How was that managed?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 25:48
  
  Sure. And like a huge shout out to everyone who's been involved in the in the writers room because I had to build a writers room to make this work, right. So like, my testimony was just me. Whereas, like, around eight people have passed through the writers room and different phases throughout the production process here. So it ran in a number of phases. There was like a world building phase. And like sticking with like, do you get to fabrics principle of interdisciplinarity like working with people from outside of games, keeping our ideas fresh and our approaches fresh. We have people from from poetry from young adult fiction from we have like an Arthur C Clarke award winning novelist, Josie Giles working with us. We have two new geometries Sarah, who was with us at the beginning of the world building process, who comes from the sort of radio and theatre background. I just thought she was going to be incredible in like imagining a world in like painting characters and stuff. So we have this first phase, which was with Clara Fernandez vara, with Josie Giles, with Tony jam, asteria sharp Whitney incredible sort of phenomenon of a person with regards to being a story person in games. She has this experience like ranges from like nuts, that super cute squirrel game, where you investigate a squirrel based mystery, all the way up to like Divinity Original Sin, right? She has this incredible breadth of experience. And I brought her on the very beginning to help us with Katrin Anna's rubbish garage, our lead programmer, together, we worked to build a system to tell this story. So I took away a lot of the I took a lot of the decisions for the narrative design to one side and made decisions about the shape of a chapter about how we wouldn't wouldn't use Inc an incredibly versatile tool, but we needed to lock down a lot of it to make it accessible to people who aren't used to working with games tools. Right? So Shah helped me build a ton of documentation. Meanwhile, we were running this process of world building which was all of those in a collaborative world, world building document and like character building document, and we just set people free. We like I gave them the basic premises of like a flooded world ensemble cast story. No cops are world which has good put aside a lot of the assumptions of our weld but does sort of reflect on some of them. But it was just like up for grabs. And everyone had a different font color that they wrote in and you know, we were commenting like this is super cool, adding details. And then after that process, we then selected location selected characters to be our lead sort of ensemble cast characters. But thereafter, every time that we we sort of got into Oh, Shana Jackson, I can't believe I forgot Shana. She'd been with us from the beginning as well. Then the process moved to making and Shana played this huge role. She's this incredible sort of children's writer but also involved in like, in games for a bunch of time. She writes these sort of mysteries for for kind of tweens and teens, like the high rise mystery series, which are these sort of black kids and sort of city environments, solving mysteries. Super cool. Anyway, Shana. Her job, when we sort of started writing was to take the place. So you take the place, say Los Gatos, which is the demo, and then we'd split it up into layers, each layer as a time, we split it up into clues, the key things that you have to have the key conversations, and then China would place characters in different places. And each time they move around to different time periods, and then assign them like this is a conversation that could happen here. This is an interjection. This is an observation that could happen. And then that would get handed to story tech. And we specifically had people who whose whole job was to set all of this up in ink. In order then the writers job is just to write like, apart from using very simple markup for choice. Story tech could take care of all the variables everything so that the experience was very much like writing scripts. And it really allowed people coming from from theater. In particular like it like I think when Josie has a theater background we also, Shana was driving the story. Then we also had a couple of story writing interns Halima Hassan, and EDA Hartman, who came from a comics background. Comics people, by the way, extremely good at writing game dialogue, because they really understand how line length has to fit within space and interact with visuals in a really sort of intuitive way. So like, I'm absolutely sure I've forgotten someone, either. Florence. So Florence is also someone who worked as a story tech, Florence, they are someone who sort of came on board, actually not someone recruited through the internship process, but whom we met when interviewing for that for those writing internships. And we hired because we just thought, like, I think we think we thought that they'd be really excellent in that position. So yeah, so the process basically went world building phase. Okay, time to stop, because you could well build forever games, right. But time to start time to move on. Now pick some locations. And obviously, those got whittled down as we realized how much time it would take to write a chapter. There are 12 chapters in the game, there are 15 locations, sometimes you return to those locations a couple of times. So it'll take you through playthroughs to visit every location, and every location has a bunch of people and Shana would sit down and produce that vision for the chapter. And then it will get handed over and people will be writing. And then as they move forward, that will get handed to both me and story. So I script edited, like on a flow because everything needed to be drafted and redrafted, right, so I take those sort of wonderful, like first drafts and sort of try and keep a coherent voice, like make sure that the gains spoke with a similar voice, punch up here and there. But you know, traditional script editing, and then it got handed to art. So art would get these wonderful scribbles from from like Shana, which we're probably going to do a blog post about because the way that they would just take what we drawn, like a scribble about how, like how the space kind of should look, and rough character sketches, right. And they were just like, absolutely blown away. Like they would take that and they would start turning that into assets and animations and character portraits. And it was just this beautiful flow from one one side of production to the other as we moved through chapter to chapter.
  
  
  
  Phil 32:42
  
  I love that because I you know, something I've been thinking a lot about, since starting at outer loop is, you know, so mainly I'm like a script editor. And I've done some like, narrative design work and some like this Compendium and the game and things like that, and be used ink for the game. And something I've been thinking about is like, you know, Ben and I, we came from a more like, graduate, educational, creative writing background, and, you know, so a lot of my friends are, you know, people with MFAs, and, you know, creative nonfiction or poetry and whatnot. And I've just been thinking, like, now that I'm kind of writing in games, how many of those people would be so perfect fit, and games writing, but just, you know, the, the way that the industry is constructed for a lot of studios, it's like, kind of disallows people with these, you know, phenomenal skills to have an opportunity to work in games. And, you know, I'm probably getting a little inside baseball. But for one, I'd love to learn more about the kind of ethos that you all brought into kind of allowing, you know, different writers in in the process of making the salt sea Chronicle, but maybe to to broaden the question like, What What has it been like, for you kind of stepping more into like, this creative direction role on this project versus, you know, more of like the writing narrative design and production side of things with some of the previous work?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 34:12
  
  Sure. I mean, the thing that motivated me to say yes, when digging for weeks Conas Doug, millstone erkennen, and Christoph have very kindly offered me a company to run. Like, the thing that really, in my brain sparked me into saying yes, yes, absolutely was just a, an excitement at the idea of sort of solving other people's problems like trying to solve my own. And it allowed me to create problems, which were the good kind of problem. So there are a lot of bad problems in sort of being a narrative designer or writer or any kind of story professional in games. Because even if a story like game just story driven games says they're story driven, you can get behind the scenes and find out that their tools and their production process you Isn't, and if you're, if your process is not story driven, the product will not be, it will, it will be hampered by that process, right. So a huge amount of the work that I did was devising a process in which people could thrive. And that's not just like making sure that we had all of this incredible documentation that we were building really robust systems for collaboration and for writing, but also, that we were building wider production processes in which people would thrive, right. So those include things like, like a flat pay structure for day week, documentation and consultation. So rather than, you know, taking three weeks to solve a problem, if we can pay someone to spend three hours with us who's already solved it, let's do that, like that kind of aggressively structured process is something I really strongly believe in, I believe in structure as a thing, which enables creativity, and which supports people to thrive and really excel. That's not entirely true for everyone. But obviously, people who are attracted to get Fabrikam wanted to work with as are people for whom that is true. So I was for the first time not dealing with a story department that was incredibly under resource or disrespected by other professionals in the room instead, and also not that, like some like so often, I was the only person in the room who was a story professional, which is extremely lonely, and also doesn't allow you to be your best because you've got no one to be uncertain with. People are already thinking that, you know, programming is much more expensive art is much more expensive, the writer can solve it, right? You have to stand your ground so much like, more deliberately and in a lonely position quite often, within the scale of games, which I've worked. So, yeah, the problems I created were problems of how do we solve this? Like? Well, not how do we solve this hampered by being under resourced? So? I am Yeah, someone who feels that a lot of the structures of production, including the conditions in which workers are expected to work are all part of enabling that stuff to to be as good as it can be? To answer your question, I may have forgotten it.
  
  
  
  Phil 37:31
  
  No, I think that was great. I mean, I think you answered it, and then it also kind of bled into like this whole kind of conversation we've been having with almost every guest this season around like sustainability and games and thinking about sustainability and inclusivity how those two are, you know, one, you know, they're together and how the industry seems to be in this place, especially more like at the AAA level, but we've seen it at like, the indie level, just like, so many studios are kind of imploding, and kind of thinking about there has to be a better way there has to be a more human centered way of, you know, approaching game development and not really a question there right now. But yeah, I think you kind of are getting you're getting at that kind of idea.
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 38:17
  
  I mean, like, under capitalism, right? Being being a boss, which I am I absolutely am. The running of a company, the the making of a space for people to collaborate under what conditions is, at its best, a process of least harm. Like, there were I think there were a few companies who make a certain kind of game, like, maybe it cozier or fluffy or wholesome type of game, right? Which I know for a fact how we're hellish to work on from, like, behind the scenes kind of whisper network stuff, right. And sometimes, and this is actually, it's not unique to games, like a lot of sort of community theater, which I was connected to as part of my practice as a theatre maker. A lot of people in community theater thinks they're doing good, and therefore everything they do is good. And that stops them actually examining their acts like we do good and therefore what we do is good and the same, the same problem, I think faces faces games, I think the only responsible means of thinking about how you run a studio is every single decision I make what is the decision which centers on people, what is the decision, which is tracing a path of least harm, because under a system of wage labor and capitalism, there is no like path without harm. And even in like the best of circumstances, you're gonna come up with, like, you know, challenges and every time I have to To use the sort of, you know, the Kobayashi Maru tests to get to Star Trek again, like the the best decision you can make in an unwinnable situation, because capitalism is an unwinnable situation, right? So essentially, my job as a studio lead is one of game design against the ruleset of capitalism. It is thinking about my hiring processes. And like from the very beginning, not caring so much about see these aptitude over experience. And then when you've hired the person who has the aptitude because you've structured your hiring process around assessing aptitude, not experience, you then need to pair them with mentors, because they haven't had the experience and the experience is helpful. So but you can you can mentor in experience, right. So like, there are a lot of people who I'm incredibly proud of in this team who have taken lead positions for the first time, or for whom has been their first time working in games full stop. And mentoring has been a huge part of that process. Also, everything I've said about documentation structure is liberating, like making sure our meetings are super effective and structured liberates everyone to spend their time or effectively the four day week, very much. Part of the process of moving a studio to a four day week is undoing the boss in the head of people who have been a particularly people who've habitually been contractors or freelancers, right? Because just like the while Augusto Burrell articulates the cop in the head of kind of contemporary society. Like there is a boss in our heads who say you should be working, you should be working, you should be working. Oh, I was sick on Tuesday. It didn't work Tuesday, so I'm going to work Friday instead to make up for it. That's still a four day week. No, it's not because you wouldn't work Sunday because you were sick on Tuesday. So taking, taking active care of people working with my incredible production team, Ben Wilson, who's my creative producer, Xia Slessor, who is my project manager at Unum in cabina, who's assistant producer, like saying to them, I see that Angus has been making commits on a Friday. And we're at a moment where we're sort of really like, have some hard deadlines, hard external deadlines like that we never crunch on internal on internal deadlines, they move. But if we have a hard external deadline, like a console submission, for example, we understand that you might put in a few extra hours I certainly am. Although as a boss, like that's a different relationship. If I see that happening, we have a time off in lieu process. So if you work a Friday, if you work a five day week, as soon as possible, we expect you to take a day off in turn, contractors, like we're not legally allowed to tell them to take holiday, but they are paid for the extra time. And we encourage them to take the holiday. So quite often, I have to say to the production team, I can see this happening, please find a time in the calendar that you think you could encourage to take this person or take this person to take some holiday and go and talk to them about it. Equally, another thing, which I think has allowed people who wouldn't normally thrive in the environments that I've often worked in, in game development, which I didn't realize would have this effect until it did and actually move you who came on board. As we were getting towards an external deadline, we wanted a bit more support so that we didn't work overtime. So we brought Moo you on board as a Gameplay Programmer for a short time. And he reflected back to me like a long time after he worked with us. He was like, I think kind of the flat pay structure that you have. So everyone in the company is paid the same, right? There's two steps whether or not you've worked for us for under a year over a year. So sort of rewards developing with us. But if you've worked for more than a year, I'm paid the same as an intern is paid, right? And as an effect of that I had not realized I had just thought I was solving pay inequality, right? Because you know, someone who's gender marginalized or a person of color who's not used to negotiating or doesn't often feel like they're in a position to negotiate for better pay. We take that out of the equation. Great. Everyone's paid the same pay the quality gone. But I think I didn't realize it was going to do is that now if I'm asking someone, are you interested in being a lead like early on in production? Are you interested in taking this position on this responsibility? They're no longer thinking about it as leading to a pay raise or leading to like resources which we all need under capitalism. And it means that people who say yes to that opportunity genuinely are interested in it and see it as like a way that they want to develop. So it is it's sort of produced an atmosphere of no one He thinks, oh, you're a senior, this or a junior this because we don't need the titles to justify paying someone less. Instead, we have this flat pay structure, which enables everyone to sort of see one another as equals in a way that I hadn't expected. But it's probably quite obvious if you think about it structurally. And mu really sort of helped me reflect on that, actually. And it's something that I will Yeah, really don't talk about too much. You should you should stop me. No, I don't as interesting as the game.
  
  
  
  Ben 45:28
  
  I feel like we're we are very interested, though. And I think like you're saying this thing about like, structure is really important to what you're doing and to making some of these systems work. You know, I want to flag this line, because I think it does kind of pair up really well with some of the things that I'm reading in terms of your approach to storytelling. This line kind of jumped out at us with your book games Theory and Practice, storytelling is not magical, and it doesn't rely on inspiration. And I think like from that I'm taking away that there's there's a very structured approach that you have to the work that I feel like, I'm also hearing is like your approach to how do we make the workplace work and function in a way that's equitable and works for everybody? Well, there's, there's got to be structures in place. The flat pay is a really great example. Are there any other examples for you of things where it's like, here's the thing that we're putting in place that just makes this work better?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 46:22
  
  Sure. And like, I mean, a part of that is also trial and error as you get people working together. And as you continually try and assess, like, is this working? What's the path of least harm that I can build better here? I mean, quite quite early on, we had clearly structured agendas, right. So we have this notion template where you create a meeting, it automatically completes a template, where you have to say what it's about the outcomes that you need to achieve, and then a space for notes and a space for resources. But quite quickly, we realized that every meeting needs to be owned by someone. And it's actually not effective if production runs the meeting every time because maybe a programmer knows better what they need to get from this, and can better prepare things. And obviously, everyone learns or communicates in different ways. And also, you've got to support neurodivergent means of sort of engaging with meetings and stuff. Some people do better if they can prep, some people do better by being in the meeting and listening and talking through, right. So we in the end, ended up devising a development process for features in the game that had several stages structures. So the first one was that the owner for that feature. And the very beginning was very often me because it was like a feature I was defining as creative director would create an agenda and a piece of design documentation. And that would go out to everyone and they could read in advance. And then there would be the first meeting. And the first meeting was the talking over one another feeling your way through it. It wasn't mandatory for everyone. It was a meeting that people went to if they wanted to ask more and to get a feel of things. And I particularly wanted people to come and like challenge me and push back so I could I could to articulate my ideas better. And then I would revise the documentation, or the person who owned it would revise the documentation. So it was a clear feature. And then you'd have the meeting where you discuss how the feature gets made. And for the people who didn't like disordered discussion, could just gather it from those, those sort of that clear design documentation date, attend that meeting. And that's where you'd work out how it happens. What's like the MVP of this feature feature? What are the sort of nice to haves and when is it due by so making room and also obviously we're having these conversations, a number of even more layers here. So we'd have in Google meet, because Google meet at that time was one of the places that offered live captioning, so people who needed to read as well as they were listening, were able to do so. Additionally to that we have a camera off policy in the company, a does two things. Number one, it's really proven to allow marginalized folks to better communicate. There are a bunch of studies about it for a number of reasons. And number two, did I say one or two anyway, a number. Another Another factor is that people for whom appearance is not just rolling out of bed, whether you'd be someone who sort of early on in a sort of journey of like, gender discovery, and you're not sure what passing even means for you, but you do know that looking at yourself on a camera is going to be a challenge without a lot of like, you know, thought around it and then equally for me, like I'm not someone who feels super comfortable appearing in front of camera without a little bit of makeup on and I probably have a whole kind of feminism issue there. But it's true. It's just true. All right. So we have a camera off policy, which also is proven to be more accessible through a bunch of studies. It's not we don't we do sometimes have camera on things. So we have camera on socials, which is good and helpful and also an important thing. So, yeah, essentially, like that's a good example of structures that we built and continued to build and rethink, as we tried to understand this isn't working for everyone, and what do people need? And thankfully, the production team helped me build a space where people could tell us what they need and didn't feel like they had to fit into one way of doing things.
  
  
  
  Ben 50:37
  
  Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, to Yeah, I don't know if I've taken this run down a bad, I just am super interested in this. And I think like, what you're saying is really resonating with me, I work for a nonprofit, I think there's a lot of this, like, We're doing good, therefore, everything's fine. But I think often about how often you know, inequalities tends to thrive on chaos and disorder. And so I think like this idea of, we can really find ways to structure these things, as a way to make things more more equitable, is very powerful.
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 51:09
  
  And to actually steer us back, hopefully help bring it back,
  
  
  
  Ben 51:11
  
  bring it back, bring it back,
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 51:12
  
  you sort of asked me the question about this quote from my book, like storytelling isn't magical. And what I mean by that is that it is a practice, it is something that you can get better at, it is a thing that you can specialize in. And while we're all storytelling animals, it's an inherent part of our culture, it is not something that everyone has an inherent professional in. And therefore, it is what I mean by storytelling, is it magical. So what I mean is, is that it's a practice, it's a process. And like, think about it as a process driven artist, like you can develop tools, you can develop a tool set through your experience, which makes you better, more effective, more insight, like takes your instincts and turns turns them into failsafes. Right. So at the beginning of your career, you might have a feeling that something isn't working about a story, but mid career, you know precisely why you can name it, and you can communicate it. Like, I know, no denigration at all, to people who love to tell stories by just getting into creative mood, and like finding out what's there, that's some people's processes. But honestly, personally, as someone who has no family wealth, who just has a bunch of debt and a PhD scholarship, right? Like, I have never been able to sit around waiting to be inspired. I've always had to earn, like, I've done my time in cockroach infested like bedrooms in London, like I have, you know, done a fair amount of skip diving, etc, etc. And in the context of that, I can't, I can't wait for inspiration to hit me, I have to go into a situation devise my brief. If they've not given me a good one, I have to work with them to make sure they do. So I don't end up delivering something that they're unsatisfied with, that I cannot help them articulate what they want, because they might often know what effects they want, but been misunderstanding how to get there because it's not their specialism. And equally, because I come from this theater background where projects were like one to two weeks long. And I would be like, like sending out like 50 applications a year for small parts of funding to do interesting things. And I had no time to sit around waiting. So that's why like, I'm I'm a very process driven leader, as well as maker. And I just think it's a useful thought to offer people new to the space. And I think certain kinds of writers can be inspiration driven. But when you are in a game design setting, which is so interdisciplinary, which involves so much communication, I don't think you have the luxury of inspiration unless you're rich. In which case, I don't know, stop doing that. Give it give it to someone who needs it.
  
  
  
  Ben 54:13
  
  Maybe before we ask the next question, do you have a heart out? How's your how's your time?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 54:18
  
  I'm okay, I might have some groceries delivered like 8pm, which is an hour from now. Okay, so I think you're doing okay, unless unless you really run over.
  
  
  
  Phil 54:29
  
  Cool. No, I mean, I think, yeah, something that I always like to ask and I'm always curious about with talking with folks in games is, you know, despite games, video games, having been around for a long while, at this point, I still feel as if a lot of people have gotten into the field in very different ways. And I'm curious, like for you your background in theater and performance, you know, you you know, have a PhD. So you've spent a lot of time in academia. I'm kind of curious like, what was your Uh, you know, journey into game development? And if you could talk a little bit about that?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 55:05
  
  Sure. Yeah, I mean, the PhD in many ways was my journey into game development. I have the, the skill, like, you know, obviously, like, we all start with certain like skill levels and certain areas, which are just sort of a bit more natural to our character and others we have to build upon. And one of the areas I was already quite fill in, fill in the sculpt skill bar is sort of objectively obsessed, assessing. Like, not just where I want to go, but all the steps that need to do to get there, right. I've always been able to assess that stuff quite articulately. When I and this is the thing I often talk to students about, like separate your career from your practice. There's three things you should be holding, there's personal, there's practice in his career. So personal is like, look after yourself. Look after your body look after your well being. Assess the fact that you might have caring responsibilities, or a disability, which means that you need to approach your sort of career and practice differently. All of these things will and whether or not you've got the time, you know, if you've got a day job or that kind of stuff, you need to assess your unit to hold yourself at the heart of your you're all of those things. First, your practice is your toolset. It's your skills. It's how you develop how like the things that you need to do what you're interested in doing. And that is in your control. You can do writing exercises, you can play games, you can form like game playing groups, where you work together to to understood understand how games have had the effect that they have. The practice your practice is in your hands, your career is not in your hands. And I think that very often students, they articulate their goals in terms of career without taking care of their practice, but your career is the thing you have the least control of of all of those things, right. It's in the hands of others, and how they see you and all the things they might be unconsciously or consciously holding against you, right. So in that context, care for your practice, develop your practice, take the career steps where you can have them. And when you think about how you chart your path to the career, I want to have articulate the practice steps you need to develop to get there as well as the career ones. So if you want to be I don't know, a lead Narrative Designer in a AAA context, like there are certainly job steps you need along the way. But there are also skills you need to assess and develop and get some experience for. Equally, I was a theatre maker for I mean, so I'm nearly 40. So in my 20s, I done a theater degree, I got involved in sort of devising theatre part of the English British theatre scene, which is the sort of experimental way of putting together Theatre, which is not one person writes a script and hands it to a director who hands it to some actors, etc, etc. It's more like the way that bands put music together. So you get together as a group, you try things out, you very often use performance games, to kind of explore a story or an aspect of a story. So you might say, okay, tell the story from your childhood. But do it from a third person perspective, pretend you are a character in the story, and then tell it like just little rule sets, which allow you to explore how effectively to tell a story. So that's why I was an increasingly in the sort of extremely indebted phase of my living in London for the first time, where I had a number of credit cards, which were paying my rent. I was meeting people in the pervasive game scene. And pervasive games are sort of physical games, you play across cities or in like, using mobile phones, like there were this pervasive games movement was really big in London and Bristol, in the sort of 2010s. And in that space, there were theater, people enjoying sort of developing performance games into things that the public could play with, to tell their own stories, or to just get pleasure about like experiencing a story from a first person rather than a third person perspective, right. And there were also video games people interested in pervasive games. There were video games, people crossing over in that same space. And honestly, I was, you know, five, seven years deep into a career and performance, which the wage suppression in games in the UK is pretty bad, but in theater, it's appalling. It's genuinely appalling. Like a day rate is rarely like over like 150 pounds, which I guess it's like $180 us and you will be working so many extra hours than we're actually advertised and applying like I said, to like 50 things a year and I was just getting tired. It was just too unsustainable. And it's a measure of how crappy the theatre industry is for its workers. But I saw games and it looked better. It looked better paid, it looked like the projects are longer. And also I had come from this space, where the dramaturg is a really important role. So a German theater concept of Well, the word is German, at least, the person who's the audience's friend in the room, the person who in this sort of massive devising, it's sometimes hard to have perspective. And the drama Turks job is to say, is to sort of stand slightly outside and help you shape the storytelling. And to me narrative design from the outside, it looked like dramaturgy done in 3d. It was not just like, how do you shape the story with the player at its heart, but also with the players agency involved also. So it just looked really interesting to me. And around that time, my I wrote this really audacious, like, undergraduate thesis, which was like a feminist theater manifesto for the developing world focusing on an incredible Egyptian theatre practitioner and her sort of it was, it was one of those pieces, which apparently, according to my supervisor, like some people wanted to fail, and the other people wanted to award an unprecedented like high mark, right? It was audacious. It wasn't good. But it was audacious. And that caused my sort of supervisor to write to me a few years ago, and he just said, look, I've got this money for us for a scholarship, do you want it come back and do whatever you like, I just liked your audacious thinking. And so I sort of proposed this thesis, which would, which I was interested in. But also, honestly, cynically, what I saw was a pay packet for three years, I wished I would have no responsibilities, I would have no office I ever had to go to. And I used that time to do the, the unpaid work, which is savagely a part of all creative industries, right? Like, they want to see the thing on your, whether or not it's me making something myself that I can put on my CV, or it's me getting experience and doing stuff for like others, right? I did that unpaid work at the same time as doing the PhD. And I also made the PhD connected to all those spaces. And I use that complete flexibility of paid time, not just to research and write a PhD, which I did, I did do, but also to, you know, put myself in the path of people to, to get experience and also to sort of show so like, you know, I interviewed people for that PhD who says, hired me because, you know, they, they knew who I was, and like it was, it's not for everyone. And I really don't want to say that, like academia is incredibly oppressive place for a lot of people because it is designed around a certain kind of mind, I was very privileged to have the kind of mind which thrives in academia, and like, except for, you know, all the crappy conditions, which I was, which swayed and stick around. But yeah, I used that PhD to put myself in the pathway of games, and then continue to move the mood moved. And then eventually, someone I knew through pervasive games, had done a bit of work V. Buckingham, they'd done a bit of work on potassium A, and they just sent an email to me and Christopher one day saying, hey, how does a pretty good writer and like, is interesting, I think, would be pretty good at doing some writing from a testimony. And from there, you know, my taking over again.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:03:48
  
  I like that, I mean, I kind of can empathize with you in terms of taking excited to different graduate degrees that were essentially the same I did like an MA and nonfiction writing. And then because I didn't really know what I wanted to do next. And another kind of graduate degree happened that was going to give me money as like, okay, that's two more years where I can kind of figure out what I'm doing and get paid to do it. And now, I mean, I appreciate you kind of just telling that that journey, because I think there's still so many people who kind of can feel defeated about the prospect of getting in to the industry, I think especially more on like the narrative and other kind of, you know, creative sides of it. So, I think it's, it's good to hear like, everybody's journey is very winding and weaving and, you know, not like there's not a normal.
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 1:04:42
  
  I also feel quite strongly and this is not always the case, I tend to not want to speak in absolutes. This way, you will have been listening to me footnote myself endlessly throughout this conversation. But I tend to feel that people coming from other art forms, too. games tend to be better once they get to grit. And as long as they're sort of in good faith engaging with games as a practice, right? I think that they tend to be better because the moment which you've worked in two different forms, is the moment which you're better able to articulate form driven design, as part of your practice, is that it's understanding that the words in a novel need to be different compared to the words on the screen compared to the words in a comic, etc, etc, right? The way that you write dialogue for a script that's read out on stage is different to how you write it for reading on a page. Like it's going to sound wrong. If people speak like they're in a novel on a stage, it's going to feel hard to read, if you're, you know, all the hesitations of real speech, or read in a book, the affordances of a video game like the visuals competing with the, you know, the audio with the, you know, possible verbs that the players disposal, the way that you've chosen to display text on the screen. You know, how it feels to read this way? I think comics people are super good. I think I've said that already at sort of moving into games writing, if you're a good comics writer, you're already engaging with, with time with how images sit alongside action sit alongside words and character driven dialogue, which doesn't feel like it doesn't a novel, right. So like, Yeah, I think that having run these two writing internships, with the help of shar, Putney, and Ben Wilson, the, we had over 5000 people apply for the first one. And then we had around two and a half 1000 people apply for the second one. Because we, we were a little bit more specific in what we asked for in terms of a sample because people it turned out, we're setting as films to watch and games to download. When you've got like 5000 people to process it turns out, we just need one page of a PDF. But in that context, I read a hell of a ton of writing. And the biggest common denominator was that people from comics had the strongest sense of like, what I tend to think, or at least what our game needed. So yeah, I think, don't if you're not someone who if you're someone who isn't doing a game degree, who has no degree whatsoever, yet, don't fret, like your experience from number one, just developing your own practice. And like a genuine plug for my book here, writing for games theory, and practice is pretty expensive, because it's been put out by an academic publisher, it's like 40 pounds, like $50, or something. But um, get it from your library, request it from your library, because then that's brilliant, even more people can have access to it. Get that to your local library and have a look at that. Because what it does is not only give you the tools to talk about and articulate the practice of writing for games, it also has a second half, which is almost entirely tools for writing, and also a different stages of working in game development. As a writer. There are lots of things that you can do exercises, you can do tools that you can weigh and find out whether or not they see your hand and your needs and whether or not you want to pop them in your toolbox or if that's something that you don't need. Like, that's what the book tries to do. And whether or not you are studying game design or not. If you are developing your practice and taking care of it, that's the most important thing.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:08:35
  
  Yeah, I should I just want to circle back because I feel like you're articulating this great thing about games as like, deeply interdisciplinary. And I'm wondering if you can talk about, you know, we have this conversation, I think with a lot of the devs that we talked to about, like, what is possible, you know, what do you feel like narrative narratively as possible in games that is not possible elsewhere? And like, what, what draws to you? What are the hopes that you have about the kinds of stories that can be told in this space and kind of nowhere else?
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 1:09:07
  
  Sure. I mean, once again, I'm going to say that I have no absolutes, present you with, right. And I would never say that games can or can't do anything. I have a whole talk which I've done in the past, which you can look up which even actually, I think I put the text on the ticket fabric blog at some point, which is the games aren't special. They're really not. They're not unique in their interactivity. You can get much more interactive theater because you don't have to invent up down stairs and door. They're just there for you. Right? They're not uniquely immersive. In fact, they're pretty bad at that film is a much more immersive art form. They're not particularly you know, special because of their duration. Sure. This is a 50 hour long game. Let me show you someone who has been doing a performance for 10 years. Like they're out there. Like What games have are? Well, video games has our affordances, which is a word I use to mean like the qualities of the material that you're working with. So if you think about a piece of clay or a plank of wood, it matters whether it's mahogany or oak, it matters, whether it's stoneware or porcelain, that you can use certain glazes and others will make it explode. If you try and work one clay in a way, which isn't appropriate to it, it will, you know, fracture. So, I instead, when working myself when inviting others to work with me, and when working with students always returning to the idea of the affordances of the material of games. And if you understand that a thing is not inherently one thing, you can work hard to make it the thing you want it to be, like, if you are interested in games as an interactive practice, then how do you lean into how do you understand how and why and what's rewarding about it and how you lean into making it more so. Right? So when, if you're sort of asking me like about the stories we can tell in games, I think I would immediately like, feel uncomfortable with anyone telling you about the wonders of immersing yourself or like interaction being inherently political. There are a lot of people who like to say that games are unique, because they allow you to walk in other people's shoes, when actually that's not the skill we need. We don't need you to feel differently special. Like, let's just imagine a White says man who's playing as a young brown woman who's a refugee, right? Like there's a there's a mobile game made by a French company, which I'm thinking of what you play in text messages. Something something home anyway, I'm sorry that I don't remember that. But in any case, like, that is an extremely good game. And I'm not saying it's a bad example of that thing. But the idea that playing as someone is the skill we need is wrong. What we need is for everyone to believe that other people are as real and as feeling as us playing as them is not the skill. It's like it I find it much more useful to think about empathy as a first person act of understanding third person experiences rather than a, an act of the it's about imagining others and trusting others in their experience not having to experience it to believe it to be true. So we had so
  
  
  
  Ben 1:12:48
  
  Xavier Dawson was was here, I think at the beginning of this season, and what he just said straight up, he was like fuck games as empathy machines.
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 1:12:56
  
  Yeah, right. And empathy is, I think, deeply misunderstood as the idea of pretending to be someone else rather than learning the skill of believing others. And, you know, equally, there's a lot of a lot of the excitement and rhetoric around Story and Games as around choice as well. And I think magnet giants is a really excellent and you should just really people should take a look at her GDC talk or read the transcript online, where she speaks about 80 days and agency just those two words and mechana giants, his name will get you to the article, where she talks about actually some of the most effective storytelling and politically important things that you can do within designing a story is to withhold agency from the player. So they talk about a particular point where past a PA to a French way guy is in a country where the local population has no reason to trust this white guy. Right? And they have a problem which you cannot solve as pastor part two. And she talks about how it's really important sometimes for like NPCs to say no to have other things going on. And yeah, I so I think that in a sort of positive light, the most exciting to think to me about games is is thinking about the affordances of the form and is for like this sort of story thinking in 3d which I described as what sort of originally sparked my interest. But I have to say I have no absolutes for you on what I think games are excellent at except for my my one favorite game which is slay the spire. And the most relaxing experience I can have is just high speed maths and finding out that I managed to top 10 You know, the daily run so all All games are a set of affordances except for stay the spy, which is perfect. Thank you.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:15:09
  
  Well, Hannah, is there anything that we haven't asked you yet that you feel like we should have? Because otherwise, I mean, I feel, you know, we clearly had a bunch of questions we sent you. But I feel like the conversation you took in a much more interesting place than we, you know, constructed and the and the questions we sent over so
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 1:15:27
  
  well, I mean, I would just like to super encourage everyone to check out salt sea Chronicles. Because I have, I've poured so much structural thinking into trying to produce a pupil a place for a team to thrive. And that team has just gone above and beyond like, if you go to succeed chronicles.com, you can click on a like a tab called credits. And there you can see the majority of their beautiful faces, and just read their names. And like, I just really want to shout out every single person, especially the people whose work will be slightly more invisible. So the writers room have done incredible jobs, the art team, le rains, breather, music is incredible. But also the production team, the programming team, the people behind the scenes, giving, making space, making tools working super hard, together, to pull together this minor, like miracle that is a completely like almost completely shipped game, right? So it's coming out later this year. And while I am very grateful that you've asked me to come in and speak to you about the company, and the team and my own practice, I just want to encourage everyone to take time to look up all the other people who've worked on the game. If you go to digital fabric.com forward slash people, I think possibly you can read more about them, you can find where to follow them online. Because Absolutely. My responsibility as someone holding a workspace was to build the structures, but the people who have done the work are the workers. And yeah, I just want to shout out everyone on our wonderful team who've sort of shared the space and built this wonderful world and all the places in it.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:17:21
  
  Well, yeah, thanks so much for coming on. This has been a really elucidating conversation. I
  
  
  
  Ben 1:17:26
  
  yeah, thank you so much for taking the time. We really appreciate it.
  
  
  
  Hannah Nicklin 1:17:30
  
  Thank you for inviting me I had a great great old chat.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:17:56
  
  And that was our conversation with Hannah Nicklin about you know, do you wanna fabrics, new games, Salt Sea Chronicles, as well as just like how to live a fulfilling, equitable, creative working life, you know, really, really great conversation.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:18:18
  
  I, there's, there's so many different like little pieces to this that I think I have really, like just been kind of noodling on for the last couple of days. One of the big ones is, I think like, Hannah does a great job of explaining like, why structure is important. And why structure is like, especially important for making a workplace more equitable, I think, like, again, we don't talk to have to talk about specific but you know, I look around at workplaces I'm familiar with, and I'm always like, Boy, these are pretty chaotic. And it feels like, you know, people are often scrambling and that scrambling often leads to situations where pay is not equitable. workload is not equitable, because it's kind of just scattershot. It's like stitch together at the end, people aren't really thinking about it upfront. And so her being like, you have to be really intentional. You have to be really purposeful. You have to have structures in place, and you got to follow those structures. And that's how you make a workplace feel better. I was like, yeah, that really resonates with me.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:19:21
  
  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there, there was a lot of kind of insights that I kind of have to even now like, I'm still thinking and I kind of have to rewire my brain a bit like one one aspect that Anna talked about that I think is is pretty interesting is like the whole flat plate pay structure like after you've been at the Gouda fabric for a year. Everybody on the team all makes the same amount, whether you're like her like creative director or, you know, whatever other other role and how that in turn, kind of allows people who are interested in you know, maybe more or leadership roles to approach those roles strictly out of a place of interest without having to worry about like pay. I think that's really interesting. I'd love to like, read more about how that shakes out.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:20:18
  
  For sure. I feel like he's actually I'm interested in it because like, I am not that person. Like, I'm like, I feel like I'm at a place right now in my career where I'm like, I'm looking at, you know, oh, do I need to start getting a management job or like an editor job, because I'm like, I'm not making enough to make this work. But not because I'm like, I am particularly passionate and interested about those things. And I think that she's, like, dead on the money that it's like, yeah, that is that like, that doesn't bring like the best people who are like, interested in it. And what you want is that and like pay a flat pay rate is like, probably a smart move in terms of getting people there.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:20:59
  
  Yeah, and I think the other aspect that was really, that I've really thought about a lot since we've had the conversation is, you know, Hannah gets, I think I had maybe asked her something about how people can kind of get into the industry or something like that. And she kind of went on this tangent about looking at, like your personal life, your, your practice in relation to your art and your career as like these three elements that you always need to juggle in order to, to make things work and how you know, a lot of people, especially early earlier, in their journeys, view career as like the big thing, then they need to be stressing over and how she is talking about like, well, careers, probably the least important of the three because it's the only one you can't control. And it's all based around external factors. And I don't know like that was really. Yeah, just really eye opening, I think an honest senses. So I've been really thinking about that.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:22:04
  
  Yeah, especially because I think like, for me, I'm always putting too much into my career and like, the career is the thing like that's as long as I got that, it's, it's going okay, and everything else can kind of take a back burner. Yeah. And her being like, No, you have to foreground practice, like practice, and because those are the things you can control. Those are the things that you have some agency over. I was like, that's just good. It's just good to hear.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:22:34
  
  Yeah, I think especially since like, you know, I didn't the victor Laval conversation, we talked a bit about it, I think in the post show of just like, getting back to our books and the creative projects we're working on. And I think again, yeah, this Hannah's whole idea around structure allows people to be more creative. I think that's really probably apt, although like, nobody wants to hear that, like, everybody wants to be the intuitive artists that kind of just sits down one day and makes their magnum opus, but I think yeah, having that more, like structured process is inherent to probably finishing more things, and also making like better art.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:23:16
  
  Right, and treating it I think, again, like the thing that she was saying is like, not inspiration based treat it like it's, it's more of a job job. Because I'm definitely guilty of being like, I'm just gonna wait for the inspiration to hit and then spoiler alert, I don't get a lot done. And then I feel bad about that. And so it's like, yeah, like, just do it as practice not as you know, waiting for to be struck by lightning and be like, and now I have the best idea ever time to sit down. And it's interesting that you brought up Victor, because I was thinking about these two in conversation with one another, you know, one of the, I think, really impactful ideas for me that Victor brought up was like, you know, I thought that, you know, my books and publishing my books, and having them, like, get a claim was gonna, like heal me in some ways. And make me feel better about myself. And I think like, that pairs up really well with like, Hannah's bit about like, control that you don't actually really have control over your career. And so staking all of that stuff on, I think that you don't really have control over is a bad idea, right? That it's like, not only does is that like you shouldn't treat your job as a thing that's going to heal you and like make you feel okay about yourself. But also, it is a thing that you have so little control over at the end of the day that like, you just can't put all those eggs in that basket and like Victor in some ways, has like had the ability to do so I think some of that soul searching because he's like, become a name right? Where it's like, he's like, Oh, I actually made it to the top and then was able to see hey, this doesn't make me happy. This doesn't solve those problems. I have actually have to like go work those personal problems as personal problems. But I think a lot of people in my life I know are like no, no, if I can just get to At the top, if I can just get that next job, if I can, you know, whatever, then I'll be happy. And because so many of us are not gonna ever get to the point that we're at the top, I think it's like, you can kind of keep telling yourself that lie. And like, Viktor, in some ways has had the advantage of like, No, we made it boys and also, okay, I can now see that like that this doesn't solve those problems.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:25:23
  
  Yeah, yeah, I think that's a really kind of APT connection to make between the, the two episodes. Because, yeah, I mean, I know, just speaking for myself, I definitely fall into that mode of thinking of like, if I just publish this book, or if I just, you know, do the next thing. That's when I'm gonna feel fulfilled or not, we're gonna make it and like having these kind of arbitrary qualifiers of happiness in relation to, to your art. I think yeah, like you said, it's really easy to have those when they are pretty unattainable. But yeah, thinking about it from once you do kind of have like these big releases or these big accolades. Yeah, I'm sure it really allows you to kind of more realistically grapple with what, what that means and what happiness in relation to your creative life actually is. So yeah, that was really interesting. And I think it would be you know, we'd be remiss not to mention Salt Sea Chronicle, I think, you know, I don't I don't think it's, you know, a bad thing to say that, you know, we both played the demo. And we were kind of like, I'd say, like, a bit confounded. Maybe, in terms of like, what our experiences were, because we saw like a pretty it sounds like that, like the slice and the demo was kind of in the middle of the game. And it's kind of hard to make sense of like, what the game is. And I think, hearing Hannah's perspective on like, what they're going for, especially narratively, and thinking about ensemble cast, and she went into this whole idea about like, Hero driven stories versus community driven stories, it definitely gave me a bigger appreciation for kind of the ethos of what they're attempting with this game. And it does actually seem like a lot, like pretty unique in terms of that kind of adventure game genre perspective.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:27:31
  
  Yeah, I think, you know, for both of us, I think there was like some getting our footing and being like, what, like, what are we playing right now? Like, what's what's, what's happening here? And I think like, it was, I'm really excited to see what's going on. Again, I think as someone who plays a ton of these more narrative focus games, and really loves these more narrative focus games, I think there's like something very different happening here. And I'm excited to kind of check out what they've got going on as it you know, once it's out the idea of an ensemble cast and the I think the thing that I was like even thinking about it is like the you know, playing the we have a story like this is this is a short story with like the the central we were you've got to you're playing a bunch of different characters, but not like role playing as a single individual. That already I'm like, That's pretty. That's pretty cool. That's pretty interesting. I'm interested to see how that, like all plays out.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:28:26
  
  Yeah, yeah. 100% X, I don't I don't think we see the collective, you know, point of view that much in an interactive fiction compared to you know, like novels, which, you know, that's a kind of classes.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:28:41
  
  To be to be clear, seems like it's really hard to do. Yeah, when she's, like, look at all the writing we had to do just to like, make this work. I'm like, yeah, that's, that's good. That seems like that's a lot of work.
  
  
  
  Phil 1:28:52
  
  Yeah, I also like, I mean, I only have one experience and, and narrative for games. But the whole thing about making a writers room. I mean, I'm sure like somebody who's listening correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm sure that that's not that common and games still to have like a full writers room of people who are kind of going in and out throughout throughout the development, which kind of allowed them to have a lot of different tones in next in you know, different kinds of tropes. I guess with the different kind of episodes of the game. I thought that was a really a really interesting approach, especially given that it sounds like a lot of the writers who came in were like interdisciplinary, they aren't just like veterans and games writing. So that was really cool.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:29:37
  
  Oh, that reminds me, we also got to talk about comic book people that translated really well to video games. I think that's like such an interesting idea. And I also just really love the idea of video games being very, like interdisciplinary in general and so like requiring in some ways, like someone who can move between these different forms, I think that's, I don't know on its face, like maybe an Obviously, but I was, I've been chewing on that also for a little while. I think that's cool.
  
  
  
  Transcribed by https://otter.ai