Significant Zero Read online

  Young Philippe wasn’t content living a life of dreams. He wanted to experience California. Since he didn’t have a car, I was his only transportation. If he went to work early, I did, too. If he wanted to check out a brewery in Lagunitas, I had to take him. Visiting the beach at Point Reyes, hiking on Angel Island, touring pubs all across San Francisco—I was there for all of it. On the nights I convinced Young Philippe to stay home, it was just as bad. Inevitably, we’d play video games, which brought out his competitive side. It didn’t matter what game we played. If it had multiplayer, Young Philippe had mastered it. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing and had spent many boring Waco days perfecting his skills. I couldn’t care less about playing the “correct way.” I was a button-masher, meaning I just pressed buttons on the controller and hoped something good would happen. I never stood a chance. It was all too much for my grumpy, lazy bones.

  After a month, Young Philippe got a car. That saved me from a life of “doing things.” He was free to have adventures, while I huddled in my dim apartment like a subterranean creature whose eyes have grown blind from lack of light. A month after that, I made him get his own place so I could regain control of my living room. He still didn’t have any furniture, so I gave him one of my chairs. It was a small price to pay for peace, quiet, and the freedom to walk around my apartment without pants.

  * * *

  THE ONLY OTHER PERSON who shared my attitude about moving to California was Carlito, our production director. He was Italian, angry, and perpetually clad in black. It was like someone broke off a piece of Long Island and chiseled it into the shape of a man. His title was production director, but his job was jack-of-all-trades. He handled contracts, licensing, outsourcing, casting, motion capture, voice direction, video editing, creative direction, level design, and script writing. He was the rock of product development.

  You didn’t see much of Carlito; his numerous responsibilities kept him on the road most of the year. He kept a private office in the Novato hangar, but it was more symbolic than functional—something to acknowledge that he was still an employee. The majority of his work took place off-site, usually in a developer’s office, hotel room, or recording studio. For a while, he worked out of a secret editing suite hidden above a deli. Whether his offices were temporary pop-ups or permanent installations, they were always fully stocked with everything Carlito needed to survive: blackout curtains, pallets of energy drinks, crates of protein bars, a minifridge filled with cold cuts, and a couch for those rare moments when sleep could no longer be ignored. Inside those darkened hovels, he was more beast than man. Nothing existed for him other than the work and his most basic human needs.

  Every so often, Carlito would select a kid from PD, someone to serve as both assistant and apprentice. Working with Carlito was like going through basic training. The physical and mental demands were high; the comforts and freedoms were next to none. Those who could learn and adapt would eventually move on to key creative roles on future projects, because if you could survive Carlito, you could weather anything a developer threw at you. Those who weren’t up to the task would stick around for a month or two and then quietly show themselves the door. One kid was so affected by his time with Carlito, he began to dress like him, even gel his hair the same way. None of us realized he was counting the days until the project ended and he was free. Last we heard, the kid had left the industry to become a man of the cloth. True story.

  When I got an email from Carlito one Friday afternoon, I knew my time had come.

  “You got plans this weekend?”

  I replied, “Do I ever?”

  “Good. I need you in the office. We got work to do.”

  The 2K office was in Hamilton Landing, a former military base that had been converted into a subdivision of Novato. Carlito was 450 miles south of there in Santa Monica, writing and recording dialogue for Mafia II.

  Originally developed by Illusion Softworks in the Czech Republic, Mafia is an open-world crime franchise, in which players take on the role of a mafioso during the mob’s golden age. A normal game will keep the player confined to a level: you start at Point A, move to Point B, then teleport to the next level and repeat. An open-world game is different in that its levels are contained within a vast world that players are free to explore. These games have a critical path you can follow, if you wish, but their appeal comes from what can be done when you’re ignoring that path. You can drive a car, ride a horse, fly a jet pack, watch TV, hunt Bigfoot, skin bobcats, find a serial killer’s dumping ground, play poker, work out, get fat, buy houses, invest in the stock market, own a bar, grow a beard, move to a shitty trailer in the desert, pretend you’re a different person. It takes a big team to populate an open-world game with enough options to make it worth playing. The possibilities are not endless, but they can feel that way.

  To make an open world seem real, it has to be filled with NPCs, or nonplayer characters. These are the computer-controlled characters you meet when playing the game. NPCs can be enemies or noncombatants. They act and react based on how their AI, or artificial intelligence, has been programmed. Imagine you’re playing Mafia II. Your character is walking down the sidewalk and passes a man in a suit. If you punched that man in the face, he might run in fear, fight back, or sprint to the nearest police officer to report your crime. You, the player, don’t know how that man will react. That variety and surprise created by NPCs is part of what makes an open world feel alive. But it doesn’t stop there. To make the illusion seem real, those NPCs need to talk, which is where writing comes into play.

  In the hierarchy of game writing, you have many levels. At the top is your core script. This is the main story a player will experience in a game. It’s like a screenplay, mostly linear and noninteractive. Next are barks, or generic lines as they’re sometimes called. These are nonscripted, nonnarrative lines that are triggered when a certain event occurs. For example, the player shoots a guy in the knee. The guy falls down and screams, “Ow!” or “Why’d you do that?” or “Oh no, my adventuring knee!” The line that plays is chosen randomly from a pool of relevant choices. Barks make a game feel more alive by having its artificial inhabitants react to the things happening around them.

  Below barks are tertiary lines. They’re background chatter, unimportant noise used to simulate an active, living world: two people chatting on a street corner, a soldier talking to himself on guard duty, a shopkeeper explaining her wares. These lines give color to your world and make it feel alive, which is funny because writing them makes me want to kill myself.

  Carlito needed two thousand tertiary lines by Sunday night—a drop in the bucket for the entire game, but a lot for an impromptu weekend marathon. The amount of lines didn’t worry me; numbers can always be overcome with the right approach. It was the nature of what I’d be writing that made me want to vomit. Writing a core script can be fun. It has rhythm, progression, flow. If I can tap into that, it’s easy to get carried away. My eyes glaze over, muscle memory kicks in. The next thing I know, eight hours have passed and my script is thirty pages longer. Barks and tertiary lines are devoid of such pleasures.

  Writing the tertiary lines wasn’t like writing a script. Instead, I was filling in a spreadsheet. I worked my way down, filling in one cell at a time, my words matching the character and action listed in the cell beside it. For example, “Gun Store Clerk—Hello,” meaning the guy who runs the gun store would say the line whenever the player entered. I wrote something like:

  GUN STORE CLERK

  If you’re looking for a gun, you came to the right place.

  But I couldn’t stop there. It would get repetitive if the clerk always said the same thing, so I wrote four more lines.

  GUN STORE CLERK

  Good afternoon, sir. Care to see what we got?

  GUN STORE CLERK

  Hello. If I can help, just let me know.

  GUN STORE CLERK

  Come on in.

  GUN STORE CLERK

  Hi.


  With each line, I felt my life draining away. That was five hellos for the gun store clerk, but I still wasn’t finished. I needed to write five “hello” lines each for the other seven gun store clerks, who all looked, sounded, and acted differently. Then, I had to do the same for the clothing store clerks, the barbers, the waiters, the car salesmen, the gas-station attendants, the shoe shiners . . . You get the picture.

  After three sets of hellos, I began to wonder how many of my fingers I could bite off before passing out from pain and blood loss. But I persevered and wrote a hundred variations of “Hey, guy! Lookin’ to buy?” Then I moved on to the next set of lines: Gun Store Clerk—Good-bye.

  GUN STORE CLERK

  See you next time!

  If I bit down hard enough, could I sever a finger in one chomp, or would I have to gnaw through the bone like it was a stubborn piece of gristle?

  * * *

  THAT WEEKEND, I WROTE lines for every store in the game. Hellos, good-byes, idle chatter, and helpful descriptions of everything the player could buy, from hot dogs to hand grenades. After a while, it felt like my skull was filling up with smoke.

  Spend enough years writing and you find your breaking point, your body’s way of letting you know it’s time to stop. Skull smoke was my red flag. I knew a migraine was on its way, soon to be followed by fever naps and vomiting. To get past it, I had to trick my brain into not thinking; I had to write with my gut, not my mind. I turned to a method I developed in college to survive speed-writing papers at the last minute.

  The next set of lines on my spreadsheet was Gun Store Clerk—Tommy Gun. Easy enough.

  GUN STORE CLERK

  I heard you’re in the market for a Chicago piano. Well, I’m your guy.

  GUN STORE CLERK

  This here’s a classic. Same one Al Capone uses, hand to heart.

  GUN STORE CLERK

  Now, this is a top-notch tommy gun. Never hear any complaints, if you get my meaning.

  GUN STORE CLERK

  It shoots bullets really fucking fast. What more do you need to know?

  The last line was for me. It wasn’t clever or terribly funny, but it’s how I felt as I tried to come up with something else to say about tommy guns. Giving voice to my frustration was enjoyable. I didn’t care if one out of every four lines wasn’t usable. It took some of the pressure off, and relieved the pain building inside my head. It was the Tom Sawyer effect. It wasn’t work if I could convince myself I was having fun.

  When I got to work on Tuesday, there was an email from Carlito waiting for me. The subject read “THIS IS GOOD WRITING.” Attached to the email was an audio file. The voice on the file was unmistakable: Curtis Armstrong, best known for playing Booger in Revenge of the Nerds. I was so surprised, it took me a second before I recognized what he was saying—it was one of my throwaway lines.

  SHOE SHINER

  You know, it’s a shame more women don’t get their shoes shined. You ever stopped and looked at a woman’s shoe? I mean, really looked at it? They’re so slim, so beautiful. They just make you wanna . . . I dunno . . . smell ’em.

  The email itself was one sentence long. “When can you come to Santa Monica?”

  * * *

  I FLEW FROM SAN Francisco to Santa Monica and drove straight to Pacific Ocean Post, where Carlito had rented an audio-recording studio for the month. I arrived around 10:00 a.m. and found Carlito in the studio with our four actors: Ricky, Nicky, Bobby, and Tony. They were flipping through a binder full of menus, trying to decide what to order for lunch.

  Bobby was going back and forth between two different pizzerias. “Is it sissy if I order the veggie pizza?”

  “Depends,” said Ricky. “What’s the veggie pizza?”

  “It ain’t got no meat on it.”

  Nicky, who’d been talking to Carlito, turned to Bobby. “You ordering a plain cheese?”

  “Who the fuck said anything about plain cheese? I’m talking about pizza with vegetables and shit on it.”

  Tony grabbed the binder out of Bobby’s hand. “What? You a fucking vegetarian now?”

  “No . . .” Embarrassed, Bobby almost blushed. “Just trying to lose some weight.”

  These guys were full of Italian machismo, but they were also professional actors. Keeping it tight was something they could relate to.

  “Nah,” said Ricky. “That ain’t sissy.”

  Tony looked up from the menu. “It’s only sissy if you order the side of cock.”

  “Well, shit.” Bobby looked devastated. “The cock’s the best part.”

  I had somehow ended up in the dinner scene of a mob movie.

  Ricky slapped Bobby on the shoulder to get his attention. “Hey, Tony. Did I hear you on the radio last week?”

  Tony shut the binder and placed it on his lap. “I knew this was gonna happen.” He sat back, squared his shoulders, and crossed his arms. “Go on. Let’s have it.”

  “What’d he do?” asked Bobby.

  “Five words,” said Ricky. “All-you-can-eat breadsticks.”

  Bobby’s eyes went wide. “You did an Olive Garden commercial? You fucking sellout.”

  “You act like I’m the only one. Nicky did one for . . . whatcha call it?”

  “It was Macaroni Grill,” said Nicky. “And it was classy as shit.”

  Ricky, Bobby, and Tony looked like Nicky had just spit on their sisters, mothers, and grandmothers.

  “I’m talking about the commercial! I classed it up. The food was . . .” He waved it off. “Eh, you know how it is.”

  * * *

  WE DIDN’T GET STARTED until lunch had been delivered, served, and digested.

  A recording booth usually has room for only one actor at a time. This forces the actor to perform alone. It’s not ideal. Carlito liked to record all his actors at once, so they could react to one another. He booked the larger studio used for automated dialogue replacement, or ADR. In film, ADR is the process of rerecording dialogue after filming is complete. It requires an actor to perform his or her lines while watching the film. Since the ADR studio had to house a projection screen, that meant it was big enough for all of us to be in there at once. Ricky, Nicky, Bobby, and Tony sat in long-legged director’s chairs, separated from one another by sound-dampening partitions. I handed each of them a script and a pencil, then joined Carlito at a long table.

  We were recording scratch for Mafia II, which means none of it was final. The script was still a work in progress, or WIP. That’s not to say it was bad or unfinished; it’s just that the game design was still in flux. If your game is WIP, then so is your script, because as sure as the sun will rise, the game will change. And when the game changes, the script changes. These are the rules.

  Just because scratch isn’t final doesn’t mean it’s not important. Scratch dialogue lets us get a feel for the story and plot cinematics, and just get lines in the game so we can see what the final experience may feel like.

  The recording with Ricky, Nicky, Bobby, and Tony was a blast. Since our cast was only four guys, each of them did multiple voices. Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Marlon Brando—we recorded every impression they could pull off.

  I asked Carlito, “Do we need to get people’s permission for this?”

  “Nah. This shit won’t make it into the final game, not in a million years.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “Because it’s fun. These guys are recording a huge script and playing too many characters. It’s important to keep things light. Besides, the more fun they have, the more they’ll want to work with us. Trust me. There’s a reason for everything.”

  The group session was only four hours long. When the time was up, Ricky, Bobby, and Tony said their good-byes and headed home. Nicky stayed behind to record his barks and grunts.

  A grunt is like a bark, except there are no words to it. It’s an exertion noise. We call them grunts because that’s what they are—sighing, panting, grunting, all the noises you unconsciously make over the course of you
r day. Video-game characters make the same noises, whether they’re lifting a box, jumping down from a ledge, or taking a shotgun blast to the face. It’s a dangerous world out there for a video-game character; a new, wholly improbable death awaits them at every turn. As writers of the barks and keepers of the spreadsheets, it was up to us to make sure we recorded every grunt we could imagine.

  I like to separate grunts into four categories: normal, bad, hellish, and sexy. Normal grunts are exactly what you’d think—jogging, sprinting, catching your breath, lifting something heavy, small jump, big jump—stuff like that. Bad grunts are sounds you might make on a really bad day—sounds of pain and struggle, like having the wind knocked out of you, being kicked in the face, or taking an arrow to the knee. Hellish grunts are sounds you’ve probably never heard, or made, in real life. If you have, then it’s possible you’re currently dead or severely traumatized. Curb-stomped, burnt alive, face sawed in half—these are hellish grunts. How dark and disturbing they get is entirely up to the director. The last category, sexy grunts, are different than all of the above. We’ll get to them a bit later.

  Before we got started, Nicky had some questions about the script. “I’m not sure what you guys want for this stuff. The first line just says ‘grunt-comma-punch.’ ”

  Some writers will give their actors scripts filled with hrghs, umphs, and gahs. That’s a rookie mistake. Your actors are professionals, not comic-book characters. They don’t need their grunts literally spelled out for them; they just need direction.

  “Lemme see,” said Carlito. He grabbed a copy of the script and found the line. “Right, okay. So, this is the sound you’d make if someone punched you hard in the chest.”