The Story of Homeworld: Interview with David J. Williams

With Apocalypso firmly on hold, I've had time to do some reading. For the past several months the focal point of my interest in games design has been converging with my interest in narrative, which is a boring way of saying Stories! Gameplay! WTF?

WTF, because stories and gameplay do not always seem to get along happily when tied up in the same canvas sack. There's no shortage of commentators pushing the opinion that games are unsuitable as a medium for storytelling, that games will never be 'art' nor contain anything of literary value, etc., etc. Some folks are fine with that, some are pissed off about it, and some of us just think it's a load of crap. Games can tell stories, and well.

So to kick off a series of articles about games and story, I contacted a man I thought might agree with me: David J. Williams, author of the Autumn Rain trilogy, and story creator for the first Homeworld game. I started off by asking him how he first came to be involved with Relic, and Homeworld.

DW: I went to elementary school with Rob Cunningham, who ended up being one of the founding members of Relic. We fell out of touch for a long while, but hooked up again after he moved out to Vancouver.

PI: What was the process of creating / writing the game like?

DW: The Vancouver scene in the 1990s was a pretty magical one: there were a lot of start-ups being revved up on a lot of different launch-pads, and a real sense of possibility. Relic was breaking new ground with its rendering engine/tech, and Rob was drawing off-the-charts spaceships way more gone than anyone had seen up to that point in video games. But they were searching for a narrative concept to tie it all together. I was out on the west coast taking a break from my corporate slave job at the time and pitched Rob the story of a people who discovered their previous legacy as galactic rulers and set off on an epic quest to return to their homeworld. I also brought my obsession with history to the project: a lot of the language of the game -- Kushan, Kadesh, etc. -- comes from that.

PI: You came up with the story concept for Homeworld before you'd ever written a novel: now that you've written 3 novels, how would you compare the two?

DW: I guess the most basic difference is that with novels you're a one-man band, whereas video games are done by committee. That worked for Homeworld because of a special alignment of people and circumstances; it was less successful for the game's sequel, which was torn by competing visions, and never really figured out exactly what it wanted to be. But I can safely say that I'd never have tackled novels if it hadn't been for my experience with Homeworld. Unlike a lot of writers, I hadn't spent my whole life writing, but HW put me back in touch with a love of science-fiction and story that I hadn't really engaged with since childhood. Three years later, in the midst of a premature mid-life crisis, I turned my attention from space opera to near-future space warfare: what will it *really* look like when we have weapons in space across the next century? What would happen if simultaneously the Internet splintered along geopolitical lines? That became the genesis for the Autumn Rain trilogy, and I thought of basically nothing else for the next decade.

PI: Would you say you were thinking like a storyteller when you were working on Homeworld? How were the storytelling elements meshed with the gameplay to create the overall play experience?

DW: Honestly, I wasn't really thinking like a storyteller. I was a total amateur and had no idea what I was doing beyond the fact that it was a damn sight more interesting than dealing with spreadsheets and corporate best practices. As for the meshing of the storytelling with the gameplay, I can't take credit there: that goes to folks like Adam Bullied, who served as game designer.

PI: Homeworld is often cited as one of the best game stories ever - what do you think of games as a medium for telling stories (v. films, books etc) Do you think games can hold their own as a narrative art form?

DW: I think games are where movies were in the 1920s -- just starting to scratch the surface of their possibilities as narrative. Ultimately, they'll be recognized as one of the great forms of cultural endeavor.

PI: What are are obstacles - again perhaps drawing on your novelist's props - to telling a really compelling story via a game?

DW: I always thought of novel-writing as creating a really big, complex machine . . and games are even more so, since there are even more moving parts---literally--and you've got to figure out how all the potential paths intersect. It's like combining several novels with several movies within a choose-your-own-adventure framework.

PI: What do you think made Homeworld, in particular, a successful story?

DW: Homeworld was a successful story because it was a simple story, imbued with huge archetypal drama. And the actual game experience was nothing short of an aesthetic masterpiece: the art of Cunningham and Aaron Kambetz and the music of Paul Ruskay combining to make you feel like you were out there among the suns.

PI: Finally, are there any other games you've played (I know you're too busy for games but I have to ask) that you think do it right?

DW: Bioshock is the standout. They do a better job at creating atmosphere than anything since HW.

And with that I thanked David and let him get back to playing with his nuclear powered train set.

Over the coming weeks I intend (real life permitting) to look at the relationship between gameplay and storytelling and consider the emergence of games as a valid art form. You can find out more about David and the Autumn Rain trilogy at autumnrain2110.com.