The deep and dark conspiracy world of Ion Storm's Deus Ex works and plays on many different levels. The just released demo version of the game is getting rave reviews so far and the full version of the game will be on store shelves later this week. The RPG contains an involving story with a huge cast of characters, all of whom need lines to speak. The Deus Ex team recruited short story writer Sheldon Pacotti to write the majority of the dialogue to the game, comprising about 10,000 lines of printed text. In this interview, Pacotti talks about his work on the game.

Stomped: How does a published short story writer hook up with the folks at Ion Storm Austin to write the script for Deus Ex?

Pacotti: You might say I got lucky on the timing. I'd pitched myself to game companies several times before as a writer-programmer, as someone who could write and at the same time understand how the writing fit into the game-logic. By pure accident, I sent Warren Spector my resume and a copy of my novella, "Khodoki," shortly after they had let their (previous) writer go. One of their programmers, Al Yarusso, had built a conversation-editor that allowed the writer to set and check game-state and to trigger events in the world, so the idea was floating around that they needed a writer who could also program, and I got my lucky break...

Stomped: How much did your scriptwriting influence the actual design of the game?

Pacotti :For the most part, I implemented the vision of Warren Spector, Harvey Smith, and the other designers. By the time I joined the company, in June of 1999, nearly all of the major NPCs had names and were sketched out in some detail. In crude terms, I was often handed a map with a dozen characters in various locations, each knowing a different piece of information or performing some function, and I would write straight from that blueprint to flesh out the situation. However, I was lucky to arrive just when the entire plot was being revised to make it more goal-oriented for the player. I got to make numerous impassioned pleas for plot elements, backstory, and character personalities, and a lot of my suggestions survived in one form or another. I'm grateful that Warren kept the plot-writing process open and regularly polled the designers and often the whole company to make sure everyone had input.

Stomped: The pictures on your web site of the Deus Ex printed script certainly suggest a mammoth effort. Can you describe briefly the process of creating the script for the game?

Pacotti: You're right -- it was very time-consuming, and we had to crank it out pretty fast. I was basically crunching from October until the middle of March. I've had problems with tendonitis (from too many hours writing computer programs) and as a result use voice-recognition when I'm writing, so to give you an idea of what it was like, picture me in a room with the door closed saying things like "insert barks alpha" or "camera shoulders left" or "replace speech," then multiply by six months. It was very cathartic. Even so, I was grateful to get help starting in January, when Chris Todd (www.7crows.com) came onboard to do pretty much all of the in-game text, plus the intro and outro cut-scenes, and Austin Grossman spent a couple of months doing all of the AI barks and revising the dialogue for a few of the missions.

Stomped: Most prose stories move in a linear fashion. Did you have to learn a new way of writing when you were producing the Deus Ex script?

Pacotti: During my job interviews at Ion Storm, I was asked many times whether I thought I could handle game-logic in the context of conversations. I remember being very contemptuous of the notion that a few state-variables could ever be complex. As it turns out, the process of writing dialogue for an open-ended game-world can be pretty challenging. It's hard enough writing "good" dialogue for a linear story, where you know exactly what's supposed to happen. Writer's block and awkward first-draft writing are pretty much inevitable for any writer. If you add to that situation three true-false flags (2 ^ 3 = 8 game-states) then when you close your eyes to imagine what someone is going to say -- and how another NPC might react, based on game-state -- you often end up with a logic-puzzle that makes it almost impossible to get inside a character's head. I found that the only way I could get through these situations was to write one whole conversation-thread, for a single game-state, and then to go back and insert flag-checks and branches to make the conversation react to the game-world. That sounds like a simple lesson, but it took me about two months to figure it out.

Stomped: Now that the game is close to being on store shelves, what are your feelings on your work in particular and the game in general?

Pacotti: I'm very happy with the way the game turned out. It's just a lot of fun to play, even knowing every line of dialogue and having played through it three times before. I continue to discover new ways to use the objects in the world to get out of tight situations -- the game keeps you thinking. The designers and programmers definitely did a good job coming up with the game-systems and balancing resources. As for the writing, I would have loved to do a fourth draft and a fifth draft and a sixth draft, but I suppose that eventually you have to ship the game. All in all, it turned out pretty well. With 400 distinct speaking parts, I feel like I had ample opportunity to express my creativity.

Stomped: Any plans to work with Warren Spector's team at Ion Storm on their next game?

Pacotti: I'm like a stray cat: as long as they put a bowl of food outside my door every morning, I'll probably stick around. I'm looking forward to starting work on a project at the beginning of the development cycle.

Stomped: Even though you are still writing prose stories do you feel that more and more writers will work in the gaming industry?

Pacotti: I think the industry will mature in time and "game writing" will come to be seen as a distinct skill, then maybe a group of writers will gradually collect into a slightly new profession. At most companies in the year 2000, the game-writer is seen as some alien being who doesn't quite "get it" but who produces necessary filler between cataclysmic explosions. In many cases, companies pick up an out-of-work screenwriter who would rather be writing the next Armageddon and who thinks games are for maladjusted 13-year-olds. This seldom leads to good writing.

My personal feeling is that even a top-notch screenwriter will have a tough time doing anything "interesting" with an interactive storyline unless he's also geeked out on the technology. What people point to as being special or unique about computer narratives is the "interactivity," the "contingency," or the "agency," as Janet Murray calls it -- in other words, the game-state and the logic that puts it in motion, which even at a high level is basically programming. The more "interesting" and effective computernarratives become, the more they will look like software, and the more likely it is that certain geeky writers will drift into this field -- or be drafted. At least, I hope the nerds win out. I'd much rather play a game with a cool AI system (like the one Scott Martin made for Deus Ex, which includes 18 distinct bark-states) than a game with a series of expensive-looking cut-scenes and slick dialogue.