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Saturday, September 19, 2009

The Tough Scenes to Write

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

One of the hardest things, I imagine, in writing a fiction story based on something that happened in a game is explaining the motivations.

Players of a game often give no thought to what the counters abstractly reflect. If a counter that indicates an infantry battalion is removed from a game map, the fact that it represented the fate of 400 to 800 men (depending the organization of the battalion, different nations use different systems) has no impact on the gamer.

So you can get into a situation in which you, the gamer, can order your "troops" to commit suicide with no second thought. You are going to launch a strike with your fighter squadron, the fact that you know beyond question that the "pilots" will all die has no effect on your decision. You order it, the fighters take off, and fly to their doom.

The mindless automatons that many think real soldiers actually are.

The reality is that a desperate situation can see men of courage performing heroic acts to try to turn the tide.

But in a game, there may not be any such situation.

The scenario rules call for the ship to gather so many points of "lab" information. So the player simply places a EW package on one of his remaining heavy fighters, and "tells the crew" to go.

And they do.

Despite the fact that "everyone else" on the ship they are launching from has a chance to survive, and they have been ordered to die.

How do you write that scene when you, as the captain, have given the order? How do you portray the crew of that doomed fighter, getting their orders, perhaps not even from the captain personally but from some more junior officer in the chain of command to whom the task is delegated?

Outside of truly desperate "save the world situations", men generally do not like to be ordered to kill themselves.

There are some good representations of that in some films. Randy Quaid in "Independence Day" originally made a mockery of the concept (flying his red biplane on a suicide mission right from the start). But it was caught, and changed to a truly effective scene where Quaid's character, himself, decides to do what must be done to save his children.

But they are tough scenes to write when you are ordering men to their deaths, and they know it.