Interview with Jemima Tyssen Smith
A talk about OlliOlli World, sense of community, anticapitalism and narrative sport games
The following it’s the original english transcript of the interview with Jemima Tyssen Smith, writer at Roll7. If you want to read the italian translated interview, you can find it here.
In this interview there will be spoilers about the last expansion of OlliOlli World, Finding the Flowzone. If you don’t want anything to be spoiled, you can easily skip those question. I’ve put alert along the text so you can enjoy the talk without spoilers.
Let’s go!
Roll7 it's still indie in his soul. OlliOlli World, and Rollerdrome also, shares anticapitalist values and attention to the environment. Can you talk about what was the process for this expression of skate culture?
I think that skate culture, in general, is inherently kind of an anti-culture. And so, when you're reflecting that in a game, it’s going to have those elements in it. And obviously I personally care a lot about the environment, for example - I think it’s fair to say that’s something the team would agree on! When you write you reflect the things that you see in the world, and you also reflect your own thoughts and your values. I think that shows up in the game!
As for the soul of the studio - we're owned by Private Division now, but I think our ethos still comes from a place of having been an indie studio and being kind of scrappy, and, you know, saying what we're gonna say. You can see that in the dialogue and even on things like the billboards which the bees hold up in Cloverbrook.
It's powerful. Players enjoy a great gameplay, but also enjoy a message. A point of making this game.
Yeah, and I think a lot of the message of the game is about being welcoming and being inclusive. You mentioned things like capitalism and global warming, and all of this sort of stuff can be in conflict with people coming together and finding community. So I think that again, like, naturally, because it's a game that's so much about community and about friendship and about finding your people, of course the thought of these things will come up. I hope we did them justice!
And about inclusivity and skate culture. With other colleagues, we talked a lot about OlliOlli World and we talked about it as a new skate culture manifesto. Simple question. Was in Roll7 mind, in your mind as a writer, to reimagine the skate culture? Skate culture had a lot of problems such as toxic masculinity.
And games as well - videogame culture is also a culture that, at times, can be hostile. I can definitely say that if you're queer, if you're a woman, really for a lot of minority groups, it's sometimes a space that is not welcoming. But I think that, like skate culture, it has become a lot more inclusive over recent years. When you go to a skate park now you do see more diversity, and you do feel more welcome. So in a way, yeah, you could say it’s a manifesto of what we would like skate culture and game culture to be - and in another way it reflects the great things that are already there.
When I joined Roll7, there were like, maybe seven or eight people in the studio, and they were all guys. And they welcomed me - I didn’t feel like the odd one out at all. They were super happy to have me there. They were also keen to listen to my perspective - for example, when we were very early in character creation, I was like “Oh, it would be cool if we had like, you know, more dresses or skirts”. And I’m not joking, I came back in a week later and there must have been a dozen new ones. Things I could totally see myself wearing in real life. And I think that's kind of, I guess, the dream, right? You want the game to reflect the world you see around you, and also the world you would like to see. I want all the people to feel welcome in OlliOlli World - we have more in common than what divides us. We all love games. We all love skating. It’s really nice to be able to celebrate that!
Sometimes, working in games or interacting with skate culture, it’s easy to feel like you might not fit in. But working at Roll7, everyone has been so dedicated to being like, ‘now we're going to make it so that you can fit in, you’re welcome here’. As a writer, I hope I can pass that feeling on - I want other people to know, like, ‘Hey, by the way, this is a space where you can be yourself, everyone's gonna have a good time, and it's gonna be really cool!’
Let’s talk about the connection between skateboarding and urban space. Skating it’s like a subversive activity, an attempt to take back your public space.
Oh, yeah - like how you see "no skateboarding" signs up in places where it would be cool as hell to skate. So much public space, especially in cities, becomes privatized and closed off and shut off to the people. It’s hard to find places to hang out, especially as a kid or a teen! And I think skateboarding is kind of anarchic, it's a celebration of being in a space with people. I think, for me - and I think a lot of gamers feel this - gaming is a very in your head hobby, you're very kind of within yourself. And I think that the ethos of skateboarding, it gets you out there and into a community and into public spaces and appreciating the world around you.
One of the things I like about OlliOlli World is that you skate through city environments and also through the countryside. For me, I spend a lot of time outdoors and I really love walking through the countryside. I love when I play a game, and then it inspires me to be like, "Man, oh, let's go see a real tree as well. Why don't I call my friends and go and you know, see people?"
That part was very interesting because resonate with all the climate change theme that you put in the game, and you know, the relation between people and the nature. Yeah. I believe there was a dialogue line of one of the NPCs that talks about the thankfulness of people to the trees because they gave them boards to skate on.
Yes - the trees make the boards and then you can skate on the boards and wallride the trees. It’s a cycle. It's so easy to be disconnected from nature in our modern world. I embroider a lot alongside playing games - I think having a hobby you do with your hands really helps you stay connected with the world. So when you play with your console, yes, it’s on a screen, but you’re also doing something physical just by interacting with that controller with your hands, and it’s cool to be reminded that that’s part of the world too!
Spoiler Alert
And about the new, and last, expansion. What was the creative process behind these three brand new characters and the setting. The initial concept was to set all the DLC underwater right?
So this DLC - it's the first one that I was on as a writer full time. Before that, I was, technically, a production assistant, and I would get involved with the writing, but it was only like one day a week or something. My role was still pretty junior so I can only speak to the bits I worked on!
But, yes, to answer your question - we were initially coming up with this idea for an underwater setting. And so it was all very maritime based. We ended up changing direction for a bunch of reasons, and it turned out to be really cool because it meant we got to put everyone on a sky ship! Very sci-fi, Larklight, Treasure Planet kind of vibes.
In the main game, you have your crew, and then in the expansion, you have a different crew. And we really wanted it to feel different. We didn’t want it to feel like, "why don't we just have the guys in the main game” - we wanted a very different group of people. Something fresh and new! And so I think we sort of had this idea of them being not necessarily exactly friends, like they're kind of at odds with each other. But they're all bound by this common goal of finding the city of Radlantis, even if it’s for very different reasons. So you have this degree of humorousness of them sort of like sniping at each other and having these little arguments.
So that was the initial idea for the squad, which Lizz Lunney (Senior Narrative Designer) came up with - Lizz is the real creative mastermind behind all the story and the writing in the game. For this expansion pack, Lizz wrote Squid, and Licht, and then I did a bunch of writing for Planks - that’s my baby.
For Planks, I was thinking about when I was at university - I loved the lecturers there. They were so inspiring. But they’re not just there to lecture, right, lots of them probably wish they had more time to do research. And then I was imagining the idea of a lecturer who really doesn’t want to teach, she only wants to do research. So, for Planks, I had the idea that maybe she’s on this search for Radlantis because as long as she's doing research, she doesn't have to talk to her students. She's like: “The last thing I want to do is have to grade papers and whatever. I want to be a professor, because I want to be at a university, but God, I don't want to have to deal with students”.
In OlliOlli World you can play all the levels straightforward, but you can also explore them. The map pieces shredded all around the levels are a great way to connect the gameplay and the narrative.
I always think that's something that for me feels important in a game. And I think OlliOlli was kind of a learning curve because it was the first title Roll7 brought a writer on board for - that was Lizz, who did an amazing job at not only writing pretty much the whole game, but also showing me the ropes. I think when it comes to writing for games, there are things you can do in a game that you can't do in other mediums. And I think that if you're writing a game and you're telling a story that you'd sit there and go, well, you could write this out and it would just be a book, you're not using the medium to its best advantage.
And so I think things like having the map scraps you have to search for is a perfect example of something where a game is kind of the only medium where you can participate in the story in that way and actually find those scraps yourself to progress. And so I think, yeah, it's just sort of something that felt important to begin to integrate, and I really hope that in future titles that we work on that we'll be able to get into that integration even more.
End of the spoilers
It was really nice because it's a sport game. Sports have a meaning in society, so you can easily interlink a good story with sports.
Well, sport is inherently so narratively driven, right? The competition, the drama, the underdog fighting for the title - all of these ideas you see in sport actually fit so well into a narrative structure. So I think that there's an opportunity there. Personally I’d love to see more sports games with narrative elements!
Can you describe your workday?
So, we’re a remote studio, and most days, I work from home. Sometimes we meet up in the office in London and have big meetings together. But mostly, yeah, I work from home.
It's something that is up to you? So if you want to work from home, you're working from home?
There is an office that you can go into theoretically, but as default everyone works from home. Like that's the default state of Roll7.
As for my workday - it varies immensely depending on what stage of development we're at. So very early on in development for a game, a lot of the work is basically like sitting in meetings with design and production and hearing what they're doing, and working out ways to kind of link narrative into that. And then also doing loads of research. So like, lots of like going in, reading books, watching films, going on Google deep dives about like random stuff that might be relevant. For this expansion I ended up (and it never comes up in the game) reading a bunch of Plato. Because he was the one who originally wrote about Atlantis, and we were going to name this place we’d written about in the game Radlantis.
Like I say, a lot of this research never comes up directly in the game, but it all kind of informs the kind of creative process. And then as kind of development continues, then it's about sitting and writing up documentation and just documenting things about the world and the space and having that all in a kind of wiki format. That helps the rest of the team understand what’s going on with the world and the story. For example, if an artist is sitting there like, “Hmm, what kind of creatures might be in the background in this level in Radlantis?" then they can go and check and see if we’ve written any info about that. Then we make characters, which is something we work very closely with the art team to do (the art team are so cool). Once we know how many levels they're going to be, we can give them names, and then we can write up the actual script and the dialogue.
So I’d say, in summary, there’s no ‘typical day’ because it varies through production. There might be a period of like a month or something where basically most of what I'm doing is just writing dialogue. But then at some point before that there might have been a month where most of what I was doing is like researching undersea creatures. It’s a big old mix of stuff!
Huge thanks to Jemima Tyssen Smith for her time and kindness, and I wish her the best.
Still Alive is an italian videogame monthly newsletter written by Damiano D’Agostino and Ilaria Celli.