Firezide Chat with Mitch Dyer

I'm a lead writer at That's No Moon, which is an independent studio in Los Angeles, for the worldwide team. I'm back in Alberta, Canada. We've got people all over the place. I can't talk about the studio or the game. I'm gonna halt there before I get myself in trouble. 

I can say, because we've said this publicly, it's not a Star Wars game. Because studio is called That’s No Moon, which is an obvious Star Wars reference, everybody in the games industry was like, ‘We know what you're doing. We know what this is.’ No, not close. Sorry, pal.

So obviously, when you got the job on Battlefront, you were junior then, but you've obviously honed your skills over the years, and you're more senior now. When did you feel like you'd made it like in your profession?

Getting to work on Star Wars at all is like, Bucket List shit – getting to write a Star Wars story like that would be enough. The fact that I got to do two with Star Wars Squadrons as well? Really cool. If this all blew up in my face and ended tomorrow, I would be perfectly happy with everything that I got to do. 

I definitely feel more confident in my skills and my abilities now. I'm more confident in my ability to make decisions or throw out shitty ideas and have people feedback them. My ego is a lot less sensitive than it used to be. I've got a lot thicker skin. My armor is good. So I guess it's, I don't know if there was a moment so much as everything just kind of formed around me over time. 

But there wasn't a specific moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this matters, and I made it and this is the big deal.’ Aside from, like, ‘Holy shit, I'm sitting at Star Wars Celebration with my mom on one side, Janina Gavankar on the other, and they're both sobbing as they watch me watch the Star Wars trailer for the game we're making. That was cool.

Did you find it hard initially to take criticism and feedback?

This was what, ten years ago, I would have been in my 20s. I think I was probably a little more defensive. Like, even working at IGN, I would get really defensive about people being mean about the website for whatever past reasons. And I'd be like, ‘But that's not us now, these people are doing cool and different things.’ Over time I was like, ‘Who fucking cares? This doesn't matter. Let people think what they think. You're not going to change their mind. You have no control over this. It's okay.’

I was nervous when the game came out. A lot of criticism was not directed at us at launch, but I would get a little defensive, like, ‘Oh, they didn't understand.’ And what I see now is like, that's not my fucking problem. I can't do anything about that. People interpret your work how they interpret it. You could argue with them online, but that's pointless. What are you going to get out of that? I've actually just learned over time to accept that, if people don't like it, or they have a particular thought about it, okay, that's cool, even if I don't agree. I can engage with that, or take it in, or think about it and whatever. It's just, it's a little more prickly when it's something you've worked on because you, you're like, ‘oh, man, like, I liked that part.’

It's a good ethos to live by. But what's another bit of life advice that you've had over the years that you like?

The best advice I got from somebody was when I was interviewing to do this job for the first time. I had talked to a friend who was a game writer for a long time, and I was like, ‘What do I need to know?’ His singular piece of advice that has helped me massively since the start is basically: you are completely at the whims of the game. You need to lean into and accept that, and that will help you become the best game writer you can be. Because if you're trying to write something different from the game, or you're not collaborating with the design of the game, everybody's going to be miserable, and you're going to lose every fight. I'm not here to write a story, I'm here to write a game. And they're different things. 

Day one, I was like, great. I'm willing to be cooperative and make sacrifices, and maybe get walked on by other teams, because that makes the game better, and I'll figure out how to make the story work. 

Best piece of life advice… I watch this TV show, Shoresy. It's one of my favorite shows ever. It's about a shitty hockey team in northern Ontario that's on the edge of closing. Just a really heartfelt show, really smart hockey comedy. There's a line in that show where they talk about finding purpose, some of the characters are lost, and the piece of advice they give them is: when you don't know where to go, go where you’re needed. And I just fucking love that. There is a spot for you, you just need to figure out where it is, and it might not be about you, and you can just go do something somewhere else for a bit, and that'll be okay. Not everything is an urgent problem right now that needs solving, and even if it is, there's other ways to do it than whatever rut you might be stuck in right now,

What's a bad habit that you've broken, or that you're trying to break?

I have terrible posture and I chew my nails. I mean, the list goes on creatively. I think I overthink. I think my writing team would agree – there are certain solved problems that I maybe give too much attention to, and I don't even know if it's perfectionism so much as interrogating every possible angle. ‘Have we thought about it this way? Could we represent this character in other ways? Is there another way to express this?’ It’s like, ‘Dude, stop. This is great. This line is great. You wrote this line. It's awesome. Stop. Move on.’ So, yeah, I can just get hung up on details, I guess, and that can slow me down, which is definitely something I'm trying to get better at. We can always polish it tomorrow. 

As a writer, you must read a lot, right? So what's the best thing you've read lately?

Currently reading this book, Careless People, by Sarah Wayne Williams. She worked at Facebook for a number of years. I can't remember the exact roles that she had, but she was very high up at Facebook. Was super idealistic about how Facebook could change the world and get involved in politics and influence the world. And then the rest of the book is about, ‘Hey, holy fuck, that didn't work out.’ And it's her just inside perspective about how all of the mismanagement at Facebook led to everything Facebook influenced over the last decade, for better, but mostly worse. 

What else am I reading? I'm also slowly chipping away through a friend of mine's book, The Father of all Things, by Tom Bissell. It's a book he wrote about his dad and his time in Vietnam. It's just a really beautiful family memoir that's also about how his dad went to Vietnam and fell in love with the Vietnamese people and the land, but obviously fell in love with it during a horrifying circumstance. So it's just about his family's legacy in the Marines and his dad's relationship with Vietnam. Love you, Tom. 

Then last year I read this book, I haven't stopped thinking about this book. In like, a year and a half, I think about this book every day. Life's Work by David Milch. He was the showrunner on Deadwood and NYPD Blue – it's his memoir and it’s a beautiful and cutting and very direct exploration of his no bullshit approach to work and creativity. He looks at creative stuff almost mathematically, which I think is really interesting. He has an idea and he knows why it works, and it is immovable, and he's not very flexible, and he's very aware of this. It's just the way he talks about working with people and getting things done. It's not how I would want to work, and I probably wouldn't want to work for him. But, man, it's a great book, and an interesting lens into a very unique, creative guy,

Do you prefer non fiction?

I guess I do. I love fiction, but I've definitely been reading a lot more non fiction lately.

Do you still find time to play video games?

Oh brother, every morning. I'm talking to you instead of playing Dragon Quest VII right now. I'm an early riser. We're in Mitch Dyer hours right now – 7am local. I'm normally half a pot of coffee deep, playing some RPG or Ace Combat game. Been really into the Ace Combat games lately. But yeah, in the mornings I hang out with my dog on the couch, have some coffee, play some games, and then after work, I either play games or go out with friends, or go to a hockey game with my family, or whatever we're doing.

What's the best video game in the past 10 years? 

I need to Google a date, because I might have missed it. I want to say Metal Gear Solid V. It didn't make the cut. I'm six months late. That game came out 10 years and five months ago. 

I'll allow it. It's fine. 

It's the most systemically interesting game that exists. It is something that you could play for ten years and have a vastly different experience every time you deploy on a mission. I love Metal Gear. I've always loved that series a lot, but this is like a wacko prequel that almost feels like its own spin off sort of thing. You can deploy with all these different kits and armors and partners, and you can do non lethal and lethal play throughs. It's a gigantic open world. I enjoy it the way that I enjoy Far Cry – there's an infinite number of approaches to any given scenario, and no matter how many times you play it, it's going to play out differently. I think I'm just attracted to that in games in general.  That's why I’ve played Dota 2 for 12 years, or whatever it's been.

It’s almost an immersive sim isn’t it? 

Oh brother, yes. Oh man, why didn't we just connect those dots sooner? Yeah, it's really involved and slow paced and contemplative, and there's a lot of information you can glean by documents and overhearing guards, not just playing like a dumb ass shooter. It's just such a varied and cool game I really love. I reconnected with it last year after ten years since finishing it, and it's just like a completely new experience for me again.

Yeah, I've replayed it a lot as well, because it was the first game I played at a review event, actually. I went off it for a while because I spent a whole week nailing it, and then I've gone back to it quite a few times. But yeah, I've done missions where I've crept in and no one's ever seen me, and then I've gone in in a gold plated tank blasting ‘80s music, and it's just a totally different vibe.

It's a sandbox. It just gives you all of these toys and tools. And it's like, alright, take as many or as few as you want. And in most games, it's like, why wouldn't I take the golden tank with 80s music and blow the shit out of everything? That's the easiest way to win. But that's not the point of that game. Winning is not the point of that game. It is the moment to moment experience you author for yourself. It's the, ‘Oh my god, I got caught, and then I had to adapt, and I went up a tower and sniped the guy. It’s got all these reactive elements. 

Realizing you can beat Quiet by dropping boxes on her head…

Dude, I didn't even know that until this recent playthrough. I was low on ammo, and I was like, ‘Great, I'll just drop ammo. And I was like, oh, there's an icon on the map.’ I guess I could see Quiet, so I just dropped it there. I was like, great. I'll drop it on her and she'll go away, I'll go get the ammo. Obviously, boom, knocked her down. Ten years later, constant discovery.

Give us a NDA-friendly answer for this one. What's the best thing about your job?

The best part about my job, it's super collaborative. I don't like working in isolation. I would go insane if I was a novelist. Maybe that makes me a sham of a writer, but I don't really like to work alone. Even if I am working alone, if I'm working on a screenplay or whatever – just for myself for fun, because I need to get the idea on paper – it is impossible for me not to end pages to people like, ‘Hey, does this suck? Is there anything here?’ And it's like, five minutes old.

I’ve done that to you, haven't I? 

Yeah, that's true. You sent me a Chapter One. That's good. We're the same. It's just like, ‘Hey, I bled on this page. Can somebody please witness it, even if it's bad?’ But game writing is awesome because you're working with so many different creative people, and they have such fucking cool ideas for how to make your story better, or how to better visualize it, instead of relying on blunt on the surface dialog or whatever else. Concept artists, holy shit, my favorite people on the planet. I love working with concept artists because they're the first contact for a writer. This is a character. This is a setting. This is a circumstance. They're the people who are like, ‘Oh, I know how to make that look awesome.’ And they give you a piece of concept art that took them, like, 15 minutes of photo bashing. And you're like, ‘This is the best thing I've ever seen in my life.’ Or they spend hours and hours on, like, a very detailed, incredible concept art piece for, like, a mission or something. And you're like, ‘Oh, my God, that's the game. That's the game.’ And it just starts to make it feel real. And you get that feeling basically every week on a game.

So that's the best part, I guess, the realization of things piece by piece. And I don't mean this in an egotistical way because so much of what I think is cool gets augmented by other departments because they think about it through such a different lens. Like, when I have a concept for these characters going to see something, and then they're going to have an exchange about it, and then they're going to deal with the thing. Going to deal with the thing, simple scene. No problem. Animation will come back be like, no, no. There should be a physical moment, or a basic action. Here’s a cool idea I had, and it's like, ‘Yeah, that – of course, of course, that was always the scene.’ I was never going to get there. But you're trying to make this even more interesting visually using the tools that you have. So it's cumulative. Everybody is bringing something to the table, and when all the ideas are good and they fit together, man, you make something kick ass. That feels good,

What about the worst thing then?

Oh, brother. Everything is at the mercy of every department. Everybody who makes games, even if you're a solo dev, you are at the mercy of technology and time, scope and scale of the project too, right? So many things are just out of your control, even the things that you know. Like, an animator doesn't always have control over the number of animations or the kinds of animations that are going to go in the game. As a writer, things are especially out of your control, because you're downstream from a lot of teams. And I'm not trying to put myself on a fucking cross. I'm not trying to woe is me. Any creative work is really hard, especially when it's collaborative. 

So again, like I mentioned before, that piece of advice, you are at the mercy of the game, and you have to be okay being at the mercy of the game. As a writer, you have to write dialog, circumstance, characters, and themes that fit what the game is. Otherwise it's going to not feel good or be interesting or believable. So as a writer, you're mostly there to create context of like, why and what's motivating the player character to do this. Why is this shit happening to them? And if you're lucky, you get to do character. You get to do personality, you get to do stories, cinematics, more story stuff. And then that's the kind of stuff that you do have a little more control over, which is great. 

Like, if I'm writing mission dialog and Star Wars, Battlefront two, I get to write fun banter between these pilots or whatever but this is not a job for anybody who wants to write the great American novel in a video game form, because it's so collaborative, and you're accountable to so many people and other disciplines, and you're downstream from a lot of people, and there are people downstream for writing.  I could be like, ‘Ah, the game design changed, so now I have to change my script.’ Localization is like, ‘Yeah, and we have to change everything that we translated again.’ So it's, it's constantly a domino effect, and it's always gonna be really hard, and there's not a ton of things that are in your control. So the best you can do is obviously clear comms with your team and understand the vision of the project together. Because just making games is unpredictable. Man, it's even volatile sometimes, depending on the project, the production. You have to be comfortable with a lot of change, throwing pages away that kind of stuff. So that can be the worst. I've gotten really comfortable throwing away pages. I just don't mind anymore. Like, ‘Oh, that's out. Okay, of course, yeah. Why wouldn't it be? No problem.’

You've got shackles on, right? Can you give me some examples of those sorts of barriers that you have to consider when writing a scene? You might have an idea for a scene in your head that you can't do because of limits on other teams.

Oh, dude. So the first cinematic I ever wrote was for Battlefront II. The scene ended up being very similar without one key detail. It was just Iden Versio and Del Meeko, the two characters in Inferno squad in Battlefront II, sitting side by side trying to figure something out. The scene I wrote was two people talking while having a drink. Dude, so fucking expensive to have somebody drink something in a cinematic because now it's like, ‘Okay, what kind of glass is it? Can you see through the glass? Do we need liquid simulation when the characters take a drink? Someone has to hand key their throat swallowing animation.’ It spirals in ways you don't expect with the tiniest of details. So like, oh yeah, of course, people having a drink. You could cheat it, but it would probably look like shit, right? Somebody puts a cup to their mouth, boom, cut to somebody else. That's a solution, and it works. It's totally fine, but it's not somebody having a drink. So immediately, my animation team was like, ‘Are you sure about this? Because the budget here gets a lot larger than if they were just not drinking anything.’ I was like, ‘Oh, let's not have them have a drink. That seems way easier.’ And it doesn't break the scene. The scene doesn't live and die by them having a drink. So it's just a lot of that kind of stuff that I hadn't considered, again, downstream, right? Like, if I write a scene, the animation is downstream of me, because they need to bring those scenes to life.

What did you do before you got into games journalism?

I worked a bunch of normal jobs. I got into games journalism when I was 20. I'd been doing amateur blogging stuff before that, while I was working factory jobs – I worked in a Styrofoam manufacturing plant. It is the most boring job in the world. On top of being like manual labor, no thank you. On top of having, like, toxic fumes in the air, not great, super fucking loud all the time. It was not a good place to be, but it was the most money I'd ever made as an 18 year old. It was like 22 bucks an hour, baby, let's go. I'd work in kitchens before that. I was a dishwasher or like a prep cook for a long time at the local golf course clubhouse, gas stations, grocery stores –  normal, boring jobs. I was a hockey referee. None of them were creative.

I was going to ask you which is the worst, but it was the Styrofoam factory, wasn’t it? 

It was the Styrofoam factory.  It was the worst boss I ever had. He was conniving, not a great guy. Stole my rent money out of my wallet from the desk. Made threatening phone calls, pretending to be somebody else to intimidate me. It was not great. 

Sounds very normal. Do you still play hockey? I was gonna ask you if you do any, like, physical training.

No. I lapsed for a while. I'm not gonna pretend like I'm some hardcore dude, but I played hockey in my teens, until I was about 16 when all my friends were getting really good. And I was not as good. I could get a lot of assists in the season. I was not a goal scorer. I was not a great skater, but, man, I would set up my center every time. But by the time I got out, all those guys were like, we're gonna go for juniors. And I was like, ‘Oh, I'm out. I'm not doing that. I'm not here to try.’ I'm a very mellow guy generally, but sometimes it gets awakened. The Olympics are happening as we speak, and I'm about to become so anti American I get put on a watch list because I'm gonna be cheering for Team Canada and America's defeat so hard. Can't wait. Love hockey. Oh my god, love Canadian hockey. No, I haven't played in a long time. 

What time do you go to bed?

Early, dog – earlier than I would like to admit most nights because I just am wiped, because I'm up early. After work, it's like, ‘Okay, I probably got a few hours of consciousness in me before I inevitably start winding down.’ If I'm awake by 10pm it's a miracle. 

What do you dislike most about yourself?

Comfort makes me really complacent. It's very easy for me to get complacent, because I am constantly in the pursuit of comfort. I crave comfort, dude, I love comfort. I love being cozy. And just like everything's taking care of itself, I don't have to worry about it. I've got a routine, whatever. So my goal at all times is to maximize my comfort. But complacency makes me indecisive and boring, unmotivated too, so I do my best to avoid getting too comfortable. That doesn't mean I'm gonna go skydiving or anything, but going out of my way to shake up the routine, recognizing that I've been doing nothing for four nights in a row. I gotta text a friend because I haven't even thought about socializing because I've been so locked in on other comfort stuff, right? When I'm comfortable, oh my god do I not want to do any writing before or after work. If you're working on a creative thing all day, there's not a ton of energy left for anything else. And if I'm writing all morning before work, man, work gets a lot harder. But at the same time, if I'm too comfortable, then I'm not going to do anything with it. I'm going to have ideas and put them in my notes app on my phone and never think about them again. That's not great. It's not a great way to write.

People don't really think of writing as tiring, but it saps your mental energy completely, doesn't it?

Yeah. And it's not even just the writing. Doing anything creative is mental energy, and it’s like physical energy – there is a finite amount, and it drains you in a different way, which I think a lot of people don't understand. And I know people with physical jobs are like, ‘Really, you're tired?’ but it's different. Being in meetings all day, solving problems all day, staring at the same problem and trying to find a new solution for it, that stuff can be draining, for sure.

If you could make a time machine and go back in time, where would you go?

My boring answer would be: I don't think about the past. I don't want to go back.

You could at least say you want to kill Hitler, Mitch…

Okay, two very different ones. One, I would love to go back to the moment the asteroid hit.

And die? 

No, they would warp me back, right? That's part of the contract. They'd warp me back before I get incinerated. 

I was gonna say, it’s a dark answer. Mitch using the time machine to top himself. 

Take me to the nearest the most violent Apocalypse possible, please. Yeah. I just think it'd be fascinating to see what the world looked like at that time, and what that looks like when a meteor hits. But my less grim answer is, I'm not a religious guy, not a man of faith. I would love to go back and just see Jesus talk like. I would love to go back and see what that rhetoric was like, what the response was like, how people responded to him in a true way, in a genuine way, in the moment. Because it's fascinating to me, and it obviously is a very meaningful point in history. I just want to see this dude talk.

What about if you could go back to like your 20 year old self? What would you tell yourself?

If you don't know where to go, go where you're needed? I uh, I mean, I wouldn't. I like my life, dude, so I wouldn't do any course correcting. I have very thankfully not experienced a great amount of tragedy or pain in my life that I would try to avoid or change or whatever. But like in just in terms of advice I would tell my young self, just to help you know, reinforce the choices that he's already making. Friend of mine, Tom Bissell, whose book I mentioned earlier, gave me this really good piece of advice that he had heard from another screenwriter, that when you're stuck in a rut, you don't know which way to go and things suck or aren't going your way, or something changed and you get fucked, the only options available to you are to wait it out or find a new way. That's it. That shit connects with me so much, I put it on a little sticky note behind my desk. Those are the only choices you have.

That's a good bit of advice. I like that. When was the last time you cried? I know you said you haven't had much tragedy in your life, but everyone's had some, right?

A couple weeks ago, I watched Heated Rivalry. These two gay hockey players fall in love. It's a forbidden love. There's a few endings to a few episodes that just fucking ruined me. Man, it is so deeply impactful, emotionally to me in so many ways, in a way I wasn't expecting. Like, holy shit, there's a scene in the at the end of the fifth episode. I'm just gonna spoil this. It's fine. I'm a firm believer that art holds up to multiple viewings, and if spoilers break something, then spoilers are fine. There's a big moment where these two main characters are in love. One is Russian. His queerness is not okay in Russia. The other guy is meant to be like a role model, and this could compromise his perceptions as a professional hockey player, they see another player come out on the ice after he wins the cup, and that moment is so fucking beautiful. I was in ruins, dude. I was sobbing on my couch. The end of this, like through the whole sixth episode, the finale. It's just such a beautiful, cathartic show about love.

How do you want to be remembered when you die? 

Man, I used to think about this a lot. For a while I had pretty severe death anxiety. I thought a lot about my own death and like, ‘Oh, what's the world? I can't imagine a world without me in it.’ Which is the most vain and egotistical shit. But it's true, I just couldn't cope with it. The inevitability of death fucks with me even now as I have come to peace with it via stoicism. Stoic philosophy is so helpful for this. So for a long time, I was like, how am I going to be remembered? Will anybody remember me? And I really put a lot of attention to that, and I didn't know how to guarantee that would happen. So that also stressed me out. And now, Marcus Aurelius helps – he really helps clarify some stuff when it comes to your own death, because ultimately, stoicism is about  being okay with the things you can't control, or letting go of the things you can't control. I cannot control my own death. Things that are out of my control are no longer any things that I give much attention to. So I think if you would ask me three, four years ago, I would have, like, a manic, 45 minute answer for you about how I'd want to be remembered. And at this point I'm like, I just don't give a shit. Straight up, stoicism has really helped clarify that, like when I die, whatever is going to happen is going to happen. If people remember me, I'd love that. All I could really ask for is that I hope I was a good hang. I hope that the people who spent time with me think that time was well spent.

That's a good answer. I mean, we're the only animals cursed with knowledge of our own deaths, right? What would you have on your gravestone? 

My Dota 2 win/loss records, it would be at a cool like 50.1% victory. I would have a shameful number of matches that anybody walking by would be disgusted by.