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BioWare Hiring Writers by Contest
AsiNisiMasa writes "GamaSutra reports: BioWare Announces Writing Contest For Industry Jobs. For all of you with some modding experience with the hopes of breaking into the gaming industry, here is your chance. For you less confident modders, there is still hope. From BioWare's official contest page: 'When hiring writers, BioWare looks only at your writing; not the areas, not the special scripting, and not the combat. We evaluate only the characters, the dialogue, the plot, the non-linear structure, and the flow and pace of the story.'"
Project Geeklight.
And now you'll be rewarded with an underpaid job, long tedious hours, endless revisions and the knowlege that you're working for a company that once upon a time produced quality products!
And you also get a genuine signed copy of Knights of the Old Republic, worth $33.
Hold your head up high, kid.
It is a dark and stormy night. You are likely to be eaten by a wet Grue.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Wow, this could be fun
What would Brian Boitano do?
So do you think BioWare is motivated by trying to recruit someone, or is this mainly an exercise in promoting their games?
Given the popularity of working in the games industry and the coverage this would get, I'd imagine it's more the latter rather than the former.
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Don't forget - you also get to relocate to balmy Edmonton, Alberta.
omfg you are next to a white house and a elf is there and he says hi.
and then the chinese dwarf totally chopped you down.
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I hope more developers have contests like this, or like the Unreal one. Gives more incentive to make mods.
When hiring writers, BioWare looks only at your writing; not the areas, not the special scripting, and not the combat.
A semicolon is not a colon.
I am a huge fan of Bioware and their games, the BG, NN, and NWN series are all breathtaking; It's things like this that remind me why I have so much respect them. Bioware have always sold games with virtually no eye-candy, just perfectly narrated stories with near-infinite replay value. It's really cool of them to turn to their fans for inspiration.
On a less optimistic note, I just hope they aren't doing this because they are running out of ideas and their company is sinking...
Oh, and you'll also get this t-shirt... signed by the guy who used to have your job!
... Me..."
He, uh, left for some reason.
Hey, wait a minute. He wrote something on the back. It says:
"Kill
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Enough with Star Wars, World War II, Vietnam, and other existing franchises. It's been done to death.
How about writing a good old school style fantasy RPG with an original storyline? If you MUST, do another Forgotten Realms game, but invent some new characters instead of copying Baldur's Gate.
Of course, an RPG set in the TRON universe would also be new and different... I don't think anyone has tried to do anything but action games in that setting before. (I liked Tron2.0, but it wasn't an RPG.)
(And I realize I just asked for a couple of holy grails, but oh well...)
I've done a number of modules for NWN (Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher, Demon) and am currently working on a NWN2 campaign. I think I'm going to end up taking one of our sidequests and tweaking it slightly to fit the rules.
There's a few tricky parts:
That being said, I think we may have a side quest with an interesting premise. I think the competition will be pretty stiff, but it should be a fun exercise.
What do such companies think they are?
I would never acknowledge and participate in such a degrading method of showing my abilities.
I sincerely wonder what this means about the health of the gaming industry, a business plagued with lack of innovation and consumer ADD! I think BioWare is seriously is attempting to break out of the mold, but by what "criteria" does a good idea an exist? A good idea is one part thought and ninety-nine parts execution! The problem you will have here is the same long-in-the-tooth people that no longer have originality (or a need for it, due to their fat salaries) are going to be the ones that choose which ideas are good. So basically, they're going to have a contest to hire some people that are just as worn out in the idea department as they are. You want to hire a good writer? Find an audience composed of the target market you need to hit and let them read the scripts. Let them rip them apart, applaud them, and determine which one is the best. I think gamers are more qualified than producers in figuring out what is fun and what isn't. You will be stuck in the loop of doing that which you think someone wants vs. knowing exactly what they want until you do that... The problem with all games of late is that they are based on what someone else thinks we want in a game (features), and not really understanding the components which we enjoy (benefits). I don't need to be told what I enjoy any more than you do, and that's why games have been really lame as of late. You could lump all of them in like 4-6 categories play one sample of them and never buy another game until next year. (Exception: Madden, you could just buy one of those for the next five years and it is the same game!) I haven't even had an urge to buy a game in a long time, and I love them -- there is just nothing out there that I don't already have as far as playability, style, action, or whatever!
-Mind
I guess the monkey house at the local zoo didn't have any great Shakesperian writers.
"That being said, I think we may have a side quest with an interesting premise. I think the competition will be pretty stiff..."
That would be the Slashdot competition. Pay no attention to them.
And my "Xena Meets the Vampire LeStat" anthology!
Can't be any worse than this.
You have exactly two months to make a module in NWN.
I attempted to build a remake of the original Bard's Tale with Neverwinter Nights, and came along pretty far with it. I even had a great and nearly perfect recreation of Skara Brea.
The problem was that as the project grew in size and become more complex the Aurora toolset became slower and slower, esspecially when laying down some of my scripted "zones".
I think the reason I gave up on my Bard's Tale recreation was because I became frustrated with the increasing slowness of Aurora as the project grew, and because I quickly realized how tedius it was trying to put together a worth "recreation" rather than doing something original.
Still, it's a decent toolset and this contest is an incentive for me to begin work on a new project. 60 days might be enough to put together something really slick if you weren't trying to build something too large.
(As an aside, I don't suppose anybody would be interested in taking over that NWN recreation, would they? The Skara Brae related maps alone might be fun for someone to play around with if they were old Bard's Tale fans...)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Well, it seems to me a number of creative entries might never come to be since thier damn development toolset doesn't work on the Mac.
I know I would have tried something...
I would have liked to do something in the vein of the Bards Tale, perhaps a mini story where you are in a sort of job interview for dungeon cleaning. So as you can see they lost nothing with my not being able to create a module, but there are probably others that would have been pretty good.
A really cool contest though and a neat idea to judge a writer on how well they can come up with a compelling non-linear story.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't suppose there is a way of getting one's hands on the toolkit for module development without buying the game? Or what if you are running Linux?
From the submission agreement (emphasis mine):So, they can copy your ideas and not reimburse you in any way, as long as they claim that their development was independent from your submission.
I'm not saying they would, but they could.
That being said, I'm still going to submit something. ^_^ And you all should too. Competition is pressure, and pressure makes diamonds.
Don't put advice in your sig.
Good. Get back to recompiling your kernel. ;-)
Yeah, but only 10% of the
"Yeah, but only 10% of the /. crowd qualifies. All of the others have severe issues (see: spelling, grammer)"
Was........ was that on purpose? As the correct spelling of that word is 'grammar'.
Might I point out that BioWare has had "create a NWN mod" in thier requirements for hiring a writer for over three years now. (I first checked when I started Uni)
The only thing different from this contest is that now they dont require the appicant to be a *published novelist*.
Thats right, they formerly wanted applicants to have at least one novel published under a major house (Tor, Baen, etc)
Lets see, I get a novel published by one of these places so I can choose to be a professional novelist and continue to publish with Tor, Baen etc or I can be an underpaid, overstresses, unrecognized writer for BioWare.
There may be a reason why they didnt have any luck finding an applicant.
Requirements:
Job pays $14/hr plus tips (to be split with management).
"Why hire writers when you can get them to work for free under the guise of a contest :)"
Open Source could borrow the idea.
They will get thousands of new story ideas and only hire a handful of people. That doesn't mean they won't use
the ideas of people they don't hire.
Look at The Apprentice. Trump makes more money with the show than he would be paying the individual that wins. So
he is already smiling even if he hire a dufus.
Look at Rockstar. Again they make tons of money with the show, if they have a bad year because the public doesn't like
the guy/girl that much, they just host a show again next year and make more money.
Its a new business model.
No contest needed. Just pick random contributors from the ELotH:TES wiki. Now there's a game concept.
...with a marketing guy who says, "HEY GUYS! I've gotta GREAT IDEA!..."
'We evaluate only the characters, the dialogue, the plot, the non-linear structure, and the flow and pace of the story.'
Sweet...finally a place where I can submit all of my half-elf Ranger/deep gnome Tinker slash-fic plotlines!
If you think you're that good, you should write a book, sell it and keep the copyright, or write your own script to see if anyone licenses it.
I believe the organizers are just looking for cheap scripts, or worse, hire the winners and then make them sign off their copyright and moral rights as "work for hire" for new writings created.
Not that far from the truth, As someone who recently ran screaming from the retail games biz, I now find almost everyone I know wants to get out ASAP, especially those who want a social life, or a salary they can buy a house and raise a family on.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
...but your modules are some of the best stuff available for NWN. Thank you for all that time you spent making them.
:-)
Signed,
Adam Miller Fanboy #1
Actually this should be insightful! I have heard Bioware have a tough time keeping employees for a few reasons:
1) Edmonton flouts its good weather in how many "frost free" days it has, due to it being the most northern MAJOR city in north america.
2) Out in the middle of the plains, about 3.5 hours drive to anything interesting (rocky mountains)
3) very short summer, long cold winters
4) Not exactly a hub of art of entertainment that vancouver or Toronto or Montreal is.
Having said that I have heard Bioware treats its employees very well and tries its best to keep them happy. And the Living cost is the cheapest in the country.
I used an old Dragon magazine (as a very loose basis) to make a module and spent weeis on the map and the scripts and story flow (quite heavily changed) to make it fun... http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Modules.Detai l&id=3808 ...it has 3 diffent endings (and many ways to die). I think BioWare ought to look at the modules in the vault instead of asking for a stupid 4x4 boring chit-chat module.
I don't have time to do another, but you can enjoy the one I already did.
Cheers,
McDoc
Cheers, McDoc
http://home.woh.rr.com/nwmovies/nwtoolset.txt
I've read claims that Volition has the same problem, at least I saw job listings stay up for months without applicants.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
that the story line is so constrained "Use a medieval fantasy setting". This will just produce a large number of similar themed entries. Much better would have been to give the writer freedom with the setting - then we might have got something new, rather than the same old thing repackaged.
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Yes.
I write my replies in Gmail and spellcheck before pasting back.