Hollywood Reporter on Game Writing

Via GameSetWatch, a story at the Hollywood reporter site on the process of writing a videogame. From the article: "'For me, writing is like gold,' says David Perry, president of Atari's Shiny Entertainment studio. 'It saddens me a lot that many video game companies don't hire triple-A writers and that they use their game designers instead. That's why, when real writers look at video game stories, they kind of roll their eyes. But that's something that I see changing, I really do.'" This guy probably has more than a little bit to do with that.

Comments

Writing a good game is unbelievably hard.

[thatguywhoiam]

I sympathize with the writers a bit on this one. We're not just talking about 'adapting' a story from book or play to the big screen, which is fraught with its own perils. Writing for the interactive screen is really an entirely new discipline, and one that we are still struggling to understand and create a common language for. If you think about something like the film Memento, and what would be required to write that properly - then imagine that you could experience that linear flow of events from multiple vantage points, multiple timelines... it gets pretty hairy, pretty fast. Then throw in the fact that characters - including the protagonist - can have multiple responses and conversational threads... eccchh. (Anyone remember Ultima 3? What keyword can I bounce off this NPC that will make them regurgitate the clue I need... I resorted to pseudo-dictionary-attacks on some of those).

Also, the expectations for 'game time' are way beyond what a film offers. The amount of dialog in some games is comparable to a novel (those epic RPGs with 20, 30, 40+ hours in them). No wonder the quality suffers.

This is the right thing to pick...

[jclast]

If you're developing a game, and you've only got so much money to go around, story is the right thing to cut some corners on.

How many of us play Super Mario for the story? Or Sly Cooper? Or Ikaruga? I'd much rather see fun games with crappy or non-existant stories than great stories with a crappy game wrapped around it.

I've shelved quite a few games due to control problems or difficulty frustrations, but I've never put down a game that was fun to play because the story was sub-par.