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What Writing For Games Is Really Like
Gamasutra is running a transcript of a recent podcast, in which host Tom Kim interviewed the well-respected games scriptwriter Susan O'Connor. She talks about what it was like to write for games as diverse as Star Wars Galaxies, Gears of War, and Bioshock. She and Kim go into what the process of writing for games entails, the increasingly interesting Writer's Game Conference at the Austin Games Conference, the interplay between designer and writer, and what it is like to write for and as a woman in a male-dominated industry. O'Connor comments: "You can look at someone like Ang Lee, who makes these incredibly powerful movies in English set definitely in America, and yet he's not from here and English is not his first language. So I think there's something to be said as a female writer writing male characters. It does take a little bit more work to get inside of their heads, but you do have that luxury of being and outsider and being able to see it with fresh eyes."
...like writing headlines for Slashdot, only harder.
Kind of like editing for Slashdot, except sometimes you have to make sense. Unless you're writing for an FPS.
Swi
I think IT fine being an editor
What It Editing for Slashdot is Really Like
Get your act together guys...
What It Writing for Games is Really Like
OOF LIKE ARTICLE! It good accurate. Oog graduate summa cum laude from cave in hills. Oog make Oog parents very proud! Oog father disappointed at first, because he want Oog be rock repairman too. But Oog have special calling. Oog study mainly rocks and mixing thing together at cave, with minor in English lit. Oog get job as game developing with Grond and Thunk Incorporated!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
"What It Writing for Games is Really Like" very intelligent title... kudos to the editor
...that the editors are intentionally making all these mistakes to troll us. You simply cannot accidentally fuck up this much.
I think I know what it is like writing games. If you get one thing wrong on the box, people ignore you completely.
Tl;dr
getting into the industry of writing for games?
Writers are looked at as the non skilled segment (they're not coders, ergo they aren't important), but all the best games have kick butt writers.
We need more of the better writers, and when we get them, Gears of War, Oblivion, etc. will be the stone age of gaming, instead of contenders for examples of the golden age.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Seems like it would have been worthwhile to link the actual poscast in the summary.
-Peter
1. Turn on main screen.
2. Decide who all base are belong to.
3. ????
4. Profit!
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
As a guy, that is my justification for playing female characters and dressing them up all nice and pretty, or running around in nothing but underwear...
Posted anonymously for obvious reasons...
It's "To whom all base are belong". Honestly.
James Munro, pseudonym E V Thompson.
Samuel Richardson
Sir Walter Scott
That took thirty seconds on Google. Now, while I would love to be able to agree with you, I just can't. Not only because I'm not sure exactly what you said in your first sentence, but because the above men have all been successful "writters" of trash romance.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
Weren't they complaining how women didn't write female characters? Now they are trying to justify a takeover and say, "Oh it was ok all along." F**k this for a joke
Writing and gaming are in a sense opposites of one another.
... writing in games just needs to be good enough, not cream of the crop excellent. Its the game itself that really has to hold up, and the writing just needs to make sure it doesn't make an ass of itself.
I am an avid reader, and a game coder, but I just don't see how it is possible to achieve great writing in a medium where the chief goal is leading towards allowing the player as much freedom as possible to create his own narrative.
How do you get recognized as a brilliant writer when the gamer is free to abuse, play around, suck, rule, kick ass, get his/her ass kicked, and provide the fixed text that an NPC ultimately says to you for 'getting to that point'. Its an impossible task.
There are games where I felt the writing was very good, like Fire Emblem, or God of War, or to reach back abit, the original Myst, but the writing has to serve to the game, which is to say it has to be there and not make you notice it rather than stand out for being awesome.
Half of me wishes the gaming industry was capable of attracting better writing talent, but the key is to attract writers who are aware of the purpose of writing for a game. It should not be an attempt to *justify* your in-game experience (think of all the over the top cheesy narratives written over games that lacked the gameplay mechanics and immersiveness to do it justice,) its merely to enhance the suspension of disbelief and level and match the level of requested immersion from the player.
Note how it is generally accepted that being an amazing and accomplished writer does not mean you can write a good screen play, or how playwrights arn't neccessarily slam-dunk book authors. I just can't shake the feeling that games will always share, albeit to a lesser degree, a commonality with porn - the narrative of the game simply isn't that central to a good gaming experience (I'm not refuting that some games have good writing, or have even been saved by the writing) just like the writing in porn isn't that central to good porn. I feel that its pretty much a permenant condition
"Old man yells at systemd"
I remember when I accidentally deleted one or two (or three?) days of Susan's work. But I'm sure it was even better the second time anyway. So everybody won!
Jeff Freeman
... since I don't own an XBox360. How much writing, exactly, went into the game? From what I've seen, it looks like a bulked-up, deadlier, more flashy version of Quake II where you can take cover and chainsaw guys in the face. Indeed, those seem to be the draws, rather than the compelling plot or dialog. The writing for QII, I can remember, was basically contained within the manual, and that was something a guy like me (moderately creative and loves spending time writing long, pointless descriptions of make-believe things--I invented a fictional naming convention for every race in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for god's sake) could've pounded out in a day or two.
What I said was, story lines of the future will make today's masterpieces look elementary. But for that we need to demand that Oblivion-style writing be the new bare minimum rather than an outstanding exception to the rule.
We need more game story writing contests (more than we have now) to see what creativity is out there.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Isn't the video game story the direct male equivalent of the trashy romance novel? Garbage writing that plays directly on our basal need for fantasy.
Oh wait, the direct equivalent in that case would be porno writing.
Lost Planet, which I'm about halfway through right now, has the most cliched plot and dialog ever. I mean, it's cliched almost to spoof-of-video-games level... it's insane.
http://blakeyrat.com/2007/01/lost-planet.html
To quote myself:
So all in all, Lost Planet is a pretty good game with a really lame story. Which is pretty much par for the course for most console FPS games. Hell, most FPS games period. But it still upsets me because, of all the low-hanging fruit, the story is the lowest hanging and it still hasn't been plucked. Sad, really.
Comment of the year
I've been skeptical since forever when it comes to women authors, especially in male-oriented genres, but I read Robin Hobb's "Assassin's Apprentice", and it was quite good. I'd never would have guessed it was by a female author.
The gaming industry practically started with Roberta Williams (Sierra On-line Co-founder) and has continued with great writers such as Susan O'Connor(Gears of War) and Amy Hennig(Legacy of Kain). Sure, there aren't as many female writer but the ones that are in the gaming industry have made some of the most noted storyline based games...It would not be fair to call it a man dominated business.
I really appreciate an article like this because as a gamer I have always wondered what sort of "process" the storyline in a game goes through. And a lot of what the author says is enlightening and insightful. However, one thing bothers me -- I haven't been happy with, well, nearly any of the storylines she has written! Gears of War was short and sweet, with some good dialogue, but the story was insanely weak. And Guild Wars (every chapter) is an utter disaster in terms of story and dialogue. Sure, I love these games, but I would be lying if I said I enjoyed their storylines. So, I was hoping she would go more in-depth when talking about where she draws her ideas from, who thinks of the "major" premises and plot points (mostly the lead designers? how much input does she have as a writer rather than designer?), and how much freedom she gets in terms of dialogue. I want to know who I should be blaming when the stories and/or dialogue in games are trash, and who I should be praising when they're stellar. I'd also be curious to see how the dynamic between designers/writers differs in, say, Japan (with regards to story/dialogue-heavy JRPGs like Final Fantasy for instance).
I like basketball!!1!
Having participated at least on the fringes in the writing process for 3 games (2 of which never saw the light of day), I can say that writing for a game is a very subtle artform if done well. Good writing augments the gameplay without restricting the user's actions, it provides colour and background to the events in the game but is flexible enough that it makes sense whatever the user does, and is hopefully not repetitive. I haven't seen that many good examples of clever and well conceived writing in a lot of games. Myst as someone said wasn't bad (even though I disliked the game myself), and I think the writing in the MMORPGs City of Heroes/City of Villains is excellent. A lot of the old Sierra titles were very well done as well.
Good writing can't supplant the gameplay but it can add to it in such a manner than you can choose to participate in it or more or less ignore it and carry on with playing the game.
One of the projects I participated in was an analysis of how much writing would be required for an MMORPG style game that never saw the light of day to the best of my knowledge (it had no title at the time), and our involvement was limited to determining how much dialog writing would be required given the design the designers had conceived of. They decided not to proceed with that concept when we told them they would end up needing roughly 60,000 pages of dialog when they were done. Obviously a poorly designed concept, which is what we told them.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Well-written characters and dialog are just another opportunity to entertain the player.
To be vulgar, it's just another asset -- like models, textures, sound, animation, and effects. It would be foolish for a developer to discount the need for quality in any of those other sorts of assets, and it's foolish to write off dialog as something players won't be interested in.
Caveat 1: I'm distinguishing between dialog and plot, because plotting is like game design, in that it happens behind the scenes and is expressed through other assets. In other words, while "writing" in novels means a lot of things other than dialog, almost all of the writing that goes into games is dialog.
Caveat 2: I work at Double Fine Productions, which is run by Tim Shafer. Tim has a reputation as one of the better writers in the game industry, and to be honest, I'm not sure I'd have the same appreciation for good game dialog if I hadn't worked on Psychonauts.
Half of me wishes the gaming industry was capable of attracting better writing talent, but the key is to attract writers who are aware of the purpose of writing for a game.
I think the problem the games industry has with attracting writers is basically down to price.
Novels can be very lucrative -- ask J.K. Rowling. So can TV and cinema.
Why? They have a large market. Gaming is still very much a fringe pursuit. To compete with moving pictures and books on writers' take-home-pay, they'd have to allocate a very large share of profits to the writers.
But yes, it's a different style of writing -- and a very intellictually challenging one at that. The cost of learning is high -- there're so many variables to take into account.
Long-term learning, poor rewards? No thanks -- much easier just to write novel, publish and be damned.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Oh wait, the direct equivalent in that case would be porno writing.
pretty insigtful, too bad i already distributed my mod points. .. she is also made of the same meat :) .. and if u believe that half-lie, u will be in the same trouble she gets into by negating her own meat and primal instincts.
few obs though:
- there are millions of women that play games but i havent heard of many men enjoying those trash romance novels
- dont believe 100% when a woman says she needs romance more than pure sex
and porno does not really need writing .. you dont need scenario to enjoy watching sex, same as u dont need a story to enjoy watching a tasty-looking steak ;)
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This reminds me that the best storytelling i've ever encountered was in Dynamix/Sierra's Betrayal at Krondor, which was based on Reimond E. Feist's universe, with the author actually doing the character, item and scenery descriptions, and of course dialogs, if i remember correctly.
...which apparently i don't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_at_Krondor claims he was only responsible for the editing.
Anyway the thing is, the game proved so successful it was made it into a book *afterwards*.