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."

Comments

Re:Wow...

[Arceliar]

And kudos for the quick correction. At least the editors are only half asleep :P

Podcast

[pete-classic]

Seems like it would have been worthwhile to link the actual poscast in the summary.

-Peter

Would be nice if Capcom had hired her

[Blakey Rat]

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.