Slashdot Mirror
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."
I think I know what it is like writing games. If you get one thing wrong on the box, people ignore you completely.
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!
What I've played of GoW I enjoyed, I thought it was a fun shoot 'em up game with a few interesting weapons. But as far as the writing? Its par for the course. The lines are totally cheeseball coming out of the characters, and much of the NPCs motivations don't really make a ton of sense. The main character is a walking video game cliche, overdone to the point of self parody.
I didn't see the ending, but the story "demons/aliens/boogeymen attack earth and must be destroyed" is hardly a new idea. They came out of the ground instead of from space I guess. And the plot device of the main guy being locked up at the beginning of the game makes no sense at all. You lock your badass super soldier up for 4 years because he disobeyed an order, while earth is being overrun? Thats just plain a waste of resources.
I haven't played the other games on the list, so I can't comment on those...but GoW is just more of the same. I'm not even saying its awful, just average.
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.
I know the story is in the manual. That just strikes me as exceedingly lame. The manual is not the game. That's like watching a movie that makes no sense because all the crucial back story is written on the cover. It should be in the game.
The dialog wasn't too bad. It just didn't constitute a story.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.