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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."
Kind of like editing for Slashdot, except sometimes you have to make sense. Unless you're writing for an FPS.
Swi
What It Writing for Games is Really Like
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The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I think I know what it is like writing games. If you get one thing wrong on the box, people ignore you completely.
And kudos for the quick correction. At least the editors are only half asleep :P
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...
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"
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.
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.
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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.