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Striking Writers May Work on Games
The ongoing Writer's Guild strike may soon impact even the games industry. While most of the copy writers working on games are not a part of the guild, via Eurogamer comes a Variety article about a possible Hollywood writer's migration to other media. "While the WGA has made no secret that it would like to eventually cover vidgame writing, it hasn't pushed the issue yet and is allowing members to work on games during the strike. 'It has been an interesting shift," says one tenpercenter who focuses on vidgames. "The literary agents are now saying, 'Why don't we get our clients over there during the strike?' even though in the past they thought the money wasn't good enough or the work is too demanding.'"
I'm not sure whether I should rejoice that more games will be getting competent writers, or weep that gaming is going to be degraded to sitcom quality.
Does this mean that we're going to get "Reality Gaming"? Are we going to have that insulting canned laughter exported to games along with TV's awful hack writing? Can you imagine how terrible Portal would have been with a laugh-track?!?
Militant Agnostic: "I don't know, and damn it, neither do you!"
If this happen it will be terrible because we'll have terrible writer right terrible games.
How ever i don't think this will happen because most game studios have writer and because most game studios are small.
Games that require laugh tracks.
Honestly though, most of my favorite works in gaming have involved professional writers really taking the time to craft a great work of fiction in a game (especially Planescape: Torment.)
Ryan Fenton
I am not making this up, there really seems to a The Sims movie in the works... If hollywood can screw up game movies with single paragraph plots, what the hell will they do with a game that HAS NO PLOT?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Or consider games such as halo 3, crysis or the grand theft auto series where the storyline is important. But it is the design of the game that is ultimately more important and provides a framework within which the writers work. In other words, the value-added of a hollywood writer in this case seems limited.
In each of the above examples, I see the involvement of sit-com and action-movie writers as a big negative. The story line in games can be silly at times ... but never as stupid or lame as in the vast majority of tv shows and movies out of hollywood.
Games sure could use some great writers, perhaps we could talk to these Hollywood/tv writers and ask them if they know any, you never know, they might have bumped into them at some time.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'd rather have authors write the storylines to video games. Screenwriters specialize in storylines that are constrained by time, authors specialize in storylines that are, well, good.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
<elitist crap>
<broad general dismissal>
Sorry, my own writers are on strike, but I see everyone else is busy mad-libbing their own attitudes toward their hate of all things sitcoms and reality tv as if that's all there ever was out there. You think you're gaining some kind of "cred" with your oh-so-jaded attitudes?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Yeah! That'll really stick it to Vivendi!
-Dave
you get to impress that lovely lady NPC with your well rounded stats! hopefully those grind sessions are gonna pay off!
remember kids, VR is the only tv show where you choose who's the skank, the psycho-bitch, the alcoholic, and what loser is actually gonna win!!! and stay tuned for Extreme Anime Fights right after our show!
copyright emeraldfoxx corporations 2007
lol!
We're in college now. There's girls here. They do stuff....
I for one welcome the writers for "The Office" to come help write the storyline for a game. That show is great and that kind of humor could transfer well into a game with a little work.
Good writing... on TV?!
Why are so many people acting as if Hollywood writers are good? Go to your local bookstore and buy some of those compilations of the year's best science fiction short stories. Read the stories. I think these upcoming authors would form a far more valuable talent pool. If you look at some of the older compilations you will notice some short stories that have become movies and the true value of the typical Hollywood writer becomes painfully apparent.
On the one hand, I think the writers should be due what their product earns in markets other than broadcast, since they contribute directly to those products. In the case of film, it's positively criminal that the directors and producers are famous and the writers almost never get name recognition unless they are also a writer, producer or actor. In television, it's even worse, and their work is distributed in more ways.
On the other hand, the quality of their work has suffered so much over the last 20 years (and us with it) that I really don't mind that much if they all starve. When you can use one hand to count the shows that don't suck, insult your intelligence or heterosexual manhood, or otherwise play to the lowest common denominator or some less common, even lower ones, you stop caring if they ever go to work again. Television may be better off without them until they show that they can actually produce something worth watching, let alone watching more than once or over an on-demand connection.
It hasn't been my experience that there's any need for this extra, "talent" in the gaming industry. More importantly, though. These recently displaced writers are going to want 8% of every disk sold, and let's not even think about what'll happen when the WGA finds out about p2p.
"Why are so many people acting as if Hollywood writers are good? "
Better question. Why are so many slashdotters unable to distinguish between movies, games, books, and
TV. They're all different mediums and the writing for them are different.
If companies were allowed to collude on prices the consumer loses, and thus the economy loses. Why is it that no one seems to be able to see that when individuals collude on wages businesses lose, thus the consumer loses, and finally the economy loses?
Here in Utah there was a raging debate recently about how to "fix" public education by allowing a voucher system. The argument was that this would force public schools to "compete" with the private schools and eachother. Of course, this argument had the vast flaw that the public schools don't have to compete because the teachers' union ensures that teachers get paid for being there, not for actual performance. In a local private school my boss is on the board for there was a problem with a teacher telling an off-color joke to elementry students. When the students repeated the joke to their parents the parents told the board, the board conferred with the principal, and the teacher was immediately fired. Within two weeks they had another teacher in the classroom. When I was in 7th grade there was an aging teacher who should have been in a mental institution. She hadn't taught a lesson in at least 10 years, but the school couldn't fire her. She told students that she lived underneath a neighboring city with aliens, and I'm pretty sure she believed it herself. Well, about a week before class started she finally died. The entire first semester they weren't able to hire a new teacher because of union rules. The private school had a substitute for two weeks, the private school had a team of substitutes for four months.
Back in the day, before unions, houses were built by the thousands with bricks. Not because they were the best, or the cheapest, but because it was the style. The bricklayers, feeling that they were being grifted, unionized, as was the style of the time. Very quickly the cost of building with bricks became too prohibitive, and the bricklayers mostly lost their jobs. Overall society didn't hurt too much, but it had a large impact on the southern California economy.
That leaves us with the current WGA prediciment. The WGA prevents companies who hire their members from hiring non-members as best they can. Now, when the writers finally figure out that the guild has left them with a shitty contract (which has been shitty for dozens of years now) they strike, leaving a gap in the economy. Admittedly, this is a small gap, but a gap nonetheless. If the guild had not been fixing wages/contracts for its hundreds (thousands?) of members, each individual would instead be creating their own contract allowing them to ask for what they need. The studios would only be able to hire workers at market price (whether higher or lower than existing is impossible to know) giving market benifits, royalties, etc.
So this all leaves me with the lingering question, why is it that businesses can't fix prices while people can?
><));>
There can't really be an effective strike because so many games are created overseas, where writers aren't likely to be a part of WGA.
It can be 100% full-motion video of the Heroes characters with no gameplay at all...I feel like the contract dispute is cheating us out of the build-up to the conclusion this season. Ending the season next week feels kind of like having sex without foreplay, which is still lots fun, but lacking the slow-burning development we had last year.
I'm all for the writers getting the $$$ they deserve...the studios are doing everything they can to take down all of their material from p2p sites and YouTube so they can make $$$ from them (through advertising revenue on their own sites or iTunes store sales), while they tell the writers that Internet media has no value and makes them no $$$. The studios should just pay the writers appropriate royalties for their creative works, so we don't need to have an abbreviated season.
there are many examples that can be added to this list, which are games far surpassing others with their storylines.
Read radical news here
Or, we'll get games based on movies or TV shows, instead of the other way around.
Imagine: a game where you sing into a microphone and get votes.
Imagine: a game where you use virtual tweezers to extract the funny bone from a virtual human while trying to date a virtual intern.
Imagine: a game where you have to shoot King Kong off skyscrapers.
Maybe we have these already and I'm just not much of a gamer or TV viewer. Ex. Karaoke.
...being a starving writer wasn't bad enough?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Now we'll never get a release date for Duke Nukem Forever!
Jabs at bad writers aside, I'm interested on how the WGA covering video games could change the industry.
Like most programmers, its rare that video game programmers see any residuals for games they worked on. I'm not saying this isn't fair, I get paid for the work I do, but if game writers, voice talent, and artists all start getting a piece of the action why not programmers?
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
Wait a minute. Am I the only one who notices the stupidity in this? The Writers Guild of America strike is about writers getting paid residuals for DVD, New media profits. So during this strike the writers are going to go into an industry where there are no residual payments of any kind for original sales, compilation sales, and new media profits? The only people who make money of of those profits are the publishers. The writes has a better deal in script writing, at least there they get residuals for the primary profits of their work (syndication)
The writers aren't likely to see any work on video game projects. The game industry is like most others in that you are generally paid for a job, not paid residuals. Also writing is a lesser part of a game than it is of a movie. In a movie, the whole plot has to be provided. In a game, the player themselves provides a lot of it, the game is more of a framework. Some kinds of games often need very little writing at all. Civ 4 would be a good example. There is technical writing in terms of documentation, but there is no story that needs to be written.
Also, since game companies already have a successful business model, they are quite likely to have a "take it to leave it" kind of attitude. The WGA can't "strike" against them since they aren't needed.
My guess is that most will find that game writing just won't give them the kind of pay scale they want, and probably won't end up taking a job.
It's San Francisco, it's not like it gets earthquakes often, or major earthquakes more than once per century.
I work in production for a 3rd party developer, and I made a guess a week before the strike that we'd see a surge in resumes for production jobs. Why? Well when the TV shows shut down, all the PAs and other production personnel all lose their jobs as well. There's a lot of shared skillsets between TV production and game production. So the strike happens and what do we get? A surge of production resumes. Ding!