Writer's Guild Nominates Game Writing

Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog notes that the Writer's Guild of America stepped back from the picket line long enough to nominate a few 2007 games for great writing. Unfortunately, their nominees suck. The list of nominees consists of: "Crash of the Titans, Written by Christopher Mitchell, Sierra Entertainment. Dead Head Fred, Written by Dave Ellis and Adam Cogan, D3 Publisher. The Simpsons Game, Lead Writer Matt Selman, Written by Tim Long and Matt Warburton, Dialogue by Jeff Poliquin, Electronic Arts. The Witcher, Lead Story Designer Artur Ganszyniec, Dialogue Sebastian Stepien, Additional Dialogue Marcin Blacha, Writers Sande Chen and Anne Toole, Atari. World in Conflict, Story Design Christofer Emgard, Story Consultant Larry Bond, Script Consultant Ed Zuckerman, Sierra Entertainment." No Mass Effect? Nothing at all from the Orange Box? No BioShock? For shame, WGA.

Comments

Uh oh.

[ControversialMatt]

I wonder if the producers for Bioshock, Mass Effect, and The Orange Box will be able to dig themselves out from under their respective piles of awards to offer an apology to the Writers Guild for not employing their members.

Re:Translation:

[kidcharles]

I have been giving the residuals vs. salary issue some thought recently and here are my initial conclusions. There are two categories of product, finite and infinite. "Finite" products are those that require labor to reproduce, including both goods (cars, computers, etc.) and services (customer support, waiting tables at a restaurant, etc.). Then there are products that are "infinite" (essentially intellectual property), such as scripts, movies, computer games, and recorded music. All of these things can now be reproduced infinitely with trivial effort.

Corporations that sell finite goods can only sell them once; if they want more of them to sell, they must rely on new labor efforts, for which the laborers must be compensated. Corporations that sell infinite goods can sell extremely cheap-to-produce reproductions of their products with no practical limits, and do not require more labor to make them (except for DVD pressings or servers hosting the material for example, which typically represent a tiny fraction of production costs).

Now we address fairness in each of these types of product. Finite products produce a predictable revenue, that can be examined to see if the compensation to the laborers who produced it is considered "fair." Infinite products produce a very unpredictable revenue, that can vary substantially. A movie that performs poorly can make a tenth of what a box office success can make. In this case, the "fairness" of compensation, measured by the ratio of the salary paid to the laborer to the revenue from sales, can vary wildly.

It seems to me that laborers in "infinite" production industries have a very good argument for residuals, from the perspective of fairness.