Tag: video

Who writes the game?

Post date 15 09 2010
Categories In Writing Workshop

Yesterday we mentioned how teamwork imposes limitations on the videogame writer. Today we’ll explore the topic.

We can understand the issue by looking at how movies are made. A script needs many pairs of hands to make a writer’s ideas become real settings, costumes, sounds, colours, performances, camera angles, cuts, soundtrack and so on and so forth. Along that path, depending on time and budget costraints and the wishes of the director and producers, the result may largely depart from the original script. In fact, as we said yesterday, quite often a movie’s production is decided upon marketing reasons (remakes, franchises, etc.) and then the script is not so much the spark of the project anymore as just a cog in the machine. Do you remember that story about Kevin Smith being forced to include a giant spider in his script for Superman Returns? The video is long but worth every second.

Something similar happens with videogames, only worse, because the writer often works in parallel to the development team, or even joins the project in its later stages. There were cases when an author was approached with a fully-finished game (level 1 takes place in a mine and the final boss is a zombie, level 2 is on the moon and the final boss is a yellow octopus…) and then asked to write a story that brought it all together.

We must take into account that the game industry is so young that the figure of the writer didn’t even exist until rather recently. Stories and texts were written by the (small) development teams themselves. As the teams grow, tasks get specialized but still today, a small indie developer, say 3 to 8 people programming for iPhone or Wiiware, won’t have a writer in their ranks. The bigger the project, the more likely they’ll have some people devoted only to writing, but also the more tensions they’ll suffer regarding budget, schedule and even intentions. On the top of the scale you have the latest issues of sagas like Metroid, GTA, Metal Gear Solid or ScarCraft, which will have their big creative star on top and a small team of writers to fill in the gaps at his orders.

So if I want to write videogames, where do I fit in all of this? Let’s talk about it tomorrow.

Tags Movies, video, videogames
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What is “writing” in a game?

Post date 14 09 2010
Categories In Writing Workshop

The people from Extra Credits offer an answer:

What is writing in a game? It’s what the characters say in cutscenes and dialogue boxes. It’s those voice tabs that characters shout out during combat. It’s also the background chatter that characters expell as the player passes by. It’s the words in the options menu, and the loading screens. It’s the flavour text describing guns or equipment or alien bases… OK, so it’s alot of things. But I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s notthe high concept. It’s not the idea behind the game. Few games ever start with a fully baked story that the developer is itching to tell, much less a complete script.

Writers don’t decide the concept of the game because in most cases, the game designer will be the person to think through and decide the setting, the mechanics and, surely, the most important traits of the story and its characters. That means the story is half-written before the writer jumps in (just like in Hollywood when a producer greenlights a remake, sequel or adaptation – the movie is already decided before the scriptwriter is hired). Thus the writer becomes part of a huge team – the video does actually review some of the difficulties of game writers’ within the cogs of the industry – but we’ll talk about teamwork tomorrow. The challenge that videogames face today is wider than that: they need to define how they can tell their stories.

Games can’t tell their story through disconnected segments of gameplay strung together by cutscenes. Games need to tell their story through the gameplay. Narrative should trip from every texture, and be integrated into every facet of the world. It should come through in the menus, in the interface, and in every loading screen. But most importantly of all it should come through in the mechanics of the game. The mechanics should teach us about the characters and reinforce the plotline. They should fundamentally attune the player to their character, and let them explore their character’s actions.

Doesn’t that contradict what they said at the beginning? If writers don’t decide the concept or mechanics of a game, how can they narrate through it?

Well that’s the big question isn’t it.