Writing Games

[Tatar Khan]

Words, words, words from Games for Windows magazine

When the Writers Guild of America--the union representing U.S. film and television writers--announced it would introduce a new "Best Videogame Writing" category to its 2008 Awards, it felt like a move long overdue.

After all, game writing has evolved since the days of Wolfenstein and Tetris. We've moved past the point where storytelling in games was about as sophisticated as the writing in porn--plot as excuse for the action. These days, games offer rich settings, complex characters, and intricate narratives. Surely the WGA's award meant the mainstream writing community finally saw games as a new medium, a form of modern literature just like film or television.

But then the WGA released its list of nominees.

The list shocked gamers--not so much for what it included but what it left out. Sure, The Witcher and World in Conflict were written well enough, and The Simpsons Game certainly had its fair share of good jokes. But how did Crash of the Titans--the 14th Crash Bandicoot game--and PSP no-name (and eventual award winner) Dead Head Fred end up on the list when Portal and BioShock, two of the best-written games ever to hit PCs, didn't?

"[Creating the award] was the right move, but if you look at the nominees, you go, 'Huh?'" says Stephen Jacobs, executive board member of the International Game Developers Association's Game Writers Special Interest Group and professor of game design and development at Rochester Institute of Technology.

The logic behind the list, explains Jacobs, is that writers had to be members of the WGA's New Media Caucus to be nominated. But few writers in the industry currently belong to the WGA, much less the Caucus.

"I'd never even heard of it," says Ken Levine, creative director of 2K Boston and writer of such games as BioShock and System ShockA 2, praised for their stories. "I don't even know where to start to get involved."

The Numbers Game

Recently, the gaming industry realized something: Well-written games sell. BioShock sold nearly half a million copies in its first month of release. For months, The Orange Box (which, with Portal and Half Life 2: Episode Two, offers some of the best narrative in gaming today) has held steady on PC best-seller lists. Even WGA nominees World in Conflict and The Witcher sold well. So while not every well-written game becomes commercially successful, quality writing has increasingly become part of that elusive formula for blockbuster magic.

Part of that comes down to shifting demographics. According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average gamer is now 33 years old, and almost 40 percent of gamers are women. The stereotypical gamer isn't a teenage boy but a harried father, a working mom, an ambitious professional--someone with limited time "who wants more out of the time they do get to play their games," says Jacobs.

"If they're going to devote the time to gaming, they want something rich, something that has depth to it," he says. "That something is better served by better writing."

Of course, what makes writing "good" is as difficult to define for games as it is for a poem. "This is a medium in its infancy," says Levine. "It's like going back in time to 1923 and asking, 'What are the great screenplays?'"

Not all games even require writing, and snappy dialogue and well-developed characters can't hide bugs and design flaws. Nor does top-notch writing ensure commercial success. Critics lauded 2005's Psychonauts for its wit and eccentricity--the game even scored the 2006 Game Developers Choice Award for Excellence in Writing. But two years later, Double Fine founder Tim Schafer revealed on his blog that Psychonauts had sold only 400,000 copies at retail (not countingA > whatever new life the game may have found on Steam and Xbox Live).

So if there's no guaranteed payoff to good writing, why worry about it in the first place? "If you use writing in the right way, you can build a world people can really buy into," says Levine. "If you trust the player, giving them the choice to opt into the story instead of putting everything in a cut-scene, players can really get immersed in that world."

But "storytelling is still so rudimentary," he says, and real innovations are few and far between. The tools game writers have to work with--cut-scenes, journal entries, voiceovers--can only be done in so many ways.

"I think that's why, when games like Portal come out, they have such an impact," says Levine. "We're working in relative space here."

When I Grow Up, I Want To Write Games

When game writers show up for work, they face two main tasks: interactive dialogue scripting (or composing the in-game dialogue and narration) and narrative design (that is, creating a game's background and story). Some writers also come up with copy for manuals and even promotional materials, like short stories or webcomics.

Writing for games, says Jacobs, is fundamentally different from writing for books, television, or film. "In any other medium, the writer is in the driver's seat, and the audience is captive," he says. "But game writing's different. You have to let your audience interact with the medium itself."

It's also more work. Games often include thousands of lines of dialogue, from minutes-long soliloquies to succinct "barks," interjections, or snippets of exchanges from nonplayer characters (like "Oof!" and "Ow!"). For example, Planescape: Torment contained an estimated 800,000 words, and the upcoming Fable 2 tips the scales at 250,000 lines of dialogue. Even The Simpsons Game has more than 8,000 lines--that's more than an entire season of the show.

All that scripting takes time. Usually, studios bring in freelance writers at various stages of a game's progress to handle dialogue creation. (In-house writers often take care of narrative design.) This means contractors could join a project at any time, from preproduction to as little as a month before release. "It's all over the place," says Jacobs. "It's still too rare when writers come in at the beginning."

To make things more confusing, developers in smaller studios often wear several hats; a game's lead designer might also act as its creative director. In larger studios--especially those with licenses for established intellectual properties--this multitasking has diminished. Red Storm Entertainment, for example, has a Central Clancy Writer for its Tom Clancy franchise. MMO powerhouses like Blizzard employ large pools of dedicated writers--both in-house and freelance--focused on everything from novels to dialogue trees. Even casual gaming giant PopCap has a dedicated writer on staff.

But these changes are slow and few. "It would be wrong to say this is some major trend, or that it's even happening in a majority of studios," says Jacobs. Still, "the industry's starting to see it's worth putting in the money to get a good story."

Writing the Future

Could game writers' unions be next on the agenda? Maybe. Since most game writers are freelancers, a union could help provide legal protections, especially in copyright and contract disputes. It could also help writers lobby for increased pay and expanded benefits. It's not surprising, then, that the IGDA's Game Writers Special Interest Group has recently pushed for better relations with the WGA.

In fact, the WGA has been eyeing game writers for some time; part of the union's rationale behind its new award category was to entice game writers to join. "By recognizing the skill and craft of video-game writing, the Writers Guilds intend to raise the profile of these writers so they can get WGA contracts and benefits for this work," said WGA West president Patric M. Verrone in a public statement. "We aim, we shoot, we score."

Of course, few industry bigwigs would welcome the prospect of a new union--especially considering how the recent writers' strike brought Hollywood to its knees. (The strike, resolved in February, had stopped production on dozens of shows and movies, idled 11,000 film and TV employees, and cost the Los Angeles economy an estimated $1.8 billion.)

"There are all the reasons in the world why [a game writers' union] should happen," says Jacobs, "but what industry wants to let in a new union?"

Not all potential members are even hot on the idea. "Any forum in which writers could share ideas, I think that would be an important thing," says Levine. "But game writers are, at the end of the day, game developers as well. I don't think a separate entity from other game developers makes sense."

Adds Jason Kapalka, PopCap's chief creative officer, "I'm not so sure they'd want to let the guy who wrote Peggle into the WGA."

Even if a union never materializes, the IGDA's Game Writers Special Interest Group is hard at work codifying standards for the business of game writing. Their first plan of attack: working with studios, the Internet Movie Database, and online game archive MobyGames.com to standardize game credits so that studios have a systematic way to acknowledge writers for their work. The group also plans to release two more textbooks on narrative design, as well as sponsor a writing contest and establish an online Game Writers Hall of Fame.

And, of course, they're trying to help game writers score more work. "It's not just about hiring someone who knows how to write," says Jacobs. "It's about someone who knows what goes into a game, who's familiar with the volume of work required."

COPYRIGHT 2008 Ziff Davis Media Inc

I completely agree with the points made in the article about the need for some kind of evaluation of quality of game writing in the industry. I am one of those people that only has 30 minutes a day to play so I want as interesting story as possible for the game.

[Dunenewt]

Yes, there are some very original stories and plots in games these days.  The whole Tiberium universe is a good example I believe.

[Tatar Khan]

Yeah especially the large series that keep the story going and consistent, this is much better than the sequels of the movies as much more work needs to be put in.

Good examples could be the Might and Magic series (including the heroes series)

StarCraft has a well detailed story.

Fallout 1 and 2

X-beyond the frontier

[Dunenewt]

I wonder if story writers for games, write plots with a potential movie in mind?  There have been quite a few movies made into films now.