Games Writing

I came across a post about writing in games over at Brenda Brathwaite‘s blog just now, and it reminded me of an old controversial article on Gamasutra wherein it was claimed that games don’t need writers since the designers generally do a way better job (I stress that Brenda’s post made a completely different point). The article’s main argument was that writers are good for one thing, which is structuring a plot into the necessary acts and arcs that a plot needs in order to be good.

I beg to differ. In my opinion, writers are good for at least two other things: Story and dialogue. Here, it’s important to discern between story and plot: Plot is what specifically happens on the screen or on the pages throughout a book, film, show, or game. Story is all of that plus anything else that’s mentioned, referenced, or subtly hinted at. The new Star Wars trilogy was already part of the story for the original trilogy before they were used as plots for films in their own right.

I agree that it’s often best to leave the plot to the designers. Good designers have a strong concept of what sort of plots work well in a game and how to turn them into gameplay. A good game plot needs to be created together with the gameplay, not before the gameplay and certainly not after the gameplay.

I think story is a different matter though – creating a world full of potential for gripping plots is an important part of much writing (especially science fiction and fantasy, in my experience), and though I base this on no personal experience, hiring a writer to flesh out your setting before you set about designing your game ought to give you the same advantages as working with a licensed IP, but without many of the disadvantages. You have a clear set of limitations and guidelines to build your plot and your gameplay on, but if you run up on a snag, you don’t have to ask for permission to change anything in your story.

More importantly, I think many modern games demonstrate an urgent need for professionally written dialogue. Some designers are brilliant at dialogue, of course, just as many designers are great at story and setting, but many many designers are apparently rubbish at writing convincing exchanges. I think I write reasonable dialogue for a designer, but there’s no way I can compete with a person like Smike who’s dedicated his whole carreer (not to say his whole life) to becoming a great screenwriter. The games with the best dialogue seem to generally be written by people who are primarily writers and designers second or not at all. This is true for Deus Ex, it’s true for Half-Life and Portal, it’s true for Grand Theft Auto 4, and it’s true for Bioware’s entire portfolio.

Not all games need writers of course. Crysis certainly seemed to do alright though its plot and its characters was all terribly cliché, and the same is true for so many action games. Nor am I saying a great writer who is also a great designer wouldn’t be a fantastic boon to a development team. I’m just saying maybe the reason so many modern games have whince-inducing dialogue is that the industry isn’t quite as good at discerning between different writing jobs as it could be. You probably shouldn’t hire a famous novelist to write the plot for your game, unless they’ve also proven themselves to have a strong understanding of game design, but I bet such a writer could do a terrific job of fleshing out your setting or tweaking your somewhat utilitarian dialogue.

Even though I love to write, I’d certainly look around for a professional screenwriter to polish my dialogue before I’d send it out to be recorded if I were designing a proper game. You just can’t compete with years of dedication to a single discipline.