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Games Entertainment

What Writing For Games Is Really Like 73

Posted by Zonk from the plenty-of-corny-jokes dept.
Gamasutra is running a transcript of a recent podcast, in which host Tom Kim interviewed the well-respected games scriptwriter Susan O'Connor. She talks about what it was like to write for games as diverse as Star Wars Galaxies, Gears of War, and Bioshock. She and Kim go into what the process of writing for games entails, the increasingly interesting Writer's Game Conference at the Austin Games Conference, the interplay between designer and writer, and what it is like to write for and as a woman in a male-dominated industry. O'Connor comments: "You can look at someone like Ang Lee, who makes these incredibly powerful movies in English set definitely in America, and yet he's not from here and English is not his first language. So I think there's something to be said as a female writer writing male characters. It does take a little bit more work to get inside of their heads, but you do have that luxury of being and outsider and being able to see it with fresh eyes."
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What Writing For Games Is Really Like More

What Writing For Games Is Really Like

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  • What it writing for games is really like? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Loadmaster ( 720754 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2007 @11:24PM (#17823484)
    Kind of like editing for Slashdot, except sometimes you have to make sense. Unless you're writing for an FPS.

    Swi
    • Seriously - they're including Gears of War in her writing credits as a good thing? I've played the game all the way through. It has great game mechanics and was a lot of fun. The script writing wasn't as bad as, say, Resident Evil, but it wasn't great either. And there was clearly a ton of backstory of which practically none made it into the movie. The main character goes back to his family's estate and they discover a secret lab with military intel on the enemy of humanity and nothing is said about th
      • Clearly when I said "none of it made it into the movie" I meant "none of it made it into the game".
        • There is backstory in the game manual that explains what his dad did, and why Fenix was in prison. Personally I enjoyed the ingame dialog, it is very entertaining. It would have been nice to have the whole context of the story introduced using the ingame engine, although I think that epic wanted bits left out to start community development much the way Halo did.

          I think that the next release of Gears will have much more story and context.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by theStorminMormon ( 883615 )
            I know the story is in the manual. That just strikes me as exceedingly lame. The manual is not the game. That's like watching a movie that makes no sense because all the crucial back story is written on the cover. It should be in the game.

            The dialog wasn't too bad. It just didn't constitute a story.

            -stormin

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by dmatos ( 232892 )
      Or a JRPG. I'm sorry, why is the planet dying?

  • Huh? (Score:2, Funny)

    by imroy ( 755 )

    What It Editing for Slashdot is Really Like

    Get your act together guys...

  • OOG LIKE ARTICLE (Score:4, Funny)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2007 @11:30PM (#17823546) Homepage
    What It Writing for Games is Really Like

    OOF LIKE ARTICLE! It good accurate. Oog graduate summa cum laude from cave in hills. Oog make Oog parents very proud! Oog father disappointed at first, because he want Oog be rock repairman too. But Oog have special calling. Oog study mainly rocks and mixing thing together at cave, with minor in English lit. Oog get job as game developing with Grond and Thunk Incorporated!
  • "What It Writing for Games is Really Like" very intelligent title... kudos to the editor

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Arceliar ( 895609 )
      And kudos for the quick correction. At least the editors are only half asleep :P

  • Now I'm convinced... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Virak ( 897071 )
    ...that the editors are intentionally making all these mistakes to troll us. You simply cannot accidentally fuck up this much.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rozz ( 766975 )

      ...that the editors are intentionally making all these mistakes to troll us. You simply cannot accidentally fuck up this much.

      interesting hypothesis and 100% plausible .. but still, only a hypothesis.

      anyway, the "offtopic" mod u got is quite a shame

  • From reading these comments (Score:4, Insightful)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Tuesday January 30, 2007 @11:34PM (#17823584) Journal
    I think I know what it is like writing games. If you get one thing wrong on the box, people ignore you completely.

  • How about tips on (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Travoltus ( 110240 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2007 @11:42PM (#17823672) Journal
    getting into the industry of writing for games?

    Writers are looked at as the non skilled segment (they're not coders, ergo they aren't important), but all the best games have kick butt writers.

    We need more of the better writers, and when we get them, Gears of War, Oblivion, etc. will be the stone age of gaming, instead of contenders for examples of the golden age.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by icegreentea ( 974342 )
      good writing is important, for sure, but on the other hand, games like gears of war... you really aren't playing for the sake of awesome writing or story. the entire aim of gow was to have a lot of senseless killing. and chainsaws. being held up in future generations as an example of the golden age all depends on kind of example they're going to be talking about. gow was never going to be held up as an example of exemplary writing. it would be held up as having exactly the kind of writing that a game like g
      • I haven't played Gears of War, so I don't know exactly where you're coming from, but you seem to believe that some games need writing that is other than good. No game needs bad writing. Bad writing sometimes doesn't hurt, but good writing always helps to some extent. There are all kinds of good writing; it doesn't have to sound like flowers to be good. Think of Frank Miller, for instance (or Ernest Hemingway).

        Anything is better with good writing, but few games depend on it, and judging from prime tim

    • Re:How about tips on (Score:5, Funny)

      by Sj0 ( 472011 ) on Tuesday January 30, 2007 @11:57PM (#17823808) Journal
      If we could get the gameplay of Oblivion with the storytelling and acting of the Legacy of Kain series, we'll have a game experience so powerful, nobody would be able to play a video game ever again.

      Do you REALLY want that?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sj0 ( 472011 )
      From tfa: "I think that in 50 years or 15 years people will be able to articulate it a lot better than we can now. "

      It depends on if you use cheat codes or not. It's kind of like Super C for NES.

    • Then who will write our books?

      These are the line of defense against fanfic.

      With writers, it depends. Some are good and some are bad. Sometimes a good one is bad for a particular project.

      The killer though, is the writer - good or bad - who doesn't seem to realize it's a video game. Those get tuned out and treated as unimportant, 'cause... You try to straighten 'em out, then.

      A lot of gamers/devs love to read well written things and recognize skill when they see it. One being treated as a member of the un

    • As someone who does a great deal of writing for games, I will tell you that the best path for a writer is through design. The vast majority of the of the writing in the industry is done by designers, and while there are some studios who have dedicated writers, they are few and far between. And while some designers are dedicated to systems or gameplay, fiction and dialog writing is a big part of the role of most designers.

      Of course, how to get into design, well... there are already a lot of great articles on

  • Podcast (Score:4, Informative)

    by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @12:07AM (#17823896) Homepage Journal
    Seems like it would have been worthwhile to link the actual poscast [llnwd.net] in the summary.

    -Peter

  • Game Writing Is Easy (Score:5, Funny)

    by mollymoo ( 202721 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @12:08AM (#17823902) Journal
    1. Turn on main screen.
    2. Decide who all base are belong to.
    3. ????
    4. Profit!

  • Justification (Score:5, Funny)

    by MrWa ( 144753 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @12:39AM (#17824100) Homepage

    So I think there's something to be said as a female writer writing male characters ... you do have that luxury of being and outsider and being able to see it with fresh eyes.

    As a guy, that is my justification for playing female characters and dressing them up all nice and pretty, or running around in nothing but underwear...

    Posted anonymously for obvious reasons...

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by BillPosters ( 823347 )

      Posted anonymously for obvious reasons...

      umm...

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Justification (Score:2)
      by MrWa (144753) on Tuesday January 30, @11:39PM (#17824100)
      (http://hamete.com/)
      .
      .
      .
      Posted anonymously for obvious reasons...
      Yeah good job on that.

  • Choose your own adventure (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @01:47AM (#17824518) Homepage
    Writing and gaming are in a sense opposites of one another.

    I am an avid reader, and a game coder, but I just don't see how it is possible to achieve great writing in a medium where the chief goal is leading towards allowing the player as much freedom as possible to create his own narrative.
    How do you get recognized as a brilliant writer when the gamer is free to abuse, play around, suck, rule, kick ass, get his/her ass kicked, and provide the fixed text that an NPC ultimately says to you for 'getting to that point'. Its an impossible task.

    There are games where I felt the writing was very good, like Fire Emblem, or God of War, or to reach back abit, the original Myst, but the writing has to serve to the game, which is to say it has to be there and not make you notice it rather than stand out for being awesome.

    Half of me wishes the gaming industry was capable of attracting better writing talent, but the key is to attract writers who are aware of the purpose of writing for a game. It should not be an attempt to *justify* your in-game experience (think of all the over the top cheesy narratives written over games that lacked the gameplay mechanics and immersiveness to do it justice,) its merely to enhance the suspension of disbelief and level and match the level of requested immersion from the player.

    Note how it is generally accepted that being an amazing and accomplished writer does not mean you can write a good screen play, or how playwrights arn't neccessarily slam-dunk book authors. I just can't shake the feeling that games will always share, albeit to a lesser degree, a commonality with porn - the narrative of the game simply isn't that central to a good gaming experience (I'm not refuting that some games have good writing, or have even been saved by the writing) just like the writing in porn isn't that central to good porn. I feel that its pretty much a permenant condition ... writing in games just needs to be good enough, not cream of the crop excellent. Its the game itself that really has to hold up, and the writing just needs to make sure it doesn't make an ass of itself.

    • Re:Choose your own adventure (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Mongoose Disciple ( 722373 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @02:26AM (#17824710)
      Let me start by saying that I agree wholeheartedly with 90% of what you're written here.

      However!

      but I just don't see how it is possible to achieve great writing in a medium where the chief goal is leading towards allowing the player as much freedom as possible to create his own narrative.

      I'm not convinced this is necesarily the case. I grant you, there are some great sandboxy games out there that allow the player a ton of freedom... but looking back at some of the games that I really enjoyed playing or thought had great stories, a lot of them were pretty linear. I don't think we'll stop seeing game creators explore either end of that spectrum anytime soon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by koreth ( 409849 )

      I just don't see how it is possible to achieve great writing in a medium where the chief goal is leading towards allowing the player as much freedom as possible to create his own narrative.

      That's one direction the medium is going, to be sure, and honestly I doubt we'll ever get there with handwritten narratives; to achieve that goal will require something like the book in "The Diamond Age" with sufficient smarts to make up a compelling story as it goes along.

      But there are plenty of games out there with mu

    • Re:Choose your own adventure (Score:4, Funny)

      by Grym ( 725290 ) * on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @03:43AM (#17825018)

      There are games where I felt the writing was very good, like Fire Emblem, or God of War, or to reach back abit, the original Myst, but the writing has to serve to the game, which is to say it has to be there and not make you notice it rather than stand out for being awesome.

      True story: My computer didn't have quicktime installed (or had some problem with QT) when I played the first Myst game. So, all the puzzles worked, but none of the story full-motion videos did. I was, of course, none-the-wiser to this and played through the entire game without ever knowing what the heck was going on--I thought that was part of the "mystique." Every time I would encounter one of those books with the movies in it, I just saw a black square, which at the time I had assumed was some kind of puzzle I just hadn't figured out yet. You can only imagine how confused I was when I got the the end of the game and there's a bunch of text regarding all these characters and their conflict which I had apparently been participating in all along.

      For what it's worth, though, I still liked the game. What others are saying here is probably true. A good storyline always takes backseat to good gameplay.

      -Grym

    • From someone who would really like to write for games:

      Right now, a lot of professional games seem to have very limited writing, and it's not just a function of bad writing but of gameplay. I recently played the Zelda-like RPG Okami, for instance, and found that there was almost no innovation in NPC interaction over the first Final Fantasy: walk up to people who stand there like idiots and hit one button to read a one-way dialogue blurb. There are notable exceptions like the Elder Scrolls series, and PC ga

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by grumbel ( 592662 )

      but the writing has to serve to the game

      I think that this is the core reason why stories in games suck for most part, they are considered fillers, stuff that doesn't really matter at all and that is simply there to fill a few holes that the gameplay left. No surprise that you don't get a good story that way. As long as developers continue to consider story as filler things won't change. It is like with movies, if you simply take the story as filler between your special effects filled space battles you wi

    • Ever played Planescape: Torment?

    • I am an avid reader, and a game coder, but I just don't see how it is possible to achieve great writing in a medium where the chief goal is leading towards allowing the player as much freedom as possible to create his own narrative.

      It's actually quite simple: Stop treating it like a narrative. Think of a soundtrack for a movie. It is there as background. It sets tone, and helps communicate what is going onscreen. The music doesn't tell the story though.

      You can have a well designed, open-ended game where the player has total control of their 'story'. The job of the game writer isn't to tell the players story, it is to tell the story of the world. To breathe life into the virtual space the player is occupying, giving it depth a

    • Half of me wishes the gaming industry was capable of attracting better writing talent, but the key is to attract writers who are aware of the purpose of writing for a game.

      I think the problem the games industry has with attracting writers is basically down to price.

      Novels can be very lucrative -- ask J.K. Rowling. So can TV and cinema.

      Why? They have a large market. Gaming is still very much a fringe pursuit. To compete with moving pictures and books on writers' take-home-pay, they'd have to allocate a

  • I remember when I accidentally deleted one or two (or three?) days of Susan's work. But I'm sure it was even better the second time anyway. So everybody won!
  • ... since I don't own an XBox360. How much writing, exactly, went into the game? From what I've seen, it looks like a bulked-up, deadlier, more flashy version of Quake II where you can take cover and chainsaw guys in the face. Indeed, those seem to be the draws, rather than the compelling plot or dialog. The writing for QII, I can remember, was basically contained within the manual, and that was something a guy like me (moderately creative and loves spending time writing long, pointless descriptions of make

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by PingSpike ( 947548 )
      What I've played of GoW I enjoyed, I thought it was a fun shoot 'em up game with a few interesting weapons. But as far as the writing? Its par for the course. The lines are totally cheeseball coming out of the characters, and much of the NPCs motivations don't really make a ton of sense. The main character is a walking video game cliche, overdone to the point of self parody.

      I didn't see the ending, but the story "demons/aliens/boogeymen attack earth and must be destroyed" is hardly a new idea. They came out
      • I'd say better than Lost Planet, better than Prey, but not nearly up to Halo/Halo 2 standards. Of course those are all Xbox games, so whether that helps the original poster I don't know.

        I mean, I played through Gears and actually slightly cared if the football player died or not, so I guess that's a minor victory right there-- whether I give a crap about a NPC dying. To contrast, though, the cut-scenes in Halo 2 are so well-written that they'd be above average for motion pictures.
        • "The Train is at home on the rails!"

          God I wanted to shoot that guy.
        • Not normally one to respond twice to a post, but it's a seperate topic really:

          Halo/Halo2 had excellent voice acting. That is what made their cut-scenes work so well. The story in Halo isn't the best, but it's not the worst either. What bumps it up is that it is well executed, and Bungie put a lot of effort into the background material, giving the world some weight.

  • Would be nice if Capcom had hired her (Score:3, Informative)

    by Blakey Rat ( 99501 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @09:44AM (#17826630)
    Lost Planet, which I'm about halfway through right now, has the most cliched plot and dialog ever. I mean, it's cliched almost to spoof-of-video-games level... it's insane.

    http://blakeyrat.com/2007/01/lost-planet.html [blakeyrat.com]

    To quote myself:

    So all in all, Lost Planet is a pretty good game with a really lame story. Which is pretty much par for the course for most console FPS games. Hell, most FPS games period. But it still upsets me because, of all the low-hanging fruit, the story is the lowest hanging and it still hasn't been plucked. Sad, really.
  • The gaming industry practically started with Roberta Williams (Sierra On-line Co-founder) and has continued with great writers such as Susan O'Connor(Gears of War) and Amy Hennig(Legacy of Kain). Sure, there aren't as many female writer but the ones that are in the gaming industry have made some of the most noted storyline based games...It would not be fair to call it a man dominated business.
  • I really appreciate an article like this because as a gamer I have always wondered what sort of "process" the storyline in a game goes through. And a lot of what the author says is enlightening and insightful. However, one thing bothers me -- I haven't been happy with, well, nearly any of the storylines she has written! Gears of War was short and sweet, with some good dialogue, but the story was insanely weak. And Guild Wars (every chapter) is an utter disaster in terms of story and dialogue. Sure, I love t
  • Having participated at least on the fringes in the writing process for 3 games (2 of which never saw the light of day), I can say that writing for a game is a very subtle artform if done well. Good writing augments the gameplay without restricting the user's actions, it provides colour and background to the events in the game but is flexible enough that it makes sense whatever the user does, and is hopefully not repetitive. I haven't seen that many good examples of clever and well conceived writing in a lot

  • Dialog is just another opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)

    by robson ( 60067 ) on Wednesday January 31, 2007 @01:09PM (#17829364)
    Well-written characters and dialog are just another opportunity to entertain the player.

    To be vulgar, it's just another asset -- like models, textures, sound, animation, and effects. It would be foolish for a developer to discount the need for quality in any of those other sorts of assets, and it's foolish to write off dialog as something players won't be interested in.

    Caveat 1: I'm distinguishing between dialog and plot, because plotting is like game design, in that it happens behind the scenes and is expressed through other assets. In other words, while "writing" in novels means a lot of things other than dialog, almost all of the writing that goes into games is dialog.

    Caveat 2: I work at Double Fine Productions, which is run by Tim Shafer. Tim has a reputation as one of the better writers in the game industry, and to be honest, I'm not sure I'd have the same appreciation for good game dialog if I hadn't worked on Psychonauts.

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