After GDC: Thoughts on writing in games

One of the things I did at GDC this year was poke around in the game writers sessions. My motivations for doing so were two fold. On the one hand, after watching my roommate play countless hours of Mass Effect (replaying the original and then the sequel) in the last several weeks I was thinking that writing for games might be an interesting job which I'm more or less qualified for. On the other, I wanted to see what the state of the industry was with regard to thinking about narrative in games, since as might be evident from my previous post I think about this stuff a lot. The results were mixed, and you can find my thoughts after the jump. I've tried to keep it brief, but I'm afraid there were a lot of interesting sessions.

There might be good reasons to question the conventions we use for getting things done.

First off the bad. Then I'll work my way back to the interesting stuff. I attended half of a writer's workshop on the first day of the conference and the bad news is that, assuming this was representative, the baseline level of thinking about writing in games is still terribly stilted and tied to non-interactive media. The workshop was focused on the basics of writing and operated under the premise that 80% of writing for games is like writing in any other story based context.  There was a lot of Aristotelian/Freytag's pyramid (although not Freytag specifically) type stuff, and engagement with Joe Campbell's hero's journey. There was also some analysis of filmic narratives through these lenses. There are two problems with this:

• These tools are really only useful for traditional narrative.


• As I found out later in the week at a writer's round table, the writer is often brought into the project late.

Basically, this all goes a long way towards explaining one side of why we're stuck with the same epic stories which sometimes map onto the game play well, and sometimes don't.  To put it another way, this works for big narratives but it's really an issue for games that don't have conventional narratives, but might have a strong narrative experience for the player anyway. Basically, it doesn't put the player at the center of the writing process which I think is really important and shockingly enough I'm not the only one.

This was evidenced when I went to Armando Troisi's (BioWare) talk Get your game out of my movie. Apparently BioWare thinks about story telling in their games as either subjective (player is character) or objective (player makes choices for the character), but either way it puts the player at the center of thinking about the narrative process. This was deeply reassuring and goes a long way towards explaining why the traditional narrative experience works so well in BioWare games . . . I mean, they actually think about this stuff.

That said, their games are definitely of the classical type in terms of subject matter/narrative form. Emily Short, Dan Kline, and Michael Matteas's talk on An AI assist to interactive storytelling definitely provided some angles on thinking about narrative beyond traditional branching structure, and beyond traditional epic tales. Some of it was programmer centric and went over my head, but one thing was evident: these people are thinking about ways of rigging story that is more closely coupled with game play, and creating mechanisms for NPCs to behave in response to player actions in ways that make the played narrative a richer experience.

Finally, Vincent Diamante (composer) and Steve Johnson's (sound designer) talk on Sound and music as narrative in Flower provided an excellent opportunity for considering how narrative writing in games can move through media apart from the written or spoken word. They basically did a play through of much of the game talking about the sound design process as they went. It was totally awesome and made me want to play more of Flower, and to make sure that I'm in a room with surround sound when I do.

All in all, I feel like the games industry is at the edge of taking a huge step in terms of narrative and writing in games. That said, it strikes me that writers in the industry need to figure out ways to more effectively communicate the collaborative practices that make game narrative uniquely powerful when they do work. Another way to think about it might be: Where are the holes in game design that traditional writing fills effectively, and what are the parts of games as designed experiences where traditional narrative just gets in the way of the played narrative. Finally, I do have to acknowledge that there are books out there on writing for games and I haven't read any of them. I might be traversing well trodden territory on some of this stuff. I'll get around to my due diligence on it sooner rather than later, but I do have a dissertation to write too.