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 Features
Book Excerpt and Review - Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames
 WHAT MAKES GAME WRITING UNIQUE?
Videogame writing is unlike any other form of writing. There is some relation to screenplay writing, some relation to writing fiction, some technical writing, and other elements both diverse and esoteric. Furthermore, the expectations of what will be delivered in a videogame script change more rapidly than in other media, because of changes originating in advanced technology and corresponding changes in audience expectations.
Game writing has very real expectations, limitations, and codes that are unique to the medium. Screenplays, novels, and short stories all present a single path through the material; all are media that are received passively by the reader. Videogames, on the other hand, are all about player choice and action. This is extremely rare in other media.
Tabletop RPGs (whose influence on modern videogames cannot be underestimated) involve player choice, but they’re written to be open experiences, offering plot hooks and possibilities so the players and gamemasters (the player in charge of the narrative and mechanics of the game) can run with the possibilities. The players construct the narrative experience in an ad hoc fashion.
In a videogame, the narrative experience must be completely defined in advance. The players will chart their way through the game, each making their own decisions so that no two players have an identical experience. It is vitally important that game writing takes into account anything and everything the player might decide to do in the world. Videogame writing is a closed system wherein the writing must lead the player to stay within the confines of the anticipated action. Everything in the world is already in the world, and there’s no gamemaster who can insert content or improvise on the fly. This means a videogame script must be both flexible enough to cover the player’s likely actions and sufficiently constrained to be less than infinite in scope.
Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames
There are simple and clear differentiations between game writing and other forms. Traditional scriptwriting involves a single narrative that doesn’t allow for choice or variance. In addition, there’s the question of scale—television dramas run at approximately 44 minutes per show whereas films are generally between 90 minutes and 3 hours. Games risk being pilloried for being too short if they clock in at fewer than 10 hours. The basic structure of scriptwriting may be applicable to game narrative, but it’s not an exact fit.
Fiction writing is just as straightforward, and offers the author the opportunity to change narrative viewpoint without asking the programmers if that feature is available. Fiction also makes the protagonist the center of the action, not the player, and doesn’t have to deal with interactive elements.
Tabletop RPG writing might be the closest to videogame writing, but even then there are major differences. RPGs are about open-ended experience and adjusting things on the fly, whereas videogame writing is a closed experience, focused on keeping the player satisfied with the options and actions available.
That being said, being able to draw on techniques from these types of writing is invaluable, as all of them can and do inform game writing. Writing dialogue and cut scenes is a process that draws heavily on traditional scriptwriting. Establishing setting and creating in-game artifacts, as well as basic storytelling techniques, can be drawn from traditional fiction. And an understanding of writing to support the game experience, not to mention working with mechanical limitations and world building, is a natural derivative of tabletop RPG work. But videogame writing is all of these and none of them, and anyone relying too heavily on another medium’s techniques as a panacea will doubtless run into difficulties sooner or later.
There are some areas of parallel with other media. When film screenwriters write a script, they know that the director, cinematographer, set builders, prop makers, wardrobe, actors, stunt people, and effects personnel will help realize the script. Similarly, when game writers compose a script, they know the producers, concept artists, modelers, animators, programmers, game designers, and voice actors will have to find ways to integrate the script into the game. In many ways, game writing is sometimes geared as much toward ease of implementation as anything else. This means writing to expected length and count, getting across key game information to the player, and making sure the writing matches the design, assets, and implementation possibilities.
Another parallel with other media is the importance of the audience. Games are not the writers’ story; they are the players’ stories. Writers are producing something for the players to inhabit and call their own, which is sometimes difficult to implement. The temptation is always there to take the narrative by the horns and ride it in the direction the writer thinks it should go. Doing so, however, railroads the player and may seriously diminish the game experience—a problematic situation of which some players can be all too keenly aware. Even heavily scripted, linear games such as Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, 2003) place the player experience front and center, using writing to reinforce the notion that the player is the protagonist in the unfolding story and not a spectator.
The expectation in game writing is that the player will firstly be the center of the experience and secondly have a good time. Creating a brilliant narrative wherein the NPCs fight all the big battles and the player watches from the sidelines might defeat this purpose. It makes players simultaneously into audience and voyeur when they signed up for the starring role. Or to put it another way, do you want to play Sly Cooper or his turtle buddy Bentley, sitting back home and watching the action onscreen?
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