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 Features
Book Excerpt and Review - Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames
 IMMERSION
Immersion is arguably the ultimate goal of videogames. Immersion is making players forget that they’re sitting on their couch twiddling joysticks with their thumbs, and instead making them believe they’re mowing down Nazis, leaping from platform to platform over boiling space sludge, or exploring a mansion full of masticating mutants. Good writing can be a vital support for this hoped-for experience.
This means that game writing needs to support the core experience in idiom, word, and phrase. It needs to avoid seams that provide a jagged end to suspension of disbelief, and remain consistent in usage and tone. It also needs to focus on the fact that the game is, after all, a game, and bend all its efforts toward supporting, not overwhelming, the game experience.
The core unique factor of game writing is the role of the audience. The player lives the game much more intensely than most readers “live” the book. The player’s actions have direct and immediately visible consequence, with reward or punishment as a result.
Game writing, then, needs to focus on maximizing the player’s experience and supporting the player’s role as protagonist in the narrative. The best writing in the world is worthless if the player never encounters it. It’s worse than no good if the writing calls attention to itself, instead of the player, or it jerks the player out of the game’s fantasy by disrupting the narrative flow.
Because the audience for the game is actively participating in the narrative flow, the narrative has to be built around the concept of audience buy-in. Players need to be fully committed to the game fantasy, whether that is to win World War II or tackle the ravening orcish hordes with sword in hand. They must also have enough information to make rewarding and appropriate choices in the context of the game world and to use those choices to drive forward through the narrative. In other words, the narrative needs to be constructed with the notion that the player will do, not observe; will act, not listen.
UNIQUE CHALLENGES AND PITFALLS
Because game writing is not quite like any other kind of writing, writers working in this field face unique problems that other writers may never experience. First, some time-honored dramatic and rhetorical techniques have no place in games. These techniques are not inherently bad, but the demands of the gaming experience don’t leave room for them. Stichomythia (single lines are spoken by alternate speakers) might work fabulously in Shakespearean plays, but outside of the Monkey Island series (LucasArts, 1990) there’s precious little use for it in games. As such, the writer must always be asking: “How will this play?” Just because something works in a novel doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate for a player-driven experience. A lengthy, tense conversation fraught with emotional violence is superb in a Harold Pinter drama, but what does the player potentially do during that time? Sit and watch? Press buttons to skip the voice-over and just read the text? Let the whole thing play out and go get a drink? Whatever the players decide to do, they are not playing, and that can be deadly to a game.
Each technique, therefore, needs to be reevaluated in terms of what it does for the player and what the player does with it. Just as not every play adapts to a film, not every writing technique is suitable to every media.
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