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 Features
Book Excerpt and Review - Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames
 THE WRITER AND THE DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Writers do not create videogames. At best, they help shape the vision, provide important elements in game creation, and help to create the assets that make up the game itself. They generally do not program, create levels or character models, wrangle animations, or tag map locations with sound files. Rather, the writer is just one part of the development team—an important part, and one whose contribution should not be undervalued, but a part nonetheless.
In games development, the writer’s role is not to lead the team any more than the writers take the lead in film or TV production. Writers work within the team, using words to craft and support their vision and labors. Writers who put together a story and then expect the rest of the team to implement their grand epic with verve and style are in for a disappointment. Writers who work with the team, crafting a story that takes advantage of the feature set and art assets and shows them off to good effect, are a lot more likely to be pleased with the end result.
Ultimately, writers fulfill multiple roles on game development teams, depending on the demands of the project. Everything from crafting the story to coaching the voice actors during recording sessions can land on a writer’s plate, with the expectation that this role within the team will be picked up and carried forward to meet the project’s needs. The trick, therefore, is to recognize that the writer’s place is as part of the team, not something outside, beside, and certainly neither above nor below it.
Writer and Producer
The producer on a game project is the person in charge of the development process. They are sometimes like a film director, in that they are also the vision-keeper for the project, but more commonly they are facilitators whose task is to ensure that the game is delivered on time and to a professional standard.
The producer is often the writer’s key point of contact, especially if the writer is working externally and therefore not in the same building as the development team. Clear, complete, and frequent communication is absolutely vital. If the producer doesn’t know the writer’s concerns, issues, and potential problems, then these issues can’t be resolved, and the game as a whole can potentially be put at risk.
Writer and Designer
A common misconception is that game writing and game design are the same discipline. Much of this results from the difficulty in expressing the role of the game designer to people outside of the games industry. Whereas the game writer’s role is chiefly to guide, develop, and script the narrative of the game, the game designer’s role is to guide, develop, and document the gameplay—a task that generally requires a diverse set of skills that can range from conceiving or expanding broad concepts at the highest level of abstraction, to wrangling mathematics or applying psychology at the most pragmatic end of a game’s design.
Many games have been written and designed by the same individual; the author of this chapter fulfilled the role of writer-designer for Anne McCaffrey’s Freedom: First Resistance (Red Storm, 2000), and many of the other authors in this volume have similarly served in this unique dual role. The reason for this comparatively common confluence between the role of game writer and that of game designer is in part due to the fact that both roles require one to be a competent wordsmith. Additionally, the vision of the game and of its narrative can be so intertwined that it made sense to have both jobs done by one team member. As projects have grown ever more complex, however, the demands on both design and writing have grown immensely, and it is now generally considered preferable to separate the tasks, not to mention extremely common to employ multiple designers and writers on a single game.
The writer and the designer, then, need to coexist and recognize their respective roles. The designer needs to communicate the vision and proposed design of the game to the writer and offer feedback on the writers’ efforts to make sure they’re congruent with the needs of the game as a whole. The writer needs to contribute to he vision and understand that writing is an aspect of the development process, not necessarily the engine that drives the design.
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