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 Features
Book Excerpt and Review - Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames
 Writer and Programmer
The writer has no choice but to work within the constraints of the game’s capabilities. Anyone who writes scenes that cannot be supported in the game’s engine will rapidly find themselves in conflict with the programming team. Writers who have a good relationship with the programming team (or teams) can discuss the story’s needs versus the rigors of the technology, communicating what the needs of the narrative might be and, in return, gaining useful and practical knowledge of the boundaries within which the story must be developed.
Additionally, the writer needs to produce work in a form that is easy for the programmers to deal with. This means writing text blocks that fit within their on-screen fields, producing deliverables on time for localization, making sure dialogue can be produced within a logical file naming system, and more. It is the programmers’ technology that ultimately presents the writer’s work to the world. As such, programmers must communicate how the writers’ content is to be presented while the writer must understand how to present his work and do so accordingly.
Writer and Artist
Writing and visual art have relatively sparse interaction, intersecting most frequently in specific instances such as character design, in-game artifact manufacture, and cut scenes. Both are creative disciplines, and the key to the writer’s interaction with artists is communication. The better the communication of the needs of the story, scene, or character to the artists, the more likely the end result will match what was originally envisioned (and also what is required by the needs of the game-play or narrative). At the same time, the writer needs to remain open to the artists’ creativity, and incorporate worthwhile new elements that the artists generate into the story, character design, and other written aspects of the game.
There is much to be said for allowing the writer to adjust the game script after the artist has rendered the scenes. Not every game schedule affords such luxury— sometimes the dialogue must be recorded early for reasons as varied as synchronization with cut scenes to limited availability of specific voice actors (often an issue in games licensed from TV or film).
THE PRAGMATICS OF GAME WRITING
The writer, encouraged by the design, can put literally anything on the page—armadas of cloud galleons, katana-wielding robot ninjas with 16 arms apiece, cute little kids that don’t immediately send hard-core gamers screaming into the night. All of these are possible in the imagination and with the written word. When these ideas meet the practical limitations of the game’s physics engine, however, they can become problematic.
For example, the animation system used for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six (Red Storm, 1998) was predicated entirely on character skeletons with two arms, two legs, and an upright stance. That meant, among other things, no dogs. No policemen on horses. The only characters available were people. This automatically created certain restrictions on the writing for the game, and had repercussions that echoed down multiple levels of decision making. So it goes for literally everything a game engine can or cannot do—it empowers or restricts the writing, and the writer must learn what the boundaries are, help establish them if possible, and ultimately learn to work within them.
This leads to the obvious and recurring game development question: “Can it be done?” This can mean many different things. Can the engine support it? Are there enough models to produce the crowd scene? Do we have enough time to render it out properly? Do we have enough money to afford the production time on all the assets this will require? All these questions and more need to be taken into account by the writer. The first draft can sometimes shoot for the moon, but subsequent drafts need to be trimmed and adjusted based on what the game, the team, and the budget can do.
Often this means scaling back to achievable aims and getting a good estimate of what can and cannot be done before the first word gets written. A producer who allows a writer to script completely undoable cut scenes is doing no one any favors. The writers’ time is wasted and so is the money paid them for the useless draft. The artists creating the assets need to wait longer to receive the materials they’ll be working from, crunching their deadlines. The engineers are forced to go through the script, hacking out bits that are suddenly revealed as unattainable, potentially creating hard feelings. Scaling the writing to the capabilities of the team from the get-go makes more sense and allows the writer to focus more tightly on the task at hand. All the resource limitations—time, money, and technical—need to be explored and laid out as soon as possible to provide the greatest benefit to the entire team.
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