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Book Excerpt and Review - Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames

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As a game project progresses, adaptation and revision are unavoidable. Precisely because a game is a team endeavor, writers cannot become too emotionally invested in their work. After all, someone else’s work might force it to change. Writers should be prepared to modify as needed. If a level space simply isn’t working and must be excised from the game, the writer is tasked with providing the narrative glue to close the gap seamlessly. If a feature is unworkable, any dialogue or story hinging on it needs to come out and, if necessary, be replaced. As such, writers needs to be flexible and, at times, staunchly practical, prepared for the parameters that have been established to shift around them. Game development is still an inexact science, and the game will necessarily change throughout its development cycle. Writers need to be prepared to meet these changes and revise their work as a result.

As well as covering for necessary changes caused by the innate friction of the development process, writers need to be prepared to adapt their work for the team. After all, it’s the team that puts the writer’s work onscreen. To do so well, it helps to have the team firmly behind the writer’s content and contributions. This is sometimes termed as getting buy-in from the team and is arguably essential if a project is going to excel rather than achieve adequate results. If the team is excited over the writing, if they think it’s cool or shows off the team’s work to great advantage, they’ll be more excited about what it means for their own work. Conversely, if the team is not buying it, then the end result is often endless argument, resentment, and potentially even less-than-optimal implementation. To get the team’s buy-in is to invite the team into the process. Canvassing ideas from the team, letting the team members see the work in progress, and showing off the cool parts of the writing all go a long way toward getting the team on board. Genuine discussion of team suggestions or concerns also helps tremendously, as the team members are quick to recognize when they’re being humored or ignored. Writers should know that it’s always better to have the team on your side, than against you. Give them reasons to be on your side and continue to provide reasons for them to stay there, and the result can only be an improvement in the final outcome of the development process.

CONCLUSION

Game narrative is infinitely more complicated than it might seem at first, both in its generation and in its execution. Unique in its demands and needs, it requires a combination of collaboration and artistic vision, storytelling technique, and technical awareness. Many of the traditional writing techniques will work for games, but just as many do not, or require significant modification to adapt to a scenario where the player, not the protagonist, is the star of the game.

Game writing is also the place where new ground is being broken in the field of narrative. Whether the fractured narration of Indigo Prophecy (Quantic Dream, 2005), the unreliable narrator—and narration device—of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Silicon Knights, 2002), or the experimental narrative seen in games such as Façade (Procedural Arts, 2005), the opportunities for creativity in game narrative are as breathtaking as the limitations are daunting.

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