How much do you find you have to strike the balance between people who can turn a clever phrase, or who understand the demands of actual interactive narrative? Presumably you have to hire people who don't come right out of the gate with both of those skills fully developed.

DE: No, I've never run into it -- if you're out there, call me.

(laughter)

DE: What I found in my experience so far training BioWare writers is that if you are a writer who loves interactive fiction [and] you understand what it means to write dialogue and story and plot and pacing, and you love our games, then I can train you in the basics of game design that you need to know to make it work.

If you do not love interactive fiction, then what I always say is, "Would you hire a screenwriter who had never seen a movie?" Absolutely not! You cannot teach people an entire form.

We are as different from a game that is just a series of cutscenes as we are from a book, as a screenplay is from a play. These are totally different art forms. In the same way, I actually can't take a very experienced designer, and teach them to be a writer. It's a very different craft.

What we do is probably about half game design -- and I don't mean BioWare in general, I mean the writers themselves. But, it's junior game design, if that makes sense. Mainly, it's just understanding how it all works, so when we put it down in the world, it makes sense and it has the right pacing.

So, because what you need to be is an expert writer and a junior-level game designer, I look for the one with the passion for the actual format, and then we train up for the other [half].

How long has BioWare actually had its defined three-month training program for writers?

DE: One of the things James [Ohlen] has talked about is how disciplined our writing staff had to be. It used to be a little bit more casual. It's something we've developed a lot in the last four years or so. We run in a very systematic way. Again, coming from the magazine experience, I run a very editor‑in‑chief-impelled sort of writing staff.

One of the things that is very important, if you've got a dozen or more people writing in a project, is that a player cannot move from one space to another, and realize he's changed writers.

So, not only do writers all have to be trained the same way, but then I see every piece of content, every single piece of content at every single stage, and make sure that we're all keeping to a voice and a tone, the same way a good magazine editor would.

LucasArts/BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic

To that end, do writers sort of end up slotting into particular class roles, where this guy is much more likely to write for the Jedi because he's developed that voice? 

DE: That is absolutely the case. People have different specialties as well. Some people are extremely good with funny. Some people are extremely good with a particular class note. Some people are born to write the Sith. And some people aren't.

When you go back to the magazine analogy, very rarely would you grab the fashion writer and ask them to go ahead and cover the sports game.

On the note of MMO design versus single-player RPGs, do you consciously hire people from both avenues? You're talking about the game, in terms of communicating the story, drawing more from the single‑player tradition.

DE: Well, we can't really draw from the MMO tradition to communicate the story.

Fair enough.

DE: Right. But how we're communicating and approaching everything else very much does draw from the MMO tradition, the notable exception possibly being the visceral nature of combat, which is something that we always talk about. Our lead combat designer is Damion Schubert, who does a lot of talks at GDC, and that sort of thing.

Very often, we talk about the fact that you shouldn't be comparing us to MMO combat. You should be comparing us to game combat. There are a lot of excuses for it, but there's no reason that combat should not be big and exciting and look like Star Wars. Outside of that, though, we play a lot of MMOs, and we love a lot of MMOs.

So, MMOs have managed to do the other three pillars of RPGs very successfully in big, expansive worlds. We learn a lot of that from that stuff. And the story stuff, we learn from what they've done, and then we bring a whole lot of the experience of what we've done.