movie in their life, which is Lord of the Rings and Aliens or variations of that,” Levine told MTV News, adding,“ There’ s great things in that, but you need some variety.”
This is one of the biggest problems in game writing. People that want to make games spend much of their time playing games, usually old-school titles that feature mostly subpar writing and a handful of rehashed concepts. But gamers who spend most of their free time playing games are going to be hard-pressed to draw on the wide set of cultural touchstones needed to give your title the resonance and weight that most games lack.
Star War Games
When writers feed into a closed system( their minds) data that comes from an industry that draws from the same four or five influences, the same attitude and set of clichés are going to pop right back out: bullet time and barbarians, force fields and regurgitated dialogue from Star Wars. The game( in terms of story and concepts) come from people who allow themselves to become immersed in different cultures, influences, and writers.
The answer to this problem is easy to say and hard to do, like most things worthwhile. Writers need to get out more, need to read more than science fiction, and need to watch movies that don’ t involve guns. Go watch a good romantic comedy and ask yourself how you could turn it into a game. Look up some Coleridge and ask yourself why“ Kubla Khan” is still an important poem, and what it suggests for the art of gaming.
The more time I spend learning about other kinds of art, the more I feel like I can understand games and the concepts behind them. One example: a few months ago I was standing in the Dalí museum looking at paintings, and I realized that the surrealist was painting gamers before we even knew who we were as a group. Dalí understood that truths sometimes work best when presented indirectly or through the lens of a fantastic vision, and he went about constructing some of the most bizarre and intriguing images of the century. Game designers looking to create alternate worlds of their own could do worse than look to Dalí for guidance.
The wider the influences, the more that a writer can bring to the table. The industry will be better for it.
The money men are against you
Here’ s a more difficult problem. If a game sells well without story or characters, then the money men did their jobs. They cut off spending to an area of a game that wasn’ t needed to get those sales, and that helps the profit margin. From the point of the view of the shareholders this is a good tradeoff, but if we want something approaching humanity or feeling in our games, this is just another case of money strangling us almost as we draw our first breath. Warren Spector has some depressing words for us in this area:“ You don’ t want to know how many projects I’ ve been told to‘ just go make a shooter’. I had one publisher tell me‘ you’ re not allowed to say“ story” any more.”
In other words,“ Get back to work; people just want to blow stuff up!” If you’ re not working on what the publishers know will sell— and that’ s shooters with shallow stories or fighting games with laughable dialogue— you’ re not an efficient member of the team. They want you working on things that they can sell in a screenshot, tell to the press, and put as a bullet point on the back of the box. Deformable environments get coverage in the gaming press; strong story does not. From every objective angle it’ s not a good investment.
The only way I can think to fix this problem is to educate as many gamers as possible and get them to vote with their cash. If games with strong characters and evocative writing start to sell, the right people will notice.
While there are those of us who do care about such things, though, it may be that we’ re the small minority of the game-buying public. It could be that the publishers really are providing the majority what it wants. This may be a depressing picture, but we need to accept that many people won’ t ever view games as art, much as many people only see films as escapist entertainment.
102 | WGSA MAG July 2013