And the bigger gaming gets as an industry, the more we’ ll see this happening. High-definition systems that require surround sound and teams of dozens, if not hundreds, of people are only going to make this worse. If you control the purse strings, do you want someone designing a new gun, or the dialogue? Guess which one will most affect your sales?
Fortunately, it’ s not quite a lost cause. There are a few ways that the industry can make things right.
Bring writers in earlier
This is easy and not even that expensive. As development budgets increase, it will get even be easier to“ sneak” a writer in than it was when people tried to release games for the smallest initial investment. If you have a strong, able writer involved in your game from day one to shipping, you stand a better-than-average shot at having something that feels cohesive than if you bring in a writer a few months before launch.
Unfortunately, most developers don’ t think that way, believing that you can drop a writer in at the end of a project and everything will turn out just fine. it doesn’ t, and the end result is something akin to putting Neal Stephenson to work writing classified ad copy for your local alternative weekly newspaper.
While the design team can come up with basic concepts and even a bare-bones story for the game, having a writer there from the first day on would be a huge benefit to most games. Think of the writer as a filter:( s) he can look at everything from character design to building structure and figure out how it fits with the theme and message of the game. Having a strong character sketch for each person in the game would also help artists work on things that are more meaningful than what kind of armour they will wear. Having strong dialogue from the jump would allow cut-scenes and cinematics to be more easily directed and to have more impact.
You can make a game world based on a dry design document, David Cage
but having the story, character, and even plot done ahead of time will allow everyone to do actual world building and infuse the experience with life and colour instead of simply making“ dystopian future earth # 294.” In the best-case scenario, the art should inspire the writer to do better work, which then inspires better artwork and assets. It should be a circular give-andtake between the team throughout production, and the only way that’ s possible is by having a writer involved as early as possible. Bringing a writer onto a team and giving them a week to do the job will just give us more of what we’ re stuck with now: stories shoe-horned into games that weren’ t built for them.
The auteur approach
One of the harder ways to handle game writing— and by extension game design— is to have one central personality who drives the entire project. This can be tough simply because it takes a lot of time to have the level of experience needed to step into that sort of role, and of course someone with money must trust you before they hand over the reins to your own game. David Cage, the writer and director of Indigo Prophecy, talks about the difficulty of having such control:
Working on an original project is both the worst curse and the most exciting thing that can happen in this industry. It’ s a curse because you go through periods of terrifying doubt. For two years you abandon all notions of a private life and forgo many hours of sleep because you are permanently looking for the right path, being
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