A Herd of Writers? Of Course I’ve Heard of Writers

So no shit, there I was, sitting at a table listening to Marc Laidlaw and Eric Wolpaw from Valve – you know, the guys who wrote stuff like Half-Life and Portal – and they’re on stage and talking about process, and I-

No, no. That’s not it. Try again.

So no shit, there I was, and I’m up on stage with Chris Avellone, and Rhianna Pratchett and Christian Allen and Andy Walsh, and these are, like, serious game people, you know, with enough credits to choke a water buffalo, and they’re going back and forth about the relationship between writers and designers, and then Andy grabs the mike and says into it in his best producer-imitating Voice of Doom – which also happens to feature a fairly dreadful comedy Scots accent – “Fuck story.” And then-

No, that’s not it, either. One more time.

So no shit, there I was, sitting in a bar called The Ginger Man, which for the past couple of years running has been the designated watering hole for the writers’ track at the at the Austin GDC. Well, maybe not sitting – I was more wandering around and bumping into people and nursing a single beer for far longer than it had any right to expect, but you get the idea. And out on the porch I see Jeff Spock, and Armand Constantine, and Evan Skolnick and Jonathan Mintz, and they’re telling war stories about projects survived and recording sessions endured. And inside there’s another crowd of folks, a German game writer named Tobias Heussner and James Portnow and Toiya Finley and a whole mess of other people, students and new writers and old pros, sitting around arguing over the role of narrative in casual games. And there’s Wendy Despain, who can’t take two steps without someone coming up to her and needing to talk to her, and Haris Orkin and Tom Abernathy and of course Susan O’Connor, who got the whole thing rolling lo, these many years ago, and everyone’s talking and laughing and having a good time, and moving from conversation to conversation like it’s one big happy family except that there’s nobody here complaining that Mom likes the other guy’s briefings better or still dealing with familial trauma from the time one of the other game writers accidentally flushed their goldfish down the toilet, and-

And right now, you’re probably thinking “Who the hell are these people he’s namedropping.” Well, either that, or “What the hell happened to Rich’s sense of grammar and ability to construct a complete sentence,” which, to be fair, is an equally valid and important question, and one that does deserve an answer at some point, most likely in an entirely different essay, as in this one I’m on a roll and don’t particularly feel like changing up mid-stream.

But I digress. You don’t know who those writers are. They’re not fiction writers, or at least most of them aren’t. They’re not famous, at least not outside the particular industry they dwell in. Hell, many of them aren’t famous inside the industry. There’s a reason the head of the IGDA Writers’ Special Interest Group – the aforementioned Ms. Despain – and I were joking about making up t-shirts that read “Hell if I know; I’m just the writer”.

So you don’t know them. But you should, and sooner or later you will.

Because something very interesting happened this year at the Writers’ Summit at the Game Developers’ Conference Austin (Formerly the Game Writing Track @ the Austin GDC, formerly the Game Writers’ Conference). This was the year we took for granted that we belonged. This was the year we stopped talking about the basics of game writing, over and over. The year we stopped trying to convince ourselves – because really, who else is at this thing besides us game writing chickens – that story was important, that good writing was important, that integrating your features and your narrative to support each other was important. This was the year we didn’t have to remind each other who Joseph Campbell was or how his stuff worked.

Why? Because we’re past that now. We know that this stuff is important, and real, and that it finally goes without saying. When the gents from Vicarious Visions talk about a four-man narrative design and writing commitment for their latest project, that’s saying that the tide has turned in the initial conversation, that we don’t have to go over the same ground again and again just to hang on to the same toehold that should have been established twenty-five years ago.

That’s why we could talk about process, and collaboration, and technique. That’s why those V.V. guys could spend an hour talking, not about how they characterized The Incredible Hulk – I mean, come on, he’s the Hulk, you don’t have to worry about him quoting Derrida – and instead packed a room with people who wanted to know how they organized their workflow and integrated with game design, how they handled a wide character pool with asset limitations and produced good writing on top of it. It’s how we could talk about how to best get things done, and not why we should be there at all.

It’s a big step, and an important one. It’s part of a change in game writing that, more than ever, puts people in position to do good work. Do more good work, and people will notice. Do more good work, and people just might start to learn your name. And in twenty years, maybe someone will dig up this post and scan the names, and say “holy crap, I can’t believe who was there.”

Why not? We’ve come this far.