Richard Dansky

Earlier this week, Gamasutra – the closest thing to an online industry bible that video game development possesses – listed me as one of the top twenty game writers in the world.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what “top” means, as opposed to “best”, “most notable”, or “most aggressively coiffured”, but I am aware that this is a signal honor, and one that I am both grateful and humble to have received.

There are names on the list who have created the stories for some of the most popular and most highly regarded games ever created. There are names on the list of people who made the games that inspired me when I first got into the industry, the folks whose shipped titles where the required reading of my education in game writing. I’m talking names like Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Psychonauts) and Marc Laidlaw (Half-Life), and I am not ashamed to say that I learned more about how to write for games from playing their work than from any other source. To be listed among them means a great deal.

A look through the list reveals an interesting mélange of writerly types. There are freelancers and in-house types. There are folks who’ve been the sole creative force behind projects and people who orchestrated teams. There are people who take projects from A to Z, and one surprised-looking scribbler who is best known “as being something of a professional ‘fixer’.” In short, no two people on the list have the same job. In many cases, they’re not even close, and that begs the question: what is a game writer, anyway?

Ask me what a game writer is and I honestly can’t tell you. Despite nine years in the business and having worked on more titles than I can generally recall, I don’t have a straight up-and-down definition of “game writer”, and neither, I think, does anyone else. The role varies from studio to studio, project to project, and team to team.

And no, this is not some “pity the poor game writer” elegy. The simple truth is that the nature of the job is fluid. This is in part because the nature of making games is fluid – compare the process used to create a Final Fantasy title with the one behind, say, Diner Dash – and in part because the role of writing within games is evolving as rapidly as it has since the days of text-only adventures and players regularly getting eaten by grues.

What I can tell you, though, is what a game writer does, and that’s write games. More specifically, it’s to do whatever writing a game needs, alone or with other writers and always in conjunction with the rest of the development team, to provide all of the writing the game needs. That can be dialog. That can be story. That can be in-game artifacts or scripts for pre-rendered cinematics or help text or manuals or God knows what else. I’ve written everything on that list and more besides, depending on project requirements.

The other thing I can tell you is that we’ve finally gotten to a point where you can say that you’re a game writer, and people will have a vague idea of what you’re talking about. They won’t assume you’re actually the designer. They’re aware that a game – even a game that doesn’t have twenty thousand lines of dialog – does in fact require writing, and that writing is a real and integral part of a game.

God help me, it almost feels like a real job.

Which, ultimately, brings me back to the Gamasutra list. Having read it back to front, and front to back again, I finally figured out what I liked best about it. No, not the fact that I was on it, though that certainly didn’t hurt. Recognition for the work one has done, when it comes from a source you respect and places you in the company of a great many people whose work you admire, means a great deal.

But what I liked best – and you can call me a Pollyanna, or a sap, or whatever the hell you want to – was the fact that in the debate below the article, there were a whole mess of other names that got proposed as folks whose work made them worthy of consideration for a list like this. (Whether they belong on it or not is not for me to say; I will merely note that I have enjoyed and admired the work of many folks who were not on the list, as well as the writers who were on it.)

That is what the political blogs like to call “having a deep bench”. More specifically, it means that there are a lot of game writers out there whom folks are aware of by name (as opposed to “that guy that wrote the game with the guns”). It means that there are a lot of game writers whose work people think is worthy of being held up for praise, and who by extension are considered praiseworthy practitioners of their craft. In plain English, there’s a lot of us out there. There’s more every day, and we’re getting better at what we do.

A couple of years ago, I did a Storytellers piece on the inaugural Game Writers Conference, now subsumed into the Austin Game Developers’ Conference. I talked about how it was exciting being there at the moment when we all walked into the big room and saw a bunch of other game writers there, how it was a stunningly good feeling to know that we weren’t alone, to find a community. I believe I even said something suitably gloopy about how it felt like the beginning of something that would only get bigger.

Well, it was. It has. Next month, the IGDA Game Writers’ Special Interest Group releases its third collaborative book on game writing, something that would have been unimaginable just a couple of years ago – not because of the concept of a third book on game writing, but rather because there are now more than enough qualified contributors to fill out a book like that. Competition for a spot on the next iteration of that list is just going to get tougher. As someone who selfishly likes seeing his name in lights, I could potentially see that as a bad thing. But as someone who cares about the development of his craft, I can’t help but look forward to it.

One of the consistent excuses given for the quality (or lack thereof) of videogame writing is that we are, and I quote, “a young industry”. While it’s a lovely and convenient excuse for the endless parade of stubble-jawed ex-space marines out for interstellar vengeance that haunt the shelves, it’s hogwash. I know. I write the bloody things for a living[1], and that means playing them – good and bad – as they come along, to see how high the professional bar has been raised[2].

For one thing, there’s plenty of good writing out there, and there has been for years. Doubt me? Go back to the classic Infocom adventure games like Planetfall or Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, twenty-five plus years ago. Check out the King’s Quest adventure game series, or decade-old gems like System Shock or Tim Shafer’s Grim Fandango. Then follow the lineage to today’s titles, games like BioShock or Mass Effect. There’s good writing out there in games, in every genre. What’s more, there always has been.

That’s not to say all of the writing in games is good. Indeed, far from it. Some of it comes from bad writers, some of it comes from competent or even good writers who haven’t wrapped their heads around the unique demands of video games, and some of it even comes from marketing insisting that a focus group in Tuscaloosa has convinced them that the hero of your epic fantasy game needs to be a hard-bitten, stubble-chinned space marine. I’ll be the first one to call out bad game writing when the situation calls for it, because to pretend it isn’t there is to avoid doing what’s needed to rectify the problem. But there’s a bigger issue that depresses the overall quality of game writing, one that I’ll get to in a bit.

And before we dismiss all game writing as bad, it’s worth looking at this in perspective. Are there badly written games? Of course there are. Then again, there are also badly written books, and lots of them. Surely you, Gentle Reader, have read one or two in your time[3]. That certainly doesn’t mean all books are bad, though, just as the presence of the infamous Zero Wing[4] means all video game writing is irredeemable.  But the possibility and the proof of good writing is there, in games as it is in books, and each title deserves to be judged on its own merits.

What people are really getting at when they say “we’re a young industry” is that we are, in fact, an immature industry. That, more than anything, has been damaging to the quality of writing in games, because we’re still figuring out how to do writing in games. Not the words, but rather the process is the question.

Part of the issue is technology. A book is a book is a book – cover, spine, pages – and apart from the invention of the pop-up, the core technology really hasn’t changed much since Gutenberg. We know how to write a book, we know how to put a book together, and we know how to get a book out there. It has, after all, been done before, and the methods for doing so are time-tested and proven.

Video games, on the other hand, change, and change constantly. The technology that comprises them doesn’t stand still, and I’m not just talking consoles here. Successive titles, even on a single, stable platform, will show remarkable technical improvement as the developers learn the ins and outs of the box, and put that knowledge to good use. And use it they do, with consequences for everyone, even game writers.

Doubt me? Then think about this. When you get a better set of facial animations for the characters in your game, the list of things you can do with characters suddenly changes – and so does the necessary writing to go with it, because now you can write sequences focusing on people’s faces when before you couldn’t. Get enough storage space on your disc media to support a fully fleshed out branching campaign, and that’s more and different writing. Able to put more characters onscreen? That’s more and different writing, too, and so it goes from development cycle to development cycle. And because the technology is advancing during the development cycle, the plan for the writing can change from the beginning of the cycle to the middle to the end.

The bigger part of the problem, though, is process, or the lack thereof. While the video game industry is nearly forty years old, in that time we’ve reinvented the way we do games time and time again. We’ve gone from “one guy in his garage” to multi-hundred person teams spread out across multiple continents and reinventing agile development techniques on the fly, but with very few exceptions, we still haven’t figured out where the writing goes in the schedule, and how to give it the love it needs.

Video game development is, in large part a cascading chain of dependencies, which is a nice way of saying that in many cases that the other guy’s got to get done with his stuff before you can take a swing at it. You can’t write the dialogue for level 14 until level 14′s been at least designed, and in many cases built. And you can’t tell if the dialogue you’ve written for level 14 actually works unless you record a version of it, drop it in the game, play it through and see how it plays as part of the larger experience.[5]

In a perfect world with perfect process, this happens, and then the writer has time to do rewrites, re-records, and re-tests, working on things iteratively until it’s as good as it can be (budget and schedule permitting). That’s how we do other game elements, after all. We build levels iteratively, with multiple passes and polish phases and critique sessions. We test gameplay iteratively as well – is that jump too long? Are there too many guys in this encounter? Can we add an objective because it’s over too fast? – much to gameplay’s benefit. We do the same for characters and sound passes, we build them and test them and polish them until we get them right, and we know how to do that.

With the writing, not so much. Because writing is so heavily dependent on other aspects of the game to get nailed down, it’s often not nailed down until very late in the project, when there’s precious little time for iteration. Because voice recording (not to mention studio time and post-production) is so expensive, it’s often not an option to keep going back to the well to re-record as desired. And because game writing is still finding its feet as a game discipline, there isn’t necessarily someone at the higher levels of the project – or of the company – who can fight for the time that the writing needs to get that polish that brings it up to the level of the other elements of the game. So we don’t quite have the proper safeguards and steps in place to give writing the time and institutional support it needs to have a chance to get done right more consistently.

It’s getting better, of course. More and more companies are realizing that good writing helps them make good games. In their own ways, they’re trying to find ways to make that good writing happen, which means finding time in their development cycles for the writing to occur. Some of the steps are slow, some are in the wrong direction, and some are quite frankly, backwards. But they’re steps, and we’re taking them.

Because we’re not young, not any more. We’re just a late bloomer.

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[1] And before you ask, no, I’m not referencing anything in particular, or anything I’ve specifically worked on here. Furthermore, I have never written a game featuring a hard-bitten ex-space marine.

[2] Or, on occasion, lowered.

[3] Or three, or four, or a half-dozen during a particularly heinous vacation to Disneyworld when it rained all weekend and all the hotel gift shop had available was a stack of murder mysteries about a winsome spinster who solved bake-sale poisonings with the aid of her suspiciously intelligent ginger cat, who is named Basil. Not that this ever happened to me, of course

[4] Of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” fame. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, then this probably isn’t the essay for you. Check back tomorrow.

[5] Side note: There are a million ways for game writing to go bad above and beyond the quality of the writing itself. Sound design, voice acting, timing of lines, timing of action sequences – all of these and more can affect how the writing comes across in the actual game in ways the writer can’t control or affect

Imagine, if you will, a movie.

A really dreadful movie.

A movie wherein no cut in the trailer lasts more than three seconds, wherein explosions and car chases and wirework kung fu abound. A movie that doesn’t go more than five minutes in between action sequences, in part to hide the fact that you could fit the plot summary in that apocryphal fly’s navel next to a producer’s heart, all the sincerity in Hollywood, and three medium-sized caroway seeds.

Got a mental picture of that movie? Good. Now take a mental picture of the reviews of that movie, at least the ones that don’t include the word “AWSUM!!!” Five bucks says somewhere in there, you find the following phrase evoked as a perjorative:

“Video game”.

And man, that pisses me off.

“Written like a video game” has become the lazy movie reviewer’s shorthand for “bad and full of things that explode.” If it’s fast, loud, and primarily action-driven, it gets slapped with the “video game” label, generally by a reviewer whose most recent interaction with video games came when he accidentally wrapped the cord on his Intellivision controller around his kid brother’s neck.

OK, maybe that’s being a bit unkind, but the underlying truth is there. Games, and in many cases specifically game writing, are constantly being compared to movies and in every instance dismissed as inferior. As a working game writer, I find this infuriating. Not because I think every line of dialogue I’ve written, every “arrgh” and “yargh” and “He’s up on the roof!” is pure unvarnished gold, but because when I do game writing, I do game writing, and having my work and the work of all of my peers dismissed out of hand on a false premise really gets the old Hulk muscles working.

What’s that, you say? False premise? But surely it’s not a false premise. Games are just…games. Their storylines, characters, and writing can’t hold a candle to movies like The Godfather and The Seventh Seal[1].

Well, no, not when you put it that way, and that’s part of the problem.

As Roger Ebert so famously noted, games aren’t great movies. To this, I can only say “no kidding” (hey, it’s a family blog, or I’d be saying something a hell of a lot more emphatic). Furthermore, I’d like to point out that Copelia makes a lousy NFL highlight film, The Faerie Queene is a piss-poor haiku, and, in the words of Bioware Austin lead writer Daniel Erickson, Citizen Kane is a craptacular ballet. Video games make lousy movies for one very simple reason: They Are Not Movies. Dismissing them for what they are not is illogical, nonsensical, and lazy.

Unconvinced? Let’s look at the basics. Movies generally run between ninety minutes and two and a half hours. They are a passive media, wherein the only audience participation you’re likely to see involves someone drunkenly throwing toast at Tim Curry’s cinematic avatar and doing the Timewarp on cue. They are also rigid in their presentation; what’s filmed and on the reel is what the movie is. For all that the audience at a slasher flick might yell “Don’t go down in the basement!”, if that’s the way it’s filmed, the nubile young babysitter is still going to wander down into the root cellar for her messy appointment in her own personal Samara, and that’s just the way that it goes.

Standard console or PC video games, on the other hand, get pillaged in reviews if they come in under eight hours of gameplay. They are immersive and interactive, with player choice being absolutely meaningful every step of the way. That, after all, is what makes it a game – players making difficult and meaningful choices, and dealing with or being rewarded for having made those choices.

In game design, we call this “hunting the unknown fun,” but that’s neither here nor there. What does matter is that even the most cursory examination reveals that movies are games are two entirely different beasts. Why, then, are games constantly pilloried for not being movies?

Part of it is that movies are seen as being the closest thing to video games, which is, of course, hooey. Part of it is cinema’s cultural dominance as a media form, where by dint of omnipresence, box office and ease of use, it’s become the default media for discussion, the prism through which everything else gets viewed. As a result, everything else suffers by contrast, because movies automatically have the home-field advantage in any comparative discussion.

What that means, though, is that when you’re looking at game writing in that way, you’re trying to fix a busted carburetor with an oil gauge and a cheese grater. Game writing, by definition, needs to take into account the player and his actions. It needs to allow the player to be the protagonist, and to support the immersive experience of play. And it needs to be understood in that context, as part of the gameplay experience, and not as a movie where the player occasionally waggles the joystick once in a while. This has to be understood, otherwise, you’re shortchanging yourself and the game, and neither of you deserves that kind of treatment.

Now bear in mind that I’m not saying that all game writing is brilliant and misunderstood, the fourteen year old emo kid of the artistic world just waiting in the corner for someone to give it a hug. Hell, I’m not even saying most of it is; Sturgeon’s Law holds for game writing as well. God knows I’m sick unto death of hard-bitten space marines and gruff unshaven ex-mercenaries and the third-act reverse where the bad guy captures you and takes away all your hard-earned inventory. Then again, one of the reasons I’m sick of that stuff is because they were movie clichés before they got transplanted into games without any adaptation to the new medium. Or, to put it another way, when the bad guys capture Indiana Jones and go through his pockets onscreen, it doesn’t provoke an angry response from me because I haven’t invested hours and hours of time filling those pockets with stuff that I can on some level consider to be mine. That’s my stuff you’re taking, not Indy’s, without letting me do anything about, and you’re doing it in a medium that’s all about what I can in fact do. That’s where the cracks start to show, the seams in the movie narrative model pasted over immersive gameplay.

Give us your poor and hungry, movies, but your tired we can do without; we’re still in the process of inventing our own tropes and conceits and language of storytelling, and the pure cinema elements plunked down reflexively can sometimes be stumbling blocks in that necessary and ongoing process.

Ultimately, what I am saying is that there’s no way we’re ever going to be able to have a useful discussion about what is good game writing and what isn’t if the default definition of “good game writing” is “like a movie” and the default description for “bad movie” is “like a video game.” You might as well constantly downgrade a burger joint for its failure to serve sushi.

Instead, we need to get to a place where we understand storytelling in games well enough to discuss intelligently and well. We need to figure out what good game writing is within the context of games, and not simply try to cram them into a movie-shaped box. Movies are great…at being movies. Video games aren’t, nor should they be. Deep down, you knew that already.

And that movie we were talking about up top? It’s a movie, and by all accounts, it sounds like it would make a lousy game.

 

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[1] Whether they can hold a candle to Godfather 3 is a question that gets asked a lot less frequently. The logic behind this argument is that video games haven’t matched the crème de la crème of movies in providing a suitably Aristotelian experience, with the comparison then made between the best film has to offer and the middle-to-bottom of gaming’s barrel. I suppose it could be turned on its head easily enough; if anyone wants to compare the writing in Glitter and Good Luck Chuck with, say, that of Grim Fandango or BioShock, I’ll take that action in a heartbeat.