Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
to be doctored. And if there's a game in place, odds are that there are characters,
levels, and suchlike, elements that pin down what a writer has to work with. Even if
your mandate as a script doctor is to tear the whole story down and start again, odds
are you won't be allowed to toss the main character or the game's central concept.
Depending on how far along the other assets are and how close ship date is, you may
even be asked to try to make a narrative out of previously existing assets, putting
them into some kind of logical order.
If that doesn't sound like a boundlessly creative task, that's because it isn't. It's
task-oriented, not necessarily art-oriented, and the most important thing to focus on
is making sure the game gets done.
15.2 The Basics
The most important thing any game script doctor can do is figure out what they're
actually there to do. Going in with a mistaken idea about their mandate, authority,
or permitted scope of change is a recipe for 180-proof disaster. After all, if a new
writer is being brought in, there's a good chance that they're being brought in for a
particular reason. Sometimes that reason is as broad as, “The last guy didn't work
out�; sometimes it's as narrow as, “We need to you take a pass on this to add some
humor to a couple of the characters.� But nobody randomly says, “We need to bring
another writer on now,� without a very good reason, and without knowing what that
reason is, the script doctor is setting himself up for immediate, spectacular failure.
Craft, Not Art
One of the things you have to deal with as a script doctor is recognizing that you're
doing a very different job than the game writer who's on the project from the word
go. You are often there to fix something, to do rewrites, or to plug holes, not to
create art. And while you may perform Herculean feats of prose in the service of
your project, nine times out of nine and a half, that's not going to be on a level
playing field with a game that's had tight story and writing development since its
very beginning. Just getting a game to “decent� from “unlistenable� might be the
work of ages, but nobody outside the development team will know that, nor will
they care. The players care about the end product, not what might have been, and
there are no writing prizes for “best patch job.�
So, instead of focusing on art, script doctors need to focus on craft—plugging
plot holes, getting things done, and making sure all of the game's needs are met. This
is an honorable approach to the work, and has done much to make many games
playable, but it's not the sort of labor that's necessarily going to always be easy on the
ego. That's not to say that script doctors shouldn't try to do the very best work they
can, but the demands they're likely to face—lots of work, short turnaround, existing
assets to be dealt with and incorporated—mean that there's a lot less wiggle room for
creativity and art.
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