Interactive Script Formatting - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 13

to make games today, the organizations still have a maverick, rebellious culture.
Everyone thinks they can do this better than the other guys, so they start from
scratch and reinvent as many wheels as possible. Every developer has a different
workflow and a different set of development tools and a different philosophy
about narrative. They all have their own way of dealing with dialog and narrative
planning.
Secondly, the added position of “writer� on these big development teams is fairly
new. Up until about 2002, game designers and programmers did what we today call
narrative design and dialog writing. Many of them didn't have the background in
traditional forms of writing but were very inventive, so they created a system that
worked for them on the particular game they were building at the time. As writers
were hired onto teams and as contractors, they mostly worked in isolation—again,
coming up with their own formats.
Historical and cultural reasons aside, there are two very good reasons for not
having one consistent script format across all games. For one thing, games are still
a young medium. New ways of playing games, new ways of building games, and
new genres of games are still being invented all the time. If we get too hung up on
back-end procedures too soon, we may tie our hands for future innovation. Games
are not novels, they're not screenplays, and they need to develop their own format.
It's going to take us more than a few years to develop best practices.
And possibly the most important reason for not having one consistent format
is that games don't have one consistent format. Consider writing quest dialog for
a role-playing game versus commentary for a sports game. They have different re-
quirements, different delivery methods, and different purposes. They can't effectively
share a common format.
Within the game-development process there are even needs for presenting the
same information in different formats. The programmers need to put dialog text
into games, the animators need to lip-sync the words to the images, and the voiceover
actors need to put feeling and tone into an audio file. All these people need different
things when they're looking at your words, and format can go a long way to bringing
out the best performance and presentation for the game.
2.2 How Format Works in the Real Development World
It's a cliche because it's true. You've got to use the right tool for the job. It's possible
to pound a nail in with a screwdriver, but it's much better to use a hammer—or even
better a pneumatic nailer. The same goes for script formatting. Game developers
today use different formats for doing different jobs.
If you're writing a cutscene or cinematic or scripted event—anything that ends
up being presented to the player in a noninteractive, movie-like fashion is best com-
municated using a movie-like format. This is either the “traditional screenplay� or
“modified screenplay� format. Examples of these formats from real games are in-
cluded in Appendix A.