Writing in a Team - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 78

members focus on “their� projects. Teammates, no matter how good their intentions,
often end up putting less time into helping others, because their own projects take
priority. If you own a project but are unable to enlist your teammates because they
are busy with their projects, you are at fault. After all, you are held accountable for
the outcome of your project, not they.
With a mastery of these three models of collaboration, a game writer should be
able to integrate into any writing team or organization. Writers may also be called
upon to use these tools when working with the rest of the development team. While
writers share a common understanding of the writing process, both developers and
writers often suffer from ignorance on how the other half works. How, then, can you
as a writer successfully work with the rest of the development team?
8.8 First-Person Perspective: Working with the
Development Team
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.� So
said Tolstoy in Anna Karenina . I hope he might allow me to invert that when I rather
less succinctly say the following. Every development team and every project has its
own unique relationship with its writer or writers, and when things are working,
chances are they're working in their own particular way—a testimony to all the indi-
viduals and all the processes that form that particular “family.� But when they're not
working, the reason is invariably the same thing.
Aretha Franklin summed it up in one word in 1967: R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
With the industry still growing up and interactive narrative still in its infancy, the
place of writers in a development team is often under dispute. There are people in
studios who still remember when they got to do all the fun stuff like dialog and nam-
ing characters and trying their hand at storytelling, and they got to do it as a treat,
a reward for all their hard work designing, doing art, programming, or producing.
It can be hard for these people to take kindly to seeing a freelancer unconnected to
the project for the first months of development walking through the studio to take a
meeting with a view to being hired. Who are you? And what happened to the good
old days? You can feel the thoughts being pumped round the semi-silence of each
air-conditioned office. And in any case, how hard can it be to write? Everyone's seen
movies and everyone can write, right?
As a game writer, sooner or later you'll meet coworkers from other disciplines
who take a less than enlightened view on your value to the industry—or at least their
project. These are the “stories are anti-game-matter� fraternity, the people who take
the view that stories and gameplay are fundamentally opposed and anywhere you
have story is a place where gameplay can't be, and vice versa. Games are for gameplay
and stories belong elsewhere.
This is clearly a huge issue in its own right. However, let me say here that every
game has its own particular story requirements—ranging from nothing at all at one
end of the spectrum to it being fundamental at the other. The trick is to be clear