Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
So how did we get to a point where the writer role for video game de-
velopment is so often overlooked? To understand, we need to go back in-
to the early history of digital game development, when dev teams were
very small. Back then, it was not unheard of for a single person to handle
the entire job: story, design, art, animation, audio, programming,
QA—soup to nuts. Over time, however, advances in hardware specs made
increasingly ambitious titles feasible. Projects increased in scope, teams
got bigger, and specializations slowly began to emerge.
First Art broke off from Programming, then Animation from Art, Design
from Programming, and so forth. The specialization process continues to
this day, with Audio just recently being widely acknowledged as a separate
discipline, rather than a subset of Design.
Narrative is in the early stages of trying to make its own clean break
from Design, but at most studios these waters remain quite murky, and it's
still common to expect game designers to also serve as writers, regardless
of their experience or qualifications in that area. In many places, writing is
seen as just one more item on the long list of responsibilities a designer is
expected to cover.
So what? Everyone can write
. This is the unspoken but widely accepted
misconception that opens the door to poor leadership decisions related to
game narrative. It speaks to a lack of respect for writers and their craft.
Game project leaders would never consider bringing in, say, a novelist to
hop on one of their computers and start designing actual game levels.
However, many of these same managers seem to have no compunction
about doing the reverse—asking a level designer to also write
professional-quality fictional content.
In such a situation, the narrative content that slowly wends its way into
the developing game is likely to be clunky, inconsistent, and amateurish. At
some point, probably too late, it's realized and acknowledged that the
game's story is just not going to be good, and that the game will join the
hundreds before it with subpar storytelling. If anyone even bothers to ask
why, the answer should be obvious.
Amateur writers generally produce amateur writing.
Writer Hired, but Not a Game Writer
There is a common, lazy, and un-researched assumption often heard
(usually from reviewers) when trying to explain why the writing in video
games is so often poor: If only
real
writers—the professional writers who
