Storytellersunplugged

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