The Fine Art of Video Game Writing

February 23, 2008 · Filed Under General, Musings, Gaming, Marketing

During the Game Developers Conference or GDC 2008, which is currently ongoing (Feb 18 - 22, 2008) at San Francisco, producer and editorial director for Vicarious Visions, Evan Skolnick gave a tutorial/talk on Effective Game Writing.

At this lecture, he gave practical tips on developing story and cited specific examples as well as comparing writing for video games to film writing.

Skolnick said that “”For every medium there are conventions, challenges and pitfalls… new conventions, traps to avoid. Games have them, of course. In my opinion 80% of good game writing is just good writing. That last 20% can be difficult to solve. When you go to the rest of the talks on writing, they’ll be [focused on that last 20%]. It’s challenging, there are lots of pitfalls with game writing, such as authorial intent versus player agency…”

Before launching into his discussion proper, Skolnick offered this advice: “Video games are a product where the buyer didn’t buy to read something — they may not even want a story. You have to accept certain realities when writing in this business. You’re not the next Hemingway, but even if you are, this isn’t the place to show it. Your job is to write tight, efficient, serviceable story content. You are not the main attraction.

“The first thing to decide is, how much story does your game actually need?” Adapting an idea from Ernest Adams and Andrew Rolling’s On Game Design, he suggested this continuum:

No story
Puzzle games
Strategy games
First person shooters
Action/platforming games
RPGs
Story-based gameplay

“The amount of story content you put in is generally how much the player will tolerate, and if you break those expectations, you do that at your peril.”

Via Gamasutra

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Comments

One Response to “The Fine Art of Video Game Writing”

SniperAngel on February 23rd, 2008 7:21 pm

Great article GM T. So gameplay and storyflow should interrelate to produce a good game. I’ve been dreaming of producing my own game [even short based games] and this game good points about it.

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