The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting article that highlights the importance of writing in video games. Video games have notoriously horrible writing and acting in them, and the recognition of the importance of good writers is something that has yet to be addressed in the industry. Obviously, there is a recognition of how important top notch artists are to the success of a game, and in recent years, audio has made it onto producers' radar and as a result, game soundtracks are now being sold in record stores.

Even voice acting has come a long way as games like Grand Theft Auto recruit top-notch Hollywood actors to record their voiceovers resulting in less-wooden dialogue for games. Sports games use professional commentators for their commentary - seemingly every aspect of game development uses dedicated professionals for the task. Except of course, writing.

As the article states, writing is often left to game designers, producers, or even programmers to do as it is not seen as a specialized task worthy of a professional. This misconception comes from the fact that everyone at this level can 'write' (meaning they can string a sentence together). Of course nobody is under the impression that anyone can sit down and write a piece of literature. Or are they?

That brings up an entirely different argument of course, and that's whether or not games are in fact a narrative medium. It's obvious that writing for a game is markedly different than writing a novel or a screenplay. Those media are linear and have defined structures, temporal pacing, and even defined output formats. Games have no such structures.

So, is game writing even the same kind of activity as writing a novel? They clearly share similarities: character development, plot, conflict, resolution, etc. However, in a game, there can be a plurality of each of those, and they can theoretically occur in any sequence. Game writers are faced with having to create an 'interchangeable' story that works in a variety of ways, as well as exploring multiple routes of character development and plot that traditional linear writers don't have to deal with.

Which brings me back to the question: is this even really the same activity? Novels have a thematic element and an authorial vision which makes them cohesive. But in a game, the user is part author of the story, as are the programmers, artists, sound designers, and producers. There may be a 'vision' in there, but it's often not a single person's vision. As the article points out, there's no writer holed up in a cottage banging away on a typewriter to 'write' the latest installment of Halo.

What about Tetris? Is there a narrative to Tetris? Is there a narrative to Super Mario Bros? Obviously there are narrative elements to many games (archetypal stores of rescue and heroism), but if you stripped these away, would the games cease to be? Would they be fundamentally altered? Or could you strip out all the cutscenes and dialogue and still have a fun game to play?

We're delving into an area of study called Ludology (the study of games) now, and these are many of the questions that this discipline asks. Writers obviously have an important role to play in the development of video games, and the involvement of professional writers can definitely elevate the quality of the product that is being released. I suppose that the more interesting questions revolve around whether or not what writers contribute is merely to the presentation of the game, to the surface, or whether they actually bring depth to the medium, if the narratives form an essential part of the gaming experience, or whether they are simply a device that brings us to the next level so that we can get back to shooting things.

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