Tag Archive for 'Writing'

Ziff Davis Sells 1UP, Shuts Down ‘EGM’

Published
on January 8, 2009
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After twenty years Electronic Gaming Monthly is closing its doors, and the January 2009 issue will be its last.

In the long rumored buyout, Ziff Davis Media sold its 1UP Digital Network to UGO Entertainment and shut down EGM, its last remaining print publication after Games For Windows magazine, the rebirth of Computer Gaming World, ended last April.

At least 30 Ziff Davis staff members were laid off, and everyone else now works exclusively for the online network, which includes 1UP.com, MyCheats.com, GameVideos.com and GameTab.com. The 1UP video podcast is terminated, and the state of the other podcasts is unknown.

That’s the news story, and here’s what it means: the games industry just lost one of the last refuges of intelligent, professional writers and editors.

Of course, this was a long time coming. Gaming journalism, especially print journalism, had a lot of problems. One was the generally greater degree of tech saavy among gamers, or at least gamers who care enough about the industry to read news. Those took to the Internet, where content came immediately and was easy to find, rather than to the magazine rack.

Another problem was with the magazines themselves. Game journalists had buddied up with gaming companies to ensure they got exclusive news, which meant that previews were sycophantic and unreliable, and journalists often bailed for jobs at game developers and publishers.

Game magazines bled to death, losing readers to the Web and writers to game companies and online publications, which are now the only option for news.

Web content versus print publication is a big issue among journalists. Web writers usually spend less time per story, since immediacy and volume are more important than detail. They have less time than their print counterparts to nitpick details, do serious investigative reporting, and write articles that matter and have a point and a literary voice.

All that matters online is getting an article up on the feed and moving to the next one. If its a rewrite of the press release without any additional information, so be it. Timeliness is all that matters for most blurbs, not care or message.

I first read EGM in 2000 not long after they hit the 100 issue mark. It had Unreal Tournament on the cover, and inside a Majora’s Mask review, funny letters, cosplay pictures, and a feature on games that were canceled en development. I loved it, and I’ve taken the thumb to every issue since.

I’ll miss the magazine’s professional insights, its wit and candor, its humor. I’ll miss reading news that has a distinct voice, and reviews that I can trust since they come from people who have been in the industry for ages and who I have agreed with in the past. Some of that is available online, but most is lost in the dash to the finish of online journalism.

Congratulations NaNoWriMo Winners

Published
on November 30, 2008
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Congratulations to everyone who cleared their schedule this November to participate in National Novel Writing Month. It’s a great way for aspiring writers to challenge their ability and pump out a good work-in-progress at the same time.

I managed to finish my science fiction novel this weekend after doing 10,000 words in two days.

For those unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, the contest is held every year and charges participants with writing a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. Be sure to sign up for next year if you’re interested in participating.

Now to get back to pumpkin pie and what’s turning out to be the best season for gaming on record.

Game Writers Need Recognition and Gaming Skills

Published
on October 18, 2008
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Game writer Lee Sheldon demands more respect for his profession, in a column for GameCareerGuide.com. He says that writers are currently misused in the production process, and that their role and the skills necessary are misunderstood by developers.

“Game studios still have a very limited idea of what writing a game means, or how writers can be used in games, and as a result rarely hire writers on staff or utilize contract writers to their fullest potential,” wrote Sheldon. “Many programs professing to train students for careers in game development share this mindset; therefore they provide limited to no training in writing for games.”

Sheldon has been involved in the industry for 15 years as a designer and writer, and for the last two years he has taught game writing at Indiana University. In his op-ed piece he addresses 10 points on why we have yet to see a prominent place for storytelling and writing in games, including the argument that games cannot balance interactivity and classical, linear storytelling.

“Non-linear stories can be found everywhere. Linear games are everywhere (and are often accused of being linear because they tell stories),” he wrote. “And boy do we need to get beyond the archaic notion that the only solution to game writing is branching.”

To succeed as a medium, games need dedicated and involved writers who understand gaming and are willing to try new things. “While writers from other media may be able to acquire it and do good work in games,” Sheldon said, “they must first understand there is a fundamental difference in writing for our medium.”

Writer James Parker adds to Sheldon’s discussion in a reply on his own blog. While a deeply involved writer can elevate a game to art, says Parker, “it isn’t the be-all and end-all of game writing.”

“There are still plenty of games that would benefit hugely from having a talented writer on board that aren’t setting out to appeal to the always vocal ‘games as art’ crowd,” he continues. “The commentary for EA’s Euro 2008 is excellent — it’s a great piece of writing, and more than that, it’s a tremendous piece of design, but what it clearly isn’t is a piece of story telling.”

“More games needs writers just to make their characters less one-dimensional, to add humor… to flesh out experiences for the player and to add realism in how the game communicates with the player.”

Authorial Control in MMOs, and How Players Can Change the World

Published
on October 12, 2008
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I’ve written a little about authorial control on this blog, but never addressed how interactive storytelling can apply to the phenomenally popular, naturally static worlds of massively multiplayer online games. A blog post by Snipehunter on Dopass.com poses a question popular among players: How can MMO developers deliver control to players?

It’s impossible for a player to be immersed in a world where independent choice and exploration are untenable, writes Snipehunter, the alias of a game designer with experience on the MMO Auto Assault. To create the “illusion of reality,” MMOs need to give authorial control to the players.

The PvE aspects of World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, and Auto Assault, Snipehunter takes note, are “basically a linear game… You’re guided, some might cynically say ‘by the nose,’ the whole way, with no encouragement (and in some cases active discouragement) to explore or make your own choices, along the way. For some players, I think, this amounts to having the game ‘happen to them’ instead of ‘making it happen.’”

In his blog post, Snipehunter reminisces on the more open world of Ultima Online. “I didn’t ask the game for a to-do list of chores,” he wrote.

“Instead, I decided for myself what my goals would me. ‘I’m going to get a boat’ or ‘I want to explore Avatar Isle’ were, in essence, the quests I wrote for myself. I went to that world specifically to be able to make those kinds of choices; to write my own experience as an adventurer in that world. I decided what my role and level of impact in the world was.”

Snipehunter said that this is the experience MMO players want when they ask for control. “Hand written quests and hand authored raids and events are a huge boon for MMOs,” he concluded. “They allow the skills of good writers and good designers to be leveraged to provide heroic experiences you can’t get in an open, true virtual world.”

As it stands, players can take the initiative to set up events like this, but there are no in-game tools to support the crowd of players looking for a role-playing experience. Interactive storytelling is about involving the player in the process of creating and populating a world, and Snipehunter’s idea, albeit simple, is a very good start.

AGDC: Sterling’s Keynote Address Calls For Creativity

Published
on September 16, 2008
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The Austin Game Developer’s Conference kicked off today with a future-thinking keynote address by author Bruce Sterling that urged creative, iconoclastic approaches to game design.

Sterling’s credentials as a writer of science fiction and one of the prime movers behind the cyberpunk genre lent themselves to his unusual speech, where he posed as a student of his 89-year-old self who had traveled back in time from 2043 to tell us where gaming was headed.

After showing off his nanotechnology and General Electric Pocket Mediator, Sterling described an intensely dystopian future for the video gaming industry, run by money, for money, and with no potential for risky ingenuity or real creative development among the factories of nameless developers. Games in 2043 are trite and consumer friendly with simple, boring gameplay lodged in the real world.

To prevent this future, said Sterling, the industry needs “creative disruption, radical innovations, provocative cultural change.”

Sterling called for visionaries, revolutionaries and auteurs from among the developers gathered in Austin. “This is your great struggle, and that is what you face,” he said. “That is what you owe to your predecessors and those who will come after you. You’ve got your place in the great parade and it’s all yours.”

Look forward to more news from the Austin GDC as it pertains to creative storytelling in games.

The Archetypal Hero in Video Games

Published
on September 13, 2008
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All of human literature, fiction and myth can be reduced to two archetypal plots: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. These basic formula are even more true of role-playing games, where the story must leave room for a main character who is controlled and sometimes even created by an unpredictable player.

The interactive aspect is what set video games apart from other media. In a traditional story, authorial control over a character’s disposition and history is absolute. Games follow the same structures and conventions of plot.

The most significant impact of these binary plots on gameplay is a reduction in the degree of creativity the player can exert over the protagonist, especially that character’s past. The man who goes on a journey must come from somewhere defined by the game’s creator; the stranger who comes to town is liberated from an established history, transferring responsibility for creating history from author to player.

Man goes on a journey

Scholar Joseph Campbell wrote extensively on the hero’s journey, that fateful series of events that drew mythic and modern heroes like Odysseus, Conan the Barbarian, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker to epic adventure. The journey begins with the hero’s call, sometimes refused, and the crossing of the threshold. Guided by mentors like Obi-Wan and Merlin, he overcomes a series of trials, receives a boon, and returns home with boon in hand.

Because they must have a home from which they set out, these characters often have pre-established backgrounds that fit into the plot. Link starts The Ocarina of Time as a normal kid in Kokiri Forest, and Crono’s mom wakes him up so he can cruise the Millennial Fair in Chrono Trigger. In games where the player can choose the hero’s race, gender, and appearance, he becomes an orphan (Jade Empire) or an amnesiac (Knights of the Old Republic).

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Warren Spector Sees Shorter, Creative Games in Industry’s Future

Published
on June 18, 2008
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“100 hour games are on the way out,” said Warren Spector at last week’s Game Education Summit, reports Gamasutra.

How many of you have finished GTA?” asked Spector, of Wing Commander, System Shock, and Deus Ex fame. “Two percent, probably. If we’re spending $100 million on a game, we want you to see the last level!”

Spector and Mark Meyers of Disney Interactive were keynote speakers at the summit and discussed changes in the industry and the new role of game education programs in entering it.

“Up until five years ago most people got into the game industry by accident,” commented Myers, who began working as an engineer.

The game industry is growing up, getting more high tech with top-notch facilities and training programs replacing ramshackle buildings and self-trained amateurs. Both speakers grew up alongside the ever-enlarging business.

“Building a game is as complex as making as a Hollywood movie,” said Spector. “Do we have the right people and how do we harness creativity without crushing it?

“We are in a business that is both software engineer and entertainment, and we have to balance it,” Spector continued. “It used to be that you could trade off gameplay for graphics, but you can’t do that anymore.”

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BioWare Writers Discuss Their Craft

Published
on April 20, 2008
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BioWare writers Mike Laidlaw and Drew Karpyshyn discussed dialog, working with user-created characters, and world-building in an interesting interview with CVG.

“Getting to the same level of quality as film is good,” says Laidlaw, “but just trying to make a film isn’t the right direction. Interactivity gives us something no other medium has.”

Karpyshyn agrees: “We’re finding that the technology is finally reaching the point where it’s starting to feel very realistic - we can actually have interactive conversation where you talk with people rather than them just talking at you.

“I like to use the analogy that we’re at the point where Hollywood was in the early ’30s where they’re just starting to add sound, they’re starting to get the technology locked in place. It’s all about our skill set, coming up with our own conventions, our own language of telling stories, something film has developed over the last century.”

Not surprisingly, writing an open-ended narrative is extremely tough. “Fortunately at BioWare,” said Karpyshyn, “we’ve kinda got used to it, but that’s why it requires a full team of four or five writers for one of our games.”

There’s a lot of fascinating tidbits in here. The BioWare writers reveal how they create characters, from the protagonists to the quirky barkeep, and how they develop their appearance alongside their dialog.

One of the most interesting things they reveal is that the team spent nine months planning out the details of the “Mass Effect” galaxy before deciding on characters or plot. Hopefully that means the sequel will get here sooner.

Designer Adam Maxwell Sees ‘No Places For Writers In Our Industry’

Published
on March 20, 2008
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“Auto Assault” creator Adam Maxwell said that game writers are irrelevant next to designers in an editorial on Gamasutra.

“Writers do not dictate the way players interact with the world, nor do they dictate the way the player experiences the content that they themselves may create. These are the responsibilities of the game designer,” he wrote.

“Even when the writer has written the dialogue, decided the plot, created every character and conceptualized every setting,” it’s the designer who puts the world together, said Maxwell. “When it comes to playing the game, to interacting with the world presented within, a writer has no real power.”

This is in stark contrast to Denis Dyack’s opinions. Dyack devotes a while section of his “Too Human” team to content. Rather than releasing writers after the plot is set, as Maxwell proposes, Dyack has them work closely with the designers to ensure that their concept of the world is implemented and that art and gameplay supplement the plot.

Maxwell is ignoring the spirit of cooperative enterprise that makes games great.

He compares games to Hollywood, and agrees with Roger Ebert that “authorial control is not something native to video games.” Do directors have absolute authorial control? Absolutely not. Films are a team effort, produced with the work of hundreds of people on and off the screen. The director doesn’t turn actors and lighting engineers into puppets, but allows their creative input to become a part of the final piece.

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Story Essential to Denis Dyack’s ‘Too Human’

Published
on March 16, 2008
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Silicon Knights’ Denis Dyack discussed the importance of story in making games in part one of an interview with 1UP’s wunderkind Philip Kollar.

Dyack founded Silicon Knights and is currently working on “Too Human.” He participated in a “Future of Story in Game Design” panel at the Game Developer’s Conference last month.

In the 1UP interview, Dyack adds to the issues raised at the panel, commenting on the future of story in specific genres of games, but the most interesting part of the discussion has to do with Dyack’s own studio.

Silicon Knights has a dedicated story, or content, department rather than a few writers. “It’s all based around this thing we call engagement theory, which is written like a formula: ‘engagement = story + technology + gameplay + artwork + audio.’” Each of those five components has its own director and department.

“We’re always evolving the content. Don’t think the content department does just story, either,” said Dyack, adding that the content team also works on in-game cinematography and on building tension through level design. “Whatever it takes to tell the story in the game, that group concentrates on, and they are busy from beginning to end just like all the other departments.”

Dyack is involving story in every aspect of game design for “Too Human.” I can’t wait to see what this approach yields when the game is finally released (still TBA).

Edit, March 18, 2008: Part two of the 1UP interview with Dyack is up. Dyack and Kollar talk about how games compare to other mediums. “When it comes to our fiction and the types of content we create, there’s no reason we can’t aspire to Shakespeare,” said Dyack.