Case Against Writers in Game Development

[GameBanshee News]

Gamasutra has a pretty interesting op-ed piece arguing that hiring writers instead of designers for game development in counter-productive.

Now, I’m not going to talk about methodology specifically, but a writer expresses the plot by putting together scenes. Scene A leads to scene B, which leads to the climax in scene C and finally to the resolution in scene D. By placing particular scenes in a particular sequence, the writer’s plot is fed to the reader in such a way as to evoke the emotional response desired by the writer.

This is why the writer’s work is linear -- the writer’s power depends on the sequence of events. It is why a writer’s work is so powerful, at least in static media. It’s also why Roger Ebert thinks games can never be art. In Ebert’s mind, this inherent authorial control is what makes art of other media. I mention Ebert’s opinion because there is one small grain of truth implied by it: This type of authorial control is not something native to video games.

It exists, I don’t deny it, but where it exists it does so because it has been enforced. Special effort has to be made to accommodate it; in the early history of gaming new technologies had to be created to enable it at all, in fact. Video games, abstracted beyond the specifics of any one genre or title, do not require this authorial control to be considered such, do they? Pong is certainly a game, but what about Final Fantasy VII, or Bioshock?

Both are certainly games, but there’s something else there, something that makes what are otherwise two mundane examples of gaming stand out. Their stories. Now, one could make a case for the story making those games better, but if you look at the games themselves, You see games hamstrung repeatedly to allow for storytelling mechanics.

To many, Final Fantasy VII is reviled as the game that introduced us to interminable cinematics, boring exposition dialog and pointless interruptions to the gameplay. Bioshock’s railroaded experience is such because of the story. I don’t think I’d have played Final Fantasy VII without the story, but Bioshock? Done as a sandbox game, I might still be playing it now. Of course, it would all depend on the implementation, but that’s where designers come in.

He has a point that's ignored too often (the difference between games and films/books), but I feel his divide between writer and designer is a bit arbitrary, and implying a writer couldn't learn how to work the game industry's chains at all is a bit elitist.

[fable]

Completely arbitrary. You want at least one games developer in the group working on an RPG who has excellent fictional writing skills. It's as simple as that. Unfortunately, some developers insist that writers are "artists" who will never understand games--which is, I think, at least partially responsible for the endless FedX quests and you're-the-secret-son-of-the-king/god/jedi plots we see all the time.