Please insert coin

Andy Walsh sets out the challenge and opportunities of writing for video games.

Blackpool Pleasure Beach in the seventies. Between clanking rollercoasters, snogging teenagers and the whiff of candyfloss came a new menace to the parental pocket – the neon hurly-swirly of the video arcade. It swallowed pocket money by the piggybankful and from side street parlours and pub corners a leviathan was about to be born. For while Mud have split up and flares faded, the computer game has entered our homes and conservative estimates see the industry behind it at as $19bn a year operation. How’s that for small change?

So, what has this to do with the average wordsmith? Well, home computer games have come full circle and writers are required once more.

The story so far

In the early days of home computing, we were promised that these exciting plastic boxes carried more computing power than was used to land on the moon. True though this maybe, they were short of the power needed to fly us round the galaxy or even to plod us round our ancient past. From Adventure to Douglas Adams’s game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, text based games were king.

Then from the East came the pixelated horde that swept the word from the screen. Graphics had arrived. Games became purely visual, the console and computer were relegated to poster lined bedrooms and kids were seen as the main audience. But the kids have grown up and haven’t stopped playing. Playstation 2 was marketed at 20-35 year olds and this more mature audience brings with it a demand for more sophisticated games.

Now, as games reach a new level, the industry is realising they need to employ professional directors, actors and writers. Enter The Matrix, for example, was written and directed by the Wachowski Brothers, whilst Tom Clancy stands behind a range of games, most notably the hugely successful Splinter Cell series. And they’re not the only ones at it. Because games now eat a vast amount of wordage. From manuals to captions, level briefings, character design, character biogs, ingame dialogue, storylining and level design, the skills of the writer are needed.

Training level

So, how to approach games writing? First off, take your games seriously. Learn the medium and the language. That doesn’t mean you have to become a code monkey (a junior programmer), but you should have a good understanding of what games are out there; of games genre; and of what different platforms can do.

Not all developers understand why they should employ a writer. There are plenty of sofa movie buffs in the industry and some games are developed online by communities who work for free. So, companies need to know that you understand them and that you can bring something extra to the party.

Next, tackle the biggest myth about computer games - that games are non-linear. The majority aren’t. There are non-linear gameplay sections, there is smoke and there are mirrors, but in most games level one is followed by two then three etcetera. The trick is hiding this.

Start new game

In theory, you can do anything in a game. However, every design, physical interaction and animation costs time and money, so the game’s engine (the coding framework that defines the game’s world and its physics) will have limits. Disguising these helps make a better game.

In a script I worked on recently every line of dialogue had to work for any of the twelve characters in the game. This meant that the dialogue couldn’t be time, character or even gender specific. The way round this lay in spotting a variable the programmers had provided for changing names then exploiting this to alter other aspects of the dialogue.

Load game

The amount of work required for a game varies wildly. Some are as short as 100 words, while others (such as X-Files) need a 250 page shooting script.

The adventure game behemoths that stride the internet have vast servers with a virtually limitless storage capacity meaning that hundreds of A.I. characters are capable of interactive conversations. That’s a lot of words that change on a monthly basis.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind for long-term contracts that studios regularly go under, or are taken over meaning that projects are cancelled, postponed or radically altered. You should know this before you sign anything.

Select difficulty

Boiled down, computer games are just another medium. Skills learned elsewhere hold true, but just as a film or radio need to be learned as media, so do games.

So, pull out that joypad, turn up the surround sound and save the world. And the best thing is it counts as research.

Save game

Now the interactive bit. The Guild wants to examine working practice within the games industry and to draw up some guidelines. So, if you have worked on a game, or know someone who has, then please email us to let us know. It’s not just about feedback; we hope to raise the profile of writers within the games industry to help generate more work. Start new game? Certainly. Please insert coin.

This article first appeared in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (Autumn 2004).