wow, my tips on writeing without error are full of errors.

by professionals, I didn't mean in game corporations, I mean people who are very good at what they do. I guess I still have some work to do myself.

Hudaw: wow, my tips on writeing [sic] without error are full of errors... I guess I still have some work to do myself.

Tom: Yes. And you still haven't answered my questions:

1. To whom does a STORY have to be presented? (To whom are you envisioning your readers pitching their stories?)
2. For what purpose do you envision this person presenting his story?
3. Since all the writer has created from your outline is a story (not a game design), why is a team needed? What is the team supposed to do with the story, if they like it?
4. Are you recommending forming a team to make one game, presumably a story-based game?
5. If you recommend forming a team, what business purpose for creating a game are you recommending or envisioning?

Hudaw: ...writing still has to do with the game design process. The writer has to be very active in this process

Tom: Granted.

Hudaw: ...if the writer is the team leader

Tom: Whoa, whoa. That is a HUGE "if." I would not go assuming that many teams are formed with the story writer as team lead. Just the opposite. Usually, someone else is the team lead.

I think you're slightly missing the point. I'm not saying that games are started from story every time. This is to the writers who have ideas that they want to turn into games, things they'd like to see in the plotline. This isn't for game developers all around, it's for the writers.

You're not always going to get a job writing for the game and you can't always write on command. When you have a story and you need the team, the story has to be presented to the concept artists and the modellers who can turn your visions into something tangible.

However, I will attempt to answer your questions

1. As said above, to the concept artists at the very least.
2. You present the story because this is what you will program around. In my eyes, the sngle player of a game should be an interactive story, not just some random movements and gameplay elements with a little bit of story thrown in. This is simply my opinion. People build new game engines for strong stories such as that of Mass Effect
3. The team is needed to build whatever elements the story involves into the game. If it involves large-scale AI control, the team is needed to program that and build an engine to support it or to use one to support it.
4. You don't form a team hoping that you'll only make one game, you hope there will be many more. And there is currently a team that posted on this forum that has to make a small game to make some money to support the creation of the main game, and that's what my team is doing as well.
5. Games aren't always about making money with the eception of the above case. Ever been to addictinggames.com? Case in point. Sometimes, you just want other people to enjoy your creation as much as you do. It's not for everybody, making freeware, but it is for some people. The business purpose of making the game rests soley with the team involved. It is their choice onif theey want to make money. This is of course, granted that they stay within the boundaries of the law.


I hope I've answered your questions.

H. I think you're slightly missing the point.

Then that's because you haven't expressed the point clearly enough in your article. That's what I'm trying to show you. If you write an article to help others, then your article should be clear and actually helpful, without making possibly erroneous assumptions about how the reader will take or use your advice (or allowing the reader to make erroneous assumptions about what it is you're advising).

T1. To whom does a STORY have to be presented? (To whom are you envisioning your readers pitching their stories?)
H1. As said above, to the concept artists at the very least.

Then your article should make that clear to the reader.

T2. For what purpose do you envision this person presenting his story?
H2. You present the story because this is what you will program around.

You're missing the question. Why does a development team need to have a story pitched to them at all, EXCEPT when the team has already been formed to work on a game of known genre, characters, and universe? Are you envisioning this writer (the reader you're trying to teach with your article) pitching a brand new, original story to a development team who is not already planning to work on a game based on the characters and universe embodied by that writer's story? Because that would not be realistic. Not with professionals, and not with amateurs. Both are tough audiences, although for different reasons.

T3. Since all the writer has created from your outline is a story (not a game design), why is a team needed? What is the team supposed to do with the story, if they like it?
H3. The team is needed to build whatever elements the story involves into the game.

You missed the question. Your article makes it sound like anybody who has a new original story idea can write it, pitch it, and get it made into a game (or assumes that that's what the reader wants to do). I think your article should not make it sound that way. I think an article for aspiring game story writers, to be truly helpful, should make it clear that the writer usually is called upon to write story on demand -- about the characters and universe already decided upon by the game development team, unless that team specifically asks the writer to just create whatever the writer wants (which would be highly unusual).

T4. Are you recommending forming a team to make one game, presumably a story-based game?
H4a. You don't form a team hoping that you'll only make one game, you hope there will be many more.

Yes, but substitute the word "plan" for the word "hope."

H4b. And there is currently a team that posted on this forum that has to make a small game to make some money to support the creation of the main game, and that's what my team is doing as well.

But that's an unrealistic foundation. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's unlikely for a team of amateurs to make money from their first game -- it's not a solid business plan. I'm also not saying it's not advisable to try to do it -- I'm just saying that if you're advising people to do the same thing you're doing, you're not necessarily doing them any favors.

T5. If you recommend forming a team, what business purpose for creating a game are you recommending or envisioning?
H5. Games aren't always about making money with the eception [sic] of the above case... Sometimes, you just want other people to enjoy your creation as much as you do. It's not for everybody, making freeware, but it is for some people. The business purpose of making the game rests soley [sic] with the team involved. It is their choice onif theey [sic] want to make money.

Yes. You're starting to see my point. The reader of your article needs to be informed of the pros and cons of pitching and team-forming, otherwise you're not necessarily helping -- OR you could simply delete the stuff about pitching and team-forming, since those are separate subjects entirely from story writing. If you want to give advice on those subjects (not only tips for writing stories), you could write separate articles on them, but in those articles you have to address these basic assumptions of many young people who aspire to get involved in making games.

Thank you for your help on the subject. I will definately take them into account and work on reforming this article.

Sorry about all of my spelling errors. This keyboard has coke and cheetos all over it xD

Quote: Original post by pothb

Quote: Original post by Tom Sloper
If you write an article to help others, then your article should be clear and actually helpful, without making possibly erroneous assumptions about how the reader will take or use your advice (or allowing the reader to make erroneous assumptions about what it is you're advising).

1. Not really, he's writing it for writers, in a forum for writers.
2. Making that assumption isn't a bad thing.
3. It's kind of like complaining that he's teaching how to get an abortion to a room full of "pro-life" people with a sign outside saying that the building or room is for pro life people.

1. So you're saying that articles to help aspiring writers should not be clear and actually helpful, that it's okay to make erroneous assumptions about the reader and to leave the door open for the reader to make erroneous assumptions.
2. I've forgotten what assumption we're talking about here. What assumption isn't bad exactly?
3. Bad analogy. Abortion isn't as fraught with misconceptions as game writing is. It's more emotionally charged (which can lead to narrow thinking), but that's a different thing. If you want to make an analogy, you'll have to make it about a subject that's just as fraught with misconceptions as this one.

Oh look. My first post here in years, and it's a long one. Again.

(Sigh.)

(Deep breath...)

Quote: Original post by pothb — replying to a post by Tom Sloper
We're talking about the assumption of who he's writing to, and that if he should clarify. This article is basically in a place for people interested in game writing so, it is fine if he made the assumption that people who wants to write for games are the ones reading. Like having his article in a book labeled Game Writing or Writing for Games.

Writing for games is most emphatically not the same thing as writing a novel or, indeed, for any linear medium, but the OP appears to believe this is what writing for games is about.

A writer in the games industry does not write stories. They create storytelling assets. Except in a very few, very specific, genres—e.g. the point-and-click adventure games pioneered by Sierra and LucasArts—the two are not the same.


If I may explain...

*

Play = Story - Interactivity. In fact, both are on the same continuum—the same line—with "100% interactive" at one end, which is basically "real life", and "0% interactive" at the other, which is death. (Novels and movies retain some interactivity, with novels a little more interactive than movies as the latter do the job of conjuring up the imagery for you.)

Stories are a human invention. A tool. They were created as a way to reduce the knowledge children had to gather through play. (All mammals play, incidentally. It's not unique to humans. It evolved as a learning tool—something our Victorian ancestors never realised, to our present education systems' detriment.)

The purpose of Story is twofold: firstly, it is the means by which we build and retain many of our mental models of the world around us. The more accurate the story, the more accurate the model. Those models which involve abstract elements—and particularly those which involve time—are heavily reliant on storytelling techniques. (See On Intelligence for more on my basis for this theory. This also underlies many of the rules behind good user interface design.)

Humans created increasingly complex and abstract stories and techniques for telling them as a means of communicating these mental models to each other directly, bypassing the need to rediscover them through fun, but long-winded, play sessions.

You could, for example, learn about fire through playing with it, but the infant mortality rate alone is likely to have been enough to spur the evolution of storytelling as a means to avoid the whole "deep-fried toddler" problem. Farming and all the trappings of civilisation that went with it are, however, increasingly abstract. Stories can use metaphor and similar tools. Play's box of abstractions is more limited.

Play and Story are essentially two sides of the same coin. They're the same thing, just viewed from different angles.

*

A game is a tool with which the user can tell his own story (or stories). There's nothing magical about it, but that distinction is an important one: You should not be writing a linear story in the traditional sense of the term. Games can have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but they don't necessarily have to happen in that order, nor do any of them have to be the same every single time.

Most games do tend to have a single beginning however. Many also prefer a single ending, while the middle part tends to be open to a greater or lesser degree. The game design defines this "plot shape".

A professional writer working on a game will not simply write down an overarching plot and build a single story. That's not the writer's job. The writer's job is to:

1. Create (or refine) a believable, consistent game world, with consistent, believable rules.

The real world can be illogical. Shit just happens. For every successful hero, there's someone who set out to avenge their brutally murdered daughter raging at the heavens after finding his home—with all his carefully organised clues—reduced to smouldering rubble thanks to a gas explosion caused by a badly-installed pipe in the apartment downstairs.

Games (and fiction in general, except for some very specific genres) cannot get away with being illogical—witness the whining and screams of protest when a player is killed in a multiplayer FPS game due to an internet connection issue such as lag—so defining hard and fast, iron-hard, concrete rules is a key process of game design.

2. Create believable, consistent characters the player can identify with.

The latter part is hard. House MD works well on TV because he acts as a catalyst for the characters around him, but such characters rarely work well in games. Players, as a rule, don't identify with a barely human, limping, mentally unhinged arsehole of a diagnostician who's only in it for the glorified crossword puzzles. Fun to watch is not the same as fun to be.

Furthermore, your characters have to be defined not in linear, storytelling form, but provided with full, logical backgrounds which explain their actions and reactions in the game. They also have to be provided with things to say. For myriad potential situations. As there's only a finite number of lines an actor can record, this is challenging in itself if you want to avoid hearing the same lines repeated over and over. (Hence the popularity of war settings, where the limited scope for long, meandering discussions about the philosophies of ancient Greece plays in the game designer's favour.)


3. Create story elements which the player can use to tell his own stories.

Is your FPS game's lead character a hard-bitten soldier who signed up because he wanted to? Perhaps he's an unwilling conscript. A freedom fighter. A terrorist. A criminal trying to escape his past, or find redemption.

(Two of those items are the same thing, viewed from a different perspective.)

These sound like great jumping-off points, but you can't dump the character's background on the player in a single cut-scene. Nor can you assume the player will read the manual—if any—that came with the game. You have to drip-feed the background. And you have to do so without breaking the player's suspension of disbelief.

This is tricky. In a novel, you can get away with long, rambling introspective monologues. But where do you do that in your FPS? You can't have the character narrate his thoughts in-game: if the player is shot, the narration has to stop too. How many times will the player want to hear the same lines while he plays the same level over and over in order to get past that tricky bit?

This is why games have cut-scenes: it gives the player time to get his breath back, but also acts as a point where some serious storytelling can be done. It is also why even single-player campaigns in most games tend to be fundamentally linear: cut-scenes are fixed points in the narrative, and also, as a rule, fixed animations. It's bastard hard to make a cut-scene modify itself to fit any number of game state variables because you then have to record one or more orders of magnitude more dialog, and probably bump up the asset count too.

(This is a very good argument for more research into procedurally-generated content, incidentally.)


Many of the rules of good user interface design also apply to this field. If you're doing your job right, players will create a mental model around their chosen avatar, not just the game itself. It is up to you to ensure that mental model is as accurate as possible. The player should become their avatar in their own mind. Identify with it. So you need that avatar's characterisation to have just enough wiggle-room to let the player bring their own personality aboard.


4. Mesh with the game designer's vision.

The play experience is paramount. Writing plays second fiddle to the game design. Always.

Even if the game designer is you.

NPCs could guide the player. They could bicker with him. They can argue the toss, or chat up members of the opposite sex(es). But they must always be secondary characters: they cannot win the quest, or complete the level on the player's behalf (except in cases where that's the point of the level, for example. And even then, the player has to be the one who works this out!)

This limits your characters. You can have a mentor who teaches your character all the basic moves, but there's a damned good reason why Obi-Wan Kenobi got killed off halfway through the original "Star Wars": if he'd stayed alive, Luke Skywalker would have had very little to do.

And these same rules apply to games too.


5. Polish, refine and hone your work. Be utterly ruthless.

This is expected of you in any medium, but it also meshes in closely with (4) above: every cut-scene you write; every line of dialog you script; every pivotal event or turning point has to be implemented in code, art and audio assets. That shit's expensive, folks. If it's not 100% necessary to the play experience, it must go.

It matters not how well-written your cut-scene, if it doesn't add anything to the game, kill it.

It matters not how cool and bad-ass that mentor character is: if she's getting in the way of the gameplay, she's gone.

This is often one of the hardest parts of writing: coming up with seriously cool dialog sequences or an awesome sidekick, only to have to rip it out because it simply doesn't work in the context of the game.

To be fair, it's not any easier to cut a favourite character when writing in other media either.

*

Finally, if your goal is to create yet another "Find the hidden junk in the ridiculously cluttered house owned by an obsessive-compulsive collector of eclectic junk"-type game, with a thin layer of shoddy, amateurish (and often illiterate) "mystery story" nailed on to disguise the game's blatant contrivances, feel free to ignore all of the above. You won't be the first. Nor will you necessarily fail to sell any copies; the casual games industry has created a relatively ignorant audience, unfamiliar with the potential and possibilities of the medium.

That audience's ignorance is not their fault: everyone is ignorant. You. Me. Tom. All of us. It is simply not possible to know everything about everything. But in this case, the casual games audience is ignorant primarily because we have failed to educate them, and are thus creating yet another market which will dismiss game writing in all games as worthless by default.

That's not to say that there isn't an audience whose primary interest is simply blowing sh*t up, but writers working in the games industry need to aim much higher, and do more.

We need to show our audience that there's more to game writing than "Aliens! Thousands of 'em!", or "Profesor Prune thinks he seen a clue in his laborotory. Go there and see if you can find a tuba, a bald eagle and a wheelbarow." (The typos in that last one are indicative of the insults to basic literacy such games often contain.)

If it wouldn't be acceptable in a novel or movie, it shouldn't be acceptable in a game.

I'm curious as to whether you were arguing my points or supporting them, because you were all over the place with your opinions.

Everything you are about to read is my profound opinion. I do not view it as hard fact:


The writer's job is to write.

I already stated your whole bit about having to cut characters, evens, cutscenes, and the like. Not only that, I never said that one cutscene would dump every possible personality trait on the character.



Keep in mind that I did not say this is a rulebook. This is a guildine to creating a strong story.


Do not say that experience overtakes writing, because the two work hand-in-hand. If one is lax, the chances are that the game will recieve poor ratings on all review websites and in magazines (people visit and read these, respectively) and players will not be interested in completing a single-player mode and will be therefore unmotivated to continue the game because nothing interesting is happening.

The story gives a reason for the player's actions in-game. The experience lends strength to the story. The two must co-exist equally.

Take a game like Mass Effect. Where would the game be without the story? No where. especially given that it's and RPG. But if it didn't have it's unique gameplay to coexist with the story the way it does, I doubt that the game would have sold as much as it did.

Drew Karpshyn wrote the story before BioWare took hold of it. The story began before the game design did. They built a whole new engine around his storyline. And an RPG storyline as massive as Drew's is staggeringly difficult to plot. It's the kind of plot that you cannot conform to a game design concept.

A story these days isn't told to educate, at least not in the sense that many people view the word 'story'. We think something fictional, not real. These stories are told to stimulate the mind into thinking in different ways. RPG games achieve a decision making ability that no other genre can, and that is the only genre in which the player can form his own story, especially in the case of Mass Effect, where you almost never finish the game with the same characters, plot, or abilities unless you try extremely hard.

A writer is supposed to either enlighten, persuade, describe, educate, inform, or entertain. That is the main goal of the writer these days. In game writing, it is almost always the latter.

Granted, you do have some word-game examples, or very well-worked mystery games that teach the user critical thinking skills, but these are not, in reality "stories". They're a series of puzzles, mazes, and guess-work based missions. So while your post has noble intent, I must strongly disagree with a lot of your opinions, though I will not say you are wrong.