These days, I’m watching more TV and playing less MMOGs. TV is more interesting than MMOGs.

I guess I straddle a line there. I think it should have both a story effect AND a game effect.

At the beginning of the game, everyone should have to pick a god, in the example. If you worship a god that is in opposition to the one the cleric worships, they automatically heal you for less. If you worship the same or an aligned god, they heal hyou for more. If your god is neither opposed nor aligned, you get the flat heal rate. Now, you can eventaully, through the course of good or bad works, reach the point where you’re equally healed by all of the gods’ clerics, or maybe you’ll get +healing if you’re loved by all of them. If you want to “opt out”, you can pick “Pantheon,” or soemthing similar. If you want to make it really tough on yourself, or alternately, want a bonus to something else, like science skills or arcane magic skills or whatever, take “Atheist.”

That’s a great example of something that can have both a character flavor effect and a game effect, and it’s also a great way to have overarching conflicts/storylines directly affect the lives of even the newest character. Sure, it’ll take balancing, but everything does.

One of the things I was attempting to address was the difference between manufacturing a game and crafting one, and the importance of writing here.

I did not mean that games would suddenly be better if we had engaging prose all over the place or quests that were written better. That is to say that no, I don’t think that writers are just good for pretty words…but pretty words contribute to the difference between manufactured and crafted.

Writers should, as SK pointed out, be involved from the earliest stages of design in a game. Sure, it is nice to have a game based on aliens vs robots vs zombies vs humans, but the story behind WHY is critical, and a great story is one of the core pieces needed to really draw players into the game.

Story also has (or should have) an impact on the game mechanics and logic. Keeping them separated during design and development is just a bad idea. You have to meet the four W’s….Why, What, hoW, and Who. Story can address the Why and mechanics/logic is part of the hoW. They should be interrelated and work together

Another point is that story, setting, plot, and content are usually confused with each other and the lines blur. Developers commonly miss the differences between macro and micro…a macro level plotline or story is fine to establish setting, but most players could really give a fig about what happens in some top level event that only a few lucky players get to be involved in. But plot or story on a micro (player) level, particularly if they can influence it, is so much more important and immersive…but also overlooked and rarely implemented well (if at all).

Pre-written prose does have a place in future MMORPGs, but not just as something limited to flavor text and quests. Writing, particularly in establishing the lore of the world and the game, is key. Keep in mind too that not all of this lore needs to necessarily be *in* the game, but it has a place in other areas.

If my cleric is looking to pick a deity to follow, I don’t always choose based on the advantages and disadvantages (although I recognize that many do)…I like to know more. What is their background? What is their origin and history? Relations with other deities? Symbols and affinities? Most of this stuff has no actual impact on gameplay, per se, other than providing a richer environment for gamers and some material for role-players to work with.

More later…

As in (most) of my computer gaming – some of my favourite games include Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, Dreamfall and any number of classic and modern Interactive Fiction titles. I’ve always been a huge “adventure game” fan, basing my opinion of the game almost entirely on the quality of the writing – including story and dialogue – rather than the puzzles themselves.

However, some game genres simply do not lend themselves well towards displaying pre-written prose, but can still tell a great story. As a near-perfect example, take Nethack (or any of its hundreds of Rogue-like derivatives). The plot is “get thee to the lowest level of the dungeon, kill the foozle and return with the Amulet of Yendor” or whatever. Everything that happens from that point on is procedurally generated.

But just because the game has a crappy plot is not to say that the game doesn’t have a good story. The story is that “on level 5, I was unexpectedly besieged by a horde of mutant crabs. Since my encounter with the minotaur had severely injured both my flesh and courage, I had to retreat back to the village, but my torch burnt out somewhere on level 3. Let me tell you, the flight through the darkness to find the hidden staircase I had come through was enough to bring a lesser man to the very edge of sanity…” and so on.

There is a story, but it is narrated by a little voice in your head, and it’s different every time you play. When you roll a new toon in WoW, you’re being explicitly force fed the same shiny turd of a story you were force fed the last time you played someone with that same starting point, and discussing it with another player delivers the sad fact that they, too, rescued the fair maiden a mere 20 minutes ago. Nothing changes, ever, unless the devs decide that “Ooooh, a world spanning event is occurring and now you all have to team up into 40-man raid parties to kill the giant foozle to save the world” and then they might deliver some up-to-date flavour text and new quests via a 300MB patch.

It doesn’t matter if the writing is world class, because it doesn’t make sense to have static prose embedded in a dynamic virtual world.

There is another problem with the equation: back in the dawn of time, when we were 10-12 year olds playing with our C64’s and Ataris, games were deep because hardware resources were limited and therefore there was little competition for eye candy between games. If you were publishing games commercially, or you were a bedroom hacker, you had roughly the same resources available to you. The professional game publisher could hire a larger team and get the game out quicker, but given a reasonable development schedule even a single programmer with limited artistic skill could spew out sprites that looked just as good as those the software houses could come up with.

Thus, the differentiators between games were the things we now bemoan as absent in today’s top titles – an engaging storyline, replayability, a higher-than-current degree of difficulty, and so on. Graphics and music resources were manufactured quickly, and the real effort was put into design and coding. Even marketing budgets were rather limited, since the computer gaming clique was so small and fanatic they’d likely find and play your game regardless of how glossy your magazine ads were. This also plays into what games would be accepted by a substantial percentage of the market – if you were really into computer games, but didn’t like reading prose, you’d probably play a game with a lot of text anyway as long as the rest of the package was OK because there were no other games out that month that were better and had less of that annoying text you had to click through. Today, a game based around beautifully written prose would get a mere fraction of the percentage of Infocom players in the 1980s, because there’s other games on the shelf that allow me to blow shit up.

Today, the scene is different – the look and feel of your game, the visual impact and sex appeal, is directly proportional to the amount of money you throw at it. The big houses know that all they need to do to get another bestseller hit for the next few weeks is to spent a gazillion bucks on:

a) Middleware
b) Artists
c) Marketers

If they follow that formula, their game will sell for those two weeks until they can release something new. If they try to put money and effort into building new in-house tools (or hire a staff of writers) to work on a project substantially different than games already in existence – then their big hit may flop in the face of some shareware bedroom coder with a great idea and a runaway success.

Honestly, I don’t think pre-written prose in MMORPGs has a future, nor that it should, whatever Nic and Bioware says. I do, however, think that it’s a fantastic platform for allowing players to experience their characters’ own story, if the MMORPG developers would stop with this static rollercoaster crap already and give us game logic as advanced as Nethack’s or Rogue’s (hint – the first version of Rogue was written in 1980).

It isn’t.

The problem with the relationship between the games industry and writers is that the games industry thinks that writers do words like artists do pictures; that you can come up with a game and then bring the writer in afterwards to ‘give it depth’ though adding the right words. Throught writing ‘filler text’.

It doesn’t work like that. The writer needs to be involved with structuring the story right from the beginning.

Writers (in this context) don’t write the words. It doesn’t matter, here, whether a writer can spell, or has atrocious grammar. What matters is whether they can structure a story, and you don’t have to be able to use words at all to do that (think of silent movies, or comic strips without words).

If you tried to make a movie by getting together some artists, some producers, some designers, some actors, shooting a load of stuff, and then asking a writer to come along and put words over the top, you’ll end up with a mess (unless one of your producers etc could also structure a story, in which case they count as a writer for our purposes).

But if you had a writer writing the script at the start, you’ll end up with a proper story — even if it’s silent and not a word that the writer wrote ever makes it to the audience.

So: the way the games industry needs writers (and it does, if story-in-games is possible (it may be, it may not be) and if they are to achieve it) has nothign to do with words; everything to do with story structure.

(oh, and you lost all your points halfway through by implying that you thought Lost had any depth whatsoever).

Hiring a good writer is the same as hiring anyone else. Experience, judgment, and faith. If you can’t make the determination yourself, find someone else that can. This is why I don’t hire programmers. I can’t code. So, I get someone else to handle that, usually a CTO or Senior Engineer.

Finally, one of my biggest points was that there simply aren’t 1) enough writers and 2) enough good writers in our industry (mmo or otherwise). Also, just getting someone to do an average job writing filler text isn’t a good way to *craft* a game, but it is perfectly acceptable to manufacture one.

If you want polish, get an editor. If you want mediocre, it doesn’t matter who does the writing. If you want fantastic, evocative, engaging, immersive, and lush, get a good writer. (or two)

Are there any good writers left out there?

However.

In MMOs, I think the role of the writer is to create the main story (or stories) of the game, then mostly act as an editor and flavor text writer. I think this is even more true now as we (should) move toward procedurally generated content for the vast majority of material. At the core of the overarching story should be the writer’s work, but most of the time, players should not/will not see that core story. Simply because of the way games are designed now, “Bring me 15 kobold tails” quests are going to make up the bulk of play time, and all they require are flavor text. Sure, it’s fine if that’s woven into the larger story, and it should be, but it can be done in a very minimal way and work well.

I’ll go one further: there are too many writers in the MMO genre, in that there are too many bad writers, or at least hack ones. As Julian touched on before, any halfway decent designer should be able to hack out something functional for text. It would be great to have a good writer come in and touch it up, but good writers often don’t want to “touch things up,” they want to rewrite them, because they’re inherently creative people. Because of that, bad writers behave, very often, in a similar way because they so desparately want to emulate good writers, down to their creative tantrums. They want to improve upon the ideas already in the script. However, if as a coder, I screw something up in an attempt to streamline or improve it, it’s immediately obvious, or at least it comes to light pretty quickly: the code stops running, or it starts running in a weird way. If a writer, or worse, a group of writers, does that, unless you’ve got a godlike editor, it won’t be caught until it’s in and seen by a ton of players. A perfect example of this was the removal of the Fifth Column from City of Heroes and their replacement with the Council: an overzealous staff writer went through and removed all traces of them from the game, including on historical plaques, which got jumped on by the players.

And that dovetails into another problem: how do you know that a writer is good? Further, how do you know he’s any good in the genre, or in the medium? Take a look at the latest crop of novelists that are trying, usually badly, to write comics and you can easily see what I’m talking about. That also goes into “how do you evaluate a writer?” A good writer and a bad writer are difficult to tell apart for the common man, because it well and truly does not matter to him. It’s the old, “I don’t know if it’s art, but I like it” thing. Writing to the common denominator works, because that’s what you have to write to in order to reach a broad audience. Those of us which are literate and cultured are not going to drag others up to us, because there is, frankly, too much of a barrier to entry in terms of time and effort, past a certain point, in learning how to “truly” appreciate the best in art and literature.

One last thing: I was a “grammar and spelling nazi” for years online, until I realized how pointless and silly it was: language evolves. That is its nature. I mean, it’s why we don’t speak Middle English anymore. Just like we speak with more familiarity and casual language in our day to day lives than we do when, say, running a presentation for investors, there is a tendency toward the arguably simpler and more understandable abbreviated language in online gaming, and it is, in my opinion a good thing. Just like I wouldn’t say, “Zounds, good sir! It does appear that a girder has fallen and is about to crush you flat before these fine people!” when “Look out! Move!” is much more appropriate in real life, I would much rather have someone say, “OMG 2 adds inc” than “There are two additional monsters coming toward us and about to engage,” particularly since in the time it took them to type that all out, we’d be in the shit with no warning.

One of the curious aspects of our industry, is that the people that tend to excel the most are generally the ones that are capable of wearing more than one hat (and no, I don’t mean asshats… those are never in style). Looking back at my examples of how some of the greatest games were made years ago (easily more than 12 or so) it is interesting to note that the number of people involved was dramatically smaller than what you would expect today. Going back even further, and the team size drops down to a handful of people, and in some cases, less than five.

Heck, in one of my first projects, I was designer, artist, animator, and sound effects engineer.

Two of the points I was trying to make (among a gazillion others) was that 1) The industry isn’t even bothering to hire token writers anymore, and we are at a point where we need some fresh blood with a focus and emphasis on writing and storytelling and
2) Hiring standards for all positions need to start making “good writing skills” an important qualification, on top of everything else. This is good for a number of reasons, including better work and communication, as well as adequate “skill” to fill in for “talent” that might not be there because of the lack of on-staff writers.

Damn it is late. Maybe I’ll go dream about hosting a coding contest where all code must be in iambic pentameter. That would be amusing. Or maybe haiku.

You know, something else that is missing…good puzzle design. Quests, particularly long ones, could really be spiced up with some quality puzzles.

First, I guess personally I’m not terribly concerned with having better and better graphics all the time. This thing of ours, for good or ill, is a visual activity 90% of the time, and we are visual creatures. So, yeah, make it look better. Make it true. But you know what I’m saying. I’m saying that I don’t want that extra veneer of glitz at the expense of other essential things. So, focusing on graphics should be a very high priority to me. But not the only priority you have. And it shows so damn hard when it’s the only priority… you can tell so easily.

To run along with your example, I don’t wanna go to the movies and stare at a black screen for 90 minutes, even if the narrator is telling me the best story in the world with the best sound effects. Balance is key.

On the subject of writers: I consider myself a writer (still trying to get the damn book published, but that’s grain from another sack). Writers are the red-headed stepchild of the gaming world for many reasons, but the main one is this: You don’t get much with a writer, and writers are pretty much naked.

Writers are the real world equivalent of a high-DPS, single-target, no healing, no CC class. That is, they’re really, really good at one thing and one thing only by default. But they need lots of love, otherwise they die. It’s different in the case of an artist, for example, that has lots of software and hardware to back him up. An artist can be a mediocre texturer, for example, but there are gobs of software that can take that artist’s output, chew it a little, and spit it out looking much better. Even a mediocre designer, with some luck, can count on the help of his coders to hide or obfuscate the errors in his design with code.

A writer is alone, and if you get a mediocre writer, you’ll get mediocre output. And there’s nothing you can do about it. No software is going to take that writer’s bland, derivative output, process it and make it look like a Tolkien short story. There’s nothing a coder or a designer can do to help hide the output of a mediocre writer, other than not to show that output at all. And if you reach that point, you’re better off just firing that writer and having the coder, the designer or the artist chip in with their bits to fill in for the writer’s output; it’ll end up being the same quality, and you save some money.

Writers excel at one thing: writing, and that’s it. Sure, some writers can assist in other areas, but you know the case is very, very rare when you get a writer that can also code, or a writer that’s also a very good artist. So, yeah, naturally that writer once he’s done and you still want to have him around, you’re gonna put him to spellcheck the mountain of shitgrammar his coworkers produce, or to ‘embellish’ quest text by adding a few words that are not monosyllabic. Some can even help beta test and make coffee. But that’s about it.

When you get a writer, that’s all you get in most cases. Designers, coders and artists are usually more versatile. And when they’re not, they have software and hardware to back them up. The writer has his word processor, and that’s it.

One last thing, keep in mind that it’s much, much easier to see when a designer, a coder or an artist is screwing up. It’s right there in front of you at a glance. Knowing when a writer is fraggin’ up usually is more subtle, and may involve periods of reading – the bane of middle management! That’s why writers seem to have that certain, very tenuous aura of uncertainty around them. Most people don’t know how to approach the writer’s work, or how to determine if it’s good, crap or *something else*. Yeah, writers take advantage of that. Mea culpa ex profeso, I guess. But it’s there. Writers, and their production, is usually less approachable and appraisable than everyone else’s.

Regarding our collective state of dumbing down: That’s huge, and there’s no room to talk about here, I’m afraid. But it’s a good point. Valid now, valid 20 years ago, and I fear will be valid 20 years from now.