This is my line of work, so perhaps I can offer you some insight. First of all, I'm a writer. Yes, I can program a little; it helps to be able to understand programmers and even to be able to handle C-like scripting languages. However, I have never seriously worked on my programming skills, because I'm never going to be as good as a talented programmer and it doesn't do me any good to have those I work for think that I am not focussed on my primary skill set.
Too many game development companies still fail to understand what a writer can do for them. Too many writers think game development should stem from their groundwork. Developers still have a tendency to believe the following:
that they can design a game that relies strongly on narrative, subsequently bring in a writer to do whatever it is a writer does with dialogue and in-game text elements, after the plot and characters have been defined, and that the result will be optimal.
that writers don't understand non-linear narrative.
that writers from a game industry background can't write.
There is some truth to each of these points. A constant reminder to me of the struggle I face is the praise heaped upon games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment. I agree that both are good games but this in spite of - not because of - their narrative qualities. The writers of the in-game dialogue and narrative were, frankly, illiterate.
Then there are the exceptions. Marc Laidlaw, for example, is a game designer and writer who is fortunate enough to have real talent in both disciplines and to have had the opportunity to combine them, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 being the result.
Plenty of vacancies for game designers can be found in the US. Register at
Gamasutra and browse the Jobs section. Most of these posts are actually for mission and level design work. They rarely provide an opportunity to influence a project's fundamental game or character concepts but they can provide good entry points for aspiring writers, because they almost always require some semblance of writing ability. Usually, new hires are set to work on a project already under development but, of course, the time will come when a developer seeks a brand new project and an accomplished level designer stands a good chance of getting involved early enough to influence core concepts.
The problem this designer faces is that he's still thought of, primarily, as a level designer, rather than as a writer. The programmers and artists have every reason to believe that it is they who will originate the superior concepts. A designer with writing aspirations must work very hard to build relationships with these people, in order for them to listen to him, as opposed to treating him as someone who should just listen to them.
The other problem aspiring writers face is this: the cost of game development has just gone astronomical. In their desire to be thought of by the mass market as the rightful entertainment providers of the future, Sony and Microsoft have spent billions of dollars subsidising supercomputers for us. The cost of developing games for these behemoths is far higher than anything the industry has seen before. As the risks to developers and publishers grow, they are taking two steps of relevance to your choice of career. Firstly, there is more of a tendency than ever to play it safe, to be less original, more derivative, to exploit the diminishing returns of the cash cow brands they have already built. Secondly, they are hiring more writers from the worlds of television, film and literature.
These hikes in development costs are also leading to more and more consolidation, which means fewer, small development companies. (Such companies are going to find it very difficult to raise the finance they need for game development.)
It is not all bad news.
The increasingly derivative formulae of game designs threatens to backfire. It's fine for EA to pronounce that the public wants Now That's What I Call Call of Duty 32, because - hey - they liked the previous thirty-one, but what will they do once they've squeezed the last drop of revenue out of the HDTV photorealistic edition? Innovative titles should find it easier to capture the increasingly jaded public's imagination. Look at the success of Katamari Damacy.
The growth of online gaming demands an ever-increasing quantity of narrative-driven content. Tomorrow's soap opera writers apply here. The downside is that online gaming is the high-risk end of a high-risk industry, at the moment.
Mobile gaming is at a point where the development costs are where they were for computer games in the late eighties and early nineties. In this area, it is possible for small, independent developers to innovate and have an enormous impact upon the market. But this situation will not last too much longer. Development costs are rapidly rising here, too.
So, there are still opportunities but writers face greater difficulty in their line of work than professionals of any other discipline, because writers are the least understood and their potential is the least understood by the industry at large.
Let me give you a recent example from my own experience. An NDA limits how much detail I can give but you should get the point.
I was interviewed by a major developer for a position as a writer on an Xbox 360/PS3 title. Eventually, the producer said he would hire me to do a limited amount of work, to see what I could bring to the project. His project already had a core concept and story arc planned. That wasn't great for me but I hadn't expected a blank page. He told me that I would be given some characters to develop. That much was fine by me.
When he finally sent me the brief, there was no character development element to it. Instead, what he wanted was a plot. Yes, the story-arc was set in stone and now he wanted a plot to justify it, because he'd never given that any thought. In addition, he wanted some sample dialogue from one semi-interactive scene that would take place fairly early on in the game. He gave me three days.
I told him three days was not enough. I pitched for five. Four would have helped. He stood his ground. Three days. That was it.
Day one: I had to do a lot of research in order to concoct a plot that would enable the story-arc to unfold as he had outlined. This game would be set in the very near future in a real place and be based on real issues. I soon realised that the handed-down particulars of the scene for which I was required to write excerpts were simply absurd. Nevertheless, I tried to work out something believable that could lead to the in-game situation I had been given to work with. I wrote up the plot on day two. That left one day to write these snippets of dialogue. I had no characters. I decided to think of the scene in terms of broad strokes, breaking down elements of action and dialogue into sequences just a few seconds long. I came up with about ninety seconds of material, formatted it and sent it with about one minute to spare before the deadline.
The producer got back to me a couple of days later. They liked the plot, he said. They would buy the plot. They thought the dialogue stank. I knew the dialogue stank. I said I could rewrite the dialogue given another twenty-four hours but he declined the offer.
Next project, please...
Good luck.
