Realistically, you don’t need any qualifications. Really, from how we’ve seen the industry shape up, if you can put “I tweet 28 times a day” on your resume, you are already overqualified for the position. But let’s assume you want to actually contribute to something more… artisanal, shall we say? Well, here are some things you might want to consider.
So video games are rather special. For how much some people want them to be like movies, they are actually very, very different, especially when you start including player input into your game. It doesn’t need to be a lot; even just a few mostly “meaningless” choices can impact the player’s experience. And the more you work with the unique aspects of the video game medium, the more the way you write might need to deviate from conventional (a.k.a. linear) writing.
So, what do you need to keep in mind if you want to stretch the boundaries of what a video game can do narratively and through writing?
1) You and the players
While maybe not the most pressing matter when writing a game, after all, the player is removed from the process until much later, it might still be best to consider your relationship with the player first.
The modern approach to this issue is that the player is beneath you and mostly a kind of hindrance to your great work. This is just about the worst stance to take on the matter. As a writer, what you are, at the core, is an entertainer, providing entertainment to your audience. As a video game writer, you can do so in a much more involved way by striking up a conversation with your player.
When considering the player, there are really just a few things to take into account to make sure most everyone is satisfied with the experience. Of course, much of it comes down to providing a compelling narrative in the traditional sense, but you might need to present the player with choices at some point.
Choices do not need to lead in vastly divergent directions. More often than not, a narrative choice will just end up being swept under the rug to keep the scope of a game within meaningful bounds. Such a case doesn’t need to be wasted, though. It’s still possible to offer the player something expressive to choose. Something that would let them define how their character feels or what they think. What’s important is to offer a few compelling (at least 2) alternatives. Video games with non-linear writing usually count as at least some kind of vestigial role-playing game, and such choices might play into the role your player wants to portray or, alternatively, how they want to portray it.
The player is not the character; they are much more like an actor portraying a specific role within a play. And much as an actor, they can add their own spin on it within the bounds of the script.
Finally, any narratively polarising choice can often do with an additional neutral option. Something non-commital that lets the player manoeuvre around situations where none of the choices sit well with them.
Of course, sometimes the game might call for something more significant, but due to game design limitations, there will always be only a limited number of meaningful forks in an interactive narrative. Sometimes none at all. But, taking into account what I’ve written above, that doesn’t preclude presenting choices that are subjectively meaningful to the player.
2) You and the programmers
Another important group of people are the programmers you will work with. Writers often don’t think of themselves as technically competent. But the requirements video game writing might present are not that steep either.
In most cases, a writer needs to understand what they can and cannot do with their non-linear writing. I’ll have another article about this specific topic up at a different time, so let’s just focus on the gist of the issue for the moment.
When the player can resolve various situations in different ways and tackle parts of the game in a freeform order, a need arises for the game to respond to these differences. Thus, when writing, it might be necessary to check what the game knows about what has happened, either overall or just recently, and work that into the flow of the story. Otherwise, the story might become incoherent. Even if you write each of the parts well in their own right, it might be that the way they come together, through the player’s choices, doesn’t add up.
Sometimes, it’s necessary to take a step back, look at everything that is (or might be) happening, and adjust accordingly. Not only will that make the narrative stronger, but it’s also much appreciated by many players.
The mistake many writers make is to assume this means they need to learn to code. But in reality, it just requires some agreed-upon way of expressing when something you write might happen. This works both on the scale of whole scenes within the game or even specific words used in dialogue. Such qualifiers can usually be expressed using natural language. For example, “If [it’s raining], then [the character should be holding an umbrella” is as formal as things need to be expressed. It can be formally seen as an implication, with an antecedent representing the condition and the consequent describing the outcome of the condition being true.
This is elementary formal logic, a topic I’ve written about before.
There’s a bit more to it, but I’ll cover that in more detail on a different day.
Thus, video game writing requires a little bit more consideration than traditional writing (for whatever medium). Narratives always have moving parts, but with conventional writing, we can always puzzle out where they go and how, and that never changes. Video games differ because they have unknown variables, both in the strictly technical sense (i.e. the variables in the programming behind the game) and in the form of the biggest unknown of them all: the player.
The role of a video game writer, performing their craft for a narratively non-linear game, is as much the writing itself as managing those variables. And it is the point of failure for many people, including those who otherwise can be even great writers. It’s a different situation that requires a different set of skills. But, at the same time, with a bit of effort and learning, it’s very much manageable, and the audience will most definitely feel the difference.
Esoteric Musings... 