Gamertell

In any story-driven media, be it novels, narrative videogames, films, etc., you can’t have a very successful project without solid writing. While visual media like film and videogames (and from here, we’re speaking of games with central story lines, not Tetris) don’t necessarily rely on the spoken word as heavily, the writing is still an essential part of the production. With narrative becoming more and more important in gaming, and the industry growing at such an exponential rate, we’re seeing more established screenwriters try their hand at writing for games. But can these skills really be translated into such a vastly different media?

At GDC 2008, 2k Boston mastermind Ken Levine gave a talk on the storytelling in Bioshock. According to Destructoid‘s coverage of the event, Levine revealed quite a few details about how the game’s story and world came together. To summarize, the designer stated that the narrative was actually written quite late in the development process, meaning that the game’s world and gameplay mechanics were established before the specific story details were written. It would appear that this organic, design-minded approach worked quite well for the format – seeing the title’s massive success and tremendous critical acclaim. He also left the audience with three bullet points essential for good storytelling in videogames: respect your audience, trust mystery, and empower the gamer.

Levine’s presentation underscored the unique nature of the gaming medium in terms of storytelling. The best game writing will take advantage of the interactive nature of gameplay and the player’s level of interest in the world, offering a sort of multi-tiered experience (i.e. in Bioshock, a player could enjoy the game on the surface level, or they could hunt down every audio log and pay attention to the rich story details present in the atmosphere).

Since the the idea of truly story-driven games (at least, games that can compete with film/TV) is still so new, there isn’t much advice available for aspiring game writers. There are literally thousands of books for screenwriters, everything from formulas for Hollywood movie magic to detailed analyses of Aristotle’s storytelling secrets. Yet these kinds of resources don’t really exist for videogame scribes. Aside from panels at events like GDC, and perhaps a paper or book here or there, there are very few resources for would-be game writers.

It’s true that many basic principles of good traditional screenwriting will also apply to a game. Writers are constantly told to keep character’s motivations in mind, to keep scenes short and meaningful, to “show, don’t tell” as much as possible. Levine’s specific advice comes in handy here as well. The first two points (respect your audience, trust mystery) work just fine for a film script, though the third (empower the gamer) requires an entirely different mindset. Telling stories in an interactive world creates its own set of complications that need to be addressed in a clever, design-minded manner and empowering the player is one of the toughest tricks to pull off.

Unfortunately, it’s still a trick that eludes many otherwise talented developers. As Kotaku reported last week, James Wan, the screenwriter responsible for the first and third Saw films, is penning the videogame adaptation of the series. Kotaku posted an excerpt from Wan’s myspace blog,

“...We are big gaming fans and we think it would a great opportunity to continue the SAW legacy into a different platform/medium…A lot of people have asked us if we would be interested in writing another SAW movie…well, we are writing another SAW story…but it’s for the game. We’re treating this story like the SAW movies with lots of twists and turns. We have no idea how that is going to apply to a computer game format, considering that most games are generally pretty simple in it’s plotting. Maybe its a good thing that Leigh and I are naive to the video game world and that we’re writing it like its a movie!”

With respect to Wan, this doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. While it’s encouraging to see a talented writer who clearly knows Saw behind the game adaptation, it seems as if that just isn’t enough to translate a property into an entirely new realm. It’s as if an accomplished playwright set out to pen a film, using only the conventions of theater (consequently, many early films were little more than “filmed plays”), highlighting that gaming is still proving itself as a medium.

Read [Destructoid] Also Read [Kotaku]