I think you are a bit off on the writer Vs designer.

Not because you are wrong but simple because it's just a single instance of something more generic. Making games requires a separate skill set to making something else, in *ALL* areas, art/code/writing/design/etc.

Simply applying a person who does x to make x for a game is not enough, they will be a problem rather than an asset until they work out how to make games.

In this case there is just some overlap between the jobs of designer and writer. When what you really really want is a game-writer.

That said I believe a good game can survive a bad story the same way a good book can survive a bad cover...

This kind of thinking is prevalent in the industry, and while it certainly has some legitimate points (the last one being perhaps most important), it also explains why so many game stories/plots/bits of dialogue suck.

Writing gets little respect, because most of us think we can do it, and do it well. Games like Portal and Bioshock and Mass Effect are popular in large part because their writing better differentiated them from other products. (Portal obviously had a unique gameplay mechanic too.) And all were written by people who call themselves writers. (Though Erik Wolpaw would make some sort of self-deprecating joke about it.) But they were also people who were full-time employees, working with designers and scripters.

While I'd agree you can't just hire a Hollywood screenwriter and expect to shoehorn their *cough* brilliance into a game design, having a full-time writer---assuming your company has multiple projects----frees up designers to design, scripters to script, etc.

If you say designers who write are valuable, I agree. But I'd also say that most designers aren't as good as they think they are, and the evidence is found in the vast majority of the games released today.

I'd also disgree with the idea that writers automatically work in a linear way. Lots of writers have grown up with rpgs and (dare I say it) computer games, and are thus quite happy with different types of narrative. Sadly, lots of us get tasked with uninteresting stuff like having to come up with twenty different way of saying 'turn left in 200 yards' for rally driving games.

Lies, lies, lies.

It simply takes a different kind of writer to do well in games. You can't expect expertise in one medium to always transfer over. A novelist doesn't necessarily make a great comic book writer, a great comic book writer doesn't necessarily make a great game writer.

A writer who understands game design will integrate much better into the development process. This should not be surprising. It's also helpful if your game artists know something about game design and game programming, because it will make them more likely to produce work that will fit in well with development needs.

Giving you 'worlds to explore' is a writing task. And an art task. And a design task. Welcome to multimedia entertainment.

A writer can work on a game very easily if he keeps his writing skills in the background. That I think is the point, in making a game the primary hat EVERYONE on the project needs to have on is the 'designer hat'. As a writer on a game sometimes your craft has to move towards "how few" not how many words can I use to get a point across. Or, how little do I need to control what the player sees and hears, not "how much".

A good exercise for a game writer is to be told, "Tell me our games story...you have 30 seconds and you need to tell the story while you look for a tennis ball I have hidden in my office." If you can't explain it that quickly while occupied with another job then how is the player going to understand it while playing?

I came into this all ready to be pissed off because I'm a writer, but mainly I agree. Except that I think it's a false question; it's not actually a case against writers, it's just a case against having people who are just there to do writing as opposed to people who are great writers AND great designers. Really, it's the case for hiring multi-talented people.

Couldn't you make this same exact argument about graphic artists or sound designers?

You casually dismiss writing as not being an important part of gameplay, but you fail to note that for mainstream gamers, why they are playing can be more important than what they are doing. Triple-A games require strong characters and evocative context to keep people interested, because they aren't selling a box of mechanics: they're selling an adventure.

Furthermore, tying up a talented designer/writer with time-intensive writing tasks (there's some alliteration for you!) is a waste. Far more people can put together an elegant, in-character dialog sequence than tight level designs or gameplay systems.

Use writers to do the writing.

Hire Max Julien next time.

"There is no places for writers in our industry."

"When a writer sits down to build a story, they are usually building a plot."

That is some stellar writing, sir.

Interesting read but incredibly narrow. The term "games" can no longer be used as a genre description. Is a writer important for Donkey Kong? Doubtful. Star Control 2? Certainly.

There comes a time when you can simply have too much writing which rips the player out of the game. Take Xenogears, for example. You play the game to advance the story. When you hit the second disc, Xenogears disassociates itself from games and becomes a barely interactive novel. Still, without the initial writing the player would have no reason to even get to that final disc.

The author mentions that if Bioshock had been a sandbox game then they would probably still be playing it. This is a totally fair assessment because that is the nature of sandbox games: create your own fun. But would you have played Bioshock to begin with were it missing its story? Would it have received the same acclaim from critics?

Good points are certainly made but, as others have suggested, a game writer is unique from a novelist. When a publisher brags that they've hired a Hollywood screenwriter for their next big game I immediately become skeptical because of this. I think that is far more poignant than just saying there should be no writers in games.

This is so moronic on so many levels, suggesting the author has both a narrow view of writing and a narrow view of video games. It's the sort of attitude that results in games like Grand Theft Auto III that have sophisticated gameplay and absurdly juvenile writing. Would Max Payne really be a better game if you used the the time spent crafting its compelling story and engaging dialog instead adding a couple of more levels? Absolutely not.

Sure, if you can find someone who is good at both writing and game design, like Jane Jensen, it's a great thing, but judging by the poor writing of so many games, including games that show a clear interest in character and storytelling, like The Experiment, there are a lot of crappy writers designing games.

Also, let's face it, you're not going to assign your best designer to write the story, even if he's also your best writer, because you'd want him to focus his energy on game design. So you'd toss the writing to some junior designer or an intern. Games without real writers are often written by whoever has the most free time and the least experience.

The idea that making a game more memorable is inconsequential strikes me as utterly absurd. Would you really trade GlaDOS's dialogue in Portal for a few more puzzles? Would you trade Half-Life's Alex for an extra hour of shooting stuff? Would Ico be as engaging if its hero was just wandering around randomly with no purpose?

I checked out Simon Carless in wikipedia. He's listed as a journalist and editor. There is no indication that he's written fiction. Perhaps he has - my wikipedia entry doesn't mention that I've written fiction - but it's a stretch for a journalist to pontificate, as a writer, that writers are a waste in games. A journalist is not likely to be a good choice to write a game, and someone whose credits are stuff like Auto Assault can hardly set himself up as an authority on game storytelling.

Certainly the traditional linear book form is not well suited to video games, but as Lee Sheldon showed in his excellent book, "Character Development and Storytelling for Games," there is no reason a writer can't create a story using a module method that allows a high degree of choice while still offering a basic linear story underneath. A lot of writer-less games are linear anyway; it is not inherently a bad thing, unless you believe all games should be sandbox games.

Carless doesn't think writers are important perhaps because he doesn't understand or care about the potential of games as a storytelling medium, a potential that has barely been tapped. There have also been people who argued that writing was inappropriate for film, which should instead be used to created a visual-aural experience rather than follow a traditional narrative. Some people don't care much about story.

Game designers need to move forward into the complex, surprising narratives possible in video games, not run backwards into the safe and mindless pure gameplay of Doom.

Hmm, I'm very interested in a discussion such as this.

I find it hard to agree with the author of this article, but can't fault him for his views. This is a world where the public are convinced Halo is the pinnacle of gaming fiction, culminating with a comment that truly made me sick - a college professor legitimately wondering whether the impending Halo 3 would be a worthy addition to his bookshelf beside Virgil's Aeneid and Homer's Odyssey.

Rather than simply assuming everything that uses our medium must adhere to any set of rules, understand that interactivity does not need to link itself to a points based shooter. Interactivity is brilliant. It's the feature that seperates our medium from others. This is why our stories must primarily be told through that tool. This is akin to film's visual element.

Some would argue that this gives us far less control as game designers, and in terms of pacing, it does. Linearity should not be confused with pacing. One of the highlights of our medium, Half-Life 2 is strictly linear - you can't avoid seeing the general imagery that Valve wants you to see, or do what Valve wants you to do. It's a severely flawed game nonetheless, but I'll touch upon that later.

FFVII however is the laughing stock of your argument, and I'll forego any disclaimers as I'll undoubtedly be attacked regardless. It favours a poor cinematic experience to deliver its...story. What the story adds is structure, which we've had since Space Invaders. It would be feasible with no complex additions - just a few simple goals (i.e get to Sephiroth) - and wouldn't at all degrade the gaming experience (which is very entertaining).

You say it would be a lesser work without the story? How? Look at Lost Odyssey - as poor a game as that is, its redeeming feature is The 1000 Year Stories written by a Japanese novelist. Pure text with some background music, they might make the game as a product more enticing at the price it is, and are undeniably better than anything in the rest of that game, but they're useless and out of place in an interactive medium. (That is, as the focal point, which, due to Sakaguchi's ineptitude, they are.)

It's the same with games and cinematics. There's DEFINITELY a place for cutscenes, though not on the pedestal.

Someone mentions Mass Effect. Suffers from the same problems, though tries to remedy it with choices in dialogue. Commendable I suppose, but the overall poor quality of writing and the fact that it's little more than a choose your own adventure book is disheartening. Shepard is meant to be your blank slate. Fine - good for players, not good for the character. Other characters change their ideals and opinions on a whim because of this system. Quite a hindrance. Inconsistency is a huge issue, and I suppose it contributes to my allegations of poor quality. Even if the dialogue were fantastic (and honestly, don't expect it from Bioware), you'd be left with those basic shooting missions inbetween which are just there to hold together the cutscenes. There's other ways to tell a story.

My point, and spoilers will follow - Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Portal, Ico, and what I believe to be the greatest example of our medium, Shadow of The Colossus. I would add Planescape Torment, as I've heard only positive things about it, but alas, I'm yet to play it. The same would go for Eric Chahi's Another World. Lorne Lanning's Oddworld series is a primitive example of excellence in writing, provides nice satire on consumerism, is still better than games today, yet suffers from common issues (that should have been erased by now).

Half-Life 2. A missed opportunity. So-so characters, interesting story, overall marvellous presentation (of that story). The cutscenes are shameful, and, there ARE cutscenes. They've just been masked with basic interactivity where it actually hinders the writing, believability, whatever else. Don't let me throw a computer at that technician while he's giving me crucial plot points and leave him unphased. Don't let me wander out of aural reach. Exert SOME damn control - it's important. It's a nice experiment, and again, highly commendable in this age of nothing, but it fails.

On the other hand - the environments you travel through beginning with the opressed City 17 and Dr Breen's screened speech on the obelisk are amazing.
The point for me where I understood the power of the game was on the Highway, riding through miles of desolate, now uninhabited lands. I stopped by some shed to restock on ammo and maybe heal myself, and discovered disused petrol pumps as I exited. This is pure interactive bliss, travelling through a world to emphasise and re-emphasise what kind of place this used to be, before it became dystopic. Radioactive lakes and swamplands right outside the city is important imagery in our real world - (rightfully) obsessed with reversing environmental damage.

I am somewhat familiar with the Objectivist philosophy, and had been prior to playing this. Bioshock sits on the lower end of the good writing/art spectrum, the most crushing point for me being the Andrew Ryan cutscene. First of all, the game makes a point to allow you basic freedom - you still do what Atlas commands. Here, the game abruptly strips that away, failing to gift you the struggle. I understand Ken Levine intended it to be a subversion of gaming tropes, but why, in what could potentially be your most powerful moment would you take away interactivity. A slave obeys, yes, and yet every other command wasn't followed by a cutscene. Inconsistency, bad writing.

That, and the idea of someone wanting to die that kind of brutal death while delivering an emotional speech is ridiculous. It's alright that he wanted to die on his own terms, but for god's sake. The moral ideas of killing or saving are weak though. The only good thing that ever came out of Miyamoto is his idea that morality is not simply to kill or not to kill.

Up until then, the environment as the main character came into play, and it was brilliant. One other issue I have was not making the audio logs mandatory. For our medium, they were examples of good writing. It's understandable that Ken was focused on commercial success as much as he was critical, seeing as there's no sustainable market for art games. Yet. Though he shouldn't preach that idea as a staple of our medium, he of all people should be trying to change it.

Portal. Closer to Fumito Ueda than the rest. Has the best character I've encountered, and yes, that is crucial to the game and it is a product of excellent writing. The gameplay's not used to tell the story as much - more than FPS#14's "kill people with gun to win war because you're a soldier" but the real star is GlaDOS. Motivations come from GlaDOS. Exploration is rewarded with insight into the story. etc. It's also very hard to write comedy, and the focus on linearity makes it possible.

Ico and SotC are indeed at the peak of interactive art. They use more than basic exploration techniques to further the story, relationships and individual characters. Some argue that there's not much story there. Not presented directly, no - not the way you're used to it - Mr Exposition strolling through the scene during a cutscene - but it's not 'fill-in-the-blanks with you own ideas' as much as detractors say. There's an unmissable narrative, and of course interpretation of that narrative possible through the player, but in SotC you DO have the ruined world and you DO have the girl Wanda would give up anything to revive.

He relies often on his horse, and Agro's required to defeat some colossi. He's loyal and obedient to a point. The player builds a strong dependence on Agro, a sole button dedicated to calling for him, and it all leads to his tragic loss as he plummets into the river, throwing you off his back after you try to speed across the collapsing bridge.

Exploring the environment (which you must do to reach the colossi) - with its many destroyed and ancient structures, with its sparse and then basic life and Dormin - presents a back story as well as reinforcing that this is, as the Shaman says, a cursed land.

Visual elements such as Wanda's hair fading from black to grey as he slays the colossi combine with gameplay elements such as the light reflecting sword, which is very limited in its use considering the environments are designed to darken and overshadow vast expanses.

The greatest focused example the game has of interactive narrative is the ending, where, resurrected into the Dormin you're just as powerless as the colossi were against you. You can't win the fight, and you struggle against being sucked into the pool for nothing. That struggle is greater than most moments in games. It exemplifies one of SotC's themes in a way that other designers struggle with.

Not only that, but a sense of fear here is done better than in other games. Fear doesn't come from facing splicers or dinosaurs or the flood with an arsenal that could take out a small army. It comes from having next to nothing, and facing that kind of foe. All the colossi can kill you, but I find the Tiger, Lion and the Sand Worm to be the most frightening. You don't have the security of a rocket launcher, but rather a bow that's next to useless and a sword that only works when you've outsmarted them using the environment and climbed onto them. I don't believe I've explained the concept well enough, but I hope someone understands what I'm getting at.

Breifly on ICO - the same principle of the castle environment, the dark beasts you fight back turning out to be other horned boys, the most effective use of rumble (feeling Yorda's heartbeat when you hold her hand), the relationship you build with Yorda.

Who designed all of this? Who wrote it? Regardless, it's integral to the experience, and offensive to dismiss it.

Interactivity does not have to suffer from linearity. Interactivity does not equate to choice. Very common misconceptions plaguing both designers and people on the outside looking in. Our medium can be used for more than point/goal based competitions. We don't have to have everything fit into the standard control schemes for platformers, action games, racers or shooters. We can restrict control just as the director restricts a camera to a specific scene. We can restrict the camera on top of control too, but don't remove any of that for the sake of narration.

If people would like to recommend games to me that I've been missing out on, please do.

@Charles Herold
I'm one of the people who would favour visual-aural to writing in film. And I favour interactivity to writing in games as well. Visual-aural comes second, then pure writing. Narrative can come through all 3, but in our medium, should primarily come through the first option.

This is just a simple response to the last poster.

Thank you for using the term "Interactive Art." For years, I've been searching for a new name for video games that did not sound pejorative, in the same way "Graphic Novel" elevates "Comic Book."

I would love to see people using this term more often.

On the topic of writer vs designer, I think the biggest problem has to do with player empowerment. Linear narratives tend to function outside of the game, as if there are actually two stories - the story and the story players create through their experiences (I'm floating around the term ludo-narrative, for all those erudite literature majors!). The best kind of narrative game experiences deal with issues of control and choice, placing the player in a participatory role rather then in the role of a voyeur, the permanent observer.

If anyone is interested, you really should check out the work of Roland Barthes, in particular his "Death of the Author" theory. Barthes, while only really talking about literature, argues that authorial mentality is not something to be lauded. It creates a closed, singular experience. Instead emphasis should be placed on the reader, whose experience will always be different depending on perpetually shifting circumstance.

Personally, I can't wait to see a game that tells a truly compelling story without a single cutscene. Games need to stop pretending to be movies and put more emphasis on developing their own unique narrativologcial codes. This requires more emphasis on the one thing that separates games from other mediums - interactivity.

I think two words sum this up Assasins creed.

A writer's work is in no way inherently linear. The end product is, ultimately, linear in the sense that one word follows another; hence it could be said that the writer's product is confined to a linear medium. Let's leave out, for now, the entire subset of post-modern and post-structuralist fiction. However, the process and act of writing are non-linear.
It seems to me that in the same way a person who doesn't truly understand writing is able to say that writing is linear, someone who doesn't truly understand design could say design is linear. After all, the majority of video games are painfully linear: we move from left to right, start to finish, entry-level to victory condition.
Writing is a rhizomatic effort, just as design is, and I believe the only way for video games to finally grow out of their adolescence is for the writer, the designer, the artists, musicians, the entire creative team to be involved in the entire process.

here are a few thoughts:

"The work of the writer is inherently linear – the work of the designer is typically not."

This takes most poetry and a good chunk of the last 20 years of postmodern literature and throws it out the window. If that's a bit too esoteric some real world examples of these are Momento and Run Lola Run. Although these movies are watched from start to finish (as any game is played from start to finish) the stories they tell are not linear. They overlap, crosscut one another tell a story from multiple perspectives. If you want some examples from literature you may want to take most scifi stories involving time travel and its implications or books such as The Life of Pi.

"No matter how well written, a story can’t make the game better."

A story may not make "game play" better but it can definitely improve the game itself. A game and game play are different things and should be separated.

Although this piece was an interesting take on the role of the write, I am concerned more that the author himself wasn't able to able to effectively merge writing and game design effectively and thusly assumed that NO writer can do it.

Mike's point that there is a difference between game and game play is an important one. If your only concern is gameplay, story is unimportant. So, for the most part, are graphics and sound. The sound in Silent Hill 2 creeps you out and makes the game suspenseful, but outside of the use of some sound cues, none of that effects beating monsters, running away from monsters or solving puzzles. Ico is visually stunning, but once again, that is irrelevant to the gameplay, which is hitting stuff with your sword, finding exits and puzzle solving.

So the question is, how narrowly do you want to define the term "video game?" In its narrowest sense, there are a lot of terrific flash games that are focussed entirely on game play, with only the simplest sound and graphics. They are tremendous fun, but I would hate to see them become the only definition for a game. I don't just want game play, I want a complete interactive experience.

In Robert Altman's "The Player" Peter Gallagher's character Larry Levy comes to the conclusion that if producers could just eliminate the writer, movies would just write themselves - his example is taking newspaper stories and superimposing a traditional plot over them. While Altman's movie's thrust is more toward's a critique of the traditional film plotline, his gesture toward a writerless creation is similar to the motion put forth here by Carless. The only, yet monumental, difference between a film and a game is its possibility for non-linear play. A movie, naturally, is linear (banning some terrible "audience participation button press" films in the early nineties) but a game (think Monopoly) plays different with every go. A game such as Bioshock, which Carless has used as a straw man, is not as linear as Carless explains. Code, as Ken Levine has explained over and over, has allowed for "randomization" of enemy locations. Some such nonsense to sell more games, no doubt.

Carless is correct, however, in that games do not need a storyline. Nor do storylines need games. But there is a disconnect with the way that a game with and game without a story is played. For the former, - say Frogger - the point is to "get from point a to b" which is still a "plot." It's the sandbox games with a storyline, such as Grand Theft Auto that appear to be doing the innovation with regard to pairing storyline and gameplay in a way where one does not necessitate, but yet still complements, the other.

Just some food for thought.

This essay is poorly written and riddled with fallacy. Let us compare PacMan v.s. Zelda.