A student wrote to ask me how I got into video games. It's a peculiar story, and maybe has a useful lesson.
The first time I got into video games, I was a computer science major at Yale, and one of the professors had a company making educational computer games. This was so long ago we had a serious discussion about whether we should be making games that could run in 128K of RAM, because after all, only the latest computers had that much memory. I spent a couple of summers programming games where the ant onscreen would wave its antennae around when you spelled the word "ant" correctly.
I got out of programming because I was not a great programmer. I was in the same intro computer class with Jordan Mechner, who programmed the first Prince of Persia game, so I knew what great programming looked like, and I wasn't doing it.
(I used to work for a movie producer who stopped playing trumpet because there was this other kid in the band who played trumpet really well and he felt daunted. That kid turned out to be Wynton Marsalis.)
The second time I got into video games was 2010. I was a film and TV writer in Montreal, Canada. I had a pretty successful film and TV-writing career -- I co-wrote a locally successful movie called Bon Cop/Bad Cop, and I co-created a TV series called Naked Josh. But Montreal's English film and TV industry is a backwater of Toronto's, which is a backwater of LA. And my iceberg was melting. Film and TV production in English was moving out of Montreal for various structural reasons. I figured I could try to become a writer-director -- I have an MFA from UCLA's School of Film and Television -- or I could go into video games.
The local funding agencies were uninterested in my solo movie project, a dark little drama called Alice is Perfectly Fine Now. But Montreal, it turned out, was a hub of video games.
How to break in? I was a video game player, but I'd never written any video games.
Well, I figured the first step was to find out what video game writing was. So, through the Writer's Guild of Canada, I organized a panel discussion of video game writers to come talk to screenwriters about what they do. That sounds involved, but it was not super difficult. I asked my intern (I had an intern!) to find a venue, and McGill had a spare auditorium. I got in touch with Jason Della Rocca, who was running the Montreal chapter of the International Game Developer's Association, and he scared up my panel of writers: Mary DeMarle, Nina Sund, Stephan Wark and the always-memorable Richard Rouse III. I got the word out through the WGC.
Here's the part where there's a lesson: no one asked me to organize the panel discussion. I did not have an official position in the WGC. The panel discussion was not part of a series of panel discussions through an organization. I just talked to people and they liked the idea and supported it.
We had a great panel discussion, and off everyone went.
Some time later, someone was starting up a video game company and asked Jason Della Rocca who could write for them. And he said, Oh, talk to Alex, he wrote Bon Cop.
Some time after that, Compulsion Games was looking for a video game writer for their game Contrast, and they asked Jason Della Rocca, and he told them, Oh, talk to Alex, he wrote Bon Cop. And so I started writing video games.
Like a lot of video game writers, my path isn't one that would work for someone else. You can't set out to write a locally famous movie and then transition in. There were fewer video game writers relative to the number of jobs then, and companies were less suspicious of movie writers. Quebec is unique in having its own successful provincial movie industry -- mostly in French, but Bon Cop / Bad Cop was half in French, as you might have guessed.
But there is no good path for video game writers, anyway. I know writers who started as game journalists, and that job barely even exists any more. I know writers who came in through QA, and QA is a highly skilled discipline now, not an entry level job. I know writers who came in through community management. And so on. As a hiring manager, I've hired writers who made their own text-heavy video games, and that might still be a path. But there's no "path to colonel."
The lesson is: keep pushing on doors till one opens. I started out in LA writing screenplays. When LA didn't love me, I moved to Quebec, and Quebec was really kind to me for a decade. When screenwriting faltered, I moved to games.
I wouldn't recommend trying to get into video game writing right now. Blood is running in the streets, and half my friends are out of work. As I used to tell people about screenwriting, if you can be happy doing literally anything else, do that. The people who succeed will be people who have to be writers. But, on the other hand, there will be people who have to be writers, who won't succeed. Failure is an option.
That said, I know two extremely enterprising young women who broke in recently. (I know they're enterprising because after they pinged me for a coffee, I talked to other writers, and each of these young woman had had coffee with each of my friends, too. Most people will give you a coffee. When I was coming up, most people gave me a coffee.)
Long term, folks are always going to want stories. Stories are hardwired into human brains. We've been telling stories since we learned to talk, and Uncle Og would tell us about that time the tiger nearly got him. AI is never going to replace story telling, because story telling is about hitting people in the feels, and AI doesn't know anything about the feels.
But the form those stories take will change. In Shakespeare's time, if you wanted to reach people, and possibly make a bit of scratch, you wrote plays. In Lord Byron's time, you could make bank as a poet. In Charles Dickens' time, novels. In the early 20th Century, radio was a thing. In the late 20th Century, TV. If you are agnostic about what medium you're going to tell stories in, you can probably find a medium that needs writers.
Good luck.
