Video Game Writing vs. Screenwriting

Q. How is video game writing different from film and television writing?

A. Wow. Lots of ways.

First of all, film and television are mature media.

There have been all sorts of experiments in both media, but most tv series tell stories about a family (whether of blood or choice) in some sort of venue (a place of work or a home). Ideally, problems walk in the door every week. People in TV don’t change much over time, because the tv audience wants consistency. After ten years of Friends, Ross was still hoping that Rachel would think he was cool, and Rachel was still hoping that one day Ross would think she was smart and worthy of respect.

Most films are about someone we find compelling, who has an opportunity or a problem, who faces obstacles, an antagonist and/or their own personal flaw. They have something to lose and something to gain. In other words, it’s a single story. The hero starts out haunts by something in their past, is crippled by some fear; in the course of the story they overcome their fear and lay their ghost to rest. (Or, in French movies, they fail to, because la vie est comme ça.)

There is blurring around the edges, of course. The Avengers movies are basically tv episodes that you go into a movie theater to see. “It’s not TV, it’s HBO,” because on pay cable shows, characters can change. By the end of Game of Thrones, Jon Snow still knows nothing, but Theon Greyjoy has turned from traitor to victim to hero, while Daenarys has gone mad. Bingewatching Netflix shows break even more rules.

But still, fundamentally, TV is a mature medium. So is film. You can write a book about how to write for film and you can write one about how to write for television. (Obviously; I did.) It’s possible to describe how you get a TV writing job and how you sell a spec script.

Video games, well. A video game can have a single story about a single, well-drawn protagonist with flaws and a past. Or it can tell the same events from different perspectives. Or it can tell a branching story about a single protagonist that has 28 endings. Or it can provide hundreds of mini adventures that are slightly different depending on hundreds of choices the player has made, starting with defining the blank slate player character’s stats (intelligent or strong? fast or wise?). It can tell no hero story at all, and only create a world and its backstory. I could write a book about how to write the flavor of video games that I write, but I’d be crazy to mouth off about what makes a good story for World of Warcraft, or Stardew Valley.

That much, probably everyone knows. There are a bunch of other important ways that video game writing is different.

The most important thing about a video game is that the player is playing it. If I write a novel (did that too), I am telling you what my protagonist did. If I write a video game, even though I have told a story that could be turned into the novel, it is still you moving the character around. While I might define the major plot twists, how the player gets from one event to another is the player’s choice, within the bounds of the game.

The player inhabits the player character. I can identify with, say, Tyrion Lannister; but I don’t inhabit his character. If I played Tyrion Lannister in a video game, then I would “be” him at a much more visceral level than if I just root for him on TV.

This generates on of the big challenges in video game writing. In a film, tv episode or novel, I can easily have the hero make a mistake, or a morally questionable decision.

But in a game, it’s not easy. If I put the player in a situation where they will likely make a mistake, many players will feel cheated; and some will spot the trap and not make the mistake. If I flat out force the player to make the mistake, the player will normally resent it. Hey, don’t make me do something stupid that I don’t want to do!

Even more so a morally questionable decision. If you force me, as a player, to murder my own dog, I might just stop playing the game altogether, and go write a nasty review. It’s not the player character killing the dog; it’s me, and I don’t want to!

So a lot of effort goes into aligning player motivation with the player character’s motivation. If you’re going to make my character murder his own dog, then you bloody well have to give me such a good reason that I agree with the player character. (The dog has the Black Plague, for example.)

Note, however, that you don’t need to give me the same reason to murder my fictional in-game dog as my player character has. I can have an entirely different motivation. (I know the dog has Plague; player character thinks it’s possessed by a devil.)

Meanwhile, your story is usually a skeleton to hang quests on. The quests ought to progress the story emotionally. But the story is there so that we care about the gameplay. Think of an opera, or a kung fu movie. The opera plot is there to motivate singing. People are not going to the opera for the story. They are going to the opera to hear great singing. Some of the great world operas have absolute rubbish plots. People are going to kung fu movies to see kung fu action sequences.

Of course, there are games that are 90% story and 10% gameplay, and some of them are quite satisfying. 80 Days is close to a choose-your-own adventure story (i.e. not a game); there is just enough gameplay to justify calling it a game. No one is playing 80 Days for the gameplay, they are playing it for Meg Jayanth’s amazing writing. But the vast majority of video games are north of 50% about the gameplay.

The video game writing process is quite different, too. At the beginning, the entire project is just a screenwriter, or possibly a producer and the screenwriter they’ve hired. At the beginning of a video game project, in our studio, the story grows out of any number of discussions between the narrative people, the studio head, the creative director, the art director, the design director, the tech director, maybe the music director, maybe some marketing people.

And those discussions are ongoing. The art director might sketch a character, and the narrative people figure out how to use that character. Or the narrative people sketch a character, and the artists figure out what s/he looks like. Films are written, then shot, then edited, then released, in that order. Video games are made by iteration. There’s a round of creation and design; then we evaluate what we’ve done; discuss how to make it better; and start another round.

That’s a little like a TV show in that you can decide to make a minor character into a major character, or cut a character that you don’t like. But even on TV, you can’t go back and rework all the episodes. So long as you haven’t run out of time or money on your video game, you can rework the game.

Meanwhile, at another studio, all those other people might work on the project for years before anyone evening talks to a writer; rather than providing the backbone of how the player character progresses through the game, the story might be just some feathers or fur that the narrative people stick on after all the muscles have been filled in.

Personally, I experience more respect in video games than I did in film. Maybe I’m just a better video game writer, who knows. But in film you have this perception among producers and directors and actors that they can all write scripts and they don’t really need writers. This might have been a perception in games a generation ago, when the writer was whoever wasn’t busy that week. But I feel like game studios are coming to understand that writing is a skill just like programming/level design/environmental art/ etc.

In video games, we are still learning things that any pro writer knows in film and television. The idea that apparently Good aligned characters can lie, or contradict each other, or even have personality flaws, seems to be newish to game writing. There are games that do, but they’re still thin on the ground.

To be a successful American film and TV writer, you really need to be in LA. New York is a distant second. There are major video game studios in at least a dozen North American cities. In video games, a resume and portfolio can legit get you recruited. In film & TV, it’s your credits, your agent, and whose party you went to last week

Film writing is terribly lonely most of the time, like novel writing. TV writing once the show is greenlit is more like game making: you go into an office and get to play in the sandbox with the other kids.

Lastly, of course, to write great film or tv, you have to watch a lot of great film and tv — and think about what you’ve seen, and analyze what worked and what didn’t, and argue about it with your film and TV friends. To write great games, you have to play great games. (And not just narrative games.)

Those are some key differences in writing in the two media. What have I missed?

Q. I am currently reading “Crafty Screenwriting” and was curious about the hook aspect. For movies that are in the same realm as M. Night Shyamalan, where there’s is a reveal or twist at the end, do you reveal that in the hook? I realize that Shyamalan’s plots usually include other elements than just the reveal; but would a writer who is in that genre submit the hook based on the reveal or the other (perhaps less interesting) plot elements?

A. I wouldn’t reveal what the hook is. The story needs to stand on its own without the surprise; otherwise you lose your audience before you get to the hook. Sixth Sense works by itself without the surprise; the surprise just makes it better. That’s why The Village didn’t work for me. It’s just super boring until you find out the surprise.

So for a query, I’d stick to what people are going to experience before the reveal.

Attempting to read Robert Jordan

Wagner's music is better than it sounds. - Mark Twain

A colleague recommended I look at Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. I am finding it strangely difficult to read. Overall, there is a lot here that feels heavily inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons: what I've heard called "generic fantasy." I.e. a world patterned on Medieval Europe plus monsters and sorcery, longing for a lost golden age, with some sort of generic Big Bad behind all the shenanigans.

But what stops me dead are the names. I stopped reading after I ran across a character named Mordeth who was promising to help the heroes. What are the odds that someone named "more death" is really bad? And so he was.

This is the Cruella Deville school of character naming, where if you listen carefully, you can guess who's evil.

Then there are the names that are just misspelled versions of names from the mythologies of Europe and the MidEast. The Big Bad is called Shaitan (Arabic for Satan). There are magical objects called "sa'angreal," which is a variation on "sangreal," the Old French for the Holy Grail. There is a servant of the Big Bad called Sammael, which is one of Lucifer's names (Samael, "Venom of God") with another "m" stuck in there for kicks. There's another servant of the Big Bad called something based on Asmodeus.

This is the Draco Malfoy school, which requires knowing another language. (Draco Malfoy is Latin/French for Dragon BadFaith.)

(Full disclosure: we have a character in We Happy Few called Nick Lightbearer. Lightbearer is of course "Lucifer" in English. The Devil is also known as Old Nick. So he's "Devil Devil." But in my defense it's the stage name of a rock singer who's trying to be bad. His real name is Norbert Pickles)

Like a lot of writers, I spend way too much time thinking about their character's names. I find it difficult to write a character without a name; searching for the name kicks up ideas about the character. If Sally Boyle had been called "Edith Finch," for example, she could not have been the same woman. Arthur Hastings could not have had the last name of Shepherd. So Jordan poaching names with old power, without necessarily using them to mean the thing those names refer to, bugs me. (There are also "angreals" and "ter'angreals" -- Jordan loves random apostrophes as much as metal bands like umlauts.)

Tolkien put a lot of writers on a dangerous track with his names. Sauron sounds a lot like it means a big lizard. Morgoth sounds like "more Goth." But he got to some of those names via legit old languages. "Gandalf" is literally Old Norse for "Wand-Elf."

Other names are from the languages he invented, complete with vocabularies and grammars. Elvish is based on, and sounds a bit like, Finnish. Galadriel means something like "Radiant Crown Daughter" (in Sindarin, "galad"=radiance, "rî" = crown, "iell" = daughter).

I like to say that "The audience doesn't know, but it knows." It knows when you get it wrong, or don't do your homework. A name built legitimately, by the processes that make names in real languages, sounds more convincing than a name made up by using scary sounds, or when you just poach words that you hope the audience sort of vaguely knows but doesn't really know.

But then, Tolkien was a linguist. His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight out of 14th C Middle English is still a classic. If he puts an apostrophe somewhere, you can bet it's an actual glottal stop (as in "Hawai'i").

None of this is to say that Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books are "objectively" bad. Who am I to judge? Obviously people love them, including my colleague. I am just trying to break down what bugs me about them, personally.

Fuzzy Dialog

In dialog, characters don't have to respond literally.

Bob: "Do we need cauliflower?"
Alice: "We're busy tonight, aren't we?" (Alice is assuming that Bob is thinking of going to the supermarket tonight.)

Player direction lines generally need to be straightforward. But I like to leave logical jumps between lines intended as drama.

Likewise, people often fail to process what the other person said immediately, or respond only to the surface level, and then catch up a few lines later.

Bob: "Red or white?"
Alice: "I'll just have soda water."
Bob: "Red would go with the steak."
Alice: "I'll go get the plates."
Bob: "Wait. Really?"

... which might be an overhead conversation between minor characters or NPCs, which the player may get the hidden meaning of, or not. If it's important for the audience or player to get the meaning, then wait a few lines for the people who got it to feel smart, then:

Bob: "Oh my God!"
Alice: "I peed on the stick this morning while you were asleep."

Likewise, people often respond to what they think they heard, or were scared of hearing, or wanted to hear, rather than what was actually said.

Dramatic dialog with these "flaws" feels human. It does demand a bit more attention. But that's a feature, not a bug. If you can get the audience or player to work a bit to process what they're hearing, they pull themselves emotionally into the scene.

Fanfic, or, some ways to learn to write game dialog

most narrative designers cut their teeth writing fanfic, but i honed my skills the classical way: rewriting every email 12 times before sending

— sophie mallinson (@sophiemallins) January 10, 2019

I wouldn't recommend writing fanfic. You're using characters already imbued with personality and style, so you aren't forced to learn to create a character on the page. Also, you can't really show fanfic to somebody you hope will hire you unless they are also a fan of the same world. Also, dialog meant to be read and dialog meant to be performed are entirely different beasts. 

I would recommend writing spec screenplays. I would also recommend taking an acting class, to learn how a scene pulses between the characters, and to understand how every character needs to have an intention and a goal in every line they speak. 

I would also recommend your choice of writing and performing your choice of poetry, standup comedy, or rap. I wrote poetry in high school. I still fuss over the syllables and word placement of a line the way I learned to do then. It matters which is the last word in a line of dialog. It matters when in the line the other character clocks what the character is talking about/asking for/doing. 

... yes, rap. Study on how Eminem twists words around his rhymes, how he fits them into the rhythm. Great dramatic dialog has a music to it. And having to find rhymes (and half rhymes and double rhymes) that communicate what you want to say makes you realize how many different ways there are to say something, and how many you have to go through to find the best one.