Writers in games

Read this. Then come back here.

Go on, it doesn't take long, I'll wait.

Read it? Good. When I showed that to a friend their reaction pretty much summarised my view.

"Accepting your flaws is a good thing. Embracing them is bad."

That's pretty much what the article is about. Yes, it is true that very, very few games have good stories. Halo's story was so laughable I had to treat it as a subtle parody just to play it. Half Life fans seem to have mistaken a 'complex' story with a 'good' one. There are many games that need to learn when to shut up and let us shoot space marines with our magical gun that fires cosmic paperclips. However the tone the (very short) article seemed to take seemed to me like the guy was saying "Well we can't do stories, so let's just keep rendering those three dimensional breasts and swords and cut one off with the other to our heart's content".

To that I say NO I RESPECTFULLY DISAGREE WITH YOUR OPINION IN A LOUD TONE OF VOICE.

One one hand I understand what is being said, people need to realise that a game is an interactive medium and so being treated to a visual book is no fun, but stating that developers should stop trying to tell grand stories in their games actually offends me. There are not many of them, but there are some GREAT games out there with great stories. Yes, they are the minority, but they are growing, and they show how possible it is with this medium to tell a grand tale.

You know what fills me with hope? When I hear of game studios hiring professional writers for their epic games. More often then not it doesn't happen, since the game will be the baby of the original head developer (who doesn't realise his story telling ability is often somewhere between an apple and an orange). However there are plenty of cases of games studios hiring writers. Often it seems the writer is hired just for small things (like randomly generated missions in MMOs), but there are also occasions of games with actual authors and professional writers attached.

That leads me neatly into a point I've wanted to bring up for a long time. A while back I stumbled across an epic arguement on a forum about the quality of the story behind the Halo games. One party claiming the writing could be disfavourably compared to being attacked and eaten by zombies, the other party claiming it was inspired by divine sources and milked from the nipple of Aphrodite herself.

Obviously I've already revealed my side in this arguement. The Halo story is as enthralling as a damp rag. The part that really made me laugh was when side one argued about how horrible the story was, side two replied with the following.

"If you read the novels you'll see why the halo story is so awesome."

I've never looked at the Halo novels, I don't know if they are well written, or what. But here we have the subtle collapse of the pro-halo-story arguement. The arguement is that the Halo story is horrifically bad, the Halo story is seperate to the novel. It's like someone saying the Spiderman movies are great because X happened in the comics (I know, not entirely metaphorically correct, but the point stands). The Halo novels are giving the setting and characters to an actual author and saying "What can you do with this, having been given this background information?". When arguing about the quality of a game's storyline, all you can utilise is the game itself.

Now, let's finish on something completely different.

Awwwwww..