Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames

457 Pages·2021·13.11 MB·English

by  Chris Bateman (editor)

Game Writing

Game Writing
Narrative Skills for Videogames
Second Edition
Edited by
Chris Bateman
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in the United States of America 2021
Copyright © Chris Bateman, 2021
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiv constitute an extension
of this copyright page.
Cover design by Ben Anslow
Cover image © Peter Bohm
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4895-2
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Contents
About the Authors vi
Preface x
Acknowledgments xiv
1 Introduction to Game Narrative Richard Dansky 1
2 The Basics of Narrative Stephen Jacobs 25
3 Writing for Games Richard Boon 45
4 Nonlinear Game Narrative Mary DeMarle 73
5 Keeping the Player on Track Chris Bateman 91
6 Game Characters Andrew S. Walsh 115
7 Cut Scenes and Scripted Events Richard Dansky 143
8 Writing Comedy for Videogames Ed Kuehnel and Matt Entin 167
9 Writing for Licenses James Swallow 187
10 The Needs of the Audience Rhianna Pratchett 205
11 Beware of the Localization Tim Langdell 217
12 Adding Magic: The Voice Actors Coray Seifert 227
13 Interchangeable Dialogue Content Dr. Ernest Adams 255
14 Dialogue Engines Chris Bateman 287
15 Massively Multiplayer Storytelling Dr. Richard A. Bartle 315
16 The Tales Cities Tell Dr. Konstantinos Dimopoulos 339
17 Interactive Script Formats Wendy Despain 365
18 The Avatar and the Player’s Mask Chris Bateman 379
Glossary 401
References 410
Index 426
About the Authors
Editors (Second Edition)
Chris Bateman (Editor) is an award-winning game designer and narrative designer.
He has thirty years of experience in the games industry and has worked on over
fifty published games with his acclaimed game design and narrative consultancy
International Hobo Ltd. His first game as lead designer and writer was Discworld
Noir, and his most recent titles are the PlayStation VR game The Persistence, Shadows:
Awakening, Tropico 6, and his lo-fi indie game passion project, Silk, which pays tribute
to the 1980s British bedroom coding legend Mike Singleton. Find him at ihobo.com or
@SpiralChris on Twitter.
Neil Bundy (Subeditor) is one of International Hobo’s hardest working minions. He
has been in the trenches of game development for two decades, providing consultancy
services in game design, dialogue scripting, and troubleshooting for dozens of
videogames at all scales of development, as well as working on tabletop role-playing
games in the 1990s. As subeditor for the second edition, Neil’s tasks included swearing
at a great variety of computer software and the main editor.
Chapter Authors
Dr. Ernest Adams is a senior lecturer at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala
University, and is the founder of the International Game Developers’ Association. He
has served in the game industry since 1989 and is the author of six books, including
the university-level textbook Fundamentals of Game Design, Third Edition. Adams’s
research interest is in interactive storytelling, the subject in which he holds a PhD.
Before his academic career, he worked for many years as a game designer and video
producer at Electronic Arts. He has developed online, computer, and console games for
everything from the IBM 360 mainframe to the present day. His professional website
is at designersnotebook.com.
Dr. Richard A. Bartle is Honorary Professor of Computer Game Design at the
University of Essex, UK. He is best known for having cowritten in 1978 the first
virtual world, MUD, and for his 1996 Player Types model, which has seen widespread
adoption by the MMO industry. His 2003 book, Designing Virtual Worlds, is the
standard text on the subject, and he is an influential writer on all aspects of MMO
About th e Authors vii
design and development. In 2010, he was the first recipient of the prestigious GDC
Online Game Legend award.
Richard Boon has enjoyed twenty years in the videogame industry as a writer,
designer, and teacher. As Head of Narrative Design Services at International Hobo
for many years, he worked on dozens of games including MotorStorm: Apocalypse,
Pac-man World 3, and numerous successful cartoon license adaptations such as Fairly
Oddparents and Spongebob Squarepants. His recent titles include Tropico 6 and Angry
Birds VR. He currently works for Leeds-based XR Games, investigating the potential
of Virtual Reality as an interface for videogame storytelling.
Richard Dansky is the Central Clancy Writer for Red Storm/Ubisoft and is a twenty-
year veteran of the videogame industry. His credits include Tom Clancy’s The Division
and The Division 2, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Driver: San Francisco, and numerous others.
A published author, he has seven novels and one short fiction collection to his credit.
Richard was also a tabletop game developer for White Wolf Game Studios, most recently
developing Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition for Onyx Path. He lives in
North Carolina with his cat and an ever-changing collection of single malt scotch.
Wendy Despain has more than two decades of experience spearheading digital media
projects. She has worked with teams around the world as a writer, narrative designer,
producer, and consultant on interactive experiences ranging from videogames to
augmented reality. She has worked with EA, Disney, Ubisoft, Cartoon Network, PBS,
Marvel, and Wargaming, and her books include Professional Techniques for Video Game
Writing, Writing for Video Game Genres, Talking to Artists/Talking to Programmers, and
100 Principles of Game Design. She is currently working as a production director at
ArenaNet, makers of the Guild Wars franchise.
Mary DeMarle has been designing, writing, and creating narratively driven Triple A
videogames for over twenty years. Although best known for her award-winning work
on Square Enix’s Deus Ex franchise, she has also written extensively for such beloved
series as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell (Ubisoft), Myst (Cyan Worlds), Dungeon Siege (Gas
Powered Games), and Homeworld (Relic Entertainment). She is currently hard at work
on a new, top secret project for Eidos Montreal that promises to be unlike anything
she’s written before.
Dr. Konstantinos Dimopoulos is an urban planner, geographer, game urbanist, and
designer. He is a lecturer on level design at SAE Athens and author of the Virtual
Cities atlas. The first commercial game Konstantinos designed and wrote for was
Droidscape: Basilica by Kyttaro Games, and he has since then worked and consulted
on the urbanism of a variety of games including The Sinking City by frogwares, Lake
by gamious, A Place for the Unwilling by Alpixel, and Cyberganked by Robb Sherwin.
Most of his articles appear on Wireframe magazine, and most of his talks and lectures
take place in Europe. His professional website is www.game-cities.com, and you can
find him on Twitter at @gnomeslair.
viii About the Authors
Matt Entin’s career as a videogame writer began with 2004’s Leisure Suit Larry: Magna
Cum Laude. Since then, he has worked on a variety of titles including Valiant Hearts:
The Great War, Agents of Mayhem, and Maneater; he forays into advertising, comics,
and film as well. He lives in Arizona, surrounded by mountains and a wide array of
desert creatures that could kill him at a moment’s notice.
Stephen Jacobs is a professor with Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of
Interactive Games and Media and is a scholar-in-residence at the Strong National
Museum of Play. He has been a narrative or game designer on “serious games” including
on Picture the Impossible, Just Press Play, the Finger Lakes Interactive Play website and
app, and Martha Madison’s Marvelous Machines. Most recently, he produced The
Original Mobile Games for iOS, Android, and the Nintendo Switch.
Ed Kuehnel has worked on the comedic games Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle,
LocoCycle, The Gunstringer, Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley, and
Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude, among others. He is a former contributor to
The Onion and cowrote the comedy-horror film Lumberjack Man. His first comic
book collaboration, Invasion from Planet Wrestletopia, can be found on Amazon’s
Comixology. He is also a senior economist at a think tank advocating credible policy
solutions that support a climate of bizarre but surprisingly delicious, fast-food creations.
Tim Langdell is an early founding member of the games industry having formed
one of the first companies, Edge Games, which at one time was effectively Electronic
Arts Europe and Sega Europe as well as being a top-five European game publisher. At
Edge, he devised and developed the brand name (which is well known through the
very successful Edge magazine) and has more than 180 games to his credit. He has
been involved in founding numerous organizations including the American Academy
of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) and the British Academy of Interactive Arts
& Sciences (BAIAS), as well as instigating the interactive media and game classes at
University of Southern California in 1992. Tim has also written a number of books
on videogames, most recently the first-ever book on games testing (Game Testing All
in One, Thompson, February 2005) which he cowrote. His first book, The Spectrum
Handbook, reached number five in the London Times Bestsellers List.
Rhianna Pratchett is an award-winning writer for games, comics, film, and TV. She
has wrestled the wild beasts of narrative on titles such as Heavenly Sword, Mirror’s Edge,
the Overlord series, Tomb Raider, and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Her work has received
awards from the Writers’ Guild of America, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, DICE,
SXSW, and a BAFTA nomination. In the world of comics, Rhianna has worked for DC,
Dynamite, Kodansha Comics, and Dark Horse, and she is currently writing film and
TV projects with Film4, Narrativia, and New Regency. She likes hard liquor and soft
cats.
Coray Seifert is a program manager at Nvidia, working on the Omniverse team.
A veteran game producer and designer with fifteen-plus years of experience for
About th e Authors ix
companies like Autodesk, THQ’s Kaos Studios, and the US Department of Defense, he
has contributed to more than twenty-five games across mobile, console, PC, and VR/
AR including Catan VR, a #1-selling title on SteamVR/Gear/Go/Rift, Zynga Slingo, a
#1-ranked title on Facebook, and AAA first-person shooters Homefront and Frontlines:
Fuel of War. Coray has lectured at leading institutions like Rutgers, Penn, and NYU
and advises students and new graduates as part of the International Game Developers
Association’s mentorship program. He was elected to the IGDA Board in 2007 at the
age of twenty-seven and still holds the record as the youngest board member in the
organization’s history. Coray’s first career was as a signed recording artist, and he has
the scars and stories to prove it.
James Swallow is a BAFTA-nominated New York Times, Sunday Times, and Amazon #1
best-selling writer of over fifty books, including the Marc Dane action thrillers Nomad,
Exile, Ghost, and Shadow, the Sundowners steampunk Western series, and fiction from
the worlds of Star Trek, Doctor Who, 24, Warhammer 40,000, Halo, Stargate, and Blake’s
7. His games credits include several titles in the Deus Ex series, The Division 2, Ghost
Recon Wildlands, Phantom Covert Ops, Bleeding Edge, and Disney Infinity: Star Wars,
and many others. He lives in London and is currently working on his next project. Find
him online at www.jswallow.com or on Twitter at @jmswallow.
Andrew S. Walsh is an award-winning writer/director with credits across film,
television, theater, radio, animation, and videogames. A man of many job titles, he has
appeared as writer, director, speech designer, narrative designer, narrative producer,
story consultant, script editor, motion capture director, camera director, voice director,
story producer, storyliner, story editor, and once mysteriously as “t - by”—something
which he can only attribute to being a tea-drinking Englishman. To date he has worked
on more than eighty-five videogames including Unannounced, still unannounced, can
tell you soon, Watchdogs Legion, Legend of Solgard, The Division 2, Fable Legends,
Nosgoth, Prince of Persia, Harry Potter, Risen, Medieval II: Total War, LEGO City:
Undercover, and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. His television credits include Raven,
Emmerdale, Byker Grove, and Family Affairs, while his film work includes the English
version of Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva.