“I’m sorry,” my housemate Hendrik asked me a few nights ago, “but what is it you DO, exactly?”
I had just mentioned being at a medical hackathon in October. He and Nishanth didn’t see how I, as a writer, got into an event aimed at medical and technology experts.
I write stories. I started doing it when I was ten, and since then I have written poetry (mostly limericks), screenplays, webseries’, comics, and now videogames.
Oh, and—as of this weekend, at the MassDigi Game Challenge—I am the writer of an award-winning game. For Bread & Roses, Giant Otter Technologies, won first place for Serious Game (Concept category).
The thing about writing, that most people—writers included—don’t seem to get, is that there isn’t a ‘right’ medium to work in. What matters is telling stories that matter, and getting them to people.
When Homer wrote the Odyssey, he wasn’t writing it—he recited it to people. If he were alive today, he would be livecasting it, or maybe doing it as an audiobook. Or - if he was smart - he would be shopping around the pilot to HBO, AMC, and Netflix.
The medium shapes the story in terms of form and technique, but stories themselves are wonderfully liquid. Writing a good story is half the battle; the other half is figuring out how to get it to people.
Last spring, as graduation loomed ever nearer, I thought about doing what nearly every other aspiring writer from Sarah Lawrence was doing: moving to Brooklyn, and trying to edge my way into TV.
But in April, I wrote my first videogame - a PTSD-simulation, which (I hoped, and still do) can be used by friends and family-members of returning veterans to get a better idea of how it feels to go through combat, and then come home to a world that is suddenly terribly alien to them.
That’s a bigger story—one that deserves its own article, and will have it soon. (Keep an eye out for that!) But I don’t want to get distracted from my main point: the importance of writers in games.
The problem with game-writing is, simply, that we’ve gotten used to shitty writing.
No, even more than that—we laugh at the plot-holes, simplistic characterizations, and straight-up lazy reliance on tropes, and dismiss it. “All Your Base” memes, the myriad of jokes that can be made about Mario-Bowser-Peach (however you choose to take that), and similar stuff is fodder for t-shirts and inside-jokes.
When a game addresses serious issues, or has character-development, this is treated as some kind of grand revelation. We should have games with complicated characters (and no, the ‘hardboiled action-guy with a heart of gold’ doesn’t count), and clever plot-twists, not just someone with basic grammar skills and a Post-It note saying “Turns out [insert name of Hero’s friend] was working for [insert Bad Guy name] all along”. And we need to stop confusing flashy action sequences for ‘great visual storytelling’.
Let’s have love-interests that are built on more than the usual Damsel-in-Distress thing. [Once again: there are games that have more complex relationships going on - The Darkness, Mass Effect, and Bioshock: Infinite, to name a few—but these are few and far between.] I’m sick of shoe-horned romantic subplots, and I’m sure that I’m not alone.
In movies, the real stars are the actors who are capable of creating complex and memorable characters, that are entertaining but also deeply human. Katherine Hepburn, for one, was a genius at portraying strong and nuanced female characters.
Show me a game with the screwball-chemistry of Cary Grant and Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, or the onscreen (and off-screen) romance between Spencer Tracy and Hepburn in their many collaborations (to name just a few, Woman of the Year and Adam’s Rib), or the outright dislike between Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen, or the late-in-life settling love of Henry Fonda and Hepburn in On Golden Pond. I want to play a game with a romantic lead that has the unpredictable magnetism and (occasionally abrasive) charm that Kathy Hepburn brought to film.
Video-games have so much potential for great storytelling, and it is being squandered by hacks who are afraid to dream out stories bigger than a shoebox.
When I write my games, I make a point of developing a compelling storyline before considering any of the graphic or gameplay elements. This is what writing is about: you need to dream big, and ALSO be able to make necessary compromises.
The idea that your art will somehow be sullied by contact with the Real World is bullshit. Dickens wrote serial-novels by the word, for newspapers. Lovecraft wrote gothic horror stories for pulp-magazines. And I write video-games.
We are, unavoidably, the product of the times we live in. If you want to be an artist in this age of digital saturation, you need to adapt to the New Media that surrounds us.
Learn to swim with the current, get out of the water, or drown.
