Games
The pervasiveness of games—in cultures ancient and new, among people of all ages—suggests they are of more than casual importance. On a social level, games are often associated with ritual occasions, just as today’s sporting events often occur on key religious and national holidays. On an individual level, there are games for almost every stage of life, from childhood to old age.
For the purposes of this chapter, a game is an interactive computer activity produced for a personal computer or an arcade console. A game may be distributed by a ROM cartridge, CD-ROM, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray Disc, or the Internet, for one or more simultaneous players.
For as short a time as the game industry has existed, its impact on the electronic media field has startled the leaders of both businesses. With greater detail, increased settings, and complex characters and objects, the games of today attract a growing number of adults. The average age of game players is approaching 30, with both men and an increasing number of women as old as their early 40s attracted to game playing. The shift in age means games must offer more than simple plots and repetitious violence and gratuitous sexual attacks against women. For you, the challenge then is to maintain the feeling and historical challenge of new games without driving away potential audiences of either the young fans or the older players.
Not only are sales of games and game machines rising, but the increased number playing the games have become a target for advertising embedded in the games. By 2010, approximately $2 billion will be spent on game advertising. This represents roughly 6% of the available advertising dollars in the United States. Microsoft recently entered the game advertising business by purchasing a privately held company that specializes in advertising in nontraditional media.
Artists and writers who create games have begun to receive recognition equal to others in their profession. Games are attracting computer graphic artists, systems designers, and writers from the motion picture and broadcast industries. Games now are considered a powerful medium for artistic expression in all of the areas of writing, in vocal and motion-capture acting, and in computer coding.
Despite its apparent short history, computer gaming may trace its history to as early as the late 19th century, when a Japanese playing card company, Marufuku, began manufacturing cards for the Western world. In 1951, that company changed its name to Nintendo, which means “leave luck to heaven.” On the other side of the world, Gerard Philips in the Netherlands established a company to manufacture electrical products of all kinds. Within 20 years, Matsushita established Panasonic. A few years later, a Russian immigrant, Maurice Greenberg, distributed leather products to shoemakers under the name COLECO. The company moved to manufacturing plastic items by 1940. Following World War II, Harold Matson and Elliot Handler produced picture frames and manufactured doll furniture under the name Mattel. A few years later, following Japan’s recovery from World War II, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka started Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company, manufacturing battery-powered miniature radios under the name Sony, from the Latin sonus (meaning sound). Following the Korean War, Davis Rosen began exporting coin-operated games to Japan. He named his company SEGA, short for “SErvice GAmes.”
In the 1960s, a series of young electrical engineers and a variety of companies and universities experimented with computer games. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ralph Baer developed a chase game, a tennis game, and a gun to shoot light at a screen using a platform called Odyssey, and Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell designed and built the first Spacewar. In 1972, Bushnell started Atari (meaning “check” in Japanese chess), and Pong was born. By the mid-1980s, a rash of companies entered the field. COLECO received the first FCC permission to operate with radio frequency (RF) controls. The Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company produced the first programmable home game console using cartridges. At the same time, the game Death Race 2000, based on a movie of the same name, raised the first of many public outcries over violence in games. Atari was sold to Warner Communications and opened the first Pizza Time Theater.
In 1 year, 1978, Nintendo released Othello, Atari released Football using a trackball, Midway imported Space Invaders, Atari tried to sell computers to compete with Apple (but failed), Magnavox released Odyssey 2 (with a programmable keyboard), and Cinematronics released Space Wars, which used vector graphics. Until 1982, the computer game business boomed, and then the bottom fell out with releases of badly designed games, poorly built consoles, lawsuits, bankruptcies, and too many games on the shelves, forcing price cuts below costs. In the following 3 years, the field began a slow recovery as Nintendo, NEC, Atari, SEGA, and Sony dominated the field.
The 1990s saw new technology developed, which increased the quality, playing time, and complexity of the games, and contributed superior graphics. In 1994, the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) was established by the industry to set ratings to overcome increased criticism of the violent and sexual content of many games offered to young people. Arizona tried but failed to outlaw violent and sadistic games. Congress accepted the ratings, but it blamed the retailers for failing to police purchasers. By 1996, Atari was out of the game business, and Nintendo, Sony, and SEGA were fighting a price war. By the end of the century, SEGA entered the field with Dreamcast, and Sony was talking of PlayStation2. Everyone released pocket units, like Nintendo’s Game Boy Light. Florida tried but failed to pass a law banning violent games, and Wal-Mart refused to sell 50 of the most violent and sexist games, but retail sales were up, and the arcade business was dying.
The beginning of the 21st century found Sony unable to keep up with demand for the PlayStation2 (PS2). Small operations began to close, but Microsoft announced the Xbox for 2001. Sears, Wal-Mart, and Kmart pulled violent and mature games from the shelves.
Indianapolis passed the first law designed to protect children from playing mature games, but the law was found to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a study showing video game companies were intentionally targeting young children for their violent games. The United States Army licensed Rainbow Six: Spear Game for training exercises, but many games were modified after 9/11, removing references to New York City, the World Trade Center, or other topics that touched on comparable terrorist incidents. The Xbox, GameCube, and PS2 all sold well as prices dropped. The FTC founds teens were still buying mature games from as many as 75% of retailers. To keep gamers happy and in an attempt to revive console game sales, Sony released PlayStation3, followed by Microsoft’s Xbox360 and Nintendo’s Wii.
Two competitors to console gaming suddenly appeared with advances in miniature technology games for cell phones and other small handhelds, offering new distribution outlets. The expansion of Internet gaming created an attraction for new multi-player games. Realistic, science fiction, war, and sport games lead in popularity as the first decade of the 21st century draws to an end.
Games may be classified in one of several different ways, either by content or by their delivery system. Content classification may include arcade, strategy, adventure/fantasy, or training games. The content may be categorized by the level of the action, by competition, narrative, cooperation, or solvability versus tractability. Solvability allows a player to solve the game in a reasonable amount of time; tractability keeps a player going and going, solving one problem after another, but still keeping involved in the game. A game may be designed to be process-intensive or data-intensive. Process-intensive games concentrate on the game itself, whereas data-intensive games provide a test for the player to keep piling up points and working against the game. Games may be delivered by arcade machines at the mall, home systems with a computer and a controller, television receivers and controllers, handheld units, or on a computer through the Internet.
Arcade games reflect the history of carnival games by depending on the skill of the operator to shoot birds flying by or offering an equivalent to a pinball machine. Pac-Man and Asteroids are examples of arcade games. Games involving moving a figure through a maze also fall into the arcade classification. Early games concentrated on such techniques, partially because they were easy to design codewise, and because they were simple for people to learn to play.
Strategy games depend on the operator using brains as much as thumbs. The concepts are based on solving a puzzle of some type, or else they are based on board games such as chess, blackjack, or a motion puzzle such as Tetris Max. The game based on the Pixar movie Cars gives the player a chance to win a race by outsmarting the other drivers on the race course. War games like Ghost Recon 2 and games involving reconstructing countries also fall into the strategy category. These games cover the entire range from simple to extraordinarily complex, challenging those who play them to raise their scores or to attempt a higher level of accomplishment.
The line between adventure/fantasy games and strategy games is blurred. The basic concept behind an adventure/fantasy game is to set the game in an environment or location that is wild and dangerous, perhaps in an unrealistic past or in a science-fiction future. The plots of the adventure/fantasy games depend more on characters and story development than strategy games, but share the concept of using the operator’s skill to attain a multi-level goal or to defeat an antagonist or army of antagonists. Star Wars: Clone Wars falls into the adventure/fantasy category.
Games designed specifically to train the player have been produced over the years for government agencies, especially the military. Health care, emergency response, religious, political, and professional organizations use games to train large groups of employees with specific tasks that may be too dangerous or too expensive to demonstrate without exposing the trainee to the dangers; the games offer trainees practical hands-on experience of performing an action expected of them. In other cases, the games give a wide range of people the opportunity to have an experience that they could or would not be able to have because of distance or lack of equipment. The military has become a leader in using games to train soldiers in the use of highly technical, expensive, or dangerous equipment. Pilots, tank drivers, and gunners all can experience the processes they need to achieve, allowing mistakes that are only recorded in a computer, not causing death or loss of expensive equipment. Games designed to teach sporting skills also fall into this category, such as Tiger Woods: PGA Tour 2004.
Games may be delivered by any digital system that provides some form of interactivity. The original games were simple programs on a computer, coded to react to either an external controller or to keyboard commands. Games still may be operated with such systems, but the controllers have become much more complex, allowing more than one player to play the same game simultaneously. The controls provide the player with the means to move the characters or objects in any direction (including 3-D depth of field) at various rates of speed. The game may be stored on the home computer or within the controller on disc, tape, cartridge, or hard or floppy drive. Increasingly, games may be played alone or among a group of players on the Internet.
As a writer of games, you may need to fulfill the functions of developer, publisher, programmer, graphic artist, sound engineer, industrialist, or architectural designer, or none of the above. Instead, you may only set down the concept in a logical and precise manner for the rest of the crew to fulfill their individual performances based on the needs of the game and the skills of the person.
But to make certain the process of writing scripts for games moves forward in a logical manner, you must begin with a study of the potential audience and the sales potential of the game. Next, develop a specific concept that defines exactly what type of game it is intended to be: adventure, strategy, or learning. Some technical decisions need to be considered early in the planning stages, especially how the game will be distributed. Some design features will vary depending on whether the game will be designed for home use, for a commercial arcade, or for Internet distribution. You need to consider the general form of the game, including the narrative type (e.g., serious, humorous, or dramatic) and the approximate character types who will provide the movement and action.
At this stage of the game’s development, it may be a good idea for you to write a log line, meaning one sentence that completely describes the game, its action, its characters, and its reason for being. If you cannot complete a log line, you probably are not ready to start writing the script.
Step two in preproduction writing is the creation of a treatment. Generally, treatments are written, as most transcripts are, in two parts—a preliminary treatment, and then a final treatment. The difference between the two is a matter of fine-tuning the first draft, making corrections, additions, or deletions to make the game salable and workable. The treatment should be brief but comprehensive. You should write it in narrative form, not script form, with the intention to completely describe the game, including each stage, action, and variations in flowcharts. A treatment also forms part of a sales package. The treatment is used to convince a game studio or developer to provide the funds needed to complete the game. If a developer can read a treatment and see the value in the game, the possibility of receiving funding is increased. A poorly written treatment may very well sink the concept before it moves any closer to completion.
Following a clear description of the premise (the log line works for this), then you should describe each story element and stage of action, along with the plot. You may modify the story elements as the process continues, but including as many and as highly detailed elements as possible helps the reader understand what you are trying to accomplish with the game. The next step requires complete and accurate descriptions of each of the characters, starting with the main characters and working through to the secondary and then the barely visible characters. The relationships among the characters are critical, but some of their background helps the players understand how the characters may act toward or react to other characters and their environment and to their specific actions.
You must work out the overall setting of the game, along with the setting of each scene, at this point in the treatment. Without an accurate description of where the action takes place and what the scene looks like, everything that is included in the scene will determine in a major manner how the action may move forward. Keep in mind, each new scene reached by a branch on the flowchart needs to be described.
Figure 8.1. A single frame from a game requiring one line of code may show the beginning or the ending of an action sequence.
Figure 8.2. Game scripts take many different forms, depending on the individual writer or the game studio’s method of operation.
A summary of the game, along with a tentative flowchart and the technical specifications, completes the treatment. You may not need to be a coding specialist to write a game treatment or script, but you should be aware of the limitations of the system within which you are working. You should at least pass your treatment by a developer as a precaution to make certain your concept is producible and within the capabilities of the planned system. Keep in mind, the first treatment is a rough draft, to be revised as you consider specific details and problems presented by your concept.
In order to gain funding, you may be required to perform a pitch session. At that time, you will stand in front of the developer or publisher and describe the game to the point of acting out the entire game. Depending on your enthusiasm and your ability to describe your concept, you may or may not win the pitch session and walk away with the assignment and funds you need to move onward.
As with any new and developing media form, the scripting process for games fluctuates as new writers and developers enter the field and as new technologies and methods of producing games change approaches and the final form of the game. No universal script format exists for games, but as with visual scripts, the basic needs of the programmers are fulfilled by semi-standardized formats. All of the visuals, actions, narration or dialogue, graphics, and character descriptions must appear in a logical and, where necessary, chronological order in each branch. Branching diagrams are part of, or perhaps even the entirety of, the total script, depending on the complexity of the game. The script may be an Excel page with columns listing a file number for each line of action, scene, dialogue, sound, and choices, as well as a final column for instructions to the developer. A game may have as many as 60,000 lines. An alternate method uses a scriptwriting program that provides four columns: two storyboard columns, one column for audio, and the fourth for visual instructions.
An adaptation of the single-column format, used for theater and television drama, fulfills most of the requirements of a game script, with the possible addition of individual scripts for branching segments or cut scenes that take the control away from the player. One addition is an indication or side note within the alternating scene descriptions and indented dialogue sections, indicating by some form of code or designation that there are alternate shots in the branching sequences.
Because games depend on interactive action from the player, alternate shots or scenes must be diagramed by you for both the developer and the programmer writing the codes to keep track of how the action may or may not move forward, depending on the choices of the player. Again, an absolute uniform manner of diagramming a multi-level chart does not exist, but writers share some conventions so that all involved in a production will understand how the flow of the action is to be programmed and produced.
Often, it helps to complete the flowchart before you complete the dialogue script. Looking at a flowchart helps in visualizing which scenes follow the action and the choices the player may be given, as well as the results of those choices. This becomes complicated when dialogue between characters may vary depending on the response of one character to another’s answer or action. In most dialogue scenes, there are at least two possible responses to any one query or action. From that multi-response, there may then may be a chain that returns to the original scene or that leads off to a totally different action.
Whichever symbols are used in charting the dialogue and action, consistency is important. If a rectangle indicates an action, and a circle, a verbal response, then those shapes must continue throughout the chart to avoid confusion.
Developing Plot and Action Lines
When writing a drama, whether for a motion picture, television, or a game, the story follows the same basic pattern. A story must tell of characters (real or imagined) acting and reacting with each other, against or as a result of changing natural conditions. The story must be based on some type of conflict, be it physical, emotional, or imagined. The conflict may take the form of dramatic tension, with or without a story. Puzzle games maintain tension, but without a definite story line other than in the imagination of the player. For a game story to succeed, you must create a maximum of action since the only way an operator can interact is by making changes in the movement, positioning, or action. Too often, games rely on violence to provide the action; action does not necessarily require violence. A puzzle game’s only action is provided by the player making moves or sitting and thinking about the next move.
Each game is based on a series of major action events. An action event may be a meeting between characters that leads to a conflict, resolved by a series of other actions, leading to a crisis of one character defeating the second character. Game plots depend on creating a fantasy, developing a metaphor between reality and the game. This may be developed through the narrative as written by you or by a narrative that is developed by the player through the player’s imagination. The interplay of the two narratives become the dynamic of the game, building interest and excitement, or else leading to boredom on the part of the player. You may write the plot so that the player may take on the personality of one of the characters (an avatar). In these games, the player operates the game to reach a point with a series of goals, overcoming a series of obstacles set by the developer, eventually ending the conflict, or else the player manipulates the character as a third person who is not personally involved in the action. The conflict may be between characters, caused by object, or even caused by nature (e.g., a tornado, a volcano eruption, or a storm at sea). Each step of the game needs to have series of goals to be reached by resolving conflicts, in the end reaching the ultimate goal or solving levels of difficulty that are awarded with scores or a new and higher level of challenge. Each goal is a crisis that must be solved before moving on to the next level of the plot.
There may be times that you will be handed an assignment to write a game that must match new technology offered by the studio’s latest engine. The developer is less interested in the plot or story than in showing the maximum abilities of the new program.
In order to complete the physical action of writing the script, you may need to start with sketches, a simple storyboard, and a list of goals and planned levels. A flowchart at this point would be helpful to keep track of how you will follow the story line. As you follow the treatment in developing the script, at each stage possible play the game to determine if it works, if it can be played, if it will hold the interest of a player, and if it will accomplish the goal you set in the premise. Keep in mind that at every stage, you will need to make modifications and changes to make the game work. Of all media writing formats, game writing requires the greatest amount of adaptability and willingness to rewrite as the process moves forward.
Despite a relatively short commercial history, the studios and game concepts started over a century ago. As the technology, basic computer sciences, and game systems evolved, some were adopted and succeeded, while others failed. The field now concentrates on three game types: adventure/fantasy, strategy, and training. The most popular games concentrate on violent action in war, sports, and crime games. Controversy over excessive violence, especially against women, has led to unsuccessful attempts by states to control game content and sales. The industry countered with a rating system that has failed to solve the problem of keeping violent games from young people because of the lack of cooperation from retailers.
Writing games is more complex than the writing of any other media genre or format due to its dependence on interactivity. A quality game will offer the player a multitude of options for actions for the characters and a multitude of reactions to every action followed. Scripts may be created on an Excel sheet, with columns of each source for every line of action. Standard script formats of either single- or dual-columns, usually with the addition of at least one extra column of storyboards, also are used for games. A flowchart showing all options and paths also may be used as a script format.
The writer is a member of a collaborative group of people with interchangeable skills, working as designers, artists, developers, programmers, and a producer, under the guidance of a publisher representing the company or studio.
1. Determine your role in the development of the game (e.g., writer, designer, or programmer).
2. Decide the type of game by content.
3. Decide the type of game by delivery system.
4. Decide the levels of solvability and tractability.
5. Write an accurate and brief log line.
6. Determine the settings and environment for each scene.
7. Determine the character cast list.
8. Outline your plot and chart each line of action.
1. Research the history of the development of a single game company.
2. Play at least one game in the following categories: arcade, strategy, adventure/fantasy, and training.
3. Storyboard a brief 3-minute puzzle game written for one player.
4. Write a script for a short 5-minute strategy game that at least two people could play simultaneously.
5. Chart the game designed for Exercise 4.
6. Watch your favorite game and try to chart at least the primary plot line.
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