It's hard to master what you don't even perceive.
The last chapter
pointed out all the areas where a traditionally trained screenwriter might run into trouble when working in games. At first glance, the apparent solution is to have a programmer, artist, animator, or someone else on the development team do the writing in the game. But that approach has its problems as well.
When I step into my role as a screenwriting teacher, I repeatedly see one phenomenon that never ceases to astound me: My students rarely read the screenplays of famous films.
No one would doubt that, barring from being born Picasso, becoming a masterful painter takes a lot of study and practice. No one doubts that much study and practice is needed to become a great ballerina. Or a great pianist.
And yet, my students continuously come to me believing that, because they grew up on films and television, they can be great writers without study and practice. Even on the face of it, this is illogical. They grew up listening to rock songs on the radio; why don't they feel they can be great guitarists just by listening?
These students of mine certainly aren't stupid; they're just naïve. They “don't know what they don't know,” as the expression goes. They simply haven't a clue to the amount of craft and artistry that goes into writing a great screenplay.
Please don't misunderstand: This isn't a way of covertly boasting about my own writing. I can give you a long, long list of writers whose work I revere. And even if you asked these writers, they'd have their own similar list.
Many of the game designers I've met are, in some ways, as naïve as my writing students. Just like the students, because they grew up on film and television, they naturally assume that they can write well.
Like my students, they don't realize how much goes into writing. Sometimes in a film, a single scene will simultaneously:
Advance the plot.
Reveal new information about a character.
Reveal new information about the relationship between two characters.
Show multiple aspects of a relationship between two characters.
Show a character struggling to grow emotionally or to resist growing.
Use 5, 10, or 15 dialogue techniques to help the dialogue sound natural.
Use a number of dialogue techniques to hint at what the character is feeling beneath the surface, even if the character is unaware of these hidden feelings.
Use other dialogue techniques to show ambivalence between two characters.
Employ specific writing techniques that give poignancy or emotional power to the scene.
Introduce small elements into the story that will be revisited in the plot later in either ironic or even momentous ways.
Artfully employ one or more symbols.
note
If you'd like too see most of the preceding done in a single scene, take a look at Chapter 2.31, “Pre-Rendered and In-Game Cinematics.”
And so much more.
Consequently, most professional writers I know rewrite every scene in their scripts five to ten times (and often more) before they even consider that they've arrived at a “first draft.”
Game moments and experiences that operate emotionally on many levels end up being like gems, each facet of which serves a different purpose. To use a film example, did you know that the final script for American Beauty was only about 100 pages long? Yet, as a film, it was a rich experience. That's because almost every scene serves a multitude of purposes.
Games indeed aren't movies, and, in fact, games that overuse cinematics and try to replicate a film experience very often aren't very appealing, especially to an American market.
Thus, in games, even in those with characters and stories, we're not trying to make movies. We are trying to integrate the gameplay with the variety, the intensity, and, sometimes, the subtlety of a powerful film's constantly changing, rich emotional nature. Techniques for accomplishing this integration are described in Section II of this book. As you'll see, however, you can't divorce them from the need for solid craftsmanship in the art of writing.
Some game companies don't hire writers because they don't know how to find a good one. Some game designers feel that writing is the “fun part” and don't want to yield it to someone else. Some “don't know what they don't know:” One game designer told me that he had read a book on mythological story structure, so he now knew all there was to know about writing(!!). And, as mentioned in the last chapter, a few game companies have been burned by bad experiences with “Hollywood types.”
Whatever the reason for its flaws, there's little disagreement that much game writing leaves a lot to be desired.
An audience, listening to a film score, rarely picks out every musical instrument, chord progression, or key shift. The listener simply feels moved.
Similarly, superb writing employs a vast array of techniques that operate outside the audience's or gamer's awareness. This is why writing techniques are almost impossible to assimilate without study. It's also why most untrained writers—whether they're in a game company or not—end up doing sub-par work. They can have control of only those techniques within their awareness. They can't, by definition, masterfully control techniques of which they are not aware.
As Chapter 1.4 pointed out, if screenwriters want to contribute heavily to the game experience, they need to learn a tremendous amount about games.
Conversely, if someone on a development team with no writing background wants to do all the writing for a game and to bring emotion into it as well, then that individual will need to buckle down to hone his or her writing skills and learn some of the available techniques.
Just as an alpaca is a sort of hybrid of a camel and a llama, the future of games with characters and stories will require a new kind of game designer/writer hybrid. Hopefully, this book will abet this process of “alpacafication.” It's really just a codification of alpacafication information.[1]
[1] This discussion of alpacas hardly scratches the surface of what kind of strange entities they are, and it stops woefully short of clarifying the full complexity of their troubling relationship to camels and llamas. Perhaps, most critically, it doesn't begin to address their relationship to Quinn the Eskimo, nor their role in the future hopes and dreams of mankind. However, these weighty issues will be examined in full detail in Chapter 5.3, “Gatherings.”