Gumpngreen
05-09-2007, 04:39 PM
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/game-writing-1.ars
Personally I wouldn't laud Half Life 2 as having great writing but overall the article makes some good points.
The problem with writing in games is that we point out when it's terrible, but we don't praise it enough when it's good. Consider Half-Life 2.
Half-Life 2: the writing
helped as much as the graphics
In the beginning of the game, you're just another desperate citizen pushed through processing before entering the city. People around you are muttering, and if this is your first time playing, you'll likely amazed by the graphics and the Source engine. It's beautiful. Then the megascreen on the building pops up and Dr. Breen appears to explain why the aliens have taken away our ability to reproduce. The quality of the writing makes it worth quoting at length:
Let me read a letter I recently received. "Dear Dr. Breen. Why has the Combine seen fit to suppress our reproductive cycle? Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen."
Thank you for writing, Concerned. Of course your question touches on one of the basic biological impulses, with all its associated hopes and fears for the future of the species. I also detect some unspoken questions. Do our benefactors really know what's best for us? What gives them the right to make this kind of decision for mankind? Will they ever deactivate the suppression field and let us breed again?
Allow me to address the anxieties underlying your concerns, rather than try to answer every possible question you might have left unvoiced. First, let us consider the fact that for the first time ever, as a species, immortality is in our reach. This simple fact has far-reaching implications. It requires radical rethinking and revision of our genetic imperatives. It also requires planning and forethought that run in direct opposition to our neural pre-sets.
I find it helpful at times like these to remind myself that our true enemy is Instinct. Instinct was our mother when we were an infant species. Instinct coddled us and kept us safe in those hardscrabble years when we hardened our sticks and cooked our first meals above a meager fire and started at the shadows that leapt upon the cavern's walls.
But inseparable from Instinct is its dark twin, Superstition. Instinct is inextricably bound to unreasoning impulses, and today we clearly see its true nature. Instinct has just become aware of its irrelevance, and like a cornered beast, it will not go down without a bloody fight.
Instinct would inflict a fatal injury on our species. Instinct creates its own oppressors, and bids us rise up against them. Instinct tells us that the unknown is a threat, rather than an opportunity. Instinct slyly and covertly compels us away from change and progress. Instinct, therefore, must be expunged. It must be fought tooth and nail, beginning with the basest of human urges: The urge to reproduce.
We should thank our benefactors for giving us respite from this overpowering force. They have thrown a switch and exorcised our demons in a single stroke. They have given us the strength we never could have summoned to overcome this compulsion. They have given us purpose. They have turned our eyes toward the stars.
Let me assure you that the suppressing field will be shut off on the day that we have mastered ourselves...the day we can prove we no longer need it. And that day of transformation, I have it on good authority, is close at hand.
This scene sent chills down my spine. The human race has become a collection of cattle, shoved into the ghettos to be controlled and handled. It was a terrifying portrait of lost humanity; we didn't even have the ability to create new life. That chill I felt wasn't created by the graphics: the writing did it.
Half-Life 2 is loaded with powerful moments like this, and the writing worked with the technology to make the game a modern classic. Bad writing could have turned the same game into a B-novel of the ripest variety. But the very success of the game points up the weakness of game writing in general, and it begs the question: why don't we have more examples of scenes like this? What, exactly, is the problem?
This week, we'll take a look at the problem. Next week, we'll talk to someone who's part of the solution: Susan O'Connor, writer on titles like Gears of War and Bioshock.
Why writing isn't taken seriously
The number one reason writing isn't taken more seriously in gaming is that writing doesn't translate into dollars. Top-selling games do fine without good writing or compelling characters. As fans of the art of gaming, though, we're concerned with making games better, not just selling more copies. Emphasizing words and dialogue would raise the quality of almost every game on the market; even games lauded for being literary, like Hotel Dusk, usually have subpar writing when compared to any other medium.
We're so starved for writing that when we're thrown a bone with a few scraps on it, we treat it like steak. We need to stop going gaga over games that are simply wordy and start caring more about quality and emotional impact. Do we praise a game because it's a step in the right direction or because memorable lines and characters populate its world? Sales chart routinely show games with barely passable writing in the top ten, while games with excellent writing—Beyond Good and Evil, Grim Fandango, System Shock—become critical favorites but rarely make the charts. In fact, from a purely financial perspective, good writing can seem almost detrimental.
Even when the writers try to turn out a quality plot, they often end up with nothing more than a steaming pile of clichés and a few cardboard characters. The reason isn't hard to find.
We write what we know. And we are geeks
Bioshock promises a more
literate experience
Ken Levine is designing Bioshock, a game that draws on the work of Ayn Rand for its story and setting. He may be painting in broad strokes here, but his brutal take on game writers has the ring of truth to it. "Most video game people have read one book and seen one movie in their life, which is Lord of the Rings and Aliens or variations of that," Levine told MTV News, adding, "There's great things in that, but you need some variety."
This is one of the biggest problems in game writing. People that want to make games spend much of their time playing games, usually old-school titles that feature mostly subpar writing and a handful of rehashed concepts. But gamers who spend most of their free time playing games are going to be hard-pressed to draw on the wide set of cultural touchstones needed to give your title the resonance and weight that most games lack.
When writers feed into a closed system (their minds) data that comes from an industry that draws from the same four or five influences, the same attitude and set of clichés are going to pop right back out: bullet time and barbarians, force fields and regurgitated dialogue from Star Wars. The best games (in terms of story and concepts) come from people who allow themselves to become immersed in different cultures, influences, and writers.
The answer to this problem is easy to say and hard to do, like most things worthwhile. Writers need to get out more, need to read more than science fiction, and need to watch movies that don't involve guns. Go watch a good romantic comedy and ask yourself how you could turn it into a game. Look up some Coleridge and ask yourself why "Kubla Khan" is still an important poem, and what is suggests for the art of gaming.
The more time I spend learning about other kinds of art, the more I feel like I can understand games and the concepts behind them. One example: a few months ago I was standing in the Dalí museum looking at paintings, and I realized that the surrealist was painting gamers before we even knew who we were as a group. Dalí understood that truths sometimes work best when presented indirectly or through the lens of a fantastic vision, and he went about constructing some of the most bizarre and intriguing images of the century. Game designers looking to create alternate worlds of their own could do worse than look to Dalí for guidance.
The wider the influences, the more that a writer can bring to the table. The industry will be better for it.
The money men are against you
Here's a more difficult problem. If a game sells well without story or characters, then the money men did their jobs. They cut off spending to an area of a game that wasn't needed to get those sales, and that helps the profit margin. From the point of the view of the shareholders this is a good tradeoff, but if we want something approaching humanity or feeling in our games, this is just another case of money strangling us almost as we draw our first breath. Warren Spector has some depressing words for us in this area: "You don't want to know how many projects I've been told to 'just go make a shooter'. I had one publisher tell me 'you're not allowed to say "story" any more."
In other words, "Get back to work; people just want to blow stuff up!" If you're not working on what the publishers know will sell—and that's shooters with shallow stories or fighting games with laughable dialogue—you're not an efficient member of the team. They want you working on things that they can sell in a screenshot, tell to the press, and put as a bullet point on the back of the box. Deformable environments get coverage in the gaming press; strong story does not. From every objective angle it's not a good investment.
The only way I can think to fix this problem is to educate as many gamers as possible and get them to vote with their cash. If games with strong characters and evocative writing start to sell, the right people will notice.
While there are those of us who do care about such things, though, it may be that we're the small minority of the game-buying public. It could be that the publishers really are providing the majority what it wants. This may be a depressing picture, but we need to accept that many people won't ever view games as art, much as many people only see films as escapist entertainment.
And the bigger gaming gets as an industry, the more we'll see this happening. High-definition systems that require surround sound and teams of dozens, if not hundreds, of people are only going to make this worse. If you control the purse strings, do you want someone designing a new gun, or the dialogue? Guess which one will most affect your sales?
Fortunately, it's not quite a lost cause. There are a few ways that the industry can make things right.
Bring writers in earlier
This is easy and not even that expensive. As development budgets increase, it will get even be easier to "sneak" a writer in than it was when people tried to release games for the smallest initial investment. If you have a strong, able writer involved in your game from day one to shipping, you stand a better-than-average shot at having something that feels cohesive than if you bring in a writer a few months before launch.
Unfortunately, most developers don't think that way, believing that you can drop a writer in at the end of a project and everything will turn out just fine. it doesn't, and the end result is something akin to putting Neal Stephenson to work writing classified ad copy for your local alternative weekly newspaper.
While the design team can come up with basic concepts and even a bare-bones story for the game, having a writer there from the first day on would be a huge benefit to most games. Think of the writer as a filter: (s)he can look at everything from character design to building structure and figure out how it fits with the theme and message of the game. Having a strong character sketch of for each person in the game would also help artists work on things that are more meaningful than what kind of armor they will wear. Having strong dialogue from the jump would allow cut-scenes and cinematics to be more easily directed and to have more impact.
You can make a game world based on a dry design document, but having the story, character, and even plot done ahead of time will allow everyone do actual world building and infuse the experience with life and color instead of simply making "dystopian future earth #294." In the best-case scenario, the art should inspire the writer to do better work, which then inspires better artwork and assets. It should be a circular give-and-take between the team throughout production, and the only way that's possible is by having a writer involved as early as possible. Bringing a writer onto a team and giving them a week to do the job will just give us more of what we're stuck with now: stories shoe-horned into games that weren't built for them.
The auteur approach
One of the harder ways to handle game writing—and by extension game design—is to have one central personality who drives the entire project. This can be tough simply because it takes a lot of time to have the level of experience needed to step into that sort of role, and of course someone with money must trust you before they hand over the reins to your own game. David Cage, the writer and director of Indigo Prophecy, talks about the difficulty of having such control:
Working on an original project is both the worst curse and the most exciting thing that can happen in this industry. It's a curse because you go through periods of terrifying doubt. For two years you abandon all notions of a private life and forgo many hours of sleep because you are permanently looking for the right path, being simultaneously haunted by the idea that you may be completely mistaken and may be taking enormous risks.
It's also a fascinating experience because an original project allows you to construct your own vision, to test your convictions on the ground, to experience an extraordinary professional and human adventure with a team, with all the alternating periods of torment and euphoria that this implies.
Indigo Prophecy was all of that. This adventure taught me an enormous amount of things by forcing me to think about my vision of the future of this medium and how to make it evolve, sometimes by remaining true to its still-young traditions and sometimes by breaking away from them.
Indigo Prophecy's characters had actual
lives and believable motivations
While Indigo Prophecy broke apart in the final acts, the first half remains one of the most engrossing gaming experiences in recent memory. Mr. Cage wrote over 2,000 pages of design and dialogue for the game, ensuring that every scene and line worked with the larger whole. Cage is candid about how he wanted to make the game.
The purpose of this organization was to have an "auteur" approach to game creation, i.e. to create a context that gives one person full power to express his/her vision. This specifically made it possible to adopt strong-willed stances without constantly seeking compromises at all costs, which would have been disastrous for a project that claims to be innovative.
For me it is fundamental to have the director embodying the vision of the project: it is extremely rare for a truly original game to be developed without the creative vision of one person (from Shadow of the Colossus by Fumito Ueda to Psychonauts by Tim Schafer or Killer 7 by Gouichi Suda, or also Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima).
Tim Schafer, who is named by everyone who enjoys good writing in games, also wears more than one hat when working on a game. In interviews he discusses his first job in the industry, which was with LucasArts, calling it "half creative writing and half programming." That background proved to be important for his style of game design. In a 2003 interview, Schaefer commented on how coming from a cross-disciplinary background provided him with a procedural way of thinking when it came to writing. "I mean it would be really hard to do if one person was doing the writing and one person was doing the programming," Schafer told Game Studies. "Because I've never written my dialog in a script program. I've always written it in SCUMM, or whatever language—into the code itself."
This sort of thinking and leadership role is common in other art forms, but gaming more often features a team approach. It's clear why inflectional games often have an outspoken and strong-willed name behind them. We're seeing personalities start to emerge that are able to work within the boundaries of the business and improve the state of game writing—a good thing.
While many of us wanted gaming to go mainstream, it was hard to imagine that with a broader audience story would take a back seat—the Michael Bay effect, in other words. Luckily for fans of story, we get enough games like Bully, Psychonauts, Half-Life 2, and Beyond Good and Evil to keep us hopeful for the future. Good writing is out there, and it's our job as fans to make sure we support it as much as we can.
Next week we'll hear from professional game writer Susan O'Connor, whose writing credits include Gears of War and Bioshock. Susan talked with Ars about words, her love for Guitar Hero, and the misery of having an actor butcher a line you've written.
Obviously those at XrucifiX are following this advice considering that I AM a writer. ;) But I'm quite busy with other aspects of business management and development so we have a dedicated writer.
Personally I wouldn't laud Half Life 2 as having great writing but overall the article makes some good points.
The problem with writing in games is that we point out when it's terrible, but we don't praise it enough when it's good. Consider Half-Life 2.
Half-Life 2: the writing
helped as much as the graphics
In the beginning of the game, you're just another desperate citizen pushed through processing before entering the city. People around you are muttering, and if this is your first time playing, you'll likely amazed by the graphics and the Source engine. It's beautiful. Then the megascreen on the building pops up and Dr. Breen appears to explain why the aliens have taken away our ability to reproduce. The quality of the writing makes it worth quoting at length:
Let me read a letter I recently received. "Dear Dr. Breen. Why has the Combine seen fit to suppress our reproductive cycle? Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen."
Thank you for writing, Concerned. Of course your question touches on one of the basic biological impulses, with all its associated hopes and fears for the future of the species. I also detect some unspoken questions. Do our benefactors really know what's best for us? What gives them the right to make this kind of decision for mankind? Will they ever deactivate the suppression field and let us breed again?
Allow me to address the anxieties underlying your concerns, rather than try to answer every possible question you might have left unvoiced. First, let us consider the fact that for the first time ever, as a species, immortality is in our reach. This simple fact has far-reaching implications. It requires radical rethinking and revision of our genetic imperatives. It also requires planning and forethought that run in direct opposition to our neural pre-sets.
I find it helpful at times like these to remind myself that our true enemy is Instinct. Instinct was our mother when we were an infant species. Instinct coddled us and kept us safe in those hardscrabble years when we hardened our sticks and cooked our first meals above a meager fire and started at the shadows that leapt upon the cavern's walls.
But inseparable from Instinct is its dark twin, Superstition. Instinct is inextricably bound to unreasoning impulses, and today we clearly see its true nature. Instinct has just become aware of its irrelevance, and like a cornered beast, it will not go down without a bloody fight.
Instinct would inflict a fatal injury on our species. Instinct creates its own oppressors, and bids us rise up against them. Instinct tells us that the unknown is a threat, rather than an opportunity. Instinct slyly and covertly compels us away from change and progress. Instinct, therefore, must be expunged. It must be fought tooth and nail, beginning with the basest of human urges: The urge to reproduce.
We should thank our benefactors for giving us respite from this overpowering force. They have thrown a switch and exorcised our demons in a single stroke. They have given us the strength we never could have summoned to overcome this compulsion. They have given us purpose. They have turned our eyes toward the stars.
Let me assure you that the suppressing field will be shut off on the day that we have mastered ourselves...the day we can prove we no longer need it. And that day of transformation, I have it on good authority, is close at hand.
This scene sent chills down my spine. The human race has become a collection of cattle, shoved into the ghettos to be controlled and handled. It was a terrifying portrait of lost humanity; we didn't even have the ability to create new life. That chill I felt wasn't created by the graphics: the writing did it.
Half-Life 2 is loaded with powerful moments like this, and the writing worked with the technology to make the game a modern classic. Bad writing could have turned the same game into a B-novel of the ripest variety. But the very success of the game points up the weakness of game writing in general, and it begs the question: why don't we have more examples of scenes like this? What, exactly, is the problem?
This week, we'll take a look at the problem. Next week, we'll talk to someone who's part of the solution: Susan O'Connor, writer on titles like Gears of War and Bioshock.
Why writing isn't taken seriously
The number one reason writing isn't taken more seriously in gaming is that writing doesn't translate into dollars. Top-selling games do fine without good writing or compelling characters. As fans of the art of gaming, though, we're concerned with making games better, not just selling more copies. Emphasizing words and dialogue would raise the quality of almost every game on the market; even games lauded for being literary, like Hotel Dusk, usually have subpar writing when compared to any other medium.
We're so starved for writing that when we're thrown a bone with a few scraps on it, we treat it like steak. We need to stop going gaga over games that are simply wordy and start caring more about quality and emotional impact. Do we praise a game because it's a step in the right direction or because memorable lines and characters populate its world? Sales chart routinely show games with barely passable writing in the top ten, while games with excellent writing—Beyond Good and Evil, Grim Fandango, System Shock—become critical favorites but rarely make the charts. In fact, from a purely financial perspective, good writing can seem almost detrimental.
Even when the writers try to turn out a quality plot, they often end up with nothing more than a steaming pile of clichés and a few cardboard characters. The reason isn't hard to find.
We write what we know. And we are geeks
Bioshock promises a more
literate experience
Ken Levine is designing Bioshock, a game that draws on the work of Ayn Rand for its story and setting. He may be painting in broad strokes here, but his brutal take on game writers has the ring of truth to it. "Most video game people have read one book and seen one movie in their life, which is Lord of the Rings and Aliens or variations of that," Levine told MTV News, adding, "There's great things in that, but you need some variety."
This is one of the biggest problems in game writing. People that want to make games spend much of their time playing games, usually old-school titles that feature mostly subpar writing and a handful of rehashed concepts. But gamers who spend most of their free time playing games are going to be hard-pressed to draw on the wide set of cultural touchstones needed to give your title the resonance and weight that most games lack.
When writers feed into a closed system (their minds) data that comes from an industry that draws from the same four or five influences, the same attitude and set of clichés are going to pop right back out: bullet time and barbarians, force fields and regurgitated dialogue from Star Wars. The best games (in terms of story and concepts) come from people who allow themselves to become immersed in different cultures, influences, and writers.
The answer to this problem is easy to say and hard to do, like most things worthwhile. Writers need to get out more, need to read more than science fiction, and need to watch movies that don't involve guns. Go watch a good romantic comedy and ask yourself how you could turn it into a game. Look up some Coleridge and ask yourself why "Kubla Khan" is still an important poem, and what is suggests for the art of gaming.
The more time I spend learning about other kinds of art, the more I feel like I can understand games and the concepts behind them. One example: a few months ago I was standing in the Dalí museum looking at paintings, and I realized that the surrealist was painting gamers before we even knew who we were as a group. Dalí understood that truths sometimes work best when presented indirectly or through the lens of a fantastic vision, and he went about constructing some of the most bizarre and intriguing images of the century. Game designers looking to create alternate worlds of their own could do worse than look to Dalí for guidance.
The wider the influences, the more that a writer can bring to the table. The industry will be better for it.
The money men are against you
Here's a more difficult problem. If a game sells well without story or characters, then the money men did their jobs. They cut off spending to an area of a game that wasn't needed to get those sales, and that helps the profit margin. From the point of the view of the shareholders this is a good tradeoff, but if we want something approaching humanity or feeling in our games, this is just another case of money strangling us almost as we draw our first breath. Warren Spector has some depressing words for us in this area: "You don't want to know how many projects I've been told to 'just go make a shooter'. I had one publisher tell me 'you're not allowed to say "story" any more."
In other words, "Get back to work; people just want to blow stuff up!" If you're not working on what the publishers know will sell—and that's shooters with shallow stories or fighting games with laughable dialogue—you're not an efficient member of the team. They want you working on things that they can sell in a screenshot, tell to the press, and put as a bullet point on the back of the box. Deformable environments get coverage in the gaming press; strong story does not. From every objective angle it's not a good investment.
The only way I can think to fix this problem is to educate as many gamers as possible and get them to vote with their cash. If games with strong characters and evocative writing start to sell, the right people will notice.
While there are those of us who do care about such things, though, it may be that we're the small minority of the game-buying public. It could be that the publishers really are providing the majority what it wants. This may be a depressing picture, but we need to accept that many people won't ever view games as art, much as many people only see films as escapist entertainment.
And the bigger gaming gets as an industry, the more we'll see this happening. High-definition systems that require surround sound and teams of dozens, if not hundreds, of people are only going to make this worse. If you control the purse strings, do you want someone designing a new gun, or the dialogue? Guess which one will most affect your sales?
Fortunately, it's not quite a lost cause. There are a few ways that the industry can make things right.
Bring writers in earlier
This is easy and not even that expensive. As development budgets increase, it will get even be easier to "sneak" a writer in than it was when people tried to release games for the smallest initial investment. If you have a strong, able writer involved in your game from day one to shipping, you stand a better-than-average shot at having something that feels cohesive than if you bring in a writer a few months before launch.
Unfortunately, most developers don't think that way, believing that you can drop a writer in at the end of a project and everything will turn out just fine. it doesn't, and the end result is something akin to putting Neal Stephenson to work writing classified ad copy for your local alternative weekly newspaper.
While the design team can come up with basic concepts and even a bare-bones story for the game, having a writer there from the first day on would be a huge benefit to most games. Think of the writer as a filter: (s)he can look at everything from character design to building structure and figure out how it fits with the theme and message of the game. Having a strong character sketch of for each person in the game would also help artists work on things that are more meaningful than what kind of armor they will wear. Having strong dialogue from the jump would allow cut-scenes and cinematics to be more easily directed and to have more impact.
You can make a game world based on a dry design document, but having the story, character, and even plot done ahead of time will allow everyone do actual world building and infuse the experience with life and color instead of simply making "dystopian future earth #294." In the best-case scenario, the art should inspire the writer to do better work, which then inspires better artwork and assets. It should be a circular give-and-take between the team throughout production, and the only way that's possible is by having a writer involved as early as possible. Bringing a writer onto a team and giving them a week to do the job will just give us more of what we're stuck with now: stories shoe-horned into games that weren't built for them.
The auteur approach
One of the harder ways to handle game writing—and by extension game design—is to have one central personality who drives the entire project. This can be tough simply because it takes a lot of time to have the level of experience needed to step into that sort of role, and of course someone with money must trust you before they hand over the reins to your own game. David Cage, the writer and director of Indigo Prophecy, talks about the difficulty of having such control:
Working on an original project is both the worst curse and the most exciting thing that can happen in this industry. It's a curse because you go through periods of terrifying doubt. For two years you abandon all notions of a private life and forgo many hours of sleep because you are permanently looking for the right path, being simultaneously haunted by the idea that you may be completely mistaken and may be taking enormous risks.
It's also a fascinating experience because an original project allows you to construct your own vision, to test your convictions on the ground, to experience an extraordinary professional and human adventure with a team, with all the alternating periods of torment and euphoria that this implies.
Indigo Prophecy was all of that. This adventure taught me an enormous amount of things by forcing me to think about my vision of the future of this medium and how to make it evolve, sometimes by remaining true to its still-young traditions and sometimes by breaking away from them.
Indigo Prophecy's characters had actual
lives and believable motivations
While Indigo Prophecy broke apart in the final acts, the first half remains one of the most engrossing gaming experiences in recent memory. Mr. Cage wrote over 2,000 pages of design and dialogue for the game, ensuring that every scene and line worked with the larger whole. Cage is candid about how he wanted to make the game.
The purpose of this organization was to have an "auteur" approach to game creation, i.e. to create a context that gives one person full power to express his/her vision. This specifically made it possible to adopt strong-willed stances without constantly seeking compromises at all costs, which would have been disastrous for a project that claims to be innovative.
For me it is fundamental to have the director embodying the vision of the project: it is extremely rare for a truly original game to be developed without the creative vision of one person (from Shadow of the Colossus by Fumito Ueda to Psychonauts by Tim Schafer or Killer 7 by Gouichi Suda, or also Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima).
Tim Schafer, who is named by everyone who enjoys good writing in games, also wears more than one hat when working on a game. In interviews he discusses his first job in the industry, which was with LucasArts, calling it "half creative writing and half programming." That background proved to be important for his style of game design. In a 2003 interview, Schaefer commented on how coming from a cross-disciplinary background provided him with a procedural way of thinking when it came to writing. "I mean it would be really hard to do if one person was doing the writing and one person was doing the programming," Schafer told Game Studies. "Because I've never written my dialog in a script program. I've always written it in SCUMM, or whatever language—into the code itself."
This sort of thinking and leadership role is common in other art forms, but gaming more often features a team approach. It's clear why inflectional games often have an outspoken and strong-willed name behind them. We're seeing personalities start to emerge that are able to work within the boundaries of the business and improve the state of game writing—a good thing.
While many of us wanted gaming to go mainstream, it was hard to imagine that with a broader audience story would take a back seat—the Michael Bay effect, in other words. Luckily for fans of story, we get enough games like Bully, Psychonauts, Half-Life 2, and Beyond Good and Evil to keep us hopeful for the future. Good writing is out there, and it's our job as fans to make sure we support it as much as we can.
Next week we'll hear from professional game writer Susan O'Connor, whose writing credits include Gears of War and Bioshock. Susan talked with Ars about words, her love for Guitar Hero, and the misery of having an actor butcher a line you've written.
Obviously those at XrucifiX are following this advice considering that I AM a writer. ;) But I'm quite busy with other aspects of business management and development so we have a dedicated writer.