Writing for Games

Theory and Practice

Hannah Nicklin

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000582734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Focussing on the independent videogames sector, this book provides readers with a vocabulary to articulate and build their games writing practice; whether studying games or coming to games from another storytelling discipline. Writing for Games offers resources for communication, collaboration, reflection, and advocacy, inviting the reader to situate their practice in a centuries-long heritage of storytelling, as well as considering the material affordances of videogames, and the practical realities of working in game development processes.

Structured into three parts, Theory considers the craft of both games and writing from a theoretical perspective, covering vocabulary for both game and story practices. Case Studies uses three case studies to explore the theory explored in Part 1. The Practical Workbook offers a series of provocations, tools and exercises that give the reader the means to refine and develop their writing, not just for now, but as a part of a life-long practice.

Writing for Games: Theory and Practice is an approachable and entry-level text for anyone interested in the craft of writing for videogames.

Hannah Nicklin is an award-winning narrative and game designer, writer, and academic who has been practising for nearly 15 years. She works hard to create playful experiences that see people and make people feel seen, and also argues for making games a more radical space through mentoring, advocacy, and redefining process. Trained as a playwright, Nicklin moved into interactive practices early on in her career and is now the CEO and studio lead at Danish indie studio Die Gute Fabrik, which most recently launched Mutazione in 2019.

PART I
Theory

Chapter 1 Craft

DOI: 10.1201/9781003182832-3

This first chapter in the Theory part of the book is going to set the context and foundations for everything else, so it’s worth sticking with this one, even if you only want to dive into one or two of the others. The central thesis of this chapter is something I touched upon in the Introduction: essentially, the idea that storytelling is a craft.

What Do You Mean, ‘Storytelling Is a Craft’?

Storytelling is a craft, and writing is a means of practising that craft. When asserting the idea that storytelling is a craft I am attempting to shift us away from the ideal that storytelling is magical. Like much art and design, when storytelling works well, you rarely see the artifice (unless intended, like Brecht or brutalism) – that is, all of the hard work and considered decisions that make it sing. Storytelling is a craft, but it’s easy to forget that because it’s an ancient one, practised for generations, and one that we all have a grounding in. It’s a craft and practice which surrounds us; we all learn and communicate and develop our relationship to the world in part through storytelling.

For that reason, there are often two perceptions damaging our ability to communicate about (and develop our ability to practise) writing, which I see particularly in games. If you’re coming from a different storytelling discipline, then the principles here may seem obvious, but you’d do well to equip yourself with the knowledge of what people often don’t know.

First, there’s the idea that the building of story stops at the world building and plot (the world the player/characters are in and what happens to them). This is the level of storytelling we’re all equipped with as children and as adults experience daily as the audience for storytelling. For that reason, many people dismiss storytelling as easy or unimportant, or naively assume it doesn’t take training, expertise, and material design decisions to make a game story and its writing effective.

The second common misconception (which has developed more because of the gatekeeping of literacy and the literary canon) is that writing and storytelling are solely instinctive or innate in only some people. That people have aptitudes for certain practices isn’t something I would wish to dispute. But I strongly believe that wherever you start from, if you work at it, you will become a better writer and storyteller. And that if you rest on the laurels of your initial aptitude, you will equally have a practice which will never develop for the better.

I’ll use the words ‘craft’ and ‘practice’ often because these are both words which speak to lifelong learning, the continual building of a toolset, and a thing you learn by doing, a living thing. The main takeaways here are

• Storytelling is not magical.
• Storytelling is an expert discipline of which writing is a part.
• Storytelling is something everyone can learn to be better at.
• Storytelling is a lifelong practice.
• Storytelling in games is made up of much else besides plot and world building.

In games it’s fairly common that a creative lead or design lead in a small indie studio may get excited about cobbling together a world, characters, creatures, and broad-brushstrokes plot and motivations for the player, and either never hire a storytelling professional or wait a long time before they hire one. They will do so because they believe that writing and storytelling is not a craft and that writing is something that fills in the gaps to make a story legible. Or they hire too late, meaning it will be very difficult for the professional to do their job well. If a writer is good, they might need to advocate for design changes, new tools, workflow adjustments (i.e. ‘you can’t rearrange the levels without telling me because it also rearranges the set-ups and pay-offs of the character interactions I have written’), the reduction of clichés, the pruning of the plot, the nurturing of more distinct characters, and more. If they are lucky, they might be listened to.

But they will do much less good work than if the lead had understood storytelling as a practice. The idea here is that a lead who understands storytelling as a practice both understands the need for placeholder content and that a less practised storyteller may often imbue their plot and worldbuilding with unknown clichés, broken design, and plot and narrative decisions that break the effectiveness of their game design. A lead who understands storytelling as a practice will know that they need initial expert consultation (if they can’t afford a full-time expert yet) to avoid any undoable poor design, tool, and workflow decisions. They will know that storytelling in games is made up of backend tools, material gameplay and design decisions, narrative, UI, character design and development, text styles and effects, and writing, as well as plot, world building, and filling in the gaps between them with dialogue.

Finally, in understanding storytelling and writing as a practice and a craft, we can also appreciate it as something done joyfully and well by both professionals and amateurs, like music, ceramics, garment-making, and more. The point of this definition is not to gatekeep but to welcome all in the understanding that you place yourself somewhere on the developmental spectrum of lifelong learning.

Educated Fan, Amateur, or Professional

Is writing something you don’t want to specialise in? Welcome! That’s totally fine; familiarise yourself enough with the vocabularies and core contexts so you can usefully collaborate with specialists and know where you want to draw your limitations. A good metaphor here is of a sports fan who watches the sport play, knows the rules and the players, and understands the contexts in which the players and coaches can excel, but doesn’t want to play the sport.

Is writing something you want to do as an amateur? That is, not to deadline, to the briefs of others, or as your primary means of income? Welcome! You won’t need any of the tools which enable you to be creative every day, to deadline, and the shortcuts for collaborating and communicating in professional settings. Define your lifelong learning as something which brings you joy and satisfaction. In the sports metaphor, you are a weekend warrior – you focus on your life, health, and well-being, and you practise the sport of your choice as part of that. You play in five-a-side tournaments, but don’t have to train every day. You may get serious about equipment, competition, and workouts, but no one will mind if you take a week off. And you can just as easily find joy in the process; you can suddenly decide that instead of the interval workout you had planned, you’re going to go for a long run through the countryside and just smell the roses.

Is writing something you want to do as a professional? That is to deadline, often to the briefs of others, and as part of the means by which you sustain yourself and those you have caring responsibilities for? Welcome! You will need to be much more strategic about the tools you build, the vocabulary, and the communication and collaboration skills, but most of all, you will need to be able to develop a practice of problem solving, solution building, and creative practice which does not rely on inspiration. You will want to seek out dedicated coaches (peer mentors); you will want to keep records of your training and knowledge as it grows, so you can reflect on it as you progress to the next season; and you will want expert knowledge of every part of the sport (practice) and will need to be ready to perform even on the days you don’t feel like it.

In the Introduction I invited you to think about yourself and how you learn best; here I invite you to think about how you relate to the different levels of investment that exist: Do you want context for your adjacent work? Do you want to find joy and well-being through creative work? And/or do you want to do this, frankly, for money?

As you progress through this text, and learn from the wider world, use this to measure where you want to invest your time. If you need adjacent professional context, you might want to focus on vocabulary (for comms) and how writing can be best produced in order to improve your related processes. If you wish to develop your skills in an amateur context, focus on concepts, case studies, and practical exercises for exploring your ideas at leisure. If you’re a professional, or want to be, then you want all of the above, plus the exercises and practices which concentrate on process, communication, collaboration, and working to deadline.

Unsure? Try it out and see how you feel! None of these approaches are better or worse than the others; the aim is to know yourself and your needs.

The Material Context of Games

The next few chapters will cover a variety of essential vocabulary in specific areas: from games studio structures, to story structure, and story components. But before we run the gamut, I wish to lay down one more set of foundations about storytelling in games.

Here’s the most important thing:

Games are really hard to make.¹

1 ‘Nobody told me when you make a video game you have to make the whole thing’ (Esposito, 2018).

Theatre is also hard to make; dance, ceramics, quilt making, all of it. I know. All media and art forms have their own challenges, but when you make a film, sure, you have to write a script and hire actors, and direct and film and edit. But you don’t also have to invent gravity, and build the actors as puppets made out of flesh and bone and weird perspectives. That you have to define ‘up’ and ‘down’ and ‘sky’ and ‘ground’ is also part of the joy and inventive potential of games, but please believe me when I say the defining thing about game development is that it is a goddamn miracle if any game functions at all, and still if it functions on most computers, most of the time.

It can take half a year for a team to resource, design, implement, and fix the display of italics in onscreen text (this happened to me). It can take several months to build the tools for defining the logic of, implementing, and displaying a character’s dialogue in the right format. A large part of game development is project planning, MVP,² and communicating with others about what’s needed, what’s a priority, and when a change is being made – so that other departments can understand how it will have a knock-on effect.

2 Minimum viable product: part of the Agile practice of design. The idea is to make the design idea, tool, or piece of gameplay in its most minimally functional way, and then to test or play it in order to know in which direction to improve and build on it.

The material context of writing and storytelling in games is that you rarely work alone – especially as a writer – and the practice of writing will as much be about communication, priorities, project planning, spreadsheets, and resources, as often as it’s about being able to actually do it.

Then you face the huge lack of common vocabulary for what we mean when we talk about story in games.

Narrative Design Is Not Writing and Vice Versa

Writing is not narrative design, and narrative design is not writing. One of the common misconceptions in videogames around storytelling is that narrative designers can write and vice versa. Sometimes you get people who do both (often you will be expected to be a dual narrative designer/writer in a small indie development team), but this problem is endemic and often means that the actual brief or recruitment copy for a piece of work isn’t clear about what’s wanted. And it’s even possible the people writing the job description don’t know what they need.

So, let’s set this out as clearly as possible:

• Narrative design is the practice of game design with story at its heart. You are the advocate for the story in the design of the game. Narrative is (and we will dig down more into this in the next chapter) the design of the telling of a story. Not just a plot in a world with characters, but also the decisions around in what order the plot is communicat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Theory
• PART II Case Studies
• Part III A Practical Workbook
• Conclusion
• Select Glossary of Games Industry Terms
• Bibliography
• Index