quote: My personal theory is that if a person hasn't read a ton of books and started composing fiction before they graduate high school, they are just not ever going to be a (non-hack) writer.
Ironically, Damon Knight, a likely more-accomplished writer (and writing instructor) than anyone posting to this board, suggests that many ought to not take up writing until their early 30s. He suggests this so that individuals can get out of their extended adolescences and start seeing the world from the viewpoints of multiple characters as opposed to writing egocentric fantasies about their idealized selves.
The above rings true from my experiences reading fiction and game storylines on the net: there are way too many Mary Sue writers out there extolling their greatness and importance to all who will listen.
The second problem (and where I'm currently stuck as a programmer/designer turning author) is that a large number of game stories have no real soul or meaning. In my own case, everything I write is about objects and events. No one buys the motivations of my (attempts at) characters, but they sure love the gadgets I design.
For game creation, this issue is much more insidious than the former problem IMO because one might never progress beyond this stage and yet still create fantastic game premises and levels with such skills alone. But it's not engaging storytelling.
So here we are. It's easy enough to escape the first problem with a decent fanboy filter. And getting a real author will let you create real characters. But what next? How do you plop these guys down into a world where they can be killed at any time without Deus Ex Machina to the extreme? What do you do when they die? How do you insure the protagonist meets them in the first place without forcing the plot and yet preventing it from drifting aimlessly?
My initial take is that you create personalities as opposed to characters. Next, you write and record a lot of canned dialog: probably an hour or more per major personality in order to capture its idiom. Then you drop them into the plot, giving them dramatic objectives to achieve. If they don't manage to achieve it, then someone else subsumes their role just like when some PITA actor in a soap opera develops a habit for nose-candy and it's off to Betty Ford with him/her. Once they achieve their objective, they can hang around, or you can kill them off, send them to the frontier, or whatever.
If the protagonist has run around the world for an hour or so without intersecting the plot in any way, you bring the plot to the player. If said protagonist is determined to stay out of it, that's cool (gaming is about choices, right?), but you bend reality in a dream-like fashion just enough to insure knowledge of the big bad game world out there.
Edited by - varelse on January 31, 2002 5:07:11 PM
Edited by - varelse on January 31, 2002 5:07:41 PM
I agree that writing is underappreciated, but the problem is "why games are made".
