On Monday 27th October we had a guest lecture from freelance games writer Conway Sutton on the subject of narrative in video games. They were a writer on both Monster Prom 4: Monster Con, a popular comedic queer dating sim by studio Beautiful Glitch, as well as doing freelance work on puzzle adventure game Ascend, which is themed around Greek mythology and tackles various mental health issues in its narrative.
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First of all, Conway established the key differences between the roles “game writer” and “narrative designer” – it is though that there is little difference between the two but we would learn that quite the opposite is true.
Game writers are about the actual writing of in-game text: dialogue, flavour text, narration etc. They are often overseen and directed by the narrative designer.
Narrative designers are focused on making much bigger picture narrative decisions – there is admittedly more overlap with game designers than games writers in a lot of cases. That said, the lines can very often blur, so narrative designers may be doing actual writing for the game and vice versa.
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Next, Conway talked to us about story structure in particular, posing several questions for us to consider in our games writing:
- Will your game have different endings?
- What does the story structure look like? (linear, branching, etc)
- What kind of player behaviour do you want to encourage?
- Will your game have different paths to the same ending?
As a short case study, we looked at Detroit Become Human and how it encourages replayability by taking advantage of its branching structure and showing it upfront to the player in a flow chart format – incentivising players to explore every possible outcome.
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We then looked at considerations to have when writing player character. In particular we looked at games with player characters at two opposite ends of the spectrum: The Witcher 3, which places the user fully in the shoes of a pre-written character – “everyone’s playthrough will feel like Geralt”.
On the other hand, a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 grants the player to have near absolute customisation over the player’s character, both visually and narratively, allowing for many opportunities for self-expression. Below are some more consideration questions:
- Is your player creating their own character or embodying one?
- How do they express their character?
- Are (and if so, how are) you making use of silent character tropes?
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“Ludonarrative dissonance” was described by Conway as being the conflict between a game’s narrative told through the non-interactive elements and the narrative told through the gameplay. Usually it is something best avoided when trying to tell a consistent narrative, but we explored one case where it actually elevated its media; Spec Ops: The Line was a game released in 2012 by developer YAGER – it is famous, or rather infamous, for coming off as a typical military action shooter game, but upending player expectations by placing them in situations deliberately designed to test their morality, inspired by real-life war and conflict.
Here ludonarrative dissonance is used effectively to make the player question their own choices and rethink the way we view military conflict, war and genocide. The game has since been delisted from online storefronts.
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Before he left, Conway gave us some more personal advice about breaking into industry. Some key takeaways that stood out to me were:
- Sell employers on soft skills – top priority is “are you pleasant to work with”, second “can you apply your skill set to our role”.
- Quote from Mike Bithell, creator of Thomas Was Alone – “Find the one thing that nobody else in the world cares about and you’re insane about and go all in on that.”
- Useful resources for games writing:
- Save the Cat – Blake Snyder
- The Creative Writing Coursebook
- Visual Novel Design – YouTube channel
Overall the lecture was very useful and insightful – games writing was in many ways an angle I had not particularly considered in my creative works, so this really helped to open my eyes to a new, and very useful way of thinking when it comes to the g
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