The Case Against Stereotyping the Games Industry

Games don't need writers, but when you think about it, they don't really need designers either. Not in the conventional sense we mean when we trot out those labels, anyway.

That's my responser to Adam Maxwell of Dopass.com, who wrote something a few weeks ago provocatively titled "The Case Against Writers in the Game Industry" which Gamasutra picked up and pruned for publication today. Maxwell has a point, but my contention is going to be that it misses a broader, more important one. (I'll be focusing hereafter on Maxwell's unedited original post.)

In his post, Maxwell -- whose credits include the defunct MMO Auto Assault -- says he came to the game industry as a writer, but quickly switched to "assistant designer," and that the change-up saved his career. The studio imploded, and Maxwell contends that would've been the end of his journey into gaming, but for the saving grace of his job title ("designer"). He thus concludes that "there's no place for writers in our industry."

Really? Yes, really, says Maxwell. Writers, he argues, don't bring enough to the bottom line to justify their existence. They plot, but they don't have to think about how players interact with a given world. They work linearly from A to Z, scene to scene, plot-point to plot-point, which contravenes the nonlinear way games work. Designers, by contrast, have to work asymmetrically, creating experiences, puzzles, and other dynamic content that may or may not conform to the structural rigidity of your average Aristotelian narrative.

For Maxwell, writers superimpose a kind of formalism that turns out to be incompatible with the spontaneous act of actually playing a game, whereas game designers have to crack the static granite of a writer's story and -- to the degree that story's even necessary -- integrate it in a way that doesn't violate the flexibility of the gameplay. Gamers want just enough structure to know what their goals are, then it's "look out below, here I come," and whatever you do, "don't fence me in."

That's a persuasive point. When we play games, we (not the game) create more of the narrative ourselves than we absorb through traditional cues like cutscenes and scripted call-and-response sequences. Whether you're playing an arcade-puzzler like Tetris or a sprawling RPG like Mass Effect, the ratio of "you" to "story" in gaming is always dramatically in your favor.

Test that theory. Take a game, any game you've been playing recently, and describe what you did in the last hour or so of gameplay. If you're like most people, you'll tell a story. "I did this, but then this happened, so I had to do this other stuff, and then I stopped to buy supplies and level up, and then I had a battle with these things over here." And so on.

Take a first-person shooter like Doom 3 with its hokey "hell on Mars" story:

I'm skulking along a klaxon-lit catwalk and I have my pistol out pointed at the shadowy space in front of me, but I think I hear growling up ahead, so I'm turning on my flashlight and whipping out my shotgun instead, and...oh-holy-crap, an imp just popped out of a closet and he's lobbing fireballs at me, so alley-oop, I'm jumping off the catwalk and scurrying for cover behind some crates in a corner, but will the imp follow me down here, and what'll I do if it does?

...or even something as seemingly plot-averse as Tetris. Say someone asks you how a game went:

I just made it to level 15, but with junk piled halfway up the screen because I was going for points, and I really needed lines to knock out a few bands, but the random generator shafted me. So I started over, but this time I'm just focusing on knocking out the bottom line instead of building stacks of four.

Did anyone at id script what you did? Predict exactly how you'd react? What you'd think? How you'd describe it?

Ask a hundred people to describe what happens in the seventh Harry Potter book or the last Star Wars flick and, allowing for memory lapses, you'll probably get very similar summaries.

Not so in gaming, where players create highly personal, event-specific narratives on the fly.

Bringing that back to Maxwell's point, games need creators (as opposed to writers) who understand nontraditional narrative, i.e. self-created narrative, narrative that lets you explore and test hypotheticals. Games that, to say it as plainly as possible, allow you to play, which is really just another word for "safely experiment."

Now here's the problem with Maxwell's argument that designers trump writers when it comes to building virtual playgrounds: It's too compartmentalized, too antagonistic, and too limited by old ways of thinking about design roles. It tries to answer the question "writers" vs. "designers" by assuming either category deserves to exist in relation to games in the first place.

Why be blinded by labels?

What we need, instead, are people who can synthesize the vital essentials of both. Call it "renaissance designing," or maybe just "common sense." Design hybridism, if you will, in the sense that stodgy old-fashioned labels like "writer" and "designer" become as functionally irrelevant as they are creatively bankrupt when it comes to making a design idea live up to its potential.

Maxwell alludes to this toward the end of his post, when he says:

For the same price (sometimes cheaper, I?m sad to say), you can hire a designer who is also an unsung writing hero (they exist in far larger numbers than anyone wants to give the industry credit for) and when the story is done, that same designer can be there to throw his lot into the fire with the rest of the designers and actually make the game fun. He can be retasked as needed, and he can be useful at every stage of development.

But then he tarnishes his point by concluding with "For those reasons, and maybe even a few more, my money is on the designer over the writer, every time."

I get that games are designable entities first, that writing, sound editing, voice acting, etc. all feed into the master design plan. What I don't get is why we still feel the need to reinforce outmoded relationships and rank design roles like ethnologists. At the very least, separating writing from design, rank and file, critically misunderstands the value a little professional word-smithing can bring to a game's bottom line.

Harrison Ford once reportedly told director George Lucas "You can write this s***, George, but you can't say it." We need more designers who get that. Who recognize that the days of "You, the master of lock picking" are over (or at best, bound for the campy-on-purpose bin), and that the days of "Would you kindly head to Ryan's office and kill the son of a [you-know-what]" are here to stay.

Or at least they'd better be. We deserve nothing -- not one word, sentence, or punctuation point -- less.

Replay

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