Rodin's "The Thinker." Courtesy of innoxiuss; edited by Level Up

The Idea: Who is this Adam Maxwell guy, and why the f--- is he saying that writers don't matter in videogames?

The Thinker: Zach Schiff-Abrams

The Source: The Cut Scene

The Quote: As a film producer I have drawn and quartered many a writer so usually I leap at the chance to jump on any bandwagon that is founded on lynching the writing community. Unfortunately this retard doesn't know his ass from his elbow, so here's my 15 cents:

"When a writer sits down to build a story, they are usually building a plot." Here's what's inherently wrong with this moron's argument. Ask any self-respecting writer (and every f---ing last one of them motherf---ers are self-respecting) what they do when they sit down to build a story and they'll tell you the first thing (and the most important thing) they do is create characters. In fact, most good stories in any medium usually come from a landscape where the writer almost obsessively focuses on creating and developing characters in a vacuum that doesn't rely on any plot. There are no good f---ing plots, there are only interesting characters that inform a plot...

What I have been arguing for years upon years is that videogames desperately need more writing. And now we're finally at a level technologically speaking where we can actually integrate the creation of character into the very fabric of the gameplay experience. You still argue? You think GTA is a successful franchise?  Think how much more successful it would actually be if Alvin Sargent or Jonathan Lethem was taking seriously the creation of character in that world? Then you wouldn't have Fritzy writing about how videogames are challenging movies for the media dollar, then my nerdy friends, then there wouldn't be any more movies.

Instead you have this dweeb and unfortunately way too many of his kind running the videogame industry that think in way too small of a box.

The Reaction: We've been following Maxwell's blog since last year, which means we not only read his original post, but the two other posts he wrote on the subject here and here. The challenge with his series of posts on his topic is that the, ah, writing was not always as clear as it should have been. That, combined with the vehemence of Maxwell's argument, set many readers' teeth on edge, including Schiff-Abrams, as seen above. But from the beginning, we believed that the essence of Maxwell's argument was fundamentally correct, because videogames are not "written" in plots, character and dialogue, even though they may contain them. They are written in simulations and possibility spaces, and the skills required to create them are far more likely to be found in a videogame designer than in a writer. As Maxwell says in his post titled "To my friend Kelly Wand--Don't be hatin man! Don't be hatin!"

[O]ne thing I would like to say is that I don't think of games as a series of events--that's an imposed structure, which was a big part of what I wanted to talk about in the first place. Games are a series of potentials--as a game designer, I don't have control over the moment to moment in the same way you as a writer might when writing a traditional linear narrative. I can gate players so that at key points I know what event they are a part of, but even that's artificial and not inherent to the structure of games themselves. The only two events a game is really beholden to are "Start" and "end," right? Everything else is structure we impose for various reasons. (Though most typically, the chief reason is to impose narrative context--something I assert is being done mainly as a fallback to what writers know) That's exactly what I was getting at when I said a writer's work is linear and a designer's is not.

As a designer, I have to work in loops and potentials--they're the necessary framework around which interactivity is built. I can't, necessarily, work the same way a writer would when constructing a story, a book, a screenplay or even just a basic plot premise. I can when I conceive the basics of the world my game will occur within, but the game itself? I can't do that--it wouldn't be a game if I did, would it?

Maxwell goes on to state, rightly, that the best solution is for the level designer and the writer to be one and the same. And many of his fellow developers on story-based games would no doubt agree. During a demonstration yesterday of Fallout 3, we asked a question of Bethesda's marketing and PR honcho Pete Hines: how big is the writing team on the game? His response was that the level designers and writers are one and the same, and they do so under the supervision of the lead designer, who also functions as the head writer. The challenge with this solution is, how many designers are genuinely excellent writers? Schiff-Abrams says that games need more writing, but apart from the folks behind Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and large chunks of BioShock, we can't think of many heavily-written games in recent years where the writing was truly good throughout. In fact, when we look at modern classics like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus and last year's minimalist gem Portal, perhaps the solution is less writing.

As Pat Redding said in his "Do, Don't Show: Narrative Design In Far Cry 2" talk at the 2008 Game Developers Conference, there are three types of narrative in videogames, or The Three E's as we like to call them. They are:

1. Explicit narrative: the game tells you or shows what has already happened, is happening or is about to happen next. Cutscenes, whether in-game or non-interactive, fall into this category, as does on-screen text.
2. Embedded narrative: things implicit or inscribed into the character or the world that tells us something about them as we discover them. The slides in Portal about the competition between Aperture Science and Black Mesa are examples of this, as is the graffiti scrawled on the walls in the same game. Ditto the evocative animations in Ico, whether it's the way that Ico takes Yorda's hand and pulls her along as he's running; or the way she fumbles her way to him when he calls to her.
3. Emergent narrative: what the player does, and how the game reacts to it. Confronting the Big Daddies in BioShock are an example of this, as is their behavior once you've used a Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid on them.
   

The explicit narrative is the province of the professional writer. The emergent narrative is the province of the videogame designer--it's the gameplay, which is why Maxwell is so focused on it. And the embedded narrative lies somewhere in between, but we suspect that it's closer to the designer because of the architectural and flow aspects of level design. Professional writers have a role to play, but the more they acquire the skills of embedded and emergent narrative design, the more useful they will be to developers. At the same time, developers must figure out a way to better integrate the writer into these two crucial aspects of a game's design--something both sides of this debate appear to agree on.

The Verdict: Yellow light. Games don't need more writing, but they do need better writing--preferably from people who can think in terms of simulations and possibility spaces.

Which game or games do you feel had the best writing, and why? Also, if an acclaimed developer like Bethesda doesn't require one or more dedicated writers for Fallout 3, do you find yourself siding with Maxwell or his critics?