Learning From the Nerds: Game Writing Techniques That Apply To Fiction
There’s a lot that separates writing for games from writing fiction. Not understanding this can lead to disaster. Game writing is fundamentally interactive, which means that the author must remove themselves from the center of the narrative and instead cede that place to the player. It is the player’s choices, even while inhabiting a character the writer may have created, that ultimately creates the game’s experienced story, along with all the details of pacing and moment to moment happenings that go along with it.
That’s a tough one for a lot of linear media writers to wrap their heads around. Conversely, there’s a ton of stuff in fiction writing that’s at odds with the demands of game writing. Total control over the manuscript is a new thing to a game writer, certainly, and so is the need to do description now that there’s no art department on hand to do it for you. The list goes on.
However, with it being clear that game writing and fiction writing are very different animals, and trying to apply the techniques of one to the other via brute force is not going to yield good results, that doesn’t mean that game writing can’t provide many useful hints and techniques for fiction writing. Applying these lessons judiciously can produce some impressive results.
One of the most important lessons game writing teaches is the importance of brevity. Players want to play, after all. They don’t want to listen to NPCs drone on endlessly, or get stuck in lengthy conversations that drag on when they’d really much rather be out there smiting for all they are worth. The need to prioritize user experience trains game writers to keep their dialogue tight and their exposition focused. Every word in a game has to convey something important because production real estate is valuable and expensive. Getting the point across fast and cleanly makes players happy because they get what they need, and producers happy because it costs less to record short dialogues than long ones.
This is a lesson and a technique that fiction writers can definitely benefit from, namely, keep it tight and give the audience what they need for their experience to be the best it can be. This can be anathema to writers who enjoy sprawling and grandiose speeches, and there’s certainly a place for those. But, if you want to keep your energy high and your story moving, stealing this from video games—and specific techniques like “three exchanges maximum per conversation” and “does anyone actually use that many adverbs per sentence in spoken English in real life?”—can really help streamline conversations. This technique is not for everyone, of course, but if you’re writing something plot-driven and action-heavy, there’s real value there.
Another notable thing that fiction writers can take from the video game world would at first seem to be backwards, which is to say, building strong and identifiable characters quickly (the knee-jerk reaction to this is that so many video game characters seem thin or undeveloped, so learning from this initially seems like a bad idea). Yes, it is true that a lot of games have thin characterization for one reason or another. Sometimes that’s the result of the needs of the game, as nobody really needs a detailed backstory for Pac-Man or the little Russian dude who pops out in between levels on Tetris. Sometimes it’s a production issue, or a design one, or a performance one. But there have always been games with strong, resonant characters that have been established under the same difficult constraints, and that number is growing.
Consider that a game writer doesn’t have a lot of tools to work with when introducing a character. That character may be seen from behind the whole game, they might not even be allowed to talk, and even if they can talk the odds are very good that whatever game they’re a part of is not going to have a Baldurs Gate 3-level dialog system that will allow them to expound their deepest secrets at length.
So, that means if you’re going to present a character in a game, you need concision and intent. That means really learning to amp up unique character voice, in particular. There is often a lot of onscreen clutter in a game, which can make it hard to tell who is saying something at any given gameplay moment (cut scenes are a little different, but you can’t always bank on having cut scenes). That means that the player has to know who is talking instantly, so they can process what is being said appropriately as part of their gameplay experience. This in turn mandates working to make sure you emphasize strong characteristics for each important character’s voice, ensuring the player can pick them out as an individual.
To achieve this, game writing teaches you to adjust every slider that goes into a character’s voice—not just word choice, but also syntax and sentence length and formality of language and uses of rhetorical devices and forms and … you name it. A good game writer must become adept at mixing and matching all of these elements to produce distinct “vocal flavor” that’s apparent right off the bat. Because if you don’t apply this technique, players are going to get confused, not identify with the characters you’ve created, and then most likely move on to another game instead.
You don’t want that to happen to your novel, either.
Something that seems perhaps less applicable but which carries real value is this sneaky key to game writing: Marrying the narrative fantasy to the gameplay fantasy. Simply put, if you create a main character for a game, that character concept has to accomplish two things. One, it has to be someone players want to be for a while. Two, it has to be someone who can reasonably be expected to be good at the things the game is designed to do well, and not be good (and make the player want to do) things the game does poorly, or not at all.
Failure at this is one of the spicier flavors of what is called “ludonarrative dissonance,” but it’s really taking narrative logic and adding an engineering department to it. The heart of the game is play, and if a game writer presents a character who does not encourage and seamlessly engage in the form of play the game excels at, then you’re going to break some brains. If your game is a futuristic science fiction first person shooter, a space marine makes sense. So does, say, a space doctor forced to take up arms against a ravening alien monster. A medieval bard, less so. The first two fit in that scenario and make sense doing what the game is really good at having the player do—shoot alien monsters. The last doesn’t jibe with the narrative logic and can’t reasonably be expected to have the skills and training and familiarity with equipment that the game’s setting and systems require. In the most basic terms, you match the who to the what, then add in the why.
Of course when a fiction writer does that, they probably don’t have the existential threat to their employment of “Match your writing to the work all these very expensive software engineers are doing” hanging over their head. The lesson itself, though, remains stark and useful. Designing characters to do what the story needs them to do reduces friction on the part of the reader, and eliminates the effort needed to get your audience to buy into the character’s role as protagonist. This doesn’t mean the character has to be supremely adapted to every potential plot demand. That would make them seem unrealistic and artificial. Rather, taking a page from game writing and presenting them as having a reason to be able to do what the story needs them to makes the fit more seamless. It marries the who to the what as surely as if the next step was mapping out button presses on a controller.
And finally, we get to the Most Important Thing fiction writers can take away from video game writing: How to adapt to the rules.
Video game writing is a never-ending series of externally imposed constraints. There are line count constraints. There are constraints on which characters are allowed to talk, if any. There are constraints on how many characters can talk in a scene, due to memory limitations. There are constraints imposed by the design of any dialog systems, and there are constraints imposed by any IP management, internal or external.
These rules may feel arbitrary at times (I once had my boss tell me that while I may have been told I had 5000 characters to write a cinematic that covered three distinct and wildly different bits of information to be conveyed, there had been a rejiggering of the budget and I now had 500 to get the same content across) but the fact remains that they are absolute. They are concrete. If you get told you can only write eight minutes’ worth of cinematic scenes and your muse tells you to write twelve, guess what? The team isn’t going to suddenly budget an extra 50% for more recording studio time and more actors and more voice directors just because your blithe spirit couldn’t be constrained. They’re going to tell you to chop 4 minutes, now, and there’s a very good chance you’re not going to be asked back for the next gig. Therefore, if you want to write for video games, you learn to ask what the constraints are and figure out how to use them to define the creative aspects of your output. It’s a form of directing your efforts immediately, without having to build everything from scratch, and it funnels your creative choices efficiently in a way that moves your narrative forward, fast.
Every writing medium has its own unique forms, needs, limitations and approaches. As such, no technique is going to be perfectly transplantable with 100% precision. Experimentation will require some sanding around the edges at the very least to plug into a toolkit for use in a new medium. But as wildly disparate as game writing might be from fiction, there are still takeaways that have been forged in one fire that can be used elsewhere to great effect. Video game writing may be a relatively young medium, but it’s been forced to grow up fast, and it’s learned a lot of lessons along the way. A few of those are definitely things its elders could stand to learn from.
