Writing for video games is perhaps the most romanticized discipline in the video game creation process.

People who wouldn't know any better imagine an author with a concrete vision, flanked by programmers, designers, and artists unified under that shared vision. They work together like a well-oiled machine to support that narrative vision, and when the game is eventually released, the story is exactly how the writer imagined.

Of course it doesn't work like that, and last week a group of accomplished game writers got together to tell their honest stories from the game writing trenches.

Game writers TJ Fixman, Marianne Krawczyk, and Tom Bissell gathered at the WGA West by invitation of the Writer's Guild Foundation in Los Angeles on a panel moderated by Naughty Dog creative director and writer Neil Druckmann to talk the craft of game writing, sharing stories about difficulties working on their most famous games, theories about the craft and what separates it from so many other forms of narrative.

Speaking for a mixed audience of film writers and game industry professionals, their stories ranged from basic advice on getting into games writing, to anecdotes from the making from their biggest games that show the frustrations, obstacles, and triumphs of telling good stories inside triple-A (and sometimes indie) video games.

On entrances and first surprises

Fixman, Krawczyk, and Bissell all entered their respective careers from wildly different circumstances, which each informed their first surprises as to what would happen when trying to tell tall tales in digital worlds. Fixman, hired up from the QA trenches at Insomniac, remembered a gag in his first Ratchet and Clank game that brought him to a Shark Tank-style meeting with a panel of Insomniac animators and designers.

“I wrote this joke, where Ratchet and Clank are in a ship together and the designers wanted them to fall asleep so they could wake up in a new environment," he explained. "So this gas comes out, Ratchet goes, 'ah cryosleep gas, I'm not gonna fall asleep!' And of course he falls asleep. And Clank says 'oh it’s good that gas doesn't work on robots!' and a boxing glove pops out and knocks him out.”

“They just started peppering me with, 'Why is this funny? What Is the joke? Where does this fall in the hero's journey? Is this the save the cat moment?' I'm wide-eyed and going ‘I thought, I thought it was funny I'm so sorry.’ That's what I realized, as a game writer, you think you have this freedom, but you don't. There are so many constraints and so many moving pieces, and from then on out I was hyper-aware that any time you write anything in a script, that changes the game for 20 different departments.” 

Krawczyk, most famous for her work on the God of War games, got her first job at Sony Santa Monica and immersed herself in some quick design courses to help her understand the craft she’d be doing, then worked closely with game director David Jaffe to brainstorm his ideas for the first game and shape them into a cohesive narrative.

“David had a really clear framework for what he wanted, he just didn't know what the story was or how necessarily in text it existed yet," Krawczyk said. "My job was to sit there and talk to him. We'd start cobbling together the story as he was figuring out how to tell it and figuring out the designer and presentation and story twists and everything came very organically.”

Many of the series’ most talked-about story beats came out of those sessions, including the tragic reveal of Kratos’ familicide and his ghost-white skin. Krawczyk observed that even casual references like that would reinvigorate Jaffe. “You could always tell because his eyes would sort of light up, and then all of a sudden we'd have that bullet point in place," she said.

Bissell’s background as a nonficiton writer, then game essayist, then game critic, was possibly the most unconventional of the 3 speakers, but he told a similar story to Fixman’s about being assigned to write an explanation on Gears of War: Judgment as to why a university level would be filled with poison gas emitters. “That's when I began to realize that this is a form of writing that throws some real curveballs at you that probably only a few hundred people on the planet have ever had to deal with," he said.

The game writer’s biggest challenge: No universal tool or format

When quizzed by Druckmann about their different game scripts, all three writers bemoaned and shared the realities of the lack of a universal tool or writing format that they had in other non-game work.

Fixman explained that on the Ratchet and Clank games, dialogue existed in three places: in Final Draft files for the in-game cinematics, in Excel files where dialog was organized by level, and in a third file just called “emergent dialogue” that was organized by character. With no script coordinator, every change Fixman made to a Ratchet and Clank script had to be made in three different places, hundreds of times throughout production. 

On God of War, and her other projects, Krawczyk said she tries to keep it in Final Draft as much as possible, but Bissell shared Fixman’s woes in a story about the opening scene of Battlefield Hardline. What the player sees in that game is a conversation between two Miami cops as they drive down a busy street, hearing snippets of passing conversations from pedestrians and the squawk of the police blotter. What Bissell hears is 48 drafts of that police conversation, 40 pages of ambient dialogue, and 30 pages of police blotter chatter yanked from real scanners in Miami and Los Angeles.

“And so those were all written at different times in different stages of the production," he said, "and once they all get in there and they're all overlapping with each other, the player...they have no idea how immensely complicated all that stuff was.”

Bissell and Krawczyk both expressed a desire to work with tools they could take from studio to studio that could track version changes and keep track of correlating dialogue needed to create a fluid experience. 

The horror stories

Druckmann, seeing Krawczyk’s putting a finger gun to her head at the mention of ambient dialogue, asked all three to share the most difficult part of their writing process, and for all three, the biggest nightmare was bark dialogue, (ambient dialogue enemies shout to alert players to gameplay clues), and expository directives (characters muttering to themselves something like “I need to go through that door!”)

Fixman said he struggled to keep directives that came out of playtesting feedback in line with character’s voices, pointing out that the problem really scales up when you don’t just need to solve these once, you need to solve these problems 10 times for the same scene.

Bissell offers up a specific example from his work on Batman: Arkham Origins. Though satisfied with the final story, he remembers one day two years ago when creative director Eric Holmes called him up and said they needed bark dialogue for one of the series’ predator stealth sections.

This was over Christmas.

“The unbelievably difficult part was, say I'm Batman, and I put down an ice bomb trap, and a guy hits the trap," said Bissell. "You have to communicate to the player, 'oh that was my ice bomb trap' without being so obvious...and  figure out things for these guys in their various state of alarm, to say "Ice bomb! He got me with an ice bomb! It's cold!" so the player knows it happened. Then you have to do that 10-15 different ways. And that's just an ice bomb.”

“I thought it would be fun working on a game franchise I loved for a dude I loved and admired, and at the end of it I can say I never regretted my decision to be a game writer more than that. When it's Christmas morning, and it's like, 'Ice Bomb, I dunno,' it gets pretty grim.”

Bissell would later go on to explain some of these darker moments went into his contributions to the Twine game The Writer Will Do Something, a choose-your-own-adventure about surviving a creative meaning of a downward-spiralling triple-A game that was played 38,000 times since published by Matthew S Burns last fall. He laughed at reading Kotaku comments where players would express doubt that developers could be so rude to each other, while developers chimed in that “this is documentary.”

Why it's all worth it