Video games, once derided within the entertainment industry as niche or a fad, have become both a highly respected entertainment form and big business – with Statistia estimating 2024 gross video game revenues at $455 billion. This has a lot of Hollywood creatives, including writers, interested in pursuing opportunities in the video game industry. Towards that end, it is important to understand more about the industry.
Differences Between Video Game and Film/ TV Narratives
Video game writers and film/ TV writers both craft stories grounded in human emotion put into conflict and tension through dramatic action. The fundamental difference lies in how people experience the narrative in each medium and what expectations that engender in the audience.
Film/ TV stories are passively experienced by viewers who expect to be shown/ told a coherent story by the filmmakers. These scripts are generally structured linearly, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. The filmed footage must be edited into the sequence defined in the script in order for the audience to experience the story as intended. Writers in this medium focus on coherent visual storytelling, pacing, and dialogue.
Video game stories are actively experienced by players who expect their actions within the game to have a clear and meaningful impact on the story. One player’s path through the game may be substantively different from another’s, and this non-linearity means that game writers must account for player agency, branching narratives resulting in variable story outcomes, and providing clear and motivating context for player actions at all times.
Writing video games requires understanding how to invoke motivations in players that align with the “possibility space” the story affords the player character in each moment, crafting narrative goals that align with player goals, and providing opponents and obstacles that give the player a feeling of challenge and accomplishment, on theme, without overwhelming them. This is done in collaboration with the Game Director / Creative Director and Game Designer.
Differences Between Video Game and Film/ TV Writer Roles
Unlike screenwriters, video game writers do not alone define a project, even in the indie space (unless the project is a Visual Novel, which isn’t strictly a game). Game Writers don’t write “spec scripts” and then pitch to executives, producers, and directors to get on board with their vision for the project because story, character, world, and dialogue are not a sufficient blueprint to make a game.
A Game Design Document (GDD) is the defining “script” of a video game, detailing the genre, player motivations, game mechanics, overarching progression and flow, and other foundational game elements. A GDD is created by a Game Designer – or a Designer/ Director, akin to a Writer/ Director in film – because the gameplay structure is the foundational blueprint without which a game can not be made.
Video Game Writers must therefore learn to work with Game Designers to co-operatively craft a narrative that utilizes the designer-specified player motivations, mechanics, and progressions to drive the corresponding narrative motivations, action dynamics, and (branching) plot progressions.
The best such writer-designer relationships are a give-and-take in which the writer suggests story dynamics that motivate breakthroughs in gameplay, and vice-versa. However, it is common for a writer to be called in to marry a story with an existing design – or even a nearly completed game with little room to vary the mechanics or even the level designs.
This dynamic places writers in a different cultural position within the industry, one of a specialized artist helping the artists defining (designer) and leading (director) the production implement their vision, more akin to the film/ TV status of a Production Designer than a Screenwriter.
The more “packetized” deliverables expected of Game Writers reflects this. They don’t just deliver a singular script containing scene descriptions (which sometimes are the purview of design and not writing at all) and dialogue, but also things like character sheets, world building guides, item descriptions, and other environmental storytelling text, user interface text, and any other narrative “decorations” needed to contextualize the game mechanics in story.
Video Game Writer vs. Narrative Designer
One video game job that combines story development with elements of game design is the Narrative Designer (ND). At some big studios, and often in indie gaming, the roles of Game Writer and Narrative Designer are combined. Story and dialog writers who can also master narrative design will be better equipped to work on projects where both skillsets are expected from one person, and understand design language and work more fluidly with System and Level Designers even when writer and ND roles aren’t unified.
Game Writers’ primary focus is story and plot fundamentals and their expression through world building, character development, dialogue, and (if the game has cutscenes or cinematic gameplay) scene craft. They write the core storyline and script the dialogue and cinematic scenes that implement it.
Narrative Designers craft the player’s experience of the story and the integration of narrative with gameplay. How the story is experienced through gameplay is their purview. They choose where and how environmental storytelling is implemented and design the branching paths – variations in plot and character arcs that alter the core story based on user actions and decisions – and therefore also the narrative pacing and flow, working with level and systems designers to align those story dynamics with gameplay progression and pathing.
Many studios also expect Narrative Designers to know how to implement these decisions inside the game engine: setting up triggers for story events, implementing the branching paths in a scene management tool, applying environmental texts to appropriate objects, and so on. Even if a Narrative Designer hasn’t worked with the same engine the company is using they will expect them to know the principles of how to do this implementation and learn the new toolset quickly.
This overview of the world of game writing and narrative design should give you a starting point for determining whether branching out into this important entertainment medium – one that is surpassing film/ TV in popularity among Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences – is right for you.
