{"id":35117,"date":"2018-07-24T19:55:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-24T19:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/322803"},"modified":"2018-07-24T19:55:00","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T19:55:00","slug":"writers-discuss-the-evolving-role-narrative-has-in-game-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/07\/24\/writers-discuss-the-evolving-role-narrative-has-in-game-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Writers discuss the evolving role narrative has in game development"},"content":{"rendered":"

“<\/em>The gameplay designers usually have more power than the writers do unless the writer is also the game director or the creative director[…]They generally have more power to say what goes than someone like me who works off-site.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

– Rhianna Pratchett shares her experiences working as a writer with different game dev teams<\/em><\/p>\n

USGamer has published an interesting piece<\/a>, the first in a series of three, about the evolving role of writers in video game development.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The full story talks to the likes of Tomb Raider <\/em>writer Rhianna Pratchett, Riot Games\u2019 Ariel Lawrence and Laurie Goulding, indie designer\u00a0Arielle Grimes, and\u00a0Dragon Quest<\/em> creator Koichi Nakamura to look at the place narrative has in games and how the writers themselves have functioned as members of the larger team.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Early on in the story, Pratchett explores how she’s always enjoyed the collaboration\u00a0that comes with working as a member of a game development team, but due to the very nature of that collaborative process itself it isn’t often that the writers themselves get to fully stretch their legs creatively.<\/p>\n

Another section explores how Dragon Quest<\/em> pioneered character-driven storytelling and how League of Legends <\/em>then brought a similar but opposite spin on narrative to the world of online games.\u00a0Nakamura explains that one thing that set Dragon Quest<\/em>\u00a0apart at the time was the fact that \u201cthere\u2019s no direct narration at all and the whole story is told through the dialog of the characters.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the flip side, the\u00a0League of Legends<\/em>\u00a0team opted to build the game’s narrative in a way that was connected to the game without fully permeating every in-game match or multiplayer showdown.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea we\u2019re moving toward is that champions, as they are experienced in League of Legends<\/em>, <\/em>are abstracted versions of themselves from a specific moment in time in the lore,\u201d explains\u00a0Goulding, lead narrative editor at Riot. \u201cAs they move around Summoner\u2019s Rift, they express the nature of their relationships to other champions and their philosophies, but we try to shy away from relating long backstories or exposition within the dialogue of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The gameplay designers usually have more power than the writers do unless the writer is also the game director or the creative director[…]They generally have more power to say what goes than someone like me who works off-site.\u201d – Rhianna Pratchett shares her experiences working as a writer with different game dev teams USGamer has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35117\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}