Editorial Note: A version of this personal essay by the author of Soon I will be invincible and the new superhero novel Fight me originally ran in 2013.
When I finished college, I applied for jobs in publishing. I wanted to be a literary young man and part of a recycled idea of a passionate, pioneering creative intelligentsia. I don’t know if I would have admitted it to myself, but it’s true.
But I didn’t get that job in publishing. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it, maybe I felt like it sounded a little hollow. I certainly wasn’t a promising candidate, with an eclectic transcript and a weird portfolio of writing samples. So I didn’t go into publishing or an MFA or any of the other regular paths to becoming a fiction writer. I went into video games.
This was at Blue Sky Productions, which would soon become Looking Glass Studios, one of the most creative, challenging, intense video game houses you could ever be a part of. It was 1992, and Looking Glass was at the forefront of real-time 3D gaming. Among the games it produced were Ultimate Underworld 1 And 2, System shock, Flight unlimited, Earth NovaAnd Thief.
Looking Glass closed its doors in May 2000, but its employees have spread across the industry and become core members of the teams that God Ex, Guitar Hero, Half-Life 2the Xbox, Dishonored, Autumn 3and many, many others. I was incredibly lucky to be a part of it. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I was mixing with some of the brightest, most inventive artists in the industry. I don’t think there was a more passionate, groundbreaking creative intelligentsia anywhere — it just didn’t look the way I expected.
Video games were how I became a working writer. I learned my plotting through adventure games and role-playing games; I wrote characters controlled by a distant, independent entity, the player. And eventually I wrote novels. I wrote Soon I will be invincibleAnd Youand more. But the most important lessons of a decade in the design pits had been learned. The warp had long since taken its toll. Writing for video games was a strange finishing school, and it had its own strange lessons, which I will share as best I can.
Stories don’t have to progress in a straight line.
As we all know, interactive storytelling means learning a different craft. Stories in video games branch out or disappear into a cloud of possibilities. Exposition and linear storytelling are often awkward, impossible, or deadly dull. The action is dominated by a distant, uncontrollable figure known as The Player, whose moods and whims must be constantly charted, right down to the raging and killing of other cast members.
After my first attempt at writing a traditionally structured role-playing game, I felt the terrible awkwardness of bossing around the player character and trying to make NPCs act like movie characters. I decided to move away from in-game non-player characters – I set up the structure of System shock So players were exploring a space station whose population had already died or mutated. Instead of scrolling through menu conversations, they reconstructed the action through environmental cues, journals, radio messages, and the banter of a mad artificial intelligence.
You learn to be inventive. After all, players use everything on the screen to form an idea of what they’re doing and why. You learn to sneak the story into the margins: to leave it in dusty corners and work it into other parts of the world, embedded in combat mechanics and level geometry and audio cues, or to leave half-signals for players to fill in. To this day, I can’t tell a story straight — Soon I will be invincible And You zooming back and forth between the past and the present.
No one necessarily wants to read your prose.
Imagine your writing is in a video game. The player is happily playing through the story, when suddenly the screen freezes and dense paragraphs of your own precious words appear on the glowing screen. The player has a button that instantly makes your text disappear and the game resumes, replaced by gorgeous computer graphics and fluid kinetic action. They can press it at any time. They have no reason not to — unless they really, really like your writing.
Yes, you can make it impossible to skip your scrolling text, if you’re okay with the player hating you. And if you’re playing your own game, see if you’re okay with hating the words you’ll then be forced to listen to. Few things are as humiliating as listening to your own prose rattle on about the history of the player character’s home planet, while you—the writer!—press every button on the controller to make it stop, praying that the voice actor will just speed it up and get it over with.
Even when I’m writing a novel, I still feel like I’m hanging with my thumb in the air, waiting to skip some suffocating, self-indulgent passage.
Words are good for some things, but not for others.
In a video game, words are often the worst way to communicate something. Why put the words “take the third door on the left” on the screen when you can light up the correct door or make the controller vibrate as you walk past it? Reading is cumbersome, abstract, and slow in a medium that uses light, sound, and even touch to communicate. You have to be aware of what tasks language does well and what it doesn’t. Video games expose those strengths and weaknesses very well.
And language has its own magic, which becomes clearer when used well. When the player is exploring an abandoned train station and you find it adds something to have a voice-over or a companion character gently hinting at the history behind it, list those never-to-be-reached destinations, mention the warm summer night air, the hint of jasmine in the wind. You can use words to evoke distant associations, to refer to the past, to engage all the senses. In video games, words have to compete for their effect, and that makes you more sensitive and trains you to use them well.
It’s not about the author.
More clearly than in other media, you’re not telling your own story, or even the player character’s story. You’re creating a narrative experience for that stranger who’s picked up the controller. You can coax them or seduce them along a narrative path, you can create all the affordances and connect all the dots. But ultimately, what they think is not up to you.
They come to a work of art with their own investments, intentions, prejudices, and plans. Their story could be about wanting to collect every missing coin in the kingdom, or breaking everything that can be broken, or just reaching the highest vertical height in the game’s universe. It could be something cooler than anything you could ever imagine. You don’t know, but you create a world in which the story can appear and have an effect, and hope for the best.
No one thinks what you do is special.
Many people who work at video game companies do not revere the ancient art of wordsmithing. Their indoctrination in that regard ended with their last high school English class. Until proven otherwise, they think you are a vaguely minded bullshit artist and that they owe you no respect. They may actively and out loud believe that you have no place in this new medium at all. It is your job to convince them that you are enhancing the experience of playing this video game rather than actively slowing it down and holding it back. Writing isn’t special until you make it special. It’s okay to get over it.
Even people who think writing is important don’t respect you because you’re writing for a video game. The third-worst screenwriter on the worst straight-to-video movie is a living god of the craft compared to you. A friend and colleague once said to me, straight to my face, without blinking, “When you’re done with these scripts, let’s get a real writer to come look at them, okay?” I took it, without blinking, and swore I would make him eat those words for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It motivated me then; it still does.
It’s worth winning that challenge, and you can. You’re building a medium from the ground up, discovering it alongside the rest of us, making story and language a meaningful part of it, with your own hands. The first moment you see a new player sit through the entire cutscene, see them lean into the screen as the weight of the drama hits them, you know you’ve done it — no faking, no charity, for real.
You can write well about anything.
It’s rare that you choose your own subject for a video game project — you write what you’re assigned. If the game is about a war between animated, sentient jelly beans, today you write Duke Lemon-Lime’s speech surrendering to the Chili-Mango Vizier, because that’s what the game needs. You find what’s meaningful to you in it, and you force that speech in, and you care, and you make sure that every single one of them feels world-shatteringly Lemon-Lime-proud and tradition-breaking, inch by inch, bean by bean. You realize that while you may be a sad young literary type, you don’t have to write about that. And maybe — maybe! — you’re a better writer when you’re writing about someone completely different from you.
You have a voice. It comes. You find it.
Writing is weird. I don’t think writing for games is weirder than other kinds of writing. It’s newer and weirder, but ultimately it works the same way. You try different things. You make drafts and throw them away. You hate yourself, your job, your plot, your characters, your producer. You decide that writing means nothing. Games mean nothing. Nothing means anything. And then a sentence or a character or an idea pulls you, and you don’t know why. You follow it, you write a hundred words and you delete 90. But it comes. It works. You find it. You write it. You’re a writer.
Austin Grossman’s latest novel is Fight mefrom Penguin Random House UK. His previous novels include Soon I will be invincible, YouAnd Crookedand there will be many more to come. Soon I will be invincible was nominated for the 2007 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. His gaming credits include: System shock, God ExAnd DishonoredHe is currently Lead Designer at Windup Minds.