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.wga.org/subpage_writersresources.aspx?id 90. The Order of Writing 291adventure that requires the player to infiltrate a military base for disarming nuclear war heads in Alaskathat has been overrun by terrorists, find out if they have the capacity to launch a nuclear strike, preventa nuclear launch at all costs, and rescue two high-level hostages, one military and one the presidentof Arms Tech.This game, like many others, has evolved over more than a decade.There is a completegame bible.The game introduces you to the characters, who are played by voice actors.The player hasan inventory of weapons and rations.There is a bank of clues to call on when the player gets stuck.The majority of games are created on a computer with 2-D or 3-D graphics tools.Not many areproduced with photographic backgrounds and live-action sequences.There are practical reasonsfor this.Actors and video production are expensive, but you don t have to pay computer graphiccharacters for their performance.You merely have to record their voices.Audio production is lessexpensive.Video requires a huge amount of bandwidth, or it has to be severely compressed.Mostof the worlds of computer games are extravagant fantasy worlds in space with aliens or in mythicalkingdoms with monsters.It is easier and probably cheaper to create those environments and theircharacters with computer graphics tools than with live-action video.The animation occupies lessdrive space than full-motion video.With graphics and animation, you can create whatever you canimagine.THE ORDER OF WRITINGBroadly speaking, video games face similar production problems to video, film, and television.Youhave to start with an idea.That seed idea has to be a written concept of the content and style of thegame and how it will look and play.It then has to be elaborated in a treatment or design documentthat articulates the vision for a larger production team.As with film and video, content has to be cre-ated except that production involves huge amounts of graphic design and programming as well asaudio recording of dialogue sound effects, and music.Video editing roughly corresponds to program-ming and debugging.However, the relation of writing to linear production inevitably differs frominteractive production.Electronic Arts, the world s leading independent developer and publisher of interactive entertainmentsoftware, outlines the video game production process on its website.The writing phase is somewhatconcealed in the description of their design document that specifies game play, fiction, characters, andlevels. 8 In preproduction, artists and software developers work up a prototype 2-D and 3-D design,animation, and programming from the design document.Production assistants then break down andprioritize the tasks to create the finished product.Teams of artists and animators are coordinated asthey create the assets that are the visual experience of the game.Likewise, teams of software engineerswrite the code with game authoring tools that create the interactivity.As with all interactive mediaproduction, there is a chicken and egg situation near the beginning in which developers have to togglebetween creating interactive play choices and then translating that into visual assets that are needed,8See www.igda.org/writing/WritersGlossary.htm for another useful glossary of gaming jargon. 292 CHAPTER 13: Writing for Interactive Entertainmentwhether video, audio, or graphics, to fulfill the vision.The miniscript for some dialogue or a story-board for an animation sequence could be written in response to the evolving game.The chicken andegg situation in which you are working from a written concept that becomes modified in production,then leads to renewed writing and or design.This is not true of film and video.Production proceedsfrom a finished script and its breakdown into a shooting schedule.To summarize, the logical sequence of game development follows these steps: % Concept /Proposal (writing) % Preproduction (design, writing story, characters, levels, game play) % Prototyping (continued writing as design evolves) % Full production (continues writing as design evolves scripting for software engineering) % Postproduction (alpha, beta, and final testing marketing and promotion)Writing and rewriting for video games is not confined to one stage.9 Conceptual writing that imag-ines the game play and design is meta-writing, whereas dialogue and character description is contentwriting.The conceptual writing at the early stage should contain a short premise, describe the type ofgame play, and outline a map of the game story, challenge, or goal.It should describe the look andstyle of the world of the game.10 As production begins, the sequence of writing and its relationship toproduction is harder to pin down and seems to vary with the developer and the way the productionteam is structured.Dialogue writing for characters and the cut-scenes can arise after considerablegame design but necessarily before production of the assets (picture and sound).You cannot writedialogue for stages of the play until you know the game design and the kind of choices that the playerhas, which trigger alternate responses.FORMATSWe have not tackled the thorny question of a format for this writing.Unlike with other media wehave discussed, we cannot be final and definitive: Game writing has no real corollary in mainstreamentertainment.Books, movies, television, theater they all involve the creation of specific documentswith established formats, which the interactive industry does not have. 11 There are some emerg-ing patterns, dictated by logic and need.The appendix shows one example from the Movie MagicScreenwriter templates.An example of dialogue writing for a kung-fu style game called Seven Shades illustrates oneapproach: 129See www.erasmatazz.com/library/Le_Morte_DArthur/Index.html for a rich documentation of written development of ideas for a game.10See http://www.ihobo.com/archive/index2.shtml for an archive containing well-thought-out concepts, elaborated game designs, and scripts.See alsohttp://jhorneman.typepad.com.photos/ico_gdc_2004/dscn5686.html for a presentation of the Game design Methods of ICO.11See the article, How Do You Become a Game Writer? at www.igda.org/writing/HowDoYouBecomeAGameWriter.htm.12See www.ihobo.com/archive/scr_7shades.shtml. Formats 293Fox.Known is set TRUE if Xia Tu has learnt that Zhapian Hu is a foxspirit and not a human being.Bandits.Wuhan is set TRUE if the bandits led by ShaoLung are currently hiding in the Wuhan marshes.If not,they have no fi xed base of operations at this time in the script.AREA: KongmoonSCENE: Mansion//The upper fl oor of FOX s mansion; plushly furnished.HARE enters throughthe window, looking around furtively
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