The George Ziets Interview Part 2: Writing For Video Games, Collaboration In Game Development
Torment: Tides of Numenera. Credit: InXile
George Ziets is the Lead Area Designer for InXile's RPG
Torment:Tides of Numenera. He graciously consented to devote a good deal of his time to this four-part interview about the video game writer's job and the special challenges and opportunities of writing
Torment. The interview took place through email and has been edited for comprehension.
Ziets received a Masters degree in Cognitive Psychology with an emphasis on Human-Computer Interaction in 1999. (Disclosure. I was a member of his thesis committee.) In 2001 he took a job writing dialog for the MMO
Earth & Beyond. Since then he has held various positions as a writer, designer or creative lead on games such as
Lord of the Rings Online,
Dungeons & Dragons Online,
Neverwinter Nights 2,
Elder Scrolls Online,
Dungeon Siege 3,
Fallout: New Vegas and
Torment among others.
Minor spoilers follow.
Kevin Murnane: People in the industry frequently stress that making video games is a collaborative process and that people who have difficulty adapting to the demands of others need not apply. How does the collaborative aspect of game making affect the writer?
George Ziets: Great ideas come from every department. An artist might have a brilliant idea for a location or a character. A level designer might come up with an exciting quest. An animator might give a character some surprising mannerisms that change the writer’s whole understanding of that character. And almost anyone can be a sounding board for ideas and help a writer brainstorm.
Of course, writers also need to remember that we’re making games, not movies or books. Even on games where story takes center stage, that story is a collaboration between the writer and the player. The one unique thing that games can do is react to the player’s decisions and change course to reflect their choices. We’re not telling the writer’s story – we’re telling the player’s story. Game stories are inherently collaborative not only within development teams, but also with our audience. And if we miss the opportunity to react to the player’s choices, we’re not taking full advantage of our medium.
Torment: Tides of Numenera. Credit: InXile
Murnane: Do requests tend to be editorial such as "rewrite for clarity or style" or substantive such as "we need a 100-character description of X"?
Ziets: Both. Writers’ schedules are full of tasks like “Write a dialogue for Character X”, “Write item descriptions for all the weapons in the game,” or “Write a script for the game’s opening cinematic.” At InXile, the leads try to review all the writing in the game – a lofty goal that we don’t always achieve (but we get close). As we’re reviewing, we put together lists of feedback and send them to the writers, who revise accordingly. Sometimes our comments focus on the content – for example, the description of a weapon doesn’t match the gameplay well enough. Other times, we’ll find lines that are unclear or sound awkward. More often, it’s a mix of both – we want the writing in our games to be top-notch.
Murnane: Are there development teams such as art, level design or technical that tend to make more demands on the writer? Tend to place more constraints on what the writer can do?
Ziets: On most games, level design is the department that works closest with writers. Level designers and writers are always collaborating to create the minute-by-minute experience for players – it’s a constant back-and-forth process. Writers provide story and lore that the level designers use to create their levels, but it’s also common for level designers to request writing to support the gameplay. For example, a level designer might want to call the player’s attention to something important, so they ask the writer to add a dialogue line where someone makes a helpful comment. Or a level designer might realize that a quest doesn’t work very well as it’s currently designed, so the writer needs to rewrite some of the dialogue and quest text. This is very common in the later stages of production, when we start testing the game more intensively.
Artists need input from the writing team, too. Before they create a character, item, or location, artists may request a description of the asset – the more thorough the description, the better. A writer or designer is usually called upon to provide the description (and reference images), to answer questions from concept artists, and to evaluate early versions of art assets.
Working with artists is one of my favorite parts of the job – it’s fun to see your characters and locations brought to life, and artists will frequently surprise you with interesting twists that you weren’t expecting. Concept art almost always adds some new element to a character’s personality or enriches the story of a location.
Torment: Tides of Numenera. Credit: InXile
Murnane: What kinds of limitations are commonly imposed on the writer and where do these limitations come from?
Ziets: At the highest level, writers are constrained by fictional genre (science fiction, fantasy, western, etc.) and game genre (shooter, role-playing game, casual game). Fictional genre determines what things make sense in the game world – if you're in a hard science fiction setting with space ships and AIs, you can’t rely on magic or mystical curses in your story. Game genre determines the kind of writing that the game needs. In a shooter, you’ll be writing lots of short, snappy lines for characters to be shouting while the action plays out, or clever back-and-forth banter between your squad-mates as you move through the world. On the other hand, in a story-driven role-playing game like
Torment, you’ll be writing complex, branching dialogues that allow you to unravel mysteries and interrogate characters at a more leisurely pace.
Another limitation is the setting or intellectual property of your game. If you’re working in the
Lord of the Rings world (as I did in 2004 and 2005), you may have to match the style of an established author. For example, on
Lord of the Rings Online, we tried to avoid words with non-Anglo-Saxon roots because that’s what Tolkien did. (So a word like “thug” was unacceptable because it has roots in the Indian subcontinent, even though it’s a word that’s common in other RPGs.)
Gameplay is always an important constraint. Writing needs to support the action onscreen, whether it’s solving puzzles, shooting zombies, or investigating a murder. It should draw the player’s attention to what’s important, foreshadow what’s coming next, and match the pace of the action.
User interface can limit writers too. If you can only fit 100 characters into talk bubbles that appear over characters’ heads, that’s going to strongly affect the style of your dialogues and the way your characters communicate.
This is the second of a four-part interview
Torment: Tides of Numenera releases on PC, PS4 and Xbox One on Tuesday, February 28.
