I guess you're one of those people who say you can't compare a to b cause they're different things. I can, and I will.
These discussions tend to put cRPG writing in a bad light because they are unconsciously compared to classic novels and such. That does not make a lick of sense because (1) you are always picking the best representatives of the genre, but 99% of the world literature is garbage; (2) literature is a different genre and cRPG writing needs to be analyzed by its own standards.
cRPGs involve a series of tropes of gameplay that would represent bad writing in literature. For instance, any cRPG worth of its salt will force you to walk around talking to random people and making stupid questions such as: “How is life?”, “Did you hear anything strange?”, etc. You are comparing apples and oranges. I’m sure that Tolstoy, for example, would be a shit cRPG writer, because being a good novelist and a good game writer are different activities, and each requires a different set of skills. Thus, they have their own standards of evaluation and we can't judge one activity based on the other.
It is not clear what cRPG writing is even when we avoid the temptation to make comparisons with different genres. Should we include item descriptions and quests as elements of cRPG writing? Or cRPG writing should include only the story and the main quest? I never read any piece on the subject that made an effort to clarify this problem, much less acknowledge it.
It is hard to identify what cRPG writing is because the writing text is tied to the gameplay, and we do not know when one starts and the other ends. This also means that the very notion of cRPG writer as a profession is misguided and betrays a poor understanding of the genre. You cannot have a good cRPG writer that does not think as a developer and ignores the importance of gameplay.
The fact that is a common practice among cRPG studios to hire different writers to make a single game should give you a reason to stop and think. Different writers have different sensibilities, styles and abilities and this will impact negatively on the game. cRPGs should have only one writer. Besides, it’s harder to be a good game writer due to the cooperative nature of your work. A novelist relies only on his own experiences, but a game writer has time constraints, development budget, engine limitations, level designers, artists, etc. In a sense, a game writer can be a genius in his expertise but deliver mediocre work because his team fucked up.
You also make the naive mistake of thinking that cRPG writing is the written part of the story and dialogue boxes. Then you remove this part from the game and compare it in your head with novels. But the writing part of a cRPG also involves gameplay conventions that require a proper understanding of game design and has nothing to do with literature. For instance, whether the player has a huge inventory on his ass or not, or whether the player can kill a whole city or not, is cRPG writing. People will put this stuff in the design territory, but it is also writing because you are structuring the laws of your game world.
