Sure. I think "lack of interest" is more pertinent when we see it as an institutional interest (are companies & production processes built to support and pay attention to it) rather than individual psychology. I think there is a severe lack of good tools, process models and learned wisdom across the industry about how you craft truly reactive quests, how you truly write characters that make sense in the context of the world rather than quest dispensers, and so on.
I think CRPG dev folks do understand this - over the last decade one benefit of a more professionalised industry (among many downsides) is a more concerted effort to share tools and tricks about how to do dialogue trees, how to design quests, etc, etc., in trade shows. But all of that remains far, far below the level necessary for the level of writing to rise across the board as opposed to a few talented people.
To an extent, it almost feels like, even in the age of 100 person teams, RPG writing in particular is done in a chaotic and primitive way with nobody really having a clear understanding of what the hell it is or how you do it, often using piledrivers to tie knots and toilet paper to cook lunch.
Look, maybe I’m being too influenced by Feyerabend, but do you seriously think that anybody really have a clear understanding of how you do good films, good novels, or even good science? Not only nobody have a clue, but completely different strategies that are emergent and unplanned flourish in different studios. I don't like these institutional professional approaches. They result in bland and very polished turds. The only variable we can pin down is that quest design must be made by people who have at least a passion and experience with the medium. That is not a sufficient condition for good writing, because what the fuck is, but it seems to be at least a necessary condition. Another variable is that having fewer writers, or especially one writer, helps because the author will be more motivated to make a compelling game instead of being just another name in the credits.
Well, I'm also a Feyerabend fan. And yes, I think a lot of the 'good methods' that we know about, often emerged accidentally out of circumstances that are themselves indifferent to the goal of better writing, and it's only retroactively that we identify them as good methods (sometimes wrongly via cargo cult).
To pick a super basic example, people like Chris Avellone are known to deliberately look to real life history for inspiration. And that seems so obvious because real life will often provide a rich mix of plausibility, motivations, socioeconomic factors, etc. that is very hard to make up in a vacuum. But it's something that really came about with game writers who happened to be history nerds because there was cultural overlap in kind of people who were history nerds and who also did D&D and wargaming. And then it's only retroactively that some people see it as a smart thing to do.
So, actually, I think a video game company sitting down and setting up a committee to very 'rationally' and deliberately come up with a structure on how to encoruage good game writing, can often lead to bureaucratic nonsensical puddle of mush, because it's a process that is artificial to how we usually realise good methods.
If I had some millions right now to fund a game, then going by just what we know in the dark, I believe I'd be most likely to try and look for a single lead writer (with a couple of helpers managed by the lead if practically necessary), someone who has a love/knowledge of real life history (and/or anthropology, mythology, folklore, etc), someone who has some experience with
designing gameplay (whether as code, as a mod, or even as a GM). That's all I care about. People these days rage and roar a lot about a huge number of possible secondary proxies - it's easy to mock the creative writing degree dude from california or something, but honestly, I don't care if they're from upper Mongolia. I think the really key factors we know from the last few decades is that it's someone, as you say, with passion and experience for this medium.
And as Shadenuat says, I think the even bigger blindspot is that good editors are
really really important and it's even more underappreciated / unknown. If you asked 100 CRPG developers how many people would they know to be really good
editors of RPG writing?
