The 100 Billion Dollar Industry: Why You Should Write For Games

25 July, 2014

Video Games are no longer the avenue of the nerds or the basement dwellers. Over the past few decades, gaming has turned from a pixel ball bouncing between two paddles to self-contained universes with fleshed-out characters and engaging story lines. The gaming industry gotten to the point that even influential people from outside the medium are starting to recognise their importance, just listen to Andrew Denton on the future of television.

If you ever want to find the truth of something, follow the money - 

and where is money really going in entertainment? Games.

As Denton mentions, the games industry is rapidly approaching $100 billion. The film industry is not the juggernaut it used to be, and television is rapidly becoming more niche – with only certain shows achieving widespread success. The games industry is one of the few entertainment mediums that is absolutely booming. In Australia, we are just starting to see a few organisations dedicated to providing resources to screenwriters who want to get into the gaming industry, and the AWG is high on that list.

It is clearly an economically wise decision to get into games, but is it a creative one? You might be thinking that the money in the industry is all well and good but it would be insufferably boring to be writing for the 400^th iteration of the “Generic Shooter Guy Shoots Everything In Sight” game. But imagine if you were to only look at the biggest movie blockbusters and based your opinion of the industry on those alone; in 2014 two of the largest releases were “Transformers: Age of Extinction” and “Need for Speed”. Not exactly a tour de force of cinematic brilliance. Once you scratch the surface you find the Schindler’s Lists, the 2001: A Space Odysseys or The Big Lebowskis of the gaming world.

The Last Of Us was a game that garnered enormous critical acclaim last year, and for good reason. It was a game set in a post apocalyptic world in which a fungus like infection had spread throughout the population. However it was relationship between the protagonists, the 40-something-year-old Joel and the young teenager Ellie under his protection that brought in the rave reviews. Good storytelling, regardless of the medium, is like Soylent Green: it’s made from people. And more and more, games are starting to be about human relationships rather than shooty gun explosions.

The other creative freedom you have with writing a video game is in expressing a more abstract story accessibly. The image below is from the BAFTA Award Winning independent game Thomas Was Alone, which followed an artificial intelligence at the exact moment it becomes self aware. As you can see from the first five minutes, the writing is clever, funny and poignant. However, the protagonist is simply a red rectangle in a relatively sparse setting. Yet you grow to care about this red rectangle, Thomas is curious and interesting and as you play you want more and more to see where the story goes. This is due to the unique relationship that the player, game and writer share. Andrew Denton mentions how “you become someone, you are someone – it is an entirely immersive experience”.

As a writer, being able to immerse your audience so quickly into a world is something unique to games. You are not only following the protagonist’s story, you are the protagonist, and you feel connected no matter if you’re a 40 something year old taking care of a teenage girl in a post-apocalyptic world or a red triangle AI coming to grips with reality. Narrative games writing is exploding both financially and creatively and you need to get on board.