November 11, 2004
Crossing Games with Language, Writing, Story
Recent activity that needs linking to:
- The fifth Game Design Workshop was held in Seattle a few weeks ago, a private gathering of 25 or so prominent game designers and writers, focused on story. Attendees that briefly described the workshop on their blogs include Ron Gilbert (which includes a comment by almost-attendee Scott Miller), Lee Sheldon, and Greg Costikyan, who was inspired to write a new essay on “games as the cultural complexification of play”.
- The November issue of Game Developer includes an article called “Writesizing” by Stephen Jacobs of RIT, which asks “what’s the difference between game writing and game designing?” and how do games “need to evolve to establish a professional standard of writing”?
- At Terra Nova, Nathan Combs wonders if use of player language in MMO’s (i.e., in-game chatting) could become an explicit part of the game, even a game world resource: “What if, some day, we were indeed measured by the number and the *kind* of words we use? Could this be leveraged by designers to make our words magical, again? If all our incantations were not so spilt lightly, but carefully crafted, considered, and measured, could this not lead to role playing?”
- Update: Steve Ince has a blog he started a few months ago now, called writing and design. On the left column of his page you’ll find links to a series of articles called “Developing Thoughts”, such as this one on interactive story, and these on dialog (1 2 3).
November 12th, 2004 at 4:12 pm
I just updated the post with a link to Steve Ince’s blog, and added it to our blogroll.
November 13th, 2004 at 4:29 pm
Thanks for the link, Andrew.