Frequently asked questions
Sometimes, I’m asked questions about what I do, which makes sense! I have an incredibly cool job and been able to work on some very exciting projects. But it’s a tad inefficient to send individual email replies to questions I’m frequently asked, so here are a few of my replies to the most common ones.
the list:
“Do you have any advice for an aspiring game writer?”
I do! Write video games. This is my single biggest piece of advice to anyone considering making the switch to writing for games.
One is a good start. Write something small (scope creep is real) and then finish it. Being able to show studios that might want to hire you that you have 1) written a game and 2) finished it is key; studios want to know you can write for games specifically, and they'll want to see that you can finish projects. Writing a compelling beginning is great and all, but you have to be able to write a satisfying ending, too.
The added bonus to doing this is you'll learn if you actually enjoy writing for games. This is crucial to find out about yourself. Player experience is going to trump just about everything — it is the single most important consideration in nearly all my work — and the player will be an incredibly active participant in unfolding the game's story. Make sure that level of interactivity is something you enjoy. You’ll also want to make sure you enjoy design work, as you will be doing loads of it.
There are plenty of tools for making a short game, by the way. If you aren’t sure where to start, Twine is a great (and free!) tool for telling nonlinear, interactive stories, and it scales up pretty nicely once you’re ready for more complexity. It doesn't require any art skills or a comprehensive knowledge of programming, and interactive fiction can be a great way for long-form writers to transition to branching story/dialogue. There are also all sorts of game makers out in the world you can try.
And again, it doesn't need to be long! Even if you don't end up including it in your portfolio, writing for an audience that is able to impact the story through their actions is a valuable experience. If this seems intimidating, start by just making something for you that you can share with a few friends or family members. Start small. There's no shame in that.
“Do I need to have a specific degree to write video games?”
Nope. I was an English major, which helped me analyze video games critically from a narrative perspective, but beyond that, I took exactly one creative writing course in college (taught by a professor who detested genre fiction) and a grand total of zero classes about games. I got into game writing because I 1) liked thinking critically about games and their design, and 2) had always written creative fiction for fun. Those skills were self-taught, and further honed through making games for fun. I ended up working on Outer Wilds and, well, here we are.
No one’s ever going to say “no” to an MFA in creative writing, mind you; I’m only saying it’s by no means a requirement.
“How do I break into the industry?”
Real talk: There is no one way to break into games. As far as I’m aware, there's not even a "usual" path to game writing. Nearly all the game writers I know either started out as writers in a different medium or in QA. On the other hand, the space exploration/adventure game Outer Wilds was the first time I’d ever published creative work, so again: You are not limited to a set path. There are so many unique paths to a career in games. That’s one of the coolest things about this job.
…But that’s not the most actionable advice, so let’s focus on what you can do right now. I can’t guess as to when your big chance will come, but I can tell you that you absolutely must be ready for it. You can prepare by building your skill set (see “make video games,” above), preparing a general portfolio, playing and thinking critically about games, and leveraging your existing experience by researching studios whose games play to your strengths.
For example: Scriptwriting experience is useful. If you have that, you might leverage that experience by applying to studios interested in making more cinematic games (it’s not my jam, personally, but many triple-A studios are huge on this). Did you study game dev in college? Excellent! Then you likely already have experience and samples for your portfolio. Don’t discount that just because you were a student when you made it. (Outer Wilds started out as a student thesis project, after all.) Heck, I worked in publishing for long enough to build strong content management skills, and even those are useful in my line of work. My experience as an editor certainly doesn’t hurt, either.
Tl;dr — build your writing and design skills, write games or interactive fiction (even if it’s just you on the project, even if it’s “only” for fun), and leverage your existing skills. That’s the best I’ve got on how to be ready when an opportunity to break into games comes up. Luck is a huge factor, and you never know when that chance is coming, so you have to be ready to go whenever it shows up.
“What are the biggest challenges and most rewarding aspects of working on games vs another medium?”
This is a great question.
Interactivity, for one, both as a challenge and a reward. Working in a dynamic medium like games where your audience is an integral and indispensable part of the experience is weird and wonderful. Players will do some bizarre and unexpected things, and you have to be prepared to handle all kinds of fringe contingencies, which can mean doing a lot of extra work, or shitcanning a piece of content you really liked, or realizing maybe 12% of players are going to see that brilliant line you wrote for an NPC. Still, it's deeply rewarding to watch players experience a story, especially when you start seeing emergent player stories as a result.
Working with a diverse team of creative people is also both a big challenge and major reward — the former when you don’t have the team buy-in and/or studio support you need, and the latter when you do. Everyone is ultimately telling the game's story together, and there are multiple departments with their own unique needs and goals. Your writing needs to mesh with what the other depts. are doing/what their needs are, and that can be tricky to pull off. There will be many times a gameplay need will take precedence over a story need, and you'll need to adapt a line or plot point you really loved to make it fit with the gameplay. (Flexibility is key here, although you also want a team that’s willing to reciprocate and make the occasional compromise for story, too.)
But working with a team is also amazing. You're making something much bigger than what you could make on your own. You get to combine writing with audio, design, gameplay, etc. to create amazing player experiences that can't be replicated by any other medium out there. The level of interconnected design in games as a medium, where everyone is working together to accomplish a common goal, is incredibly cool to me. I’ve worked with many, many devs from non-narrative departments who initially weren’t sure how to approach story or how to interact with a writer, and it’s been a profoundly rewarding experience to help them embrace storytelling and the ways their work can support the story and be supported by it in turn. That’s one of the best feelings in the world to me.